"...due to budgetary and ideological reasons, the regime requires all of its field battalions to be as economically self-sufficient as possible. This policy, introduced in the early 1990s, has encouraged the battalions to engage in a diverse array of activities to fund their operating expenses, which minimally include food, ammunition, and pay packets for Ken MacLean | 44 | the soldiers under their command. Of these activities, joint ventures are among the most lucrative since they allow the battalions to collect various rents (such as extra-legal taxes and protection fees) in addition to a percentage of the commodities extracted. Second, decades of counterinsurgency operations have resulted in the extensive militarization of Burma?s border regions. There are, for example, more than 200 infantry battalions presently deployed on or near the country?s eastern border.11 Due the density of these deployments, battalions frequently find themselves seeking to exploit the same limited number of economic opportunities in order to finance themselves. Third, most of the extractive enclaves in the ceasefire areas contain several different kinds of resources, so concessions devoted to one commodity often overlap spatially with others, which results in shifting forms of competition and collusion between the ad hoc joint ventures. Over time, these practices have produced a curious paradox that complicates conventional understandings of sovereignty, which still privilege a state?s monopoly over the legitimate use of force within a territory. On the one hand, the resource concessions have helped the regime to expand its military, administrative, and economic reach into areas of the country where it previously had little or none. On the other hand, the resource concessions have simultaneously undermined the regime?s ability to exercise centralized control over these same areas since the joint ventures are able to divert a considerable portion of the resources they extract (rents as well as primary commodities) to members of their respective patron-client networks, group, or locality. Both processes have not only intensified efforts by the joint ventures to claim what remains of Burma?s natural ?capital? before someone else does, but accelerated the devolution of sovereignty into competing networks of authority and accumulation, which cross-cut the regime?s civil and military bureaucracy at some moments and bypass them entirely at others..."