Abstract:
In this talk, I drive for two aims. First, I want to give an ethnographic impression in the ways that humanitarian assistance was organized to the refugee camps, to the migrant villages and migrants in Northwestern Thailand on the Thai-Burmese border and to internally displaced in Eastern Burma. Further, I argue that humanitarian assistance has also fueled the imagination of a Karen homeland in a context of devastation of the Karen landscape in Eastern Burma. Humanitarian assistance then boosted in important ways the recovery of a project that was both nationalist and religious. The talk is examining the crucial position of Theravada Buddhism and local Christianity in the refugee experience. In particular, the talk follows the way that the participation in grassroots humanitarian assistance through the back door from Thailand to re-enter Burmese territory with a humanitarian project has also led to a religious re-awakening and to an interpretation of the conflict in religious terms.

- Dr. Alexander Horstmann, University of Copenhagen