Climate, Conflict and Environmental Struggles: Perspectives from Myanmar

Sep 10, 2026 | Danish Institute for International Studies
Copenhagen, Denmark
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This seminar explores how decades of conflict in Myanmar have shaped relationships with land, forests, and the climate crisis. Drawing on two new publications, it examines how conservation and climate action have become entangled with struggles over territory, political authority, and belonging.

Violent conflict profoundly shapes how people live with, understand, and govern their environments and the climate crisis. In Myanmar, decades of armed conflict have disrupted relationships to land and forests, while environmental conservation and climate action have become entangled with struggles over territory, political authority and belonging. 

This seminar launches two new publications that explore these intersections, based on in-depth ethnographic studies that center the experiences of conflict-affected populations. 

First, a special issue on Climate Change and Conflict in Myanmar, edited by Helene Maria Kyed, Justine Chambers and Nyan Pyi Thit, offers new research on how conflict-affected communities experience and interpret climate change amid war, military dictatorship and economic crisis. It also explores how climate politics have become a terrain of struggle between the military regime and resistance organisations competing over territorial control, domestic legitimacy and international recognition. 

Second, Tomas Cole’s new book, Possessed Landscapes, explores how Indigenous Karen communities, activists and revolutionaries have established a conservation park to protect their environments and ways of life amid decades of war. Drawing attention to indigenous cosmologies in which forests and landscapes are inhabited by spirits and ancestors, the book shows how human and more-than-human relations intertwine environmental stewardship with revolutionary struggles over land, political autonomy and sovereignty.

Speakers

Helene Maria Kyed is a social anthropologist and senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). Her research is embedded within peace and conflict studies with special interest in informal justice, policing, resistance, violence, and climate change. She leads the MyCClimate project (2021-2027) exploring intersections between climate change and violent conflict in Myanmar.

Justine Chambers is a social anthropologist and senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). She has more than ten years’ experience researching and writing about Myanmar, with a focus on moral identity, the impacts of long-term conflict, and everyday experiences of climate uncertainty. Her current work at DIIS focuses on the interplay between climate change and violent conflict as part of the MyCClimate project (2021-2027).

Saw Ner Dhu Da is a Karen researcher and PhD candidate at Chiang Mai University in Thailand as part of the MyCClimate project. Using a political ecology approach, his doctoral research examines how power dynamics between the state, ethnic armed organisations, and local communities shape land relations, territorial control, resource competition, and responses to environ-mental and climate change in southeast Myanmar following the 2021 military coup.

Nyan Pyi Thit is a senior researcher who has dedicated nearly twenty years of his life to studying social justice and political economy. He is a co-founder of a non-profit Myanmar research institute established in 2011. In addition, he provides training in social research methodology. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Economy, Political Ecology, and Critical Development Studies and is part of the MyCClimate project.

Marianne Mosberg is a research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research with a PhD in International Environmental and Development Studies from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Her doctoral research examined climate change adaptation, vulnerability, and conflict in southeastern Myanmar, drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in 2018-19. Mosberg’s work focuses particularly on the social dimensions of environmental and climate change, with a particular emphasis on vulnerability, politics, governance, conflict, equity and justice.

Tomas Cole is an Associate Senior Lector in Social Anthropology at Lund University. He has focused on indigenous conservation and environmental peacebuilding in Southeast Myanmar. This work examines indigenous modes of possessing landscapes and the ways these are translated and rescaled into struggles to protect environments and to gain greater autonomy. His current project explores divergent attempts to make peace with “pests”—specifically with diseases bearing mosquitoes in both Singapore and Myanmar.

Kevin Woods is a research associate at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science, is a political ecologist and political geographer who investigates the politics of land and resource extractivism, forest conservation, and armed conflict in Myanmar’s ethnic borderlands. Kevin has published widely in top journals on political ecologies of war and revolution, developing concepts such as “ceasefire capitalism,” “conservation as counterinsurgency,” and “greening territoriality.” Along with his co-editors, Kevin published the book Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region with University of Washington Press. His second book, The Fifth Cut: War and the Remaking of Nature in Myanmar, will be published in the Spring 2028 with Yale University Press. 

Programme

14.30-14.35     Welcome and introduction, Helene Maria Kyed
14.35-15.30     Climate change and conflict in Myanmar, Justine Chambers, Saw Ner Dhu Da, Marianne Mosberg, Helene Maria Kyed and Nyan Pyi Thit
15.30-15.50     Possessed landscapes: When spirits guard forests, conservation becomes revolution, Tomas Cole
15.50-16.30     Discussion and Q&A, Kevin Woods

Practical information

The event takes place in DIIS Auditorium, Stockholmsgade 45, 2100 Copenhagen. Everyone interested is welcome, and participation is free of charge. However, registration is required and must be completed via our registration system.