Bertrand, Jacques, Alexandre Pelletier, and Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung. Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar. Cornell University Press, 2022.

Winning by Process asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities. Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state's ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued to impose their vision of a centralized state even as they appeared to support federalism.

See all of our future pubs here.

Where did “Burmanization,” as a term, come from? We think the first mention is in a 1967 article by Robert Holmes entitled “Burmese domestic policy: the politics of Burmanization.” But there the author took “Burmanization“ to mean the cleansing of specific ”foreign“ elements (Western, Chinese, and Indian capitalist) from the country after the 1962 military coup. In other words, “Burmanization“ was not used as a way to differentiate Bama from taingyintha, at least in this specific text.

Houtman’s might be the first published use. Although his contribution, to be fair, is not explicitly on Burmanization but on Myanmafication. And this is not just a semantic quibble – for his use of “Myanmafication” focuses on the SPDC’s attempt to create a new quasi-civil identity under the sign “Myanmar” (all while smuggling in Bama normativity). His towering book is not just on these issues, however, and must be engaged by all serious Burma Studies students for the arguments about mental culture and its relationship to politics – which is why we link to it here, with all the other cuts.

26 May | 6pm PDT | Central Washington University

more info here.

see here for more details / zoom:

University of California Riverside’s CIS Interdisciplinary Working Group Speaker Series “Art, Authoritarianism, Activism in Contemporary Southeast Asia” Presents
A VIRTUAL FILM SCREENING & TALK WITH THE FEMINIST FILMMAKER COLLECTIVE
May 18th 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM PST

Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/ethnocineatucr

2022 CAORC – INYA Short Term Fellowships for U.S. Graduate Students Conducting Field-Based Research on Myanmar/Burma in a Third Country

Application deadline extended to June 17, 2022 (11:59 PM EST)️

Fellowships awards from $2,400 to $4,400 for a maximum of 4 months

The Inya Institute announces the 2022 CAORC-INYA Short Term Fellowships competition for research that will contribute to studies on Myanmar in any aspect of its wide linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity and to a better understanding of the country’s past or present political and socio-economic situation. Applicants must be U.S. Graduate Students currently enrolled in a graduate program (Master’s or Doctoral level) at an institution of higher education in the U.S. or elsewhere.

see here for the deets.

For all of you graduate students and post-docs out there, don’t forget that 1 June 2022 is the deadline for BSG’s new paper prize. See here for more details.

This week in New Pubs we feature an edited volume on zomian boderlands, with chapters by Cederlof, Pachuau, Möller, and Tharaphi Than and Htoo May; then Bagh and Das on how political economy impacts the security of religious minorities in Bangladesh and Myanmar; last but not least, Suante writes on the history and politics of schooling in Myanmar.

This week we will put all the citations here (because there are so many); see our Recent Publications page for abridged citations and for all of the citations in past weeks.

• Cederlöf, Gunnel and Willem van Schendel (eds). Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces Amsterdam U Press, (2022)
  • Cederlof, Gunnel. “Imperial Competition in the Late-nineteenth Century Burma-China Borderlands.”
  • Pachuau, Joy. “‘Circulatons’ Along the Indo-Burma Borderlands.”
  • Moller, Henrik Kloppenborg. “Frictions and Opacities in the Myanmar-China Jade Trade.”
  • Tharaphi Than and Htoo May. “Multiple Identities of Young Sittwe Muslims and Becoming Rohingya.”
• Bagh, Dipannita Maria and Tapas Das. “The changing dynamics of the political economy in South and Southeast Asia and their impact on the security of ethno-religious minorities: a case study of Bangladesh and Myanmar,” Stosunki Międzynarodowe–International Relations 2.14 (2022).
• Suante, Kam Tung Tuang. “The history and politics of schooling in Myanmar,” Peadagogica Historica (2022).