"ABSTRACT: The intersection between land grabs and climate change mitigation politics in Myanmar has created new political opportunities for scaling up, expanding and deepening struggles toward ‘agrarian climate justice’. Building on the concepts of ‘political opportunities’ and ‘rural democratization’ to understand how rural politics is relevant to national regime changes in the process of deepening democracy, this paper argues that scaling up beyond the local level becomes necessary to counter the concentration of power at higher levels. At the same time, this vertical process is inextricable from building horizontal networks and rooting struggles in communities. By looking at national-level land policy advocacy for more just land laws, accountability politics in mining at a regional level in the southern Tanintharyi region, and the bottom-up establishment of local indigenous territories, this paper illustrates how expanding these struggles becomes necessary, but is also accompanied by potential faultlines. These fault-lines include divergent political tendencies within the network and challenges to working in areas contested by the Burmese state and ethnic armed organizations.....Introduction: Political reactions ‘from below’ to what has been termed ‘the global land grab’ following the 2007/2008 financial crisis have been diverse, ranging from resistance to grabs and mobilizations across local, regional, national and transnational levels, to negotiations to improve compensation or for better terms of incorporation into land deals (Hall et al. 2015; Borras and Franco 2013). Attention has been given to the importance of ‘convergence’ across struggles, around common demands for system change, food sovereignty or climate justice as a strategy to strengthen demands against powerful actors (Tramel 2018; Mills 2018; Claeys and Delgado Pugley 2017). However, linking local and national struggles with transnational movements also brings accompanying tensions, as these have their own histories (Edelman and Borras 2016; Peluso, Afiff, and Rachman 2008). While studies have looked at different ways in which mobilizations have engaged with the state, this contribution looks specifically at the context of a national regime transition in Myanmar, namely from authoritarian militarism to nominal democracy, and how agrarian resistance shapes and is shaped by these changes at national level. Reforms in 2011/2012 in Myanmar under President Thein Sein intensified entry of capital into infrastructure, land and extractive industries, deepening liberalization policies that began in 1988 under the SLORC/SPDC governments. Open conflict still continues between the Burmese military and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in some areas. In others, ceasefires have created a situation of ‘neither war nor peace economy’, building on earlier rounds of ceasefires in the 1990s, in which the Burmese military steered EAOs toward businesses, granting them concessions as part of a strategy of political neutralization (Kramer forthcoming). The term ‘ceasefire capitalism’, has similarly been used to describe the entry of foreign and domestic capital into infrastructure development, large-scale land concessions, mining licenses and forest demarcation in previous conflict areas (Woods 2011). National elites linked to the military are consolidating a new form of crony capitalism, building on the historic concentration of power in businesses and conglomerates in what has sometimes been considered an emerging oligarchy (Jones 2014; Ford, Gillan, and Thein 2016). While these changes have created threats, they have also opened political opportunities for mobilizations ‘from below’, in the context of increased formal civil and political rights even as targeted repression through jailing and threatening of farmers and journalists still persists. New land laws, such as the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Lands Management Law (2012) and the Farmland Law (2012), facilitate the acquisition of land by powerful actors, but discussions around the National Land Use Policy (NLUP) have also created openings for actors ‘from below’ to influence policy-making and attempt to shift this balance of power (Franco and Ju 2016). Similarly, multi-stakeholder platforms such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) have created new frameworks for investment that can threaten existing livelihoods, but have also allowed civil society actors to push for greater participation. ‘Green grabs’, interconnected with land grabs (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012; Borras and Franco 2020), have threatened the livelihoods of forest users but have prompted grassroots to mobilize around indigenous rights (CAT 2018, 2020; Morton 2017). Prior to the recent political liberalization, there was a systematic weakness of social forces that could challenge the model of state-facilitated crony capitalism, such as labor organizations, the middle class or radical food-sovereignty or peasant movement (Jones 2014; Malseed 2008). However, recently there has been emerging ground level resistance by farmers through ploughing protests, collective judicial action against land grabs, regional CSOs helping farmers through networking and training, and other tactics such as letter writing, negotiations and protest (TNI 2015a; LIOH 2015). There have also been campaigns against large-scale dams and mining and palm oil concessions (ALARM et al. 2018; Tarkapaw et al. 2015; Suhardiman, Rutherford, and Bright 2017; Park 2019) and demands for the recognition of customary tenure systems in the ethnic borderland areas (CAT 2018, 2020; ECDF 2016). In this context, activists in Myanmar have found opportunities and challenges in strengthening local community-building while at the same time strengthening national-level mobilizing and advocacy. As this paper will argue, they are both necessary in the struggle toward ‘agrarian climate justice’ and in the wider process of deepening democracy. National-level advocacy can create ‘openings’..."