Addressing the ‘Burma Gap’: The Hard Case for Environmental Securitization in Myanmar

For twenty years, Myanmar has remained one of the most environmentally vulnerable countries in the world, deeply affected by myriad threats from cyclones to droughts. Alarmingly, Myanmar’s environmental security trajectory is set to worsen with climate change. Compounding such circumstances are a number of research gaps, reflective of Myanmar’s broad academic neglect. This ‘Burma Gap’ is also present in securitization studies. Using the Copenhagen School’s (CS) securitization framework, the primary aim of this area study is to understand how and why environmental threats weren’t securitized in a country with so many dangers, several of which risk the survivability of multiple referents. This work is also among the first to apply the CS’s approach to environmental security in Myanmar, use a comparative methodology for analyzing securitization (the environment/the Rohingya Crisis), and further attempts to illuminate the problems with the Constitution from a securitization perspective. Collectively, such endeavors are highly suggestive that environmental threats were not securitized under the NLD, but the Rohingya ethnic group was. This research thus helps to fill the ‘Burma Gap’, adding to securitization’s intellectual landscape. A second argument advances the hard case for environmental securitization in a country long-fractured by internal war. This contention highlights the benefits of such a policy as both optimal and justified, partly because no other solutions are capable of arresting what may be a bigger threat to the Union. The militarization of the environment by the despised Tatmadaw, however, is a difficult sell, and presently unlikely, but its potential for delivering environmental security should not be underestimated, particularly if driven by self-interest. This analysis also seeks to move beyond casual low-politics labels, and towards a serious re-evaluation of environmental security challenges in Myanmar.