Abstract
This article examines the vastly expanded mobility of displaced Karen villagers in the evangelical humanitarian movement, the Free Burma Rangers. This builds on ethnographic fieldwork on humanitarian cultures in the Thai-Burmese borderlands conducted since 2007 with a Thai research team and funded by Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious Diversity. While refugees are too often presented as victims, the article argues that by joining the mission, the Karen freedom fighters become ambassadors of a political ideology and evangelism. Bringing Christianity with them from their displaced homes, displaced Karen meet the evangelical humanitarian organization in the Karen hills or in the Thai refugee camps, train with them, and supply the villagers left behind with emergency health care and religious messages. Sponsored by American evangelical churches, the US military, and resettled Karen communities in the West, the freedom fighters of the Free Burma Rangers mobilize people and resources all over the globe. Recently, they have expanded their operations beyond Myanmar to places as far as Syria, Iraq and South Sudan, thus getting involved in what it presents as a global struggle between good and evil.
Highlights
Taking up humanism as its constituency: The Free Burma Rangers:“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s Grace in its various forms”. 1, Peter 4: 10.Beginning every interview with a prayer, American missionary and humanitarian worker DavidEubank tells us that he is giving himself to God and depends on his guidance
Military, and resettled Karen communities in the West, the freedom fighters of the Free Burma Rangers mobilize people and resources all over the globe. They have expanded their operations beyond Myanmar to places as far as Syria, Iraq and South Sudan, getting involved in what it presents as a global struggle between good and evil
This paper looks into emergency healthcare for the wounded in the borderlands of Myanmar’s ethnic minority areas through the example of the evangelical Free Burma Rangers
Summary
Taking up humanism as its constituency: The Free Burma Rangers:. “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s Grace in its various forms”. Religious solidarity is helping to build a global liberation project, mobilized by donations from local parishes and faith communities, that shrinks distances in a globalized mission Humanitarian organizations, such as MSF, substantially add to Foucault’s governmentality, establishing alternative networks and actors who monitor the world for human rights violations, making evidence of atrocities public, bringing them to the attention of the media, and assisting the most vulnerable They want more than just to provide medical help. The Karen who participate in the missions of FBR, as well as other humanitarian organizations, become missionaries in their own right who leave their protected environment to go out on dangerous missions as well doing missionary work in the hills of Eastern Myanmar, in the refugee camps of Northwestern Thailand, and as Rangers in Myanmar and elsewhere These Karen cultural ambassadors are not the passive and victimized refugees that are known from media images, but are homegrown missionaries who use their enhanced mobility in the West to establish religious centers wherever they are. The way of traveling with modern military equipment, jeeps, and modern airplanes contrasts with Jesuit Vinai Boonlue’s metaphor of walking caused by suffering and poverty that he develops in his sensitive and ethnographic dissertation (Boonlue 2015)
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