The Politics of Aid to Burma: A Humanitarian Struggle on the Thai-Burmese Border.

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Author: Jaquet, Carine
• Date: 01 December 2016

The Politics of Aid to Burma: A Humanitarian Struggle on the Thai-Burmese Border. By Anne Decobert. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Hardcover: 247pp.

Humanitarian practitioners and academic researchers evolve in universes that hardly seem to converge. In The Politics of Aid to Burma, Anne Decobert--who wears both a development specialist's and an anthropologist's hat--successfully manages to bridge the gap. The author provides a detailed description and analysis of the politics of aid through the lens of people and organizations working along the Thai-Burma border, and draws heavily on her personal experiences and participatory observation approach. This authentic first person narrative provides a chronicle of how lines drawn on paper--marked by marker stones, barbed wire and land mines--at times decide life and death.

The focus of the book is Back Pack, a civil society organization which provides access to basic public healthcare services to people who lack access to such facilities in remote areas along the Thai-Myanmar border. It depicts the lives of individual aid workers, but also the political aspects of humanitarian aid, and questions the dynamics of legitimization of cross-border aid at a time when international donors decided to increase engagement with the Myanmar government after President U Thein Sein introduced economic and political reforms in 2011. At this time of...