"ABSTRACT: The changes that have swept rural Myanmar, transforming landscapes and affecting livelihoods, have ignited rural politics and civil society and grassroot organizations’ strategies to counter, resist, negotiate and adapt to these changes. Rural politics have centred on broad calls for agrarian and environmental rights and social justice that do not address women’s rights, gender and generational justice explicitly. Based on fieldwork carried out in Myanmar’s Taninthary region, and engagement with grassroots organizations, I examine how gender and generational power dynamics play out, transform and are transformed in processes of agrarian and environmental change and rural politics.....Introduction: In Myanmar, land and natural resources have been historically the focus of extractivist initiatives that benefited colonial administrations, central states, the military and powerful elites and deprived small farmers, fishers and forest-dependent groups, including ethnic groups, particularly women and girls, of access to natural resources, shelter and livelihoods (Karen Human Rights Group 2006, 2015; Tavoyan Women’s Union 2015; Barbesgaard 2019; see also Kramer forthcoming; Sekine forthcoming, this collection). Starting in 2012 the neoliberal orientation of recent civilian governments, discursively legitimized by agendas for economic growth, sustainable development and climate change mitigation and adaptation, has bolstered this tendency. Since 2011, legal reforms in the areas of land use, land conversion, and investments have facilitated the entrance and operations of international capital and investors in the country. In addition, the 2012 preliminary ceasefire between the Union Government (UG) and several Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) has enabled access of domestic and foreign capital to once secluded areas, including Tanintharyi region in the South, which had long been a hotspot of conflict and ethnic insurgency and had thus remained relatively isolated (Bryant 1994; Malseed 2009; Woods 2015a, 2015b). The surge of extractive and infrastructure development initiatives, combined with conservation plans to restrict access to protected and designated areas, have accelerated the transformation of Myanmar’s rural landscapes and livelihoods. This, in turn, has sparked civil society and grassroots organizations’ strategies and actions to resist, negotiate and adapt to these changes. Members of affected communities, often with support from grassroots and local civil society organizations, have resisted, mobilized and strategized on ways to advance their own counter-visions of development (Park 2019). Coupled with opportunities to engage in ‘contentious politics’ (Tarrow 1994; Tilly 2002, 2004) as noted in the introductory article of this Special Issue, the mobilization from below has expanded the repertoire of ‘contentious performances’ that are being developed dynamically and in conversation with the political, social and economic context (Tilly 2002, 2004). In Myanmar, just like in other countries in the region, women and men, young and old, have taken active part in these political struggles; women, notably, have been at the forefront of protests and diverse forms of activism, often at the cost of their bodily integrity and the breakdown in family relations. Research from other countries confirms that women, including older women, participated in protests often as a strategy to curb violent repression and retaliation by the military and the police, to protect their sons and husbands, and in some cases as activists in their own right (see for example, Brickell 2014; Lamb et al. 2017; Park and Maffii 2017; Tavoyan Women’s Union 2015; Morgan 2017). While these changes affect different people, including their political agency, in ways that are mediated by gender, age, ethnicity and other social and power differences, the urgency and fluidity of the issues on the ground requires cohesion in mobilization and swift action. Partly because of this, rural politics have tended to centre on broad calls for agrarian and environmental rights and social justice that do not address women’s rights, gender equality and generational justice explicitly. Women’s groups have also been often side-lined; whereas youth have been engaged by environmental and ethnic grassroots groups within the frame of well-defined scripts that do not challenge power, gender and age hierarchies. The exclusion of women’s groups and gender equality from agrarian and environmental justice movements, and the reasons underlying it, have been highlighted by many feminist scholars (see for example, Harris 2015; Park 2018; Deere 2003; Stephen 2006; Krishna 2015) who have called for urgent convergence to avoid the risk that movements for social justice could be void of gender and generational justice. Krishna (2015), for example, notes that in India some of the larger movements that have led to state formation have failed to recognize women’s claims for gender justice in spite of their conspicuous participation and even leadership. In the Andes, Harris (2015, 171) highlights the disconnect between feminist and indigenous and other movements and calls for a better articulation of ‘feminist analytics and organizing’, advocating for going beyond women’s engagement towards adoption of a feminist agenda that questions power structures. The fight against patriarchy has also been central to the demands of peasant women in international movements such as La Via Campesina. This article explores the potential of rural politics to be catalytic of change that promotes gender and generational justice and contributes to making the case for the need for not one but multiple convergences – feminist political ecology with feminist political economy, agrarian and environmental movements with feminist movements. Based on fieldwork conducted in Tanintharyi between 2014 and 2018 and engagement with local grassroots organizations, I examine how gender and generational power dynamics play out, transform and are transformed in processes of agrarian and environmental change and rural politics. I look at the conditions that support a (re)negotiation of gender roles and relations and how these could be conducive to gender-transformative rural politics, that is, politics that fosters gender equality and generational justice as a key dimension of social change and social justice (Cornwall 2014)..."