Foreign Aid, Civil Society and Post‐colonial Statebuilding in the Thai‒Myanmar Borderworld

Abstract

Foreign aid is often used to promote good governance and to strengthen civil society, yet it can reproduce the uneven geographies of post‐colonial statebuilding. This article provides a relational and interpretivist analysis of foreign aid in southeast Myanmar between 2012 and 2021, when Western donors backed the country's democratic transition. The aid influx generated tensions between donors and long‐standing border organizations — civil society actors that had operated in conflict areas from across the Thai border for decades — who felt increasingly sidelined. This article makes three contributions to critical development studies and political geography. First, it shows how aid disbursed under the good governance agenda is embedded in contested relations between centre and margins — a dialectic central to post‐colonial statebuilding. Second, it unpacks tensions between donors and border organizations, revealing competing political projects: while donors aimed to reform the Myanmar government, border organizations resisted post‐colonial statebuilding itself. Third, the article shows that margins, though subject to state violence, were foundational to border organizations’ work. The article conceptualizes border organizations as leveraging and seeking to expand the Thai‒Myanmar borderworld — interlinked and interstitial spaces, including refugee camps, frontier towns and conflict areas, that confound a distinction between state and non‐state.