Vol. 50 No. 3 September 2019 ‘Accountability Amidst Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: Learning from Recent Cases’ the Muslim Rohingya community residing in Rakhine State (Human Rights Watch 2014). Seeing the nationalist Buddhist movement as an ally against the NLD, Thein Sein also ratified a controversial marriage bill rendering marriage between Buddhist women and men of other religious faiths unlawful. Uncivil society, similar to civil society, can also keep formal authorities on the run. Prominent sources from within the NLD, for instance, acknowledged that the NLD’s decision to remove all Muslim candidates from their ballots in the 2015 election was due to growing pressure from Buddhist nationalist groups (Hindstrom 2015). Similarly, Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence in the face of atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims is often explained with strong anti-Muslim sentiments on the Myanmar ‘street’. 4.2 Borderlands: peace-building as counterinsurgency The complex of relief, advocacy, and ethnic minority organisations at the Thai border has also shaped social and political action inside conflict-affected border regions. These include CSOs such as the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), which works for safeguarding the natural livelihoods of conflict-affected communities, and the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG), which documents human rights abuses in eastern Myanmar. Both organisations received training and assistance from international organisations. International assistance and a comparatively liberal political condition on the Thai border have also enabled organisations such as the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand (KWAT) to advocate for the rights of ethnic communities in other conflict-affected border regions of Myanmar. Many ethnic CSOs have developed within a particularly complicated web of social relations, which impacts on their actions and outlook. In a similar vein that they cannot be understood in separation from international aid on the Thai border, they cannot be dislocated from armed conflict inside Myanmar’s border regions, including the politics of EAOs. This is primarily because EAOs such as the KNU have long been embedded within local communities. In fact, Myanmar’s EAOs cannot be understood in separation from the wider society. This is not least because many of them have established reciprocal exchange relations through wide-reaching governance and welfare provision among parts of their claimed population in ethnic border areas. These governance arrangements have embedded ethnonational movements into the social lifeworld of ethnic minority communities in Myanmar’s conflict areas. This is particularly true in areas where rebels remain in control of territory and operate relatively sophisticated administrative structures, including education provision (Brenner 2017, 2018b). This historically grown context has two main implications for social and political action in Myanmar’s conflict-affected border regions. Firstly, some of the administrative and welfare departments of EAOs are part and parcel of social and political action in Myanmar’s borderlands. They cooperate with CSOs in the provision of services and advocacy work, for instance, in the development of curriculum and teacher 28 | Brenner and Schulman Myanmar’s Top-Down Transition: Challenges for Civil Society