Margins of War in the Kachin Hills: Women’s Collective Resistance and Community Protection Mechanisms Against GBV

Our research examines gender-based violence (GBV) in Kachin, Myanmar’s internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, where kinship, gender norms, and normalised violence characterise the ways GBV unfolds, and communities respond. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in May and June 2021, in the immediate aftermath of Myanmar’s military coup, we investigate community-based protection mechanisms to GBV when formal justice systems collapse or remain unreachable. These include informal practices such as kinship-based mediation, locally brokered compromises, community watch groups, and, at times, corporal punishment. Since the coup, barriers to formal justice—legal costs, language barriers, lack of documentation, mistrust of state institutions—have grown steeper, amplifying what was already there: Kachin communities’ preference to resolve disputes informally. We argue that kinship structures are central to how GBV is understood, addressed, and often perpetuated in Kachin IDP contexts. Yet kinship is not monolithic: it does more than control. It also harbours resistance. Emerging acts of resistance by younger kin, faith-based women’s fellowships, and local GBV committees demonstrate that the very institutions that have silenced women for generations are being pressured—slowly, unevenly—toward gradual norm transformation. Women and girls in these settings are far from passive victims. They navigate systems that both protect and harm them into contested terrain, claiming what agency they can within structures designed to limit it. Our research demonstrates that GBV responses through community and kinship-based protection mechanisms in Kachin are inherently political. Confronting violence against women means uprooting the authoritarianism and misogyny embedded in Myanmar’s war. Weaving gender justice into community protection is therefore foundational to the broader democratic aspirations of the Myanmar Spring Revolution and offers insights for empowering localised protection mechanisms in war-affected societies globally. Keywords: GBV, kinship, community protection mechanisms, displaced women and girls, collective resistance, Kachin, Myanmar Note: An expanded version of our work will appear as a forthcoming book chapter in Gender, Resistance, and Survival in the Myanmar Spring Revolution, Vol. 2 (NUS Press). Please do not share this work-in-progress publicly.