Institute of Development Studies | bulletin.ids.ac.uk of thousands of other civilians that have fled the war since the 1980s. In 1995, the Thai government merged various dispersed refugee settlements into nine major refugee camps. These have since become increasingly dependent on foreign aid from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as well as a dazzling array of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), many of which established their offices in Mae Sot or Chiang Mai. The influx of Bamar political activists, ethnic minority organisations, and international human rights, relief, and development organisations, quickly established the Thai border as the main hub of CSOs from Myanmar, both from the Bamar-dominated centre and ethnic border areas of the country. With the help of international donor money, diverse projects came into being, from health clinics to anti‑trafficking and poverty relief, as well as funding of both ethnic minority organisations and NLD-affiliated networks. Ethnic CSOs, such as the Mae Tao Clinic, have since focused on health and education to refugees as well as communities trapped inside eastern Myanmar’s conflict zones. NLD-affiliated democratic activists established independent media outlets such as The Irrawaddy and have campaigned extensively for the release of political prisoners. The Thai–Myanmar border also became the cradle for Myanmar’s women’s movement through the establishment of the Burmese Women’s Union (BWU) in 1995, followed by the umbrella organisation the Women’s League of Burma (WLB) in 1999. The shared experience as refugees created an opportunity for the women’s movement to overcome state-imposed ethnic divisions between centre and borderland communities (O’Kane 2018). The proximity to international human rights agencies on the Thai border provided funding and support for Burmese women’s organisations to conduct research on gender‑based violence committed by the Tatmadaw (Hedström 2016). When the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN) together with the Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF) in 2002 published the report License to Rape about the military’s systematic use of rape in the Shan State, the military regime appointed a committee to look into allegations of gender-based violence (SWAN 2002). This incident elevated the issue of sexual violence onto the overall political agenda for the exiled opposition movement and carved out a platform where women as political agents could be heard with the support of international advocacy. Women’s rights groups have since flourished and pushed for stronger protection of women’s rights and more political participation of women in a country where women accounted for about only 10 per cent of political representatives between 2011 and 2016 (Shwe Shwe Sein Latt et al. 2017). Despite the successes in civil society mobilisation on the Thai border, this exile civil society emerged as highly dependent on continuous donor funding and interest. Since most international donors started to engage more actively with the Myanmar government in the wake of IDS Bulletin Vol. 50 No. 3 September 2019 ‘Accountability Amidst Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: Learning from Recent Cases’ 17–36 | 25