| 40 | THE RISE OF PRIVATE INDIRECT GOVERNMENT IN BURMA Ken MacLean T he concept of human security, commonly deined as both “free- dom from fear” and “freedom from want,” emerged in the early 1990s, largely in response to the challenges globalization posed for traditional understandings of sovereignty in the post-Cold War era. 1 Proponents of the new paradigm argued that state-centric approaches to security, while not unimportant, were insuicient in an era characterized by a dramatic and often destabilizing increase in lows of people, goods, and services—many of them illicit—across national boundaries. 2 Instead, they advocated for a more lexible, proactive approach, which placed the basic needs of ordinary people rather than those of states at its core. While this paradigm has become quite popular, especially among those who sup- port an integrated, rights-based approach to human development, it has also proved to be very di icult to implement, especially in cases where the primary cause of “want” and “fear” is the state itself. This has long been true in the case of Burma, where the military has ruled the country in one form or another since 1962. Indeed, many ex- perts are concerned that the country as a whole is on the verge of hu- manitarian collapse after nearly ive decades of inept, kleptocratic, and frequently brutal authoritarian rule. 3 The most extreme forms of this rule can be found in the country’s border regions, where successive campaigns against diferent armed groups, many of them opposed to centralized rule by the ethnic majority, have militarized many, though not all, of these Ken MacLean is an assistant professor of international development and social change at Clark University. He is the author of “Sovereignty after the Entrepreneurial Turn: Mosaics of Control, Commodiied Spaces, and Regulated Violence in Contemporary Burma,” in Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in a Neoliberal Age (Cornell University Press, 2008). Extracted from FINDING DOLLARS, SENSE, AND LEGITIMACY IN BURMA Essays by Bradley O. Babson, Mary Callahan, Jürgen Haacke, Ken MacLean, Morten B. Pedersen, David I. Steinberg, Sean Turnell and Min Zin. Edited by Susan L. Levenstein ©2010 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. www.wilsoncenter.org Full text accessible at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ASIA_092010_Burma_rpt_for%20web.pdf (2MB) and http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs09/$-sense-legitimacy_in_Burma.pdf (1.6MB)