Justine Chambers

Primary Research

Justine Chambers holds a PhD in anthropology and her work focuses on everyday morality, identity politics, authority and ethno-national conflict in Myanmar. She has recently commenced research on a project exploring the relationship between climate change actions, natural resource management, land governance and conflict in Myanmar’s ethnic borderland regions.

Current Research

Justine Chamber's research will contribute to the MyClimate project by producing new empirical knowledge on how local communities adapt to climate change and how state actors, civil society organizations and political movements across Myanmar and its border regions address climate change and the interlinked fields of environmental conservation, natural resource management and extraction, land use and pollution.

How do military state interventions linked to natural resources and environmental management reconfigure local access to and control over land and other natural resources in ethnic areas? Which forms of resistance emerge in response – both armed and non-armed?

How do different local actors react to military state interventions in the fields of natural resources and environmental management? Which discourses and perceptions of climate change and its urgency prevail amongst (military) state, local civil society, ERO and indigenous actors and how do these diverge or converge? How does identity – ethnic and religious - shape local adaptation and mitigation measures introduced to respond to climate change?

How do natural resource and environmental interventions and demands under the military coup shape the conflict dynamics and the prospects for future peace and democracy? By examining the linkages between these major dynamics – and how they are felt on the ground, particularly amongst ethnic communities who have long experienced conflict– Justine Chamber’s work aims to provide a critical perspective on global climate change interventions in conflict-affected states. 

Projects

Justine Chambers is postdoc on the collaborative research project: MyClimate: Climate Actions, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Myanmar (2021-2026), led by Helene Maria-Kyed (Senior Researcher, DIIS). Funded by the Danish Research Council for Development Research, MyClimate is part of a collaboration with researchers from DIIS, which leads the project, the Nyan Corridor, the Regional Centre for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University (Thailand), and the Highland Institute in northeast India, the project will shed light on the linkages between climate change actions and conflict dynamics in Myanmar’s contested ethnic border regions.

As part of the project, Justine Chambers is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Regional Centre for Social Science and Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University, Thailand.  

Justine Chambers is also finalising work on her forthcoming monograph, Pursuing Morality on the Frontiers of a Buddhist State, with the National University of Singapore Press as part of their Southeast Asia Publication Series (in alliance with the University of Hawaii Press and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS)).

Pursuing Morality is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015-2019 in Myanmar’s Karen State, an area defined by the world’s longest civil conflict. Drawing on anthropological theories of morality and ethics, it adds valuable insights into the lives of conflict-affected communities in Myanmar and their understandings everyday morality on the frontiers of a Buddhist state.

Beyond academic publications, Justine Chambers is also a regular commentator in the Australian media on Myanmar's affairs and has worked for the British Council's MyJustice programme researching housing land and property rights and plural justice systems Myanmar.