Community-Led Housing in Yangon: The Struggles of Non-Confrontational Resistance and Feminist Crisis Management

Abstract

In this article, we draw on community-led housing, non-confrontational resistance, and feminist crisis management literature to analyse the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the military coup in a community-led housing scheme in Yangon, Myanmar. Based on the direct involvement with a women's grassroots network and a local NGO between 2018 and 2022, we focus on the impacts of the double crisis on low-income populations, their responses to overlapping challenges, the emergent forms of mutual care, and the extra and intra-community learnings. We argue that, in the context of authoritarian regimes, community-led housing practices constitute a modality of non-confrontational resistance that, in times of crisis, revealed how collective housing members had an important safety net-in material, emotional, and social terms—sustained through collective mobilisation and mutual care. This analysis contributes to expanding the debates on housing justice struggles, non-confrontational resistance, and care from the standpoint of grassroots women's organisations.