Weddings amidst War: the intimate and insurgent politics of marriage

ABSTRACT

Putting insights from feminist political economy into conversation with the scholarship on legal identity, this article explores the use and effects of military marriages in reproducing the Kachin revolution. I argue that the organisation of weddings reproduces the revolution in both material and legal ways by creating new legal and political subjects with loyalties and responsibilities towards Kachin authorities. I suggest that the public nature of the weddings creates bonds of allegiance, expectations regarding the performance of particular gendered roles for men and women, and feelings of obligation towards Kachin authorities. These practices also stem from efforts by the KIO to encourage childbirth; although marriages across clan-lines are sanctioned, weddings outside the Kachin community as less acceptable to a leadership invested in reproducing a particular kind of Kachin citizen. This allows me to illustrate how the conferring of legal identity does not rely on documents alone, and turns our attention to how the practice of marriage ceremonies and their effects on everyday married life is generative of legal identity. This in turn shapes the organisation of daily lives in ways that both promote the continuance of the armed revolution and bind people to the nation-in-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Kachin
• civil war
• gender
• marriage
• myanmar

One of the longest conflicts in Northern Myanmar has been fought between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the armed wing of the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), and the central Bamar state. The war began officially in 1961, after the Bamar-dominated leadership in central Myanmar made attempts to outlaw minority languages and practices. This was the final straw for ethnic populations, such as the Kachin community, who felt betrayed by the government’s failure to deliver on promises made in negotiations for independence from the British in 1948. War ensued, with thousands of people displaced from their land and villages. In 1994 a ceasefire was verbally agreed upon, and while the halt in fighting allowed the Kachin Independence Organisation to establish a de facto government in ‘liberated’ areas of Northern Myanmar, complete with departments of health, justice, and education among others, the ceasefire did not resolve any underlying political issues. In the lead-up to Myanmar’s political transition in 2011, Bamar troops attacked Kachin army outposts after the Kachin Independence Organisation refused to disband their army as required by the new constitution. This effectively ended the ceasefire that had lasted almost two decades and the war in Kachinland began anew (Sadan 2016). At the time of writing this article in late 2023, more than 120,000 people are living in displacement in Kachinland. The Myanmar junta is restricting humanitarian aid from reaching camps in Kachin-controlled areas, and aerial attacks on Kachin displacement camps are common. Poverty is widespread and increasing (see Durable Peace Program Consortium 2018; UN Women 2021; UNOCHA 2021). However, the war is not just a space for violence, fear and trauma, but also for love, duty and affection.

In early summer 2013, I was in Laiza, the headquarter of the Kachin Independence Organisation, interviewing female soldiers. A young woman from the local women’s wing named San Htoi¹ had been assigned to help me organise these meetings, and each morning she and her husband would knock on my hotel room door to pick me up. Sitting in the car one morning, I asked the husband, Zau Ring, what he was doing and was told he was an active soldier. Zau Ring and San Htoi had met at a military training organised two years prior. Although women and men lived in different quarters at the training grounds, Zau Ring and San Htoi still participated in the same lectures and military exercises, and fell in love. They married after graduating and nine months later a baby boy was born. By the time of the baby’s birth, Zau Ring had already been posted to the frontline and San Htoi was working for the women’s wing in Laiza. The baby was with the maternal grandparents. When I arrived in Laiza, Zau Ring was home on permission, for the first time since deployment. Scrolling through my phone for pictures of my rural home in Sweden over lunch one day, Zau Ring commented that it looked green and quiet. As quiet and peaceful as Kachinland will be one day, he added. The next morning, my last in Laiza, only San Htoi picked me up: Zau Ring had been called back to the frontline. San Htoi was on her own again, the baby back with the maternal grandparents.

Many of the women I met in Laiza had experienced similar hardships to that of San Htoi and sympathised with her. They knew what life was like as a wife married to a soldier – almost always being left on their own after marriage, struggling for an income while providing for the husband on the frontline and the babies back home – and cautioned their younger relatives not to marry a soldier, or as they put it, a servant to the Kachin Independence Organisation. Indeed, knowing this, almost all married women with whom I spoke told me they had not intended to marry within the army, but in the end, love or duty got the better of them.

Using oral histories with six women married to male soldiers and interviews with two officials performing weddings under the auspices of the Kachin Independence Organisation undertaken remotely and with the invaluable help of a research associate in 2022,² as well as previous research on gender and war in Kachinland undertaken by the author since 2013, this article considers how the intimate politics of marriage operates in the context of the changing dynamics of war. Through a focus on the practice of army-sanctioned marriages – rather than the specific marriage certificates themselves – it explores how these particular marriage rituals create, or attempt to create, political and legal subjects loyal to the Kachin nation. This allows me to argue that legal identity is not fashioned through documents alone: the spectacle of the marriage itself and the daily practices the marriage creates both produces and sustains the Kachin nation.

My interviews with women entering into relationships at different cycles of the war suggest that marriage is positioned as a critical resource for the Kachin Independence Organisation through which the organisation generates affective, material, and legal resources for the military, blending tradition and customs with military objectives. Women’s labour as reproduced from the household is more important than their soldiering, and they are typically expected to leave the army upon marriage. By contrast, single women are not bound to the nation in the same way, and children born out-of-wedlock are not seen as promoting

the Kachin Independence Organisation’s vision of the ideal Kachinland and its subjects. To serve as a wife is to provide for the revolution, as married women help support individual soldiers and the army writ-large through extensive, hard and creative labour, including childbirth – yet the hardships experienced by women in providing for their families in situations of war and increasing poverty make married life all but impossible to sustain (Hedström 2016, 2020).

Feminist political economists have examined how social reproductive labour matters for state relations (see Federici 2004; Elfenbein 2019; Bhattacharya 2017); here I put these insights into conversation with the scholarship on legal identity to argue that the everyday affective, intimate and romantic relations sanctioned through marriage matter far beyond the individual household. Separation from their husbands, and sometimes, as with the case of San Htoi, from their children too, suggests that war-time marriages are not simply concerned with romance or love, but are a means to create gendered legal and political subjects in service of the nation. Indeed, as Marika Sosnowski and Bart Klem argue in their introduction to this special issue, the power of aspiring states lies not only in violence, but in everyday bureaucratic and administrative practices. These practices can help legitimise insurgent groups’ claims to nationhood by offering countervailing national identities, and, as this paper argues, generate much-needed resources and support. In fashioning affective and material ties between soldiers and households, marriage provides stability for individual soldiers and confers legitimacy and support for the revolution writ-large. This has allowed for the development of the Kachin revolution as a formidable armed and political force to be reckoned with.

As a religious official affiliated with the Kachin Independence Organisation explains: ‘The soldiers are getting old by serving in the military and most of them are away from their families and relatives. Therefore, it is very important and necessary to have the family of their own to support them so that they can be able to serve the military with enthusiasm and loyalty’. However, marriage does not only allow men to serve with ‘enthusiasm and loyalty’, but also women who, propelled by love and duty as much as by immediate needs and ideological commitments, are positioned as political and legal subjects expected and able to contribute to revolutionary aims and objectives.

Yet, despite the Kachin Independence Organisation’s attempt to engender ‘enthusiasm and loyalty’ through marriages, the loyalties created through intimate relationships also produce tensions in the movement: women tired of the expectations put on them and their families’ request that their husbands retire from active duty or are stationed close to home, and warn other women off marrying KIO servants. What this suggests is that women, as married wives and mothers, have the possibility to reinforce as well as fragment intimate and military relations. Thus, although gendered inequalities are reaffirmed through an overarching division of labour which positions women – through marriages – as proper subjects for an emerging nation, these roles are neither determined nor fixed: women do not necessarily become the kind of subjects expected of them.

This article is structured as follows. Next, I examine how military marriages have been structured, practised and understood in relation to the creation of the Wungpang Mungdan – or the Kachinland nation – and the development of the Kachin Independence Organisation. Through an examination of why the KIO mandated a lowering of the dowry, enabled marriage across clan and kinship lines, and hosts army-sanction weddings, I argue that the Kachin Independence Organisation has attempted to foster new, armed loyalties geared towards the Kachin Independence Army and a liberated Kachinland, helping to stretch the boundaries – and loyalties – of the household far beyond one’s kin or geographical location. To reveal the importance and impact of women as legal and political subjects on both the war and on the women themselves, I next highlight three women’s marriage stories, each marrying in different cycles of the war. While ostensibly honouring and recognising the support of women, I argue that these revolutionary marriages reaffirm a gendered division of labour to be utilised for the broader interest of the revolution. This illustrates how the conferring of legal identity does not rely on documents alone, and turns our attention to the practice of marriage ceremonies and certificates and their effects on everyday life. In the conclusion, I return to this argument, showing how particular state or state-like practices such as mass weddings and wedding ceremonies, and the rituals that have developed around these marriages, can be fruitfully understood as markers of legal identity. These in turn shapes how married women’s daily lives are organised to promote the continuance of the armed revolution and bind people to the nation-in-making. This is a focus that foregrounds married women as key political actors in the Kachin nation-making project, and military marriages as a critical component of legal identity.

Military marriages and mass weddings amidst war

The Kachin Independence Organisation uses the term Kachin (or Wungpang) to describe a community of people belonging to six primary lineage groups that identify as Jinghpaw. This is not to say that the kinship alliances underpinning the collective Kachin identity are straightforward. On the contrary, political contestations about exactly who are to be included in the broader Kachin umbrella have been (and continue to be) controversial (Sadan and Ja Htoi Pan 2022). However, Kachin communities have traditionally been structured through a patrilineal kinship system, wherein ‘clan identity is traced through the male line, one does not marry into one’s own clan, and […] exchange of women for marriage is one-way directed for each instance of exchange’ (Maran 2007). This means that kinship structures are reproduced through weddings, and although these are neither impenetrable nor fixed, they nevertheless provide the foundation for Kachin national identity and the current political struggle (Maran 2007).

As the Kachin Independence Organisation extended and solidified their reach after 1961, the military apparatus began to take on social relations of authority, including intervening in these kinship related issues. During the early years of the war, the Kachin Independence Army attempted to overhaul the ways marriages were organised,³ including preventing excessive dowry payments paid by the husband’s family to the wife’s family (Sadan 2013, 336). As historian Mandy Sadan reminds us, Kachin political leaders have long been invested in fostering a united Kachin community (Robinne and Sadan 2007) and while their efforts to ban the dowry (Tang n.d., 58) eventually proved unsuccessful, the practice of mass weddings and officers officiating marriages between soldiers suggests that the intimate relations of everyday life are, and have always been, instrumental to revolutionary aims and objectives. Importantly, the public spectacle of army-sanctioned weddings creates subjects, materially and politically, with duties towards, and a place within, a nation – Kachinland – framing the Kachin Independence Organisation as legitimate actor, on par with other states conferring legal identities and extracting loyalties.

Within the Kachin Independence Organisation, marriage both embodies and illustrates a dynamic and contested political construct: the modern Kachin nation, as envisioned by the Kachin Independence Organisation, and which is contingent on the institution of marriage to foster new loyalties and physically regenerate the nation. The application of Wungpang Mungdan – or Kachinland – to represent and unite the six Kachin clans is also materialised in the organisation of weddings by the Kachin Independence Organisation, as the Organisation’s official view is that revolutionary marriages supersede clans and kinship lines. A member of the Kachin Independence Organisation wedding committee explained that ‘The Kachin Independence Organisation’s policy is reconciliation among Kachin clans. So, we do not reject or approve who they can marry or they cannot marry. This is all about their personality and their right so we have no comment on the clans’. An official with a Baptist church agreed: ‘When we organise the wedding individuals or mass wedding, we do not pay attention to the clans. Kachin Independence Organisation is zero tolerance on racial discrimination so the marriage would not classify on clans’.

The practice of mass weddings began in the 1980s, but they do not take place on a regular basis. An official responsible for organising weddings on behalf of the Kachin Independence Organisation in Laiza said that, since 2014, they have organised eight of these weddings in the headquarters,⁴ where 213 couples have been married in mass ceremonies, paid for by the Kachin Independence Organisation and held either at a church venue or in a military hall. A young woman who grew up in liberated areas explained to me that mass weddings are a way for the Kachin Independence Organisation to show how much they value their soldiers, echoing the sentiments of the officials interviewed for this project, who stressed the importance of ‘loyalty and enthusiasm’:

The Kachin Independence Organisation organises mass weddings, once or twice per year, for their soldiers. You know, everyone wants this kind of ceremony, even if big or small, so the Kachin Independence Organisation organises like that to give encouragement to soldiers and to provide for the soldiers. The soldiers don’t have money or a salary, and don’t have holidays so how can you do a wedding like that? Everyone values a wedding, and the Kachin Independence Organisation values its soldiers so it organises the weddings for them. In our culture, if you don’t have a proper wedding, people view you badly. So in order for the soldiers to be equal and happy in the community, it’s important for the soldiers to be married. If you don’t have a proper wedding, you don’t feel good inside.

The mass weddings are ambitious as well as arduous events, carefully planned in detail by a committee made up of officials from different departments within the Kachin Independence Organisation, including from the Central Committee, responsible for managing the weddings and the steps leading up to it. Before a couple can get married, interested individual soldiers must submit a wedding leave permission to their higher-ranking officer. This can only be done if the soldier has served for at least five years (in the case of men) or three (in the case of women), and indicate interest in participating in the mass wedding. The Kachin Independence Organisation then collects and reviews the list of couples in the area ready to be wed and interviews all the couples. After that is done, the ‘wedding committee’ reaches out to the relevant pastors or priests to set the wedding date and wedding rehearsal dates as well as three days of bible practice. They also take measurements for and order traditional wedding clothes (different for different clans), the wedding rings and the Kachin sword, and produce the marriage certificate. As one official remarked with a sigh, ‘It is not an easy job to organise the mass wedding. We have to manage all details, like taking the right wedding ring size from the brides and remember the couple’s names for the wedding certificates’.

The careful negotiations and official rituals associated with KIO-sanctioned weddings validates the KIO as a government-like entity able to grant rights to subjects. Notably, the marriage certificate, when issued by the church, is both performative and legal: it is the only document legally recognised by the Burmese state (other documents, including death and birth certificates, household registrations and Kachin national registrations cards issued by Kachin authorities are not recognised by the central state), and helps confirm a wartime gender order that shapes the relationship between governance practices and intimate relations.

As mentioned above, after the wedding, the new wife – if a servant of the Kachin Independence Organisation – is usually allowed to leave the military, suggesting that women’s household labour holds more importance than their work as soldiers: women’s duties are in reproducing the revolution through careful reproductive and productive labour, including childbirth and the fashioning of new loyal subjects. This also confirms men as head of household, army and nation, illustrating how marriage helps endorse a particular gendered division of labour.

Another important aspect in the production of legal identity is the dowry. In military marriages, the Kachin Culture and Literature Committee typically helps negotiate this. The Kachin Culture and Literature Committee is not under the Kachin Independence Organisation, but an association initially set up in the early 1960s by Jinghpaw-speaking nationalistic students to promote and protect, as anthropologist Ying Diao puts it, ‘one official Kachin history and culture’ (Diao 2021, 673; my emphasis). These students, the Seven Stars, later formed the Kachin Independence Organisation (Sadan 2013, 250). The Kachin Culture and Literature Committee is responsible for ‘doing the culture thing’, as many of my interlocutors phrased it: gaining permission from the families about the wedding and agreeing on the dowry. As noted above, the dowry – alongside the old system of chiefs – were officially rejected by the Kachin Independence Organisation in 1969, with General Secretary Zau Sen leading by example by marrying his wife without any dowries being exchanged (Tang n.d., 58). Yet the dowry has proven difficult to abolish, with young men and women I met as late as 2018 telling me they would not want to get married without the exchange of a significant dowry. After the outbreak of war in 2011, religious, political and military leaders came together to, again, discuss the dowry announcing that it should be a maximum of 300 USD across Kachinland. ‘Weddings are huge and expensive, and that’s why people don’t get married’ a woman working in civil society told me, before she revealed that neither she nor her friends would marry without a substantial exchange of dowry: it would be embarrassing to do so. She explained, ‘Even my friend’s father, who was at the meeting deciding on lowering the dowry, said he didn’t want his daughter to get married cheaply’. However, in the armed forces, the dowry is often adjusted down as the soldiers do not have enough of an income to pay a substantial dowry. ‘Since they are serving at the military’, a pastor told us, ‘most of the brides’ families are not asking for a high rate of dowry. They are already aware that the soldiers are serving the military and not making money’. Reflecting on her dowry, a woman married to a soldier similarly explained that:

[w]hen we married, it was too difficult for my family and relatives to travel to Kachin-controlled areas. And I didn’t want to burden them simply because I and my husband were serving the Kachin Independence Organisation. My parents really understood and they happily allow me to marry with a servant of the Kachin Independence Organisation and they did not request the dowry fee so much. My father revised the dowry down.

Marriage is important both for the organisation, as well as for the individuals who do not want to just co-habit (which as noted above is looked down upon) yet have not been able to afford a wedding or receive leave from their superiors to hold a wedding. ‘Some couples do not have money to hold the ceremony but already got two or three kids’, a pastor working in the Independence Organisation headquarters said. ‘As religious people, we believe that children born outside the marriage are lacking the blessing and also it is not good for the Kachin Independence Organisation image as well. So that’s why we, the Kachin Independence Organisation, organise the mass weddings for the couples and households who are not married yet’. It is also important in terms of regenerating the community and strengthening ties to the Kachin Independence Organisation. Marriage, which is strictly heterosexual, functions as a way for the organisation to engender material and affective support for soldiers and the army writ-large. The pastor again: ‘The marriage is important to our Kachin people since our population is still very low. It is kind of promoting our culture by bonding two families together and growing the population rate. And it also very important to the Kachin Independence Organisation as well’. Here, marriage is situated as critical for physically regenerating the supposedly dwindling Kachin population, and sends a message of coherence and stability, arguably all the more important during times of violence and war (also see Baines 2014; Marks 2017).

As such discussion shows, households, in which the institution of marriage is physically and symbolically materialised, are recognised as central to the revolution by the Kachin Independence Organisation. Wives provide stability as well as emotional and material support for male soldiers, who sometimes are away for years on end without regular financial or material support from the army. One young woman with whom I spoke recalled that she did not see her father for more than five years: her parents were married in the late 1970s, and as the war intensified, men were called away to fight. When she finally met her father again, she did not recognise him. This was not an isolated experience; during times of war, soldiers in the Kachin Independence Organisation primarily serve the armed forces rather than their immediate families, with especially low-ranking soldiers stationed away from home for months or even years on end. Thus, in the lived experience of marriage, to be physically together does not seem to matter as much as the affective and emotional ties that are forged between wife and soldier, and the political and legal ties generated between the household and the Kachin Independence Organisation. These ties animate the revolutionary cause, providing much-needed material and spiritual sustenance, and help reproduce the revolution through actual childbirth, hard labour, and loyalties towards military spouse and nation.

Married to the cause: experiences of married life within the Kachin Independence Organisation

Most of the soldiers’ wives with whom I spoke in the course of my research had met their husbands through the military. Some recently married couples like San Htoi and Zau Ring met and fell in love at the military training facility, whereas others had been introduced via friends in the military. Despite feelings of love, most women I met had not wanted to marry a soldier because they knew his loyalty would always be towards the army first and foremost: a soldier is a servant, they would explain time and again. Moreover, a soldier’s pay is bad, if it comes at all, and positive experiences are often reliant on having good relationships with higher officers who are able to grant leave requests, provide extra money for housing or pay for sick family members, or support the costs of proper weddings. Women know that life married to a Kachin Independence Organisation servant will be anything but easy, as Htoi Bu recalls below, with women expected to shoulder the burden of maintaining both household and military life. As feminist political economist Emma Dowling powerfully writes: ‘Love does not come for free and indeed costs some people more’ (Dowling 2016). Women are often expected to work harder, perform more, and receive less in the political economy of marriage; yet this is also work that is obscured by military elites and in the stories we tell about war, in which men are protagonists and heroes, rather than the women whose labour makes their achievements possible.

Below I consider three women’s stories, each different in that they represent different cycles of the war, but also similar in that they emphasise the critical role played by women in sustaining everyday military life through the institution of marriage. Taken together, the three women’s stories reveal how marriages are lived within the context of the war, and importantly, how marriage binds women to the nation-in-making by fashioning ties between the household and the army.

Htoi Bu. Married during the height of the conflict in the 1980s. Has two sons and five daughters. Is a former female soldier

Marriage life journey with a Kachin Army soldier was not easy. I joined the military in 1974 and I served about eight years. I met my husband there. He got a crush on me on his first sight and his friends also told him that I might be a good housewife. My husband liked me so much and proposed to me but I didn’t reply because I felt that I was not old enough to get a boyfriend. He sent many love letters but I did not respond to him. He also asked his senior’s help to get us married. I felt so annoyed and finally said yes. Even though we became boyfriend and girlfriend, we both were serving at the military and had our duty in different places.

When we finally got married, we did not have a chance to do any culture-related things. His family was away and I was also away from my family. And the situation at that time was, we could not easily communicate or access our families as we served in the military. But we got help from our higher-ranking officials who gave us kitchen supplies and furniture. Two weeks after we got married, my husband left for his duty. As for me, I applied for my discharge order, which I got once I explained that I had to take care of my mother-in-law.

Once I got my discharge order, I moved around to sell any kind of goods. But when my pregnancy was reaching eight months I just stayed and sold things at my place. And I learnt sewing as well. To increase our family income, I decided to sell and sew at the same time. My husband was busy with his army duties so I had to take every household responsibility such as housekeeping, babysitting, income generating and so on. Since my husband could not earn any income, I had to support everything he needed, such as cigarettes, food, soap, toothpaste and so on. I do not know how to express in detail what kind of support I provided him with. It was really stressful when my kids got sick because there were no other hands for taking care of my kids and earning money.

For the dowry, we arranged this when the situation got better. His grandfather went to my home to do the culture thing (for example, deciding on the dowry and agreeing on the union with the relatives). My brother gave him a sword and blessing for our marriage life. In 1998 we finally paid a dowry of about 20 lakhs. The dowry might be small but we assisted as much as we could to my family. We got a marriage certificate from church, and not from the KIO’s Department of General Administrations, which issued these before the ceasefire in 1994. But after the ceasefire, church officials could travel to Kachin-controlled areas, so they could take over this responsibility.

Since my husband was away, I faced many challenges and hardships in raising my kids and earning money for their education and our survival. So finally, I went to the Kachin Independence Organisation chief and requested my husband back. He came home, but then the political tension began and in 2009 he was not granted sick leave even though he was very unwell, because we had a very fragile political situation. He died. I can’t express how difficult my marriage life has been.

Seng Gu. Got married during the ceasefire years. Works as a cook, has four children

He was my second husband and I was his second wife. He was recruited to the KIA in 1975. After 10 years of service, he got his Discharge Order due to a health condition, and became a car mechanic. I lived with my sister’s family doing gold mining. He asked my sister for permission to marry me. We just did a small culture thing, instead of a wedding so we did not get a marriage certificate until we moved to Laiza.

When we started our life journey together, we faced many difficulties. At first we lived in his hometown. Most of the money that we earned we had to send to his parents. I was very busy with housework and taking care of my mother-in-law, who lost her vision, and also 10 of my husband’s siblings’ kids during my second pregnancy.

We came to Laiza to earn money. When we arrived in Laiza, the quarter leader asked me about my husband’s military personnel number and his discharge order number in order to assess if he was a veteran or if he had left the army without permission. I replied that I didn’t know his details because the Kachin Independence Organisation was tightly restricted in government-control areas, even for the veterans, so he had not kept all the documents. They noted him down as a veteran. Later, I think in 2009, when the political tensions increased, the Kachin Independence Organisation organised the Local Defence Force which he joined.

Life in Laiza was full of challenges. My husband was posted to the Local Defence Forces so I had to work hard. I worked as a daily worker for cutting and clearing the farmyard. I worked six days a week. I got up early and prepared for my elder kids to go to school. I made a rice soup mixing with milk powder for my breastfeeding baby and I left him with one of my neighbours. I earned 1,500 kyat per day but I had to pay 1,000 kyat to the babysitter. I did not miss any chance of a day job opportunity which came up, I just took it. Every time I went for a day job, I left my breastfeeding baby with the babysitter. And I also made military uniforms. I worked any kind of job because I needed to feed my kids. I also served as much as I could at the church cooking, cleaning and decorating. I was assigned as a deputy head of the women department of our quarter’s congregation parish. I also was appointed by the Kachin Women’s Association as a secretary of our quarter. At the same time, I also raised 10 pigs as well. But when the war resumed in Kachin-controlled areas, I had to stop farming, due to security reasons. I even can’t express how my marriage life was so difficult.

Due to family hardships, my husband had requested many times to resign but there was no one to replace him. But when our son signed up for service, my husband was able to resign after 10 years. But then he passed away with tetanus.

Cecilia. worked for the KIO administration. Got married during the new war; has three children

After I took my high school exam in 2009, I went to Laiza to earn an income. I was working at the local administration office as a clerk. While I was working there, together with some friends and colleagues, I applied for Kachin Independence Organisation membership. After one month, six of my friends were sent to take military training, but me and my other friend were transferred to the municipal court for our service. That time, my now-husband was working at the administrative department office. At their department, the number of staff had increased a lot, so their barrack was crowded, which meant that he had to be moved to the compound I stayed at for my service. So that’s how we met and fell in love and became a couple. In 2010, he came to my house for the engagement. He was from the brigade area so none of his family members was able to accompany him; it was just him, and he could only pay 3 lakhs in dowry. My parents did understand that he was a Kachin Independence Organisation servant and could not pay more for dowry.

My husband didn’t want me to be a soldier so he didn’t let me take the military training. When my senior clerk heard about my engagement, he told my husband that I should have got a discharge order before I got married. So I came back to Laiza and applied for the discharge order.

Due to the political situation, which was very unstable, he had to go back to his barrack as soon as possible and we could not negotiate about our wedding ceremony. I stayed with my parents and he went back to Laiza, to serve. I gave birth to our first daughter in 2010, and we finally got married when she turned three. He received a month for wedding leave, but then he went back to his barracks and I continued to stay with my parents, as he had no place for his family in Laiza.

He could not support us because the monthly stipend for a Kachin Independence Organisation servant was only 10,000 kyats, and he didn’t even get his stipend monthly. He received it mostly bi-annually. He got neither paternity leave nor financial support. In fact, we didn’t receive any support from the Kachin Independence Organisation. When my second daughter had to be sent to the nursery school, we needed more money, so I had to find a job. By the end of May 2018, I got a job as a cashier. After I got this job, I could support my family a lot, and especially when he went for short course trainings.

I have heard that receiving support for lower-ranking soldiers is dependent on their higher officials. My husband reported to his higher officials about the hardship of family being apart and he requested a space for me and our kids to stay in Laiza. Finally, his officials agreed to give a space for our family and we were able to reunite in 2017, seven years after we got engaged and four years since our wedding. I got my third daughter in August 2021.

The social contract of marriage within the armed forces

Scholars working on legal identity have focused on how the production of life-cycle documents – like wedding certificates – helps create wartime order and governance practices (Sosnowski 2023). The narratives above help to illuminate the effects of these practices on everyday life, and show how public rituals like weddings produces a type of legal identity with loyalties towards the military household and the broader nation, even without the issuing of wedding certificates. The spectacle of the weddings helps the KIO solidify the relationship between the household and the armed organisation, through which they can mobilise resources and loyalties. This is reinforced by kinship alliances in formulating the ‘nation’ of Wungpang, and in the reproduction of certain gender norms, which positions married women as supporters and mothers and men as fighters and leaders. In other words, documents are not necessarily needed to produce legal identity: marriage helps bind people to the nation and realise Kachin revolutionary objectives through everyday, reproductive labour.

For Htoi Bu, Seng Gu and Cecilia, their marriage to a Kachin Army soldier pushed them into a chapter of even harder work, as women married within the Kachin Independence Organisation are often responsible for keeping households and individual soldiers fed and clothed, needing to meet the gap in welfare. As I have shown elsewhere (Hedström 2022), women married to soldiers, especially lower-ranking foot soldiers, are bound by duties, expected to address soldiers’ material and emotional needs, unlike unmarried women whose loyalties towards the military household and the nation-in-waiting are voluntary and welcome, rather than expected and required. That this is hard labour, requiring both creativity and perseverance, is illustrated in this quote by a woman who got married in 2011 against her family’s wishes illustrates:

After we married, my husband spent most of his time in the military even though he was just with the volunteer force. So, I have had to take responsibility for earning an income. I leave my kids with my neighbours and take day jobs. It is really not easy to be a wife of a Kachin Independence Army soldier. But I’m not afraid of anything and I can work hard. Our family cannot rely on him, even when he was a volunteer soldier. I already know that he would be busier than before, since he became a permanent soldier with the current political situation. I’m not afraid at all since I have strength to work hard and I can take care of my family.

As with Htoi Bu, Seng Gu and Cecilia, this woman’s everyday experiences of war include juggling a variety of chores ranging from basic substance farming, to raising animals, sewing uniforms, nursing children back to health, and sending all sorts of support to the frontline. Reflecting on her ‘marriage journey’, another woman interviewed for this research explained that being married to a Kachin Independence Organisation servant means that women have to take ‘every household responsibility’. When asked what this entails, she elaborated on a long list of the different duties, which stretched beyond the physical boundaries of the household – from housekeeping to income-generating activities. She added that they also have to provide for the frontline. As she recollected it, lower-ranking Kachin Independence Organisation staff members did not receive a regular stipend, leaving her to support her husband ‘with everything he needed’. This apparently included, but was not limited to, clothes, cigarettes, food, soap, and toothbrushes. Taken together, these women’s experiences illustrate how women’s labour extends beyond the immediacy of the home, as households include husbands posted as soldiers and children looked after by grandparents, with wives being at the core of the household.

As these stories show, told with pride as well as exhaustion, women’s new subject positions – as married women and wives – animate and maintain webs of relations spanning the households and the armed forces. This, importantly, helps to reinforce the collective project of Kachin survival, and indicates how marriage helps to situate women as political and legal subjects in relation to, and with responsibilities towards, Kachin military authorities, even without the issuing of legal documents, unlike unmarried women whose loyalties and duties towards the Kachin nation are outside the reach of Kachin authorities.

Conclusion

To understand the ways in which the intimate politics of marriage operates in the context of the changing dynamics of war means to recognise that intimate lives are enmeshed in military structures. My analysis shows how women’s intimate labour goes far beyond the household to reproduce and realise a Kachin nation as envisioned by the Kachin Independence Organisation. In villages across Kachinland, these intimate relations serve to materially and emotionally sustain the armed revolution while emphasising the role of individual households within it. The centrality of militarised social reproduction to revolutionary goals and objectives, here understood as the intimate and emotional labour performed by women through the institution of marriage, is clearly recognised by the Kachin Independence Organisation, demonstrating how the Kachin revolution cannot be understood without consideration of the gendered aspect of civil-military relations. The interviews from the officials involved in organising weddings paints a picture of an institution eager and willing to mobilise a range of legal, cultural and military resources and networks in order to fashion ties between the subject and the armed organisation.

In this sense, weddings are both performative and legal, material and political: they solidify the relationships between the household and the armed forces, and reaffirm commitment towards the armed revolution. These practices also stem from efforts by the KIO to encourage childbirth; although marriages across clan-lines are sanctioned, weddings outside the Kachin community as less acceptable to a leadership invested in reproducing a particular kind of Kachin citizen. This has gendered effects by positioning men as soldiers and fighters, and women as supporters and mothers.

Putting insights from feminist political economy into conversation with the scholarship on legal identity thus reveal how everyday affective, intimate and romantic relations matter far beyond the individual household to underpin, indeed make possible, revolutionary warfare fought by smaller ethnic armed groups lacking in legitimacy, recognition and revenue. As the other articles in this Special Issue highlight, not only do states – whether recognised or not – ‘bring the law into being’ (Sosnowski & Hamadeh 2021: 2); the law also has the potential to bring the state into being through the creation of citizens. The public nature of the weddings creates bonds of allegiance, expectations regarding the performance of particular social roles for men and women, and feelings of obligation. Thus, the organisation of weddings reproduces the revolution in both material and legal ways by creating new legal and political subjects with loyalties and responsibilities towards Kachin authorities. Importantly, in the intermeshing of military, religious and customary tradition, the marriages arranged under the auspices of the Kachin Independence Organisation fuse clans with military customs and legal responsibility, helping to affect support for the Kachin Independence Organisation and its ambition for an autonomous Wungpang Mungdan.

Many of the women I met told me they wanted this too – a liberated and free Kachinland – but none wanted to marry a soldier. Citing hardships and poverty, older women warned younger women off marrying within the Kachin Independence Organisation. Indeed, as the stories included in this article show, young women’s marriage journeys, facilitated by the Kachin Independence Organisation, reaffirmed a gendered division of labour and the military’s reliance on the household for sustenance and support. This illustrates how military marriages and mass weddings in a setting of ongoing, unresolved ethnic armed conflict help confer important legal, material and emotional benefits for the armed group, but often at great costs for the women themselves who are expected to sacrifice their time, love and labour without sufficient compensation or indeed recognition.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Bart Klem for suggesting this title, and to Marika Sosnowski for inviting me to the workshop on legal identity, introducing me to this field, and for the careful and generous feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names used in this article are pseudonyms to protect the identity of the people I met and learned from during the course of my research.

2. The interviews were also translated by the person doing the interviews, a younger woman the author has known since 2005 and worked with on an ad-hoc basis since 2013. The longer interviews have been edited down for clarity. Particular phrases like ‘the culture thing’ or ‘servant of the KIO’ were translated as such as by the interviewer/translator; however these are phrases the author has frequently heard being used by other people when speaking about KIO soldiers (as servants), or when referring to the cultural rituals associated with Kachin weddings.

3. As Major N’Chyaw Tang noted in his unpublished memoir: ‘The modification of the polity, the Title of the Jinghpaw have been a changed into the new one (Wunpawng) ethnic composition, Jinghpaw, Maru, La Shi, Azi, Lisu and Ravang, the ruling system by the chiefs and the Dowries paying and demands in this marriage system has been abolished off’ (Tang n.d., 58).

4. Weddings are also held in the brigades, but I have not been able to obtain the numbers for these.