Title: “The Coup in Myanmar: The Politics of Buddhist Nationalism, Everyday Resistance, and the Future of Federal Democracy”
Date / Time: 29 Nov, 12-1pm EST
host: Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs
Title: “Defending Human Rights in Myanmar: Responding to the human rights crisis in Myanmar”
panel with Chris Sidoti; Htwe Htwe Thein; Manny Maung; and Tun Aung Shwe
Date / Time: 29 Nov, 6-7pm AEDT
host: Sydney SEA Center
Title: “Local politics and violence in Myanmar’s drylands”
Date / Time: 25 Nov, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm AEDT
The Anya region remains quite understudied compared to other places in Myanmar. Part of the reason for this lacuna is that long-term fieldwork has been almost impossible since the 1960s. In consequence, we tended to overestimate the homogeneity of Bama society and to see the central drylands as a state space.
Yet, the current guerrilla warfare within Anya contradicts this narrative. I approach this region as an internal frontier of the military state, where people have experienced several episodes of violence and upheaval in recent history. By analysing how violence in the Bama society affects local politics, I seek to specify the experiences of violence, the reconfigurations of temporality, and to understand local politics as changing spaces of engagement.
This week’s New Pubs features Sheikh on a unique project being pursued by Rohingya in Malaysia to create a blockchained archive of their ethnos; Nwet Kay Khine considers factors of resilience and constraint in the Myanmar resistance movement; and Tual Sawn Khai and Asaduzzaman write on on how Covid has affected Burmese migrant workers in Thailand.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
image courtesy of The Rohingya Project
The launch will be online on the 23rd of November at 4pm AEDT with a panel discussion with me, Sara Tödt, co-author of the report, Associate Professor Htwe Htwe Thein from Curtin University and Khain Zar Aung , president of the Industrial Workers’ Federation of Myanmar (IWFM) and treasurer of Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar (CTUM).
The report is the result of a research partnership between CARE International and RMIT’s Business and Human Rights Centre, and presents interview and survey data on women garment workers during COVID and just after the coup.
After a six week hiatus, attributable to your stenographer’s busy semester, we return with a Deep Cut that examines historiography written by Burman historians during the post-independence period. Tun Aung Chain concludes by arguing that: “Rather than thinking of nationhood as a process developing in the course of history, [this literature] regarded nationhood as an underlying constant of Myanmar history, innate throughout the political fluctuations of the Bamar kingdoms” (19).
Tun Aung Chain. “Historians and the search for Myanmar nationhood.” in Tun Aung Chain, Broken Glass: Pieces of Myanmar History, SEAMEO Regional Centre for History and Tradition, Yangon, 2004: 9–24.
See here for these pdfs and for all the others in the series.
| 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.
This week’s New Pubs features Khin Zaw Win on Myanmar’s resource curse; Vrieze on the way ethnic minorities see the revolution; and Huard on village leaders in the dry zone;
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
| 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. |
Burma Studies Group 