Contentious Compliance: Dissent and Repression under International Human Rights Law. By Courtenay R. Conrad and Emily Hencken Ritter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 280p. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

spective to Brenner’s future research in this field (see Alicia De La Cour-Venning, “Revolutionary Law Abidance: Kachin Rebel Governance and the Adoption of IHL in Resistance to Myanmar State Violence,” International Criminal Law Review 19 [5], 2019). Similarly, Andrew Ong’s study on the internal dynamics of the political culture of the Wa rebellion could offer Brenner opportunities for thinking about whether, and under what circumstances, his focus on grassroots relations can be applied to other, perhaps more top-down, rebellions such as the Wa (see Andrew Ong, “Producing Intransigence: [Mis]Understanding the United Wa State Army in Myanmar,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 40 [3], 2018). Seeing as much of Brenner’s argument developed from his “manifold everyday interactions” (p. 24), I wish we would have seen and heard more, both from the grassroots themselves and from his ethnographic journey. For example, the pronouncements on the opinions of the grassroots are often not underpinned with direct quotes, unwittingly tilting the favor and the focus on elites, whose voices seem to be included to a greater degree. This does not detract from Brenner’s argument but simply means that I would have liked to hear more from the grassroots, in their own words. In a similar vein, more detail from his ethnographic journey would have been welcome. How did his choice of methods and his own positionality as a male researcher affect the type of data he was able to collect? How did it shape where he went and to whom he spoke? Did he mostly speak to men? What did this mean for the type of knowledge produced in this book? Brenner suggests that his methods forced him to “unlearn and relearn as much as learn” (p. 25), but he leaves us curious as to what this learning process entailed. I would have loved to see a more reflexive discussion on learning processes such as these to illuminate how his choice of methods, and his very being, ultimately informed the type of knowledge produced. I also think that Brenner misses a productive opportunity to engage with feminist and gender studies. In making the case that we need to analyze conflict in the borderlands with a relational ontology, we need to take seriously the workings of gender. Recent studies on rebel behavior complicate the dynamics of social order in South and Southeast Asia.My ownwork (JennyHedström, “The Political Economy of the Kachin Revolutionary Household,” Pacific Review 30 [4], 2016) has, for example, shown that the “rebel social contract” in Myanmar relies on a gendered division of labor in which women are pushed to provide the public goods that Brenner identifies as a critical element for maintaining grassroots support (p. 21). Moreover, Srila Roy’s important study into the Maoist revolution in India troubles the suggestion that legitimacy among the Maoist comrades was crafted through everyday social interactions between the leaders and the movement (Srila Roy, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement, 2012); instead, Roy shows how the struggle was legitimated through everyday gendered violence that cemented social relations and provided a raison d'être for the conflict. In other words, it is not that Brenner is wrong to emphasize the relationship between the grassroots and the elites, but rather that the rebel social contract is infused with gendered relations of power and violence. Engagement with this body of literature would have strengthened Brenner’s overall argument and allowed him to uncover more of the internal politics of rebellion and conflict in Myanmar’s borderworlds. These (small) critiques notwithstanding, Brenner has meticulously crafted an argument about rebel politics that is rich with ethnographic details and theoretical insights. In providing a view from within rebel politics, Brenner identifies the dynamic relations of social life as giving form and shape to political violence. Rather than seeing the sometimes “uneasy relations” (p. 15) between competing leadership factions and the grassroots as necessarily troubling rebel behavior, Brenner suggests that they lead to productive tensions, which are able either to hamper or propel rebellion forward. This insight adds critical knowledge to our understanding of how broader questions of peace and conflict in a country can be affected by the messy, everyday relations that communities and elites engaged in rebellions have, making Brenner’s book essential reading for any student or scholar interested in learning more about rebel politics in general or the Kachin or Karen rebellions in particular.