No State, No Service

Episode #516: “I want to be able to center women in their full right and to shine a spotlight on how I think they are very much the heroes of the revolution,” says Jenny Hedström, a researcher whose book, Reproducing Revolution, examines women’s labor in the Kachin struggle. Joined by Stella Naw, a Kachin activist and scholar, they argue that the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple story of aggressor and victim. Instead, it must be understood through the everyday labor that sustains communities across generations of war. Jenny’s engagement with Kachin women began in the early 2000s while working with the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand. She found that English-language scholarship centered male fighters and formal politics, while the women she spoke with talked about displacement, rebuilding, and survival. When she began her PhD in 2015, she initially focused on female soldiers, assuming armed actors were the proper lens for studying war. But spending time in Kachin towns, army brigades, and displacement camps shifted her perspective: she realized that labor that was not militarily or publicly celebrated proved equally essential to revolutionary endurance. Together, they argue that Kachin womens’ roles in farming, teaching, organizing, and caregiving within Kachin Independence Organization–controlled areas constitute real governance, and not merely domestic support. Stella reframes gender as relational, noting that rigid expectations of masculinity have harmed men as well. “When they can no longer perform the values that define them as Kachin men… they take their own life!” They extend this critique to the international arena, contending that legitimacy is too narrowly defined through sovereignty and armed control. The sustaining labor that makes resistance governance possible remains politically undervalued, and Jenny and Stella want conflict analysis and policy engagement to more explicitly account for this foundational layer of local governance. They stress that the governance sustained by women is politically indispensable, so it should be studied, supported—and valued—accordingly In the end, their commitment remains unequivocal: “We’d rather live and fight for freedom than to submit,” says Stella. “People are willing to die, so they will continue fighting. It's not going to end, but we can end it soon by supporting these resistance actors, who made up for pluralistic states, and support civil society groups who can hold EAOs and EROs accountable.”