Author Archives: burmastudiesgroup

Event: Megan Ryan and Mai Van Tran, “Democratic backsliding disrupted: The role of digitalized resistance in Myanmar”

18 November –  7-8pm AEDT
sign up here.
More than one year since its coup, the Myanmar military has neither established effective control of the territory nor crushed online dissent. What factors have enabled the resistance forces to deny the consolidation of military rule? We address this question by building a novel theoretical framework that incorporates the role of long-standing digitalized pro-democracy activism and conducting a mixed-method analysis that includes an original, largely representative sample of public Facebook posts in post-coup Myanmar. We find that the development of online and hybrid pro-democracy activism against digital abuse and other illiberal policies under previous quasi-civilian governments enabled anti-coup resistance forces to thwart the military’s attempt of authoritarian revival in 2021. Our research findings deepen understanding of Myanmar’s post-coup contestation dynamics as well as other cases of unpopular autocratization in the current-day digital era.

full calendar of BSG events here.

Event: Gerard McCarthy, “Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar“

16 November –  5pm (UK time)

The Cambridge South Asia Seminar
16 November, 5pm
In-person Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT
 
Please register using this link: Meeting Registration – Zoom
 
Abstract: The transition to partial civilian rule in Myanmar in 2011 was meant to herald progress towards more socially-oriented governance following decades of autocratic austerity. Both successive governments, including Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy administration (2015-2020), instead encouraged charitable, philanthropic and private non-state actors to plug social gaps while avoiding state welfare spending. Informed by Dr. McCarthy’s forthcoming monograph (Cornell University Press, 2023) and ongoing research on hybrid social order, this presentation will consider the long durée of ‘social outsourcing’ in Myanmar: its autocratic origins in the collapse of socialism in 1988; its repercussions for post-2011 notions and practices of ‘democracy’; and the role of non-state welfare mechanisms and ideals in sustaining contemporary resistance following the February 2021 military coup. 
 
 

 
 

full calendar of BSG events here.

Event: Aye Lei Tun on the effect on gender norms and cultural taboos in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution

Title: “Deconstructing and reinforcing gender norms and cultural taboos in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution”

Time: 4 Nov 2022 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm AEDT

Aye Lei Tun is currently working as a researcher on gender- and media-related studies for Burma-based international NGOs. In 2021, she enrolled in the PhD program in Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. She is also a published author, with a pen name Thawda Aye Lei and recently she has published four novels and two short story collections.

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source: internet

Recent Pubs, 24 Oct 2022

This week’s New Pubs features Steinmüller on how sovereignty is expressed through care in Wa state; Ryan and Tran on the role of digitized resistance after the coup; and a report by Haaretz, a watch-dog newspaper in Israel, exposing Israel’s role in supporting Myanmar’s military despite genocide and civil war (PDF posted here).

As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.

israel-saw-brutal-myanmar-regimes-as-a-business-opportunity-documents-reveal-israel-news-haaretz.com_Download