Myanmar

Cheesman
Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into how words

animate politics. Across sixteen entries, the lexicon stages
dialogues about political speech and action in this country
at the nexus of South, East and Southeast Asia. This Element
offers readers venues in which to consider the history and
contingency of ideas like power, race, patriarchy and revolution. Politics and Society
Contention over these and other ideas, it shows, does not
reflect the political world in which Myanmar’s people live – it in Southeast Asia
realises it.
Myanmar
Myanmar
About the Series Series Editors
The Elements series Politics and Society Edward Aspinall
in Southeast Asia includes both country- Australian National
Nick Cheesman
specific and thematic studies on one of University
the world’s most dynamic regions. Each Meredith L. Weiss
title, written by a leading scholar of that University at
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108565523 Published online by Cambridge University Press

country or theme, combines a succinct, Albany, SUNY
comprehensive, up-to-date overview of
debates in the scholarly literature with
original analysis and a clear argument.
Cover image: tashechka/Shutterstock ISSN 2515-2998 (online)

ISSN 2515-298X (print)
Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia
edited by
Edward Aspinall
Australian National University
Meredith L. Weiss
University at Albany, SUNY
MYANMAR
A Political Lexicon
Nick Cheesman
Australian National University, Canberra
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467
Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

a department of the University of Cambridge.
We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009454339
DOI: 10.1017/9781108565523
© Nick Cheesman 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-009-45433-9 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-46474-1 Paperback
ISSN 2515-2998 (online)

ISSN 2515-298X (print)
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence
or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this
publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will
remain, accurate or appropriate.
Myanmar
A Political Lexicon
Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia
DOI: 10.1017/9781108565523
First published online: November 2023
Nick Cheesman
Australian National University, Canberra
Author for correspondence: Nick Cheesman, [email protected]
Abstract: Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into how

words animate politics. Across sixteen entries, the lexicon stages
dialogues about political speech and action in this country at the nexus
of South, East and Southeast Asia. This Element offers readers venues in
which to consider the history and contingency of ideas like power, race,
patriarchy and revolution. Contention over these and other ideas, it
shows, does not reflect the political world in which Myanmar’s people
live – it realises it.
Keywords: Myanmar, Burma, politics, meaning, lexicon
© Nick Cheesman 2023

ISBNs: 9781009454339 (HB), 9781108464741 (PB), 9781108565523 (OC)
ISSNs: 2515-2998 (online), 2515-298X (print)
Contents
A Political Lexicon: How Come? 1
1 Politics 10
2 Power 13
3 Dictatorship 16
4 Federalism 18
5 Sovereignty 21
6 Citizen 24
7 Race 27
8 Buddhism 30
9 Genocide 34
10 Impunity 37
11 Interrogation 39
12 Revolution 41
13 Reform 45
14 Development 48
15 Patriarchy 53
16 Freedom 56
References 59
Myanmar 1
A Political Lexicon: How Come?

Myanmar is a country dense with political ideas and crowded with political
actors. If this were not obvious before 1 February 2021, when the country’s
military again seized its government, it was almost immediately afterward.
The quality of the resistance that people in Myanmar showed to the takeover
was remarkable. For over two months, acephalous protests ran up and down
the country’s length. Throngs of bodies and emotions enveloped Yangon,
Mandalay, and provincial towns and cities around the country. People
assembled in a festive atmosphere, celebrating Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,
whose National League for Democracy had overwhelmingly won a general
election the year before and who was about to lead a new legislature. They
called for her release, along with that of hundreds, then thousands, of other
political prisoners from her political party and others, not to mention many
from state agencies.
With their numbers growing, assembled demonstrators began to challenge
notions of political order in Myanmar that, in the three-quarters of a century
since the country pulled free from the disintegrating British Empire in 1948,
have never been settled. Even before soldiers and paramilitaries started system-
atically shooting protesters dead, abducting people from their homes and
profaning corpses, demands for the recall of the semi-elected legislature were
supplemented, and then supplanted, by calls to overthrow the military state
itself. As soldiers, paramilitary police and their proxies shot, assaulted and
humiliated demonstrators, civilians who yet took to the streets inverted the
relationship between themselves and their adversaries. They denounced the
soldiers and paramilitary cops who approached them as robbers of sovereign

power, not guardians of it. They did this in chants and jeers and by holding
placards that read like:
/ Down with usurper military government!

/ Our aim: overthrow the military rebels!
/ Cut the fascist army at the roots!
Taken out of context, these might seem like expressions of anger that could be
directed towards military government anywhere – evocative of what people in
those assembled crowds felt, but not revealing much of political thought and
action. This lexicon rests on the opposite premise. The countless aphorisms,
poems and songs heaping ridicule on the army and its running dogs, sitkwe,
after the February coup did much more than merely convey contempt. They
theorised forms of power relations which were alternatives to the ones on which
Myanmar’s military insists.
2 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia
How? Well, in conditions in which army officers claim an exclusive and

unmediated right to defend sovereign power from the nation’s enemies, pro-
testers inverted the relation of soldiers to sovereignty. They labelled the
Tatmadaw (Defence Services) a rebel army, thubôn sitdat. In this one usage,
Myanmar citizens, political activists and enemies of its armed forces turned the
political world upside down. They denied the military any exclusive right to
guard sovereignty and assigned that right to themselves. In this way, they
upended their relations with soldiers sent to kill, capture and humiliate them.
Thubôn sitdat is not a glorious institution. It is a murderous gang, a rabble. The
only right thing to do is to fight it.
What about condemnation of the army as fascist? Isn’t this just a smear
borrowed from the language of social movements abroad? No, it is not that
at all. It is an allusion, but not to fascism as an ideal type, nor to the
historical experience of fascism in Europe that gives the term substance in
English. Instead, it registers the historical narrative of fascism in Myanmar
(then called Burma) during the Second World War and, with this, the
fascism of historical myth against which people back then united in struggle.
That is to say, ‘fascist army’ is less about the qualities of the army itself
than it is about those of its anti-fascist opponents. It does not matter whether
the army meets criteria for a formal definition of fascism or not, and to cast
around for such criteria would be to miss the point. ‘Fascist’ here is
a negative descriptor, a placeholder; ‘anti-fascist’, the term implied by it,
is its productive opponent. The epithet ‘fascist army’, then, places today’s
struggle in an historical lineage to which people can refer and from which
they can draw as they organise, innovate, form alliances, press claims and
together make the political world in which they live.
The language people use with one another, the meanings they infer and the
assemblies they form to hear and be heard do not reflect the political world; they
realise it. When language is revolutionary, it endows those who use it with
a power of public speech that they would not otherwise have. It provides them,
as the historian William Sewell (1980: 201) has written, with the ‘power to
redefine the moral and social world’. This is why the words with which people
are made political subjects and through which they interpret and remake polit-
ical subjectivity deserve attention.
But which words should get attention and why? That question brings me to
the design of this lexicon: to the approach that I took to researching and writing
it; and the choices I have made when deciding which words to select for its
entries. In the remainder of this introduction I explain these. I begin with the
principles that guided its design, its background and its rationale. I conclude
with three contributions I hope it can make to the understanding of politics in
Myanmar 3
Myanmar. The remainder of the Element consists of the lexicon’s sixteen

entries, followed by recommended readings for each.
Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into political usages and into
the times and places that these usages have animated politics in the mainland
Southeast Asian country that is its site of inquiry. The rubrics for its entries serve
as a series of lexical prompts. Though they are followed by dictionary defin-
itions, the entries sketch lexical relations. In this respect, they depart from the
keywords approach that Raymond Williams (1983) made famous. In that
approach, the author’s concern remains with the words themselves as semantic
units (see Fassin and Das 2021). In this lexicon, the selected words do not mirror
meanings. They are entries, or openings, into possible dialogues. It follows that,
unlike certain terminological works on Myanmar (e.g., Seekins 2006), the
lexicon does not aim at completeness. It makes no pretence of comprehensive-
ness. Its entries are few. They decide nothing. What they offer, in combination,
is a venue in which to stage relations between certain words, to see what they do
or do not do politically, how they coexist and how they might otherwise be.
Williams says that, although they might seem somewhat arbitrary, his key-
words forced themselves onto his attention because the problems of their
meanings seemed to be bound up with the problems the words were being
used to discuss. The words caught his eye and ear because they were doing
things that mattered to culture and society. Like him, I have selected terms that
have troubled me personally. These are what Craig Reynolds (2014) has called
‘worry words’. It is because they are worrying that they have pressed me to
think harder about concepts and categories. And it is because I have worried
about them that they have from time to time revealed some things and led me to
think about some others.
As conditions have changed in Myanmar, so has what has worried me.
However, my basic intuition has not. Rather than try to sum things up or write
a report based on the contents of source materials, my aim throughout has been
to choose words with which to make the lexicon political in two senses: one, in
the sense that it is about politics in Myanmar; the other, in that it is itself
political, because it stages a dialogue between the terms it contains and invites
a conversation between me the author and you the reader.
Unlike Williams, I never intended to tease out the entries’ semantic histories.
The lexicon’s method is, as Carol Gluck (2009) writes of her and Anna Tsing’s
jointly edited Words in Motion, situated in time and place. But what does that
mean for the writing of this lexicon? Throughout, I have been guided by three
principles (drawing on Bernstein, Ophir and Stoler 2018). The first goes back to
criteria for selection of entries. It was that the lexicon should comprise an
admixture of conventional political usages, in Burmese and English (like the

entries for Dictatorship and Federalism), while including words that are not
necessarily political (like those for Interrogation and Buddhism). My goal
was to query assumptions about politics and the political in Myanmar so as to
open words to inquiry that they might not otherwise get.
A second principle was that the lexicon should remain attentive to how
translation itself is a political concept (Lezra 2018). The politics of translation
in or from Burmese is unlike translation in or from English (Cheesman 2021). In
English trans-lation, something is moved from one place to another. A word or
phrase is transferred. It is picked up and dropped off as if by taxi. In Burmese, on
the other hand, words translate by rebounding from one language to another.
They are not transferred so much as they are negotiated and reinterpreted. I have
tried to evoke something of this back-and-forth, which is why readers may find
that the entries have an open-ended quality. Their inconclusiveness is not an
oversight. It is for the reader to decide what comes next.
The third principle was that the lexicon should reach for big ideas about
politics without trying to grasp them in all their bigness and, likewise, that it
should look into small details of politics without getting entangled in them.
Following this principle, the lexicon is neither a work of general theory nor
a compendium of facts and figures. It is a series of exchanges in which ideas that
words connote or denote are called to account. A principle annexed to this one
was that the lexicon should be unencumbered by jargon and minutiae, to make it
easy to read – but not so easy that it can be read hastily. The entries are short, but
they ask the reader to pause and question the truths that words in everyday life
convey as self-evident and in need of no further justification. They invite the
reader, I hope, into a conversation that follows from what are, for me, by now
three decades of conversations that I have had about the many meanings of
politics in Myanmar.
It has been written that the past is a foreign country. If so, its foreignness may
prove to have been an advantage for me when writing this lexicon. I sense
Myanmar’s past as I do my own, but I can only apprehend it as something
distant and foreign, familiar but unsettling. When I first took interest in what
was happening in Myanmar, as an undergraduate at the University of
Melbourne, the news reports were of soldiers who had seized government.
Myanmar – or, as we insisted on calling it, Burma (see Metro 2011) – had had
a student-led uprising in 1988 that brought down the Burma Socialist
Programme Party state, but this, as in 2021, ended bloodily. I read Bertil
Lintner’s (1990) account of it, found out about the country’s history of colonial
invasion and occupation, and learned about how Burma was, from the moment
of its political independence in 1948, beset by strife (see Charney 2009).
Myanmar 5
I got hold of human rights groups’ newsletters, which circulated through the
offices of the trades hall. These documented atrocities in the country’s highlands
and told of half a century of civil war and ‘the politics of ethnicity’ (Smith 1991).
In Thailand I met people documenting state violence and read first-person
narratives of political struggle and resistance (e.g., Aye Saung 1989).
I volunteered at a refugee camp on the border with Myanmar, where I learned
the rudiments of Burmese – though it was not until later that I went to Yangon
(or Rangoon) to study the language in earnest. The army was pursuing armed
enemies in Myanmar’s highlands and frontiers. It pushed hard against parts of
the border with Thailand and China, and it cut deals with armed groups claiming
sovereignty over certain subnational territories and the people, creatures and
things in them. Para-states like the Karen National Union, which governed the
camp where I lived and worked, splintered. Members of a breakaway group in
1997 and 1998 burned the camp down.
In the lowlands the State Law and Order Restoration Council that had
usurped power in 1988 repressed all unarmed political opponents. Dissidents
went underground. Many fled abroad. The Council locked Aung San Suu Kyi in
her house; members of her party, in an archipelago of prisons old and new.
Meanwhile, in the name of development, it welcomed capitalists from China,
Korea, Japan and other parts of Southeast Asia – Singapore and Thailand in
particular. International sanctions and bad press kept non-Asian capital away for
a time, though profits from petroleum and natural gas brought multinationals
like Total and Unocal. Peri-urban industrial zones contained few factories and
many weeds. The country remained agricultural. The junta continued to impose
socialist-style quotas on farmers, with which to acquire grains and pulses for
redistribution to public servants and for international sale. Hundreds of thou-
sands of young men and women went abroad in search of work – in the fisheries
and canneries of Thailand, in the construction sites of Singapore and Abu
Dhabi, and in merchant vessels criss-crossing the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
The military insisted that it would govern temporarily. This was necessary, it
said, to prepare for the ‘discipline flourishing’ multiparty democracy under
a new constitution to come. It suspended its constitution-drafting convention
in 1996 and reconfigured itself the following year as the State Peace and
Development Council. Work on the draft constitution resumed in 2003, and it
passed through a pantomime referendum in 2008. The military Council indi-
cated that it was now ready to consider electoral politics. One of its constitu-
tional provisos was that its soldiers would occupy a quarter of the seats in the
new union legislature. The legislature itself would occupy a grandiose complex
that was the centrepiece of Myanmar’s newly erected high-modernist answer to
Brasilia, Canberra and Islamabad: Naypyidaw.
In 2011 the military’s own Union Solidarity and Development Party took
government via a tightly controlled election held the year before. The premier of
the outgoing junta, General Thein Sein, became president. He proved to be
adept at forging an elite pact with Aung San Suu Kyi, bringing her and her
National League for Democracy onside while keeping the military committed to
partial withdrawal from government and administration of a sort that would not,
at least in the short term, threaten its core economic and political interests. As
a result, Suu Kyi and forty other members of her party entered the union
legislature in a by-election in 2012, right on cue for the anti-Muslim violence
that traversed the country that year and the next.
The rest is the recent past, though no less foreign for that. The National
League for Democracy swept the 2015 election, forming government in 2016
a quarter-century after the military first denied it the right to do so. In 2020 it
won even more seats than it did in 2015 – despite, or perhaps because of, the
army’s genocidal campaign against Rohingya in the north of Rakhine State,
which the League did nothing to try to stop and international criticism of which
Aung San Suu Kyi deflected. But if genocidal violence did not cost the League
any votes and advantaged a few minor parties, like the Arakan National Party,
then it came at a cost to others. Many that had hoped to pick up small numbers of
seats representing particular constituencies went away disgruntled, blaming
campaign restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic and major party trickery
for their poor results.
Even before the vote, military spokesmen had indicated that they would not
acquiesce to another resounding National League for Democracy victory.
Egged on by resentful minor party leaders, the military and the Union
Solidarity and Development Party lodged a slew of complaints. One military
spokesman made the extraordinary claim that the veracity of 8.6 million votes
out of around 27 million was in doubt (the Union Election Commission rejected
the claim). After the soldiers who occupied one-quarter of the seats in the union
legislature and their allies failed to get a special session called to debate alleged
voter fraud, their commander, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, threatened to
act. He gave no time or opportunities to negotiate. He had already initiated his
plan. The day that the new legislature was due to sit, soldiers detained President
U Win Myint. One of Win Myint’s deputies, a former army officer, took his
place. He signed the order for a state of emergency with which to hand
government to the military, which established the State Administrative Council.
Then came the protests. They cut across class, religious, linguistic, occupa-
tional, cultural and gendered lines. They were strongest among unions formed
by working people in state-owned industries, in city quarters where charismatic
young leaders inspired residents to fight back, and in peri-urban areas whose
Myanmar 7
occupants had had enough of decades of dispossession and oppression at the

hands of Myanmar’s military and its lackeys. They continued until participants
could no longer bear the gunfire and systematic, performed atrocities that they
met in March and April. Then protests gave way to what has become a protracted
revolutionary situation (see El-Ghobashy 2021; Lawson 2019; Tilly 1993). New
defensive armed groups, concentrated in upper Myanmar but extending into
Yangon and other lower regions of the country, first proliferated and then in
parts consolidated. The National Unity Government that in April formed in lieu of
the Naypyidaw legislature initially seemed an unlikely contender but then showed
itself to be a viable alternative to the military. However, the military state did not
collapse. The State Administrative Council, like the State Law and Order
Restoration Council and the State Peace and Development Council before it,
succeeded in containing politics via the one method for dealing with them that
Myanmar’s military has mastered: their prevention.
This situation ruled out any further research for the lexicon in Myanmar. Prior to
it, before the coronavirus pandemic, in 2018 I had held twenty-five discussions
with lawyers, legislators, political activists, human rights defenders, serving
and retired university professors, Buddhist monks and fellow researchers about
what words they would include in such a political lexicon and why. I collated
their recommendations and also collected and read print news media. Over three
months I did a simple content analysis of the titles of articles in the news
sections of then-popular domestic newspapers (Daily Eleven, The Voice, The
Standard, 7 Day News). In 2019 I carried out additional content analysis of
Burmese-language titles in periodicals held at the National Library of Australia,
where I consulted monographs and edited volumes, alongside those in my

personal library. Later that year I went through newly published Burmese
books at Kyoto University.
Since February 2021 my research for the lexicon has been in the manner of an
ongoing dialogue with colleagues and students. I have consulted Burmese-language
news websites (BBC Burmese Service, Mizzima, Myanmar Now), listened to
podcasts (Insight Myanmar, Myanmar Musings, Myanmar Revolutionary Tales),
watched videos, and reviewed photographs, statements and memes on platform
media (e.g., Facebook pages of people’s defence forces and interim university
councils), organisational webpages (e.g., the Assistance Association for Political
Prisoners, the National Unity Government), military state media and websites,
briefing papers and reports issued by researchers, and personal correspondence.
Most entries in the lexicon start with a definition from the standard Myanmar–
English Dictionary compiled by the Myanmar Language Commission (1998). In
the case of the first entry, for example, this is ‘naingnganye / n politics’.
The purpose of including these dictionary entries is not, as indicated, to insist on

an authoritative meaning. It is to provide a convenient Romanised version or
versions of the Burmese word or words relevant to each entry at its outset. And it
is to give a sense of which words appear to have, in the dictionary compilers’
view, stability in meaning when moving between Burmese and English, as in
‘dictatorship’, and which do not, as in ‘power’.
A few of the entries begin with English definitions from the Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary (2007) rather than with Burmese ones. The reason for this is
that their Burmese equivalents are not, to my mind, inviting of the type of
dialogue to which the entries aspire. They are stilted and rather awkward
translations. This is not to imply that all political words that are translated or
transplanted from English and other languages are uninteresting or unimportant
to the vernacular. As Tamas Wells (2021) and Matthew Walton (2017) have
shown, the Burmese dimogarezi, for instance, is not a thin veneer on an English
or French or Latin or Greek word for democracy. Burmese dimogarezi is
culturally, historically and linguistically distinctive. We are liable to misunder-
stand what people in Myanmar say about democracy if all we try to do is find
points of correspondence between their dimogarezi and our democracy. The
same goes for all of the entries in this lexicon, regardless of whether they begin
with Burmese or English definitions.
Burmese and English are the two languages with explicit stakes in this
lexicon. They are not the only two languages with stakes in Myanmar’s politics.
The country is home to a mind-boggling diversity of languages. A lot of
minority languages have well-established political vocabularies, especially
those languages adopted and taught by armed groups in the country’s frontier
areas, like Mon and Sgaw Karen (see, e.g., South and Lall 2016). The attention
that this lexicon pays to Burmese and English does not imply that other
vernaculars do not matter. However, an attempt to write a political lexicon
that would consider multiple language users and sources in Myanmar would
have called for a different research design, working towards different goals
from this one (see, by way of one example, Ball et al. 2007).
Following the dictionary extract or extracts with which each of the sixteen
entries begins is a short quote or proverb. These gesture to the politics of the
word in question, its translation or both, by way of a metaphor or proposal or
argument about its use.
The entries are not alphabetically ordered, but they are not arranged arbitrar-
ily either. They are, as I have been at pains to point out, performing and inviting
dialogue. Certain entries talk to one another; others, across one another. There is
no reason to read them in the order they appear, since they are not
a concatenated series but a venue, a place for coming together. Readers can
Myanmar 9
choose to participate in their dialogues or move on. They can enter as they
please and leave as they choose.
To assist readers who find their own ways through what follows, each time
one of the words for the entries in the lexicon (other than the word with which
that entry is concerned) appears it is in bold. Readers might use these words as
cues for other entries to visit, or they may find another way to get about. A few
places in the lexicon contain parenthetical recommendations to look at another
entry, where these relate directly to the topic discussed.
The lexicon has no designated exit, no conclusion. Instead it ends with short
lists of recommended further readings, organised by entry. These lists follow
the bibliographic references for this introduction. As with the entries in the
lexicon themselves, many more works might have been included in these lists.
Readers might find some of them in Andrew Selth’s (2018) bibliography of
Burma studies or in the Online Burma Library (https://burmalibrary.org). For
readers of Burmese, an indicative list of references follows the further reading
lists.
Throughout the lexicon, with the exception of proper nouns, the transcription
of Burmese follows the Romanisation System for Burmese, BGN/PCGN 1970
Agreement. This includes the dictionary definitions of the Myanmar Language
Commission (which uses a different system). The BGN is a crude system that
groups similar-sounding Burmese consonants and vowels together and disre-
gards tonal markers. But it has the advantage of being simple to use and easy to
read. Names of people and places follow popularised spellings.
What can a small lexicon contribute to our understanding of politics in Myanmar?

What can it say or do in an era of revolution? To these questions, I have three

responses with which to conclude these preliminary remarks. The first is that, by
attending to how political values are negotiated and transformed through words
and deeds, talk and action, I hope this book can be a place for thinking and talking
about politics in Myanmar differently from works that try to follow all that talk
and action. In tumultuous times it is hard to keep up. There is always something
going on. Attention to how words are used, to their valences and histories, to their
relations to other words and to power can help us to think when it is hard to get
a grip on things. The important thing is to resist the urge to pile up facts – to
describe new events and add data as if the accumulation of these will automatic-
ally aid understanding. As Lisa Wedeen (2019) has shown in her work on Syria,
the opposite can be the case. Undoubtedly, without facts it is not possible to
interpret events; however, accumulation of facts not guided by purpose or
informed by theory is unproductive, if not counterproductive. I have written
this lexicon against that impulse.
The second related contribution that a lexical approach to political meaning-

making can make is to show how our interpretations of the political world shape
that world and the interpretations that comprise it (see Blakely 2020). The
lexicon itself interprets a vernacular world of politics in Myanmar. It does not
describe it. It is not a lens onto that world. It is a series of entries into it. It
communicates with it. It recounts political practices, not with the goal of
providing, on its pages, faithful likenesses but with the objective of producing
trustworthy interpretations. There are, after all, no likenesses to be had. There
are only more or less trustworthy interpretations of other interpretations of
political facts. In this way the lexicon enfolds with all those other interpretations
of politics in Myanmar that I have read and heard and discussed and considered.
The third contribution I think this political lexicon makes is that it resists
hopelessness. Cynics multiply in dark times. For them, there is no point in
opposing dictatorship. Dictators get their way and the vulnerable suffer if
people resist, they say. Violence is never the solution, some well-meaning
principled folks argue, implying that those who opt to use violence in self-
defence are, with their attackers, blameworthy when it intensifies. Others talk
knowingly of failed states and military stalemates, as if revolutionary situations
were like chess games. Though not every one of the lexicon’s entries is hopeful,
I have written it against such expressions of futility. Its premise contains my
hope. Political ideas flourish in times of conflict and change because there is
cause to be hopeful. And where they flourish, there is.
Myanmar 11
1 Politics
/ naingnganye / n politics.
—————————————————————————
Politics are like puppetry, or walking with a stick. – Burmese saying
Politics, naingnganye, pronounced naing-gan-ye, are matters, -ye, of a state or polity,

naingngan or nainggan. This denotation chimes with an old-fashioned way of
talking about politics, that where a state or polity exists, politics do; conversely, no
state or polity, no politics. But like the idea of the state in English, nainggan connotes
different things. These complicate the idea of the polity in Myanmar and of its
politics.
Take the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar, which anticipated the political reform
of the 2010s. Compare its two versions, Burmese and English. The comparison
reveals a number of shifts in usage. In English, nainggan, or formally, for
Myanmar, the elevated naingngandaw, or nainggandaw, designates in its first
chapter the basic principles of the ‘union’ and in its second the ‘state’ structure.
‘The sovereign power of the Union [naingngandaw]’, the constitution at its outset
runs, ‘is derived from the citizens and is in force in the entire country [naingn-
gandaw]’ (section 4). At its other end, the constitution in chapter 13 refers to the
‘state’ (naingngandaw) flag and the ‘national’ (naingngandaw) anthem.
Naingngan (or naingngandaw), then, is at play in different fields of meaning.
It does different things, depending on whether politics are imagined as matters
of the state or nation, country or union; whether they are constituted by citizens
or constitutive of them. Politics as naingganye refer to the state but do not

correspond to it. The state is a site of political action but not a container for it.
Political affairs spill all over the place.
For Myanmar’s military, spillage makes politics problematic. Its tasks are to
prevent and contain spills – to insist that the state is, in fact, the container in which
politics must be conducted and that the military alone can define the limits of the
state and of those activities that are properly political. Its theories and methods have
varied. The Revolutionary Council (1962 to 1974) and the Burma Socialist
Programme Party states (1974 to 1988), each of which was commanded by the
country’s prototypical dictator, General Ne Win, made monopoly claims on what
was political. To participate in politics legitimately, citizens had to join the Party
programme. This meant being a member of a mass organisation under state
leadership or otherwise contributing to the new socialist economic system.
After the programme met with nationwide protest, the Party collapsed in
1988, and a new junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (1988 to
1997; reconstituted as the State Peace and Development Council from 1997 to
2011), tried containment through electoral party politics. In the 1990 general
election the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi,
charismatic daughter of the country’s independence hero, trounced the mili-
tary’s National Unity Party (in Burmese, the ‘National Race’ Unity Party). The
military learned from this experience that if politics were like proverbial arts of
puppetry then these were practical arts it had not mastered. Politics, it turned
out, were harder to handle than puppets and walking sticks. And what the
military could not keep its hands on, it would not allow.
The military now prohibited politics, first by locking away Aung San Suu Kyi, as
well as leading members of her political party and assorted others, for the better part
of the next two decades; second, by making a mockery of politics themselves. Its
officers delineated national politics, amyotha naingganye, from party politics, padi
naingganye. The former, they said, were the proper affairs of state in which they
were duty-bound to participate. These were for the greater good. They were matters
of state sovereignty, racial solidarity and territorial integrity. Over these the military
would have the final say. This is a notion of politics as command. There is no
dialogue, no meeting of minds or exchange of views. Nor is any invited. The active
exchange of ideas is unwelcome. Dialogue, in the military’s scheme, is an attribute
of party politics. Those are small-minded affairs that occupy the attention of people
who would, whether they know it or not, ruin the country. National politics are the
military’s bulwark against that possible outcome of anything aberrantly political.
National politics are formless and aimless. Though they have the appearance
of a structure and a set of objectives in the military’s three national causes –
non-disintegration of the Union; non-disintegration of national solidarity, which
is to say, the solidarity of national races; and perpetuation of sovereignty – these
are nothing other than a restatement of what any sovereign state stands for.
Existential threats to territory, authority and sovereignty are repugnant to all
existing states. All states circumscribe the possibilities for political action. It is
in how these threats are formulated and circumscribed that states differ. Where
those threats are located in the practice of politics itself, the only thing left to do
is to prevent people from thinking and acting politically.
Consequently, from the election in 1990 to the next in 2010 the struggle between
Myanmar’s military and its political opponents was not a political struggle in the
sense of one fought for political power. It was a struggle by one side to redefine
politics absent of political thought or action; by others, to keep politics alive. The
struggle went on in political party gatherings, for as long as those were permitted, in
public protests and in the closed-door trials of dissidents. It went on in myriad other
places and ways. People in Myanmar, like people living under politically repressive
conditions elsewhere, came up with strategies to undermine or mock or bypass
military strictures, many of which constituted forms of political resistance, though
they were not spoken of in this way. People wrote and talked about politics
elliptically. Anyone who was not overtly political avoided speaking about
Myanmar 13
naingganye and professed disinterest in them. Better to leave something unsaid

than to say something that you might later regret.
Politics did not magically reappear when the military next tried its hand at
a general election in 2010. The junta kept Aung San Suu Kyi locked in her house
and thousands of her party’s members and their affiliates in jails around the country.
In 2011 it ushered the last premier of the military junta, General Thein Sein, into the
presidency. It delivered the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party the
bulk of seats in the first union legislature. Its representatives met with uniformed
soldiers there. The latter occupied a quarter of the legislature, not as representatives
of any constituency but in the name of national politics. Thereafter, the military
released Suu Kyi and her party leadership from captivity.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her party members contested and won nearly all
available constituencies in a 2012 by-election. She went on to chair the legisla-
ture’s rule of law committee and by 2014 was campaigning for the next general
election. In 2015 the National League for Democracy won over 57 per cent of
the vote for the union legislature and 78 per cent of the elected seats – still over
59 per cent of the total seats, including the military’s bloc. It was a huge victory
and an unequivocal rejection of the military and its affiliates. Suu Kyi, constitu-
tionally blocked from the presidency because she had married and raised
children with a non-Myanmar national, instead took the supra-constitutional
role of state counsellor and in 2016 effectively became head of government.
With the return of politics, people found their voices and formed new institutions
for political action. They assembled in order to be seen and have their claims heard.
By the early 2010s not a day went by without, somewhere in Myanmar, peasants
blocking a road to demand that land taken from them in the name of development be
returned or workers occupying a factory compound to insist that they be paid more
and that conditions be improved. Buddhist monks came together and called on
laypeople to defend their religion and race against Muslims. Representatives of
armed groups occupying frontier areas gathered in conference halls to negotiate
ceasefires and discuss the prospects for federalism. Politics started spilling all over
the place again. The citizen was back. Power was once more, so to speak, up for
grabs. Or was it?
2 Power
/ ana / n power; authority. [Pali ana]

/ awza / n … 3 power; authority; influence (as in ~,~ [the voice of
~, exceeding ~]). …
—————————————————————————
Awza, as distinct from ana, ‘permeates’. – Gustaaf Houtman, Mental Culture
in Burmese Crisis Politics
In Burmese, two short words usefully convey ideas of political power. Both have
Indic roots in South Asian statecraft. The first is ana. Politically speaking, ana is
a source of commands that are obeyed because they are issued in the form of
maxims backed by force. Ana is, as Gustaaf Houtman once observed, centralised
power: the power of dictatorship, the power of sovereignty. It is power repre-
sented in organisational charts of authorised decision-makers, ana-baing, who by
virtue of office possess a quantum of ana with which to act.
Ana, lest it be misunderstood as a rational bureaucratic type of power, stands in
need of supernatural intervention and protection. Dictators have to be aided by
intermediaries trained in esoteric arts, such as astrologers and numerologists, to
anticipate threats and head off challengers. They can do this by visiting sites where
confluences of supernatural power can be accessed and by participating in rituals to
anticipate and outperform future unwanted events – or by forcing others to partici-
pate in them. Those others might include anyone who has ever travelled by road in
Myanmar, since one well-known story goes that the reason drivers in Myanmar, then
Burma, were ordered from the left to the right side in 1970 was that an astrologer
advised General Ne Win that via this expedient he would avert a right-wing putsch.
Awza denotes another type of power. This type gives those in whom it accrues,
through education, race, religion and the arrangements of patriarchy, opportun-
ities to say and do things that others cannot. This is power that (like ana) exists as
a force in the world; like two other types of awza with which it is lexically linked –
the awza of nourishing food, which gives creatures life, and the awza of healthy
soil, on which plants thrive – it is a nutrient, not an instrument. Though somebody
may be possessed of awza, they cannot wield it. This does not mean that it is not in
their service. They can influence others to do their bidding. But the power/awza to
influence others issues from elsewhere than that of power/ana. The latter power is
in the form of commandment exemplified as sovereign power. The former is
relational. Ana can be obtained and moved about through mundane and supra-
mundane interventions. Awza has potency that is tangible but not transferable.
There are, to be sure, other words that denote power. Among them, bôn
(sometimes Romanised as hpoun), is a type of power that accrues through
meritorious action. It is manifest in the form of the Buddhist monk, the
bôngyi, or one with great bôn (see the entry on Buddhism), since having
adequate power of this sort, accrued from the deeds of previous lives, is
a condition of possibility to become a monk. It correlates with awza inasmuch
as it radiates rather than dominates. Another is the English loan term pawa,
which rocker Lay Phyu’s album Power 54 adopted back in 1996. Fifty-four is
the number of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house on University Avenue. The number
disappeared from official labels when censors belatedly got the reference and
cassettes circulated as mere pawa, with the 54 in their ellipses, on crooners’ lips
in the karaoke bars and teashops of dictatorship.
Myanmar 15
Perhaps the pawa in Power 54 was meant to refer not to either ana or awza but to
both. Ana and awza, after all, are not mutually exclusive. The power of the ideal
political leader is constituted by each. Military dictators are far from ideal. They
have a surfeit of ana and an exiguity of awza. Aung San Suu Kyi, by contrast, has
come close to the ideal. This is why, as leader of the National League for
Democracy and people’s champion, she has constituted a surpassing threat to the
military – one that it has been unable to contain other than by preventing politics.
General Aung San, her father, in death achieved the ideal by virtue of his lifelong
struggle for national liberation and martyrdom. His daughter carries his legacy.
While Aung San Suu Kyi’s awza derives in no small part from her father,
genealogy is but part of the story. The power of Suu Kyi’s awza is that it is at once
hereditary and cultivated, through religiously imbued practices of self-discipline,
which inform her idea of freedom; her bilingual eloquence, which brought her to
prominence at mass demonstrations in 1988; her performed selflessness; and, for
over three decades, her unbroken commitment to her Burman (or Bama) race among
other national races. In the 1990s she refused to leave the country, and with it the
struggle for democracy, even as her husband lay dying in Oxford, lest she be denied
re-entry. In 2017 she refused to criticise the Myanmar state when it stood accused of
genocide. For people abroad, these two positions might look contradictory: the one
in defence of human rights, the other in defence of their violators. At home they do
not. Both were in defence of the nation. Both enhanced Suu Kyi’s awza.
The reform era of the 2010s was a testing time for power not only for the
military and for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party but also for others in
government or dealing with government. People who were new to the experi-
ence of being in proximity with power/ana wanted to try it out. These include
members of the legislatures at the union level and those in the seven subnational
regions (Ayeyarwady or on an earlier Romanisation Irrawaddy, Bago or Pegu,
Magwe or Magway, Mandalay, Sagaing, Tanintharyi or Tennasserim, Yangon or
Rangoon) and seven states (Chin, Kayah or Karenni, Kayin or Karen, Kachin,
Mon, Rakhine or Arakan, Shan). They included the likes of the new commis-
sioners for human rights and corruption, the Union Election Commission, and
the leaders and representatives of armed groups in ceasefire talks or deals.
Throughout this decade the military ceded a quantum of power/ana to civilians
in these and other agencies, but it never relinquished it. As well as holding one-
quarter of the seats in the union legislature (see the entry on Politics), it retained
the ministries of defence, border affairs and home affairs, the last of which
oversaw the police force, prisons and the fire brigade, which has an auxiliary
security function. Its men sat at tables in tripartite ceasefire negotiations, with
civilians from government, while armed groups demanded rights to development
and debated the meaning of federalism. Through these processes it succeeded in
winning civil war by keeping belligerents at the negotiating table and enhanced its
status by being in proximity with Aung San Suu Kyi.
It should be clear from this entry that, among different types of power, ana clashes
whereas awza absorbs. Awza has no resources with which to resist the coercive force
of ana. But if its power is great enough, awza can deaden the effects of ana. It can
render the master of that type of power, the anashin or dictator, politically speaking
a pathetic figure whose sovereign commands ring hollow – whose achievements, if
they can even be called that, remain limited to the prevention of politics.
3 Dictatorship
/ anashin / n dictator.
/ anashinzanit / n dictatorship.
—————————————————————————
The content of the legislator’s action is right, but devoid of legal power: it is
powerless right. Dictatorship is omnipotence without law: it is lawless
power. – Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship
Unlike the English word ‘dictator’, whose origins in Renaissance interpretations

of a Roman republican office for dealing with emergencies Carl Schmitt traced in
his 1921 book on the topic, the Burmese word anashin is descriptive, not
juridical. The dictator is nobody other than one who masters ana, power. His is
indeed a lawless power, but it is not freed from legal restrictions through certain
arrangements to resolve an abnormal situation like a war or rebellion. Though war
and rebellion have been justifications for the military’s repeated usurpation of
power in Myanmar, these are false motives; pretexts to seize power, ana-thein.
Dictatorship in Myanmar is not a means to an end, except inasmuch as its ends are
immanent. The point of dictatorship is to constitute a dictator.
In Myanmar, with the exception of the constitutional emergency government,
which General Ne Win temporarily headed from 1958 to 1960 when the civilian
legislature continued working under constrained circumstances, every military
government that has followed has been despotic (see the entry on Politics).
None have heeded constitutional order. Usurpers in 1962 (General Ne Win) and
1988 (General Saw Maung) never even bothered to revoke the constitutions that
the military state superseded. As they had grabbed power/ana lawlessly, they
had no reason to bother with powerless right.
General Ne Win, who in civilian guise later went by the handle U Ne Win
(U being the honorific for an adult male, like ‘mister’ in English; Daw the
equivalent for women) was the prototypical anashin who set the terms and tone
for those who followed him. He was petty, his efforts parochial, his power
Myanmar 17
adequate. The party dictatorship he established was his own, not the masses’.
Burma never leapt forward into upheaval of the sort that the communist party
brought to China. Ne Win’s party didn’t engineer a program for radical eco-
nomic and cultural transformation. He didn’t want it to do that, and the party
couldn’t have done it even if he had. The Burma Socialist Programme Party was
not that type of mass organisation. Ne Win was not that type of dictator. Burma
was not China.
This is not to imply that there were no major changes in Ne Win’s time. In the
mid-1960s the Revolutionary Council nationalised private enterprises. These
included newspapers and printing presses, ending what little remained of public
communications that were not those of the coming party-state. It dispossessed
large landholders and non-natives (see the entry on Race) of capital that it
concluded would be better off in its own hands or in those of native peasants
whom it addressed as a core constituency. With the 1974 Constitution it inte-
grated party and state functionaries horizontally. While keeping them formally
separate, it collapsed the executive, legislature and judiciary into one another.
Throughout these decades, soldiers and police contained politics by putting
down public protests as they arose, like those that accompanied the Southeast
Asian Peninsular Games in 1969 and the workers’ and students’ demonstrations
of 1974 and 1975. But protests in 1988 wouldn’t let up. The military shot its way
back to power, jettisoned the party state and returned its men to the foreground
of government. Two more dictators followed: General Saw Maung from 1988 to
1992, whom Senior General Than Shwe pushed aside to become and remain
chairman of the ruling military junta in each of its iterations (the State Law and
Order Restoration Council to 1997 and then the State Peace and Development
Council to 2011), until the beginning of the short-lived reform era.
After the junta back-pedalled on the 1990 election result, it took out its
frustrations on what it labelled internal destructive elements. People who
spoke up loudly for democracy or federalism or human rights disappeared
into an obscure network of interrogation camps. Through intrusive and
arbitrary administration, Saw Maung and then Than Shwe kept everyone
else in check and themselves in power. All attempts at forcing them out,
whether through use of arms or through unarmed protest, failed. In the end, it
was via a staged constitutional referendum in 2008 and then an election in
2010 that dictatorship gave ground, with the establishment of new legislatures
in 2011, to politics.
Things were changing, and lasting change began to look inevitable when the
National League for Democracy won a first election in 2015 and a second one in
2020. But Myanmar’s armed forces hadn’t gone anywhere. They were no longer
at the forefront of all national affairs, but they were far from out of the picture.
Army officers ran ministries, planned for genocide, talked about federalism,
profited from economic development, and were visible to all and sundry as
a bloc sitting in one-quarter of the national legislature. Military spokesmen
sounded vociferous complaints about the conduct of the 2020 vote, and in
January the next year their commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung
Hlaing, uttered threats about the consequences of not heeding the military’s
concerns.
A few days later, Min Aung Hlaing usurped power and became the country’s
fourth military dictator since 1948. He broke from his predecessors by insisting
that he was acting in accordance with the military’s own 2008 Constitution, by
abducting the civilian president and putting a former army officer in his place
(see the entry on Sovereignty). After a brief interval, protests began. Within
a few weeks, they had enveloped towns and cities up and down the country.
Once the shooting started, politics spilled into revolution. The reform era that
the army had taken over a decade to engineer was finished. With it went
prospects for brokering a federal union.
4 Federalism
ˈfɛd(ə)rəlɪz(ə)m noun. l18. (The principle of) a federal system of government;
advocacy of this . . .
—————————————————————————
In order to achieve lasting and sustainable peace, we agree to . . . Establish
a union based on the principles of democracy and federalism in accordance
with the outcomes of political dialogue and in the spirit of Panglong . . .
– Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, 2015; official translation
The Myanmar Language Commission’s Burmese–English dictionary contains

no entry for federalism. Nor does the Commission’s five-volume concise
Burmese dictionary redress the oversight. Both contain definitions for the
alphabetically adjacent English loan terms, fascism, petsit-wada, and fashion,
pet-shin. But federalism, petdarè-wada or petdarè-zanit, depending on whether
one is talking of federal ideology (-wada) or a federal system (-zanit), has
disappeared into the dictionaries’ ellipses.
It may be that the omission was unintended. Even so, the unintended can be
telling. Before the 2010s federalism was rarely mentioned in Myanmar.
Participants at seminars in territory occupied by armed groups representing
various national races along Myanmar’s borders, as well as those in training
programs in the offices of exile groups in Thailand or India, talked about it. People
in the country did not. It is not that they were not interested, but for the military
Myanmar 19
federalism was a euphemism for separatism: a threat to the union that it could not
tolerate as guardian of national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Soldiers insisted that they had gotten involved in politics in the first place to
counteract this threat. The military had to usurp power in 1962, their story goes,
to prevent hereditary Shan rulers from pulling out of the union. The threat of
secession followed an earlier proposal to amend the 1947 Constitution of
Burma, which marked the end of British colonial rule, to make a federal instead
of unitary government. The Shan leaders had only agreed to enter the union on
condition of autonomy. A constitutional proviso granted a right of secession to
any state whose representatives were unhappy with how things were going –
once they had waited for at least a decade after independence. Aung San, the
country’s independence hero, had reached this agreement with representatives
of groups in frontier areas at the town of Panglong, in southern Shan State, and it
has been popularized as the Panglong Agreement.
It is to the spirit of this agreement that negotiators in the 2010s repeatedly
referred, not least among them Aung San Suu Kyi, since her father was
instrumental in making it a success. Panglong made postcolonial Burma
a reality. In 1962 the reality changed. General Ne Win’s takeover put an end
to that deal and dashed hopes for a federated state. The only way that Shan or
Kachin or whichever racialised minority would secure the autonomy they
sought would be by fighting for freedom. And so they did.
Since then, much time and energy has been spent in combat among multifari-
ous armed groups who have asserted sovereignty over one slice or another of
Myanmar’s territory. In the 1990s and 2000s, many harboured hopes that
Myanmar would fragment as the former Yugoslavia had. One reason it did not
was that while the State Law and Order Restoration Council that seized power
in 1988 fought multitudinous enemies it sought terms on which to cede territory
to certain armed groups through bilateral ceasefires. Not all the seventeen
ceasefires its officers negotiated held. But enough of them held long enough
for the military to stitch together a patchwork of relationships that meant at any
given time it didn’t have to fight on all fronts. Nor was it ever fighting against
a united front.
With the reforms of the 2010s, things changed. Federalism was no longer
a topic that the military would not or could not broach. Some people said that the
2008 Constitution, which was authored under the military’s watch, could be
read as conceding to a kind of federalism without saying as much. Under its
terms, the fourteen state and regional legislatures can raise revenue through
taxes on land, buildings, basic services and excise. They can make decisions
about commerce and agriculture, electricity production, forestry and mining;
manage roads, bridges, ports and transport; and oversee cultural and social
affairs. However, governments of subnational states and regions lack autonomy.

They are subordinated to Naypyidaw, where formal political power remains
concentrated. So regardless of whether it can be read as allowing for a kind of
half-sail federalism, like the half-sail democracy that Thailand’s military has
practised, Myanmar’s constitution does not envisage or articulate a quasi-
federal political order.
Nevertheless, in the reform era federalism was now an accepted topic of
discussion among military representatives, their civilian counterparts in
government and negotiators for armed parastates in frontier areas.
Discussions were no longer one-on-one affairs. They brought a lot of differ-
ent groups to the table for comprehensive negotiations from which but
a handful of belligerents were excluded, chief among them the Arakan
Army, which had formed in 2009, much later than most other groups.
Myanmar’s soldiers were prepared to entertain federalism notionally, at
least – as the text of the 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement with eight
armed groups shows. Whether they were at all persuaded by the idea is
another story. It might be that they used it as a stalling tactic, to keep
negotiators from armed groups in the room. After all, if everybody wanted
to talk about federalism but had divergent ideas about what it meant, then the
chances that progress could be made towards it were remote.
Consequently, despite superficially favourable conditions the decade of
efforts towards this end accomplished precious little, at least at the national
level. By the late 2010s Myanmar was no closer to a deal that would end fighting
and transform the country into a federal union than it had been before the
National League for Democracy came to government in 2016. In parts of the

country there was progress on decentralisation, but the promise of federalism
lay far off.
In the meantime, parastates did as much ceasefire state-making as they
could. The idea was that, regardless of what was agreed, they would
materially have in place, at least provisionally, institutions that they
could substitute for those of the union – schools to teach local languages;
courts and police forces to deal with certain categories of offences consist-
ent with local ideas of justice; departments of land, agriculture, forestry and
the environment.
When the military usurped power in 2021, the reform-era negotiations
came to an abrupt end. Although the military insisted that it wanted to
continue talks, fighting soon renewed in parts of the country that had been
peaceable beforehand, including in Chin, Kachin, Shan, Karenni (Kayah)
and Karen (Kayin) States. Certain groups, like the Kachin Independence
Organization, came out in support of the new National Unity Government,
Myanmar 21
which had formed in April to stand in for the National League for
Democracy government that had been unable to sit. They and others
gave training and lent arms to people’s defence forces bubbling up all
over the place: notably, in parts of Sagaing and Magway Regions where
armed groups had not previously been active (see the entry on
Revolution). The Arakan Army, which the government had classed as
a terrorist group and excluded from negotiations in the 2010s, condemned
the coup and remained in combat but did not extend its activities beyond
its home territory in Rakhine State or publicly back the National Unity
Government. Others, like the United Wa State Army and the Shan State
Progress Party, refrained from commenting or acting on the changed
conditions.
The National Unity Government for its part has committed to the idea of
a federal system of government and a federal army. It has a minister of federal
union affairs. It has revivified an earlier idea from a 2011 coalition of armed
groups that had proposed a federal union army before the negotiations of the
2010s got underway. That proposal remained on paper. In May 2021 the
revolutionary government established its People’s Defence Force as a step
towards its goal of a federated force for a federal Myanmar and an assertion
of its determination to contest sovereignty.
5 Sovereignty
/ agyôk / n 1 person in full charge of an undertaking. 2 Anything of the

highest kind or order . . .
/ agyôkagya / n 1 same as n 1. …
/ agyôkagya-ana / n sovereignty.
—————————————————————————
Don’t be overcome with sadness if I die, for my death will have been in the
struggle for popular will over national sovereignty. – Ko Thiha Tun, undated
letter, 2021
The pretext for the army’s usurpation of power in 2021 was, as previously,
threats to the integrity of sovereignty. Unlike previously, the military claimed to
act in defence of popular sovereignty, pyithu agyôkagya-ana, rather than old-
fashioned state sovereignty, naingngandaw agyôkagya-ana. The electoral pro-
cess had, the military said, been undermined by the National League for
Democracy and the Union Election Commission. It fell to the military to restore
the people’s right to have their sovereign power acknowledged. The problem
was that the military had no rightful basis to declare a state of emergency within
the terms of the 2008 Constitution. President U Win Myint would not give that
right. The military solution was to abduct the president and install one of his
deputies, a former army officer, in his stead. The officer then signed an order for
a state of emergency and handed power to the commander in chief, Senior
General Min Aung Hlaing.
If the charade was intended to demonstrate a legalistic concern for the
niceties of a constitutional order that the military had itself fashioned, then it
failed to persuade anyone. What it succeeded in doing was underscoring the
supreme contempt that Myanmar’s military has for politics and for any part
that citizens might play in them. Protesters who took to the barricades
against the new dictatorship, like Ko Thiha Tun, a young medical doctor
whom soldiers shot dead on the street in Mandalay, were explicit that they
were in a fight first for survival and secondly for sovereignty. Against the
military’s conception of sovereign power as referent object of security for
a preeminent security state, protesters embodied sovereignty in coming
together politically. In 2021 sovereignty was contested in Myanmar when
citizens enjoined one another to make claims that were not controlled by
institutional terms for its demarcation. That is to say, they contested sover-
eign power and the concept of sovereignty itself.
People in Myanmar are well prepared to do this. Sovereignty has long
been a recurrent topic among writers and speakers on politics in Burmese.
Historians, commentators and agitators have all made it their business to
remind everyone else of how sovereignty, agyôkagya-ana, was lost to the
British with the fall of Mandalay in 1885, the exile to India of the last king
of the Konbaung dynasty and the indignity of colonial domination. British
sovereignty came through armed conquest, policed occupation, legislated
violence and racialised administration. All these features of colonial rule
passed over into the period after political independence from 1948: in wars
fought against groups with competing claims to sovereignty going under
various banners, ideological and racial; and in the policing of postcolonial
citizens in the manner of colonial subjects.
When in the 1990s and 2000s Myanmar’s military did its best to
prevent party politics, it fell back on sovereign power. Sovereignty was
something over which it could have the final say. The perpetuation of
sovereignty became one of its catchphrases and a feature of its ‘national’
political scheme. In this scheme, sovereign power is inert. It has no force
of its own. Sovereignty has to be cared for. It is critical to the survival of
the state but vulnerable to attack. It stands to reason that sovereignty will
always be in need of guardianship. This is the role that the military
Myanmar 23
assigned to itself. To defend sovereign power against its enemies is the

burden that the military has to bear – its heaviest duty. To do this it needs
no external authorization. It is itself the author of this authority and the
exclusive actor. The military is, in its scheme of things, the only institu-
tion capable and meritorious enough to succeed in this task of national
politics. The premise is that, without it playing this role, sovereignty
would be lost. The Union of Myanmar would cease to exist.
In this way, the military relates to the citizen not through binding obliga-
tions of care and assistance but out of benevolence or goodwill. By its own
lights, this practice reaffirms the moral superiority of its leadership and the
inevitability and indispensability of its guardianship role. This role contrasts
with that of all party political opponents of dictatorship, above all the
National League for Democracy, others like the Shan Nationalities
[National Races] League for Democracy, which has been competitive in
the country’s vast northeastern state, armed groups in frontier areas who lay
claims to sovereign control of subnational territories and their occupants,
and myriad activists in the country and their allies abroad.
If sovereignty is for Myanmar’s military a referent object of security, then
the corollary is that the citizen is a latent security threat. The threat is realised
when the likes of Ko Thiha Tun band together with others and through their
words and deeds challenge the military’s prevention of politics. Hence,
though successive juntas have enjoined citizens to defend sovereignty, the
exhortation has not been a call to action but a warning to remain inert.
Politically active people like Thiha Tun endanger sovereignty and, hence,
themselves. Politically inert people endanger neither.

That is not how Myanmar’s citizens have seen things, not, in any case, if
the size and heterogeneity of the protests against military dictatorship in
1974, 1988, 2007 and above all 2021 are anything to go by – ‘above all’ in
2021 because what it means to be a citizen has, through the struggle for
sovereign power and the revolution that has followed from the protests of
that year, been thrown into doubt. In contesting not only the sovereign
power of the military state but the military conception of sovereignty,
people like Thiha Tun have created conditions in which it might be possible
to make themselves citizens as they will. The citizen, they have shown, is not
someone who is formed at the end of political upheaval. The citizen is
formed, rather, in upheaval, not because sovereignty has been successfully
contested but because it has been plausibly disputed by people enacting
citizenship and upsetting sovereign power. Because sovereignty has been
contested, citizens in Myanmar have, in resistance and in revolution, refashioned
themselves.
6 Citizen
/ naingngantha / n citizen.
—————————————————————————
Myanmar citizens are those national races and subgroups, being Kachin,
Kayah, Kayin, Chin, Bama, Mon, Rakhine, Shan, etc., having permanently
resided in some part of the national territory as their original country anterior
to the year 1185 Myanmar Era, 1823 Christian Era. – 1982 Citizenship Law,
section 3, unofficial translation
In 1948, almost anyone residing in Burma could opt to be a citizen: a child or

son, -tha, of the state or polity, naingngan. The struggle for freedom from
British colonial subjugation had been hard fought and won. Burmese and Indian
nationalists had had a common cause. People from throughout Asia for whom
Burma was now home had joined the anti-colonial struggle there. Many died for
it. Some of those responsible for the newly independent country’s constitution
and laws on citizenship and residency had a cosmopolitan and elite liberal
vision of the citizen as someone who came into being by joining in a modern
polity rather than by virtue of their lineage alone. They drafted laws
accordingly.
After the military usurped government in 1962, the situation changed. The
new Revolutionary Council declared that the country was burdened with
unscrupulous foreign exploiters of honest workers. By dispossessing them of
capital, dictatorship made life unbearable for hundreds of thousands who had
lived in Burma for decades. For many, those decades were the whole of their
lives. It put tens of thousands onto boats to India and to what was then East
Pakistan, later Bangladesh. In 1978 the Burma Socialist Programme Party state,
which followed the Council, launched a policing campaign to reclaim Burma’s
frontiers, or those few parts of them over which it had control, for citizens. This
led to a forced exodus of Muslims to Bangladesh. Official accounts have it that
most of those who fled returned under a bilateral agreement. But the agreement
struck a nerve. Party chairman and dictator Ne Win had a commission set up to
reexamine the question of who should be a citizen and draft a new law on the
same.
Under the 1982 Citizenship Law (in Burmese the Citizen Law,
Naingngantha Ubade), citizens are those people descended from others
born in the territory today designated Myanmar anterior to 1823, the year
preceding the first Anglo-Burmese war, which ended with a treaty and the
occupation by the British of coastal areas and towns in the territory’s west
and east. To produce genealogical evidence of the sort that the law
Myanmar 25
demands would be an impossible task for almost anyone in Myanmar. But

the law does not demand evidence from everyone. Only those whose
claims to be citizens are suspect must have their citizenship vetted.
Everyone else gets waved through.
The difference between those who are suspect and everyone else has in
practice come down to race. To be exact, it has come down to the colonial-
era discursive differentiation of native and non-native – Indian,
Chinese – subjects, now classed as national races and others. Military govern-
ments in the 1990s and 2000s sharpened the difference through arrangements to
deny racialised others citizenship in the name of sovereignty (see entry on
Genocide). At the same time the military kept the citizen in abeyance through
the general prevention of politics. The citizen was nowhere to be found. Either
they were no longer a citizen because they were racially suspect or they had had
their citizenship affirmed but were warned against saying or doing anything in
the manner of a citizen lest they threaten state stability.
That is how things were in Myanmar up to the late 2000s and early
2010s. Then events took a different turn. As the reform era began, the
military conception of public order through the prevention of politics met
with a reemergent citizenry. The reformed citizen was no longer obliged to
remain inert – to be seen but not heard. Provided that their words and
actions did not threaten sovereign power, they were entitled, up to a point,
to stand up, speak out, talk back. And they did: in mass demonstrations over
land confiscation; in press conferences demanding an end to military impun-
ity; in calls to protect the country’s rivers, mountains and forests from
cronies who were draining, digging and cutting away in the name of
development. Instead of, as previously, being a subject of power who had
to supplicate office holders, with no expectation of reply or intervention, the
reformed citizen tested office holders’ power by making morally imbued
claims upon it. They were soon someone to be reckoned with. Citizenship
was something again worth fighting for.
Talk of rights in Myanmar now shifted from universal principles of human
rights, which opponents of dictatorship had championed, to the rights of the
citizen versus the non-citizen, of national race versus non-national race;
Buddhism versus other faiths. The citizen reemerged as a duty-bound
defender of the rights of the majority (Buddhist, Burman or combined
national races) against the rights of this or that minority. Instead of colliding
with the army’s conception of sovereign power, citizens were now enlisted
to help care for it, through violence directed against people whom belliger-
ents denied were citizens who, apologists said, did not deserve to be: people
classed as racial and religious others. The reformed citizen was egged on
and let loose. Mass killing and assault of Muslims in 2012 and 2013 forced
hundreds of thousands of people to flee from northern Rakhine State, in the
country’s west, to Bangladesh. It augured the genocidal violence of 2017,
which in turn portended the atrocities that followed the 2021 military
takeover.
As protests from abroad became more vociferous, the language of sover-
eignty became more bellicose. People who in the 2010s had flocked to
Myanmar from Europe and North America to take up roles in projects for the
rule of law, democracy and human rights were dismayed to find that citizens
whom they had taken on as reliable partners or trusted intermediaries in projects
for national development showed little or no sympathy to the plight of hundreds
of thousands of Muslims not only in Rakhine State but elsewhere in the country
who were forced to flee or risk being beaten, raped or murdered, their houses,
villages and town wards torched. The reformed citizen, it turned out, wasn’t
going to be fashioned into a liberal image of rule-of-law subjectivity at all.
Myanmar’s racialised category of citizenship was not up for negotiation either –
no matter the consequences. The more that foreign experts, international organ-
isations and Internet commentators expressed shock and disgust at what was
happening (see the entry on Genocide), the more Myanmar citizens dug in their
heels. All parties were dismayed. Myanmar citizens had expected to be better
understood. After all, weren’t they the victims of yet another attempt to under-
mine sovereignty through foreign encroachment and cultural subjugation? Was
it their fault that when provoked they defended themselves, their territory, their
rights as citizens? Wouldn’t Europeans or North Americans or anyone else do
the same, in their situation?

The revolution that followed the military’s usurpation of power in 2021
has changed the terms for brokerage of Myanmar citizenship and pushed
these kinds of rhetorical questions to one side. Protesters who took to the
streets and then barricades in 2021, who joined civil disobedience cam-
paigns, mushrooming defence forces and other initiatives to drive the mili-
tary out of government for good, have reopened the category of the citizen
for negotiation. This is not to say that everyone who has resisted the military
takeover has stopped being racist. Though many people have expressed
belated remorse that they did not speak out against or do something about
the demonisation of Rohingya and anti-Muslim sentiment when they had
a chance, racism does not melt away in the heat of political struggle. But in
it, the meaning of naingngantha is again being contested. New lines will
have to be drawn between who is a citizen and who is not. In this way,
Myanmar citizens might yet redeem themselves from their recent past and
rescue politics from race.
Myanmar 27
7 Race
/ lumyo / n 1 race, nationality. 2 nation (as in [for country

and ~]). 3 type (of people); character.
/ lumyozu / n ethnic group.
/ taingyintha / n native of a country.
—————————————————————————
Race / Faith : Burman+Chinese-Burman / Buddhism
Race / Faith : Burman-Intha+Shan / Buddhism
Race / Faith : Malay+Burman / Islam – Entries on Citizenship Scrutiny
Cards, photographs posted online, 2022
Much has been written about the politics of ethnicity in Myanmar, less about
those of race. But in Burmese the two are inseparable. The word for race is
lumyo. Ethnic group is lumyozu, where -zu designates a group or class. In daily
usage, lumyo (sometimes, amyo) connotes race, nationality or ethnicity. Yet
lumyo denotes nothing other than a type, -myo, of person, lu, a word that in
principle might apply to, say, a person’s gender or class as well as to their race.
That lumyo signifies race and not gender or class or some other human kind is
a result of British colonial administration. During the first four decades of the
twentieth century, large numbers of migrants entered Burma, in particular from
neighbouring India, to which the territory was tethered by the British Empire, and
from China. The new arrivals encountered others whose forebears had migrated
to the region in earlier centuries, with whom they had affinities and differences.
The categories of British colonial administration were premised on a different

theory of knowledge from their predecessors. They had different objectives. In
earlier times the radical distinction drawn among kinds of people within lowland
political communities in mainland Southeast Asia was between royalty and
commoners. Other salient categories established class or caste-type relations
between superiors and inferiors. These categories rank-ordered people by birth.
But the conditions for membership in one category or another were not rigid.
Physical attributes and demonstrated prowess meant that people could pass from
lower to higher categories. The conditions for moving between categories them-
selves changed over time. And people could always opt to form more egalitarian
political communities in upland areas beyond the easy reach of lowland polities.
British administrators, by comparison, sorted people into ostensibly nom-
inal categories along racial lines. European administrative racism was, in the
mid-to-late nineteenth century, at its apogee. It had been liberated by
pseudo-scientific theories of descent that put Europeans naturally at the
apex of world civilization. The racial schemes for organising colonial sub-
jects were not explicitly rank-ordered, but effectively they were, for two
reasons. First, Europeans were, by their own criteria, superior to everyone
else; and secondly, the British distinguished non-native subjects from their
native others.
As colonial government tinkered with schemes to turn colonial subjects into
races, it correlated scientistic data that its men supposed they had uncovered
from close observation of the shapes and sizes of adults’ craniums or babies’
birthmarks with attributes of social groups on whom its administrators reported.
They mashed physiognomy and ethnology together and came up with naturalist
explanations for lassitude, criminality and martial qualities. These they correl-
ated with socially constructed and administratively reified cultural and linguis-
tic categories. In this way the logics of race penetrated all aspects of colonial
government. Subject races were brought into existence and rank ordered
depending on the attributes that administrators assigned them. Race became
the locus on which colonial rule turned in Burma, not because of the genius of
colonial administrators for scientific discovery but because they made
a racialised world on the terms that scientism provided.
The representatives of various races, thus classed, over time enacted the
categories they were assigned. If the logic of colonial administration was racial
then it was logical to identify racially. Race became a thing to be reckoned with.
The fortunes of political and cultural elites came to rest on their racial identities.
When, after 1948, the newly independent state failed to deliver on the promise
of a federation in which racially and linguistically diverse people would be
equals, recently racialised groups took up arms. The racist world that British
colonial administration created turned into a world of racial conflict.
This conflict helped to enlarge and strengthen the state military and justify
dictatorship. When the Revolutionary Council usurped power in 1962 it used
the threat to sovereignty posed by Shan separatism as one of its pretexts. It
reanimated colonial categories of native and non-native subjects, using them to
identify internal enemies and defend the nation against them. The difference
from earlier was that now the native or national race would be the general ideal
type; the non-native or other type, a political and cultural inferior.
In doing this the Council coupled lumyo with another word that up to then had
had little political significance in postcolonial Burma, namely taingyintha.
Nowadays taingyintha translates as ‘national race’. Plural, it is ‘national
races’ or ‘nationalities’ – though in English it is commonly translated as ‘ethnic
races’ or ‘ethnicities’, as in the English title of the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs.
But taingyintha does not denote ethnicity. It is an analogue for the generic
colonial category of the native.
Myanmar 29
As with the colonial taxonomies of native and non-native subjects, the

national races schema is on paper nominal and in practice ordinal. At the top
of the hierarchy, or at the centre of the array of the eight races in the schema – the
seven minor ones being Kachin, Kayah (or Karenni), Kayin (or Karen), Chin,
Mon, Rakhine (or Arakanese) and Shan – are the majority Burman, or Bama.
Outside the schema come all those acknowledged non-national races, like
Chinese, Bengali and Nepali.
Among non-national races, Chinese cut the most ambiguous figure. This is
not only because the word for Chinese, Tayôk, lumps Sino-Burmese shop-
keepers together with migrant workers from Yunnan, gems traders from
Guangdong, executives from Beijing, tourists from Singapore and religious
pilgrims from Taiwan. It is because Chinese in Myanmar are accorded a special
relationship of kinship, which is conveyed by another word in Burmese,
paukpaw. Yet, as in other parts of Southeast Asia, Chinese people living in
Myanmar have long suffered attacks by those who have classed them as
outsiders and threats to social and economic well-being. Xenophobic state
policies in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s taught the Sino-Burmese population to
keep quiet or get out. In the 1990s, with the partial emancipation of capital (see
the entry on Development), Sino-Burmese businesses flourished and Sino-
Burmese who left the country came back. By the 2010s everybody in govern-
ment wanted Chinese capital. But anti-Chinese sentiment lingered and fostered
racially articulated protests against, among other things, a project to build a dam
at the Ayeyawady (or Irrawaddy) River headwaters, which the Thein Sein
government suspended in 2011.
If national races’ attitudes to Chinese were in the 2010s reform era ambiva-
lent, then towards Rohingya they were unambiguously hostile. The reasons
have to do with administrative racism. The preponderance of people in
Myanmar have never met any Rohingya, who are concentrated, for historical
and policing reasons, in a small area of Myanmar opposite Bangladesh. They
have been confined there since the State Law and Order Restoration Council
started using the 1982 Citizenship Law shortly after it took power in 1988 to
deny them standing as citizens and, relatedly, to deny the existence of Rohingya.
Denial has come first through refusal to recognise the nomenclature ‘Rohingya’,
as if the nomenclatures of any other cultural and linguistic groups in Myanmar,
or anywhere else, are not themselves socially constructed – or any less politic-
ally salient for that. And denial has come, secondarily, through refusal to
recognise Rohingya as taingyintha, on which the possibility of collective
participation in the racialised polity depends. Thirdly, it has come via innuendo
and analogy which suggest that not only are these not Myanmar people but that
they are suspiciously unlike human beings at all (see the entry on Genocide).
Were members of the political community classed exclusively as members

of one or another race then it would be relatively easy to sort people out.
But scientistic racism does not work like that. In Myanmar, people fall into
more than one category depending on parentage and grand-parentage, like
the holders of Citizenship Scrutiny Cards whose photographs circulating
online denote them as children of a Burman and a Chinese-Burman, of
a Burman-Intha and Shan couple, or of Malay and Burman parents. Anyone
who identifies or is identified as Burman might administratively be the child
of unions between people designated as Burmans and those designated as
belonging to other national races, and non-natives, since the entry on the
card is for lumyo not taingyintha. In practice, because to be Burman is to
embody a bundle of attributes, a person who is nominally part Chinese or
Shan can, if they wish, perform Burmanness by practicing Theravada
Buddhism and speaking Burmese. A Muslim who is part Burman could
become a Buddhist and do the same. Concomitantly, a Buddhist who
voluntarily converts to Islam or Christianity undermines their privileged
status.
The politics of race in Myanmar, then, contain two forces, the one centripetal
and the other centrifugal. The first draws people towards the exemplary
Burman, the preeminent national race and ideal citizen. To be Burman is to
be a member of the political community ‘Myanmar’. Not to be Burman is not to
be excluded from this community but ideally calls for membership in another
national race. Not to be a member of another national race is not to be disquali-
fied from citizenship; however, it is to be peripheral and, for many, vulnerable.
The second force pushes those who identify firmly with another national race
category further into that category, and the politics of minority rights to
membership in the national racial scheme. The goal becomes to advocate for
the rights of one’s own national race in relation to those of others. The combined
effect of these forces is to further racialise politics and make for the conditions
in which genocide is possible.
8 Buddhism
/ Budda batha / n 1 Buddhism. 2 person of the Buddhist faith.
/ Budda thathana / n 1 Buddha’s Sasana; teachings of Buddha.
—————————————————————————
The state acknowledges that Buddhism and the Buddha Sasana, which the
majority of citizens venerate, are replete with special qualities. – 2008
Constitution of Myanmar, section 361, unofficial translation
Myanmar 31
The rubric for this entry is Buddhism, but its subject is the politics of the
Buddha Sasana. Buddhism is Buddha-batha. The suffix -batha denotes faith.
Hence, Christianity is Christian-batha; Islam, Islam-batha; Hinduism, Hindu-
batha; and the like. Thathana, or in Pali sasana, refers to a religious order and
its teachings. This term can pertain to any established religious order: Christian-
thathana to refer to the Christian mission, for instance, or Islam-thathana for the
contents, institutions and instructors of Islamic education. But for many people
in Myanmar, thathana is nothing other than the Buddha Sasana of the
Theravada tradition (as distinct from the Mahayana traditions practiced in
neighbouring China): the discourses of the historical Buddha, Gautama; the
Dhamma (in Sanskrit, dharma), or natural law; and the lineage of practitioners,
the Sangha, and their interpretive and pedagogical works. In short, it is through
the Buddha Sasana that Buddhism survives and thrives. Absent the Buddha
Sasana, there would be no Buddha-batha.
Concern to defend and preserve the Buddha Sasana has for centuries been
elemental to politics in mainland Southeast Asia. But the object of defence and
preservation and the idea of what it means to defend and preserve the Sasana,
against what threats and with what means, have changed from one period to the
next. Buddhist kings throughout Southeast Asia for centuries propagated the
Buddha Sasana. They fought under its banner. At times they secured their rule
by purging the clergy or checking its influence. Monarchy and Sangha had
fluctuating interdependent power relations. Sometimes monarchs allied with cer-
tain monastic orders against others. At other times the Sangha’s resources enlarged
to a point that it threatened the ability of a king to rule. Throughout, Buddhism was,
in one way or another, a force for Buddhist monarchy to reckon with.

British imperialism threatened Buddhism not because it brought with it
competing creeds – or not for this reason in particular – but because its
administrators had little interest in whatever the Buddha Sasana had to offer.
The British occupation of Burma was for commercial and geopolitical reasons.
Christian missionaries from Europe and North America who tagged along
converted many people among the cultural and linguistic minorities they
encountered, but they failed to impress the majority Theravada Buddhist popu-
lace. The threat that colonial rule posed, then, was not from another dogma. It
was the severing of the Buddha Sasana from sovereignty that made it threaten-
ing. With the exile of the last Buddhist king to India in 1886, the Sangha lost its
formal role in sanctifying political order and much of the income and prestige
that came with it. That was not all. It lost social functions, in particular its
monopoly on the teaching of literacy and numeracy to boys through monasteries
ubiquitous among towns and villages in the lowlands and in parts of the
highlands like areas of the Shan plateau.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Buddhist monks fell in with
those fighting against the colonial takeover. Monks participated in resistance to
British forces even after the fall of Mandalay in 1885. They formed part of the
earliest urban political opposition in the 1910s and 1920s. As antagonism to
imperial power hardened into durable opposition to colonial rule in the 1920s
and 1930s, monks joined with intellectual nationalists and with armed enemies
to colonial rule in the countryside. Buddhist adherents took a greater role in
defence of Buddhism, establishing organisations like the Young Men’s
Buddhist Association, modelled on its Christian counterpart, to promote
Buddhist values among the general population and campaign against mores
that its members considered alien to Buddhism.
When colonial occupation was over, efforts shifted from defence to promo-
tion of the Buddha Sasana. In the 1950s monks remained involved in politics.
Among them were those who pushed, along with lay adherents, for Buddhism to
become the state religion. It briefly did, under the last civilian government led
by U Nu, before General Ne Win usurped power in 1962. Thereafter his
Revolutionary Council began to push back against the Sangha. The Burma
Socialist Programme Party that the Council established had to have a monopoly
on the administration and conduct of social order. It was not going to tolerate an
autonomous and intrusive Buddhist clergy. It imposed rules and introduced
bodies to contain the Sangha, for instance by ordering monks to register for
identification documents and by establishing an official body, the State Sangha
Maha Nayaka Committee, for the oversight of clerical administration and
discipline.
There were limits to what the military could do. It could not stop monks from
joining the massive democracy protests in 1988 that brought down the Party.
The junta that followed, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, lacked
any ideological agenda or novel political theory. But it could claim moral high
ground by planting the Buddhist flag and presenting itself as authentic defender
of the Buddha Sasana against bogus monks and blameworthy charlatans within
the religious order. It backed conservative apolitical abbots and jailed agitators
and schismatics. On state television broadcasts, its officers mimicked ancient
royalty by prostrating themselves on sprawling rugs before senior monks. They
made oversized donations with which to construct new pagodas and repair old
ones (see the entry on Development), and they lectured public servants on how
to conduct themselves virtuously.
Once more soldiers’ efforts to prevent politics were only partly effective. In
2007 monks formed the backbone of anti-dictatorship protests that, now in the
age of the Internet, became known as the Saffron Revolution after the colour of
their robes (though in Myanmar these are commonly copper or bronze
Myanmar 33
coloured). Soldiers, police and assorted thugs raided and smashed up monaster-
ies identified as nodes for organisation and resistance, abducting alleged ring-
leaders for interrogation and imprisonment. State media again blamed ‘fake’
monks for inciting others and lamented the involvement of religious men in
politics, much as their colonial predecessors had done.
After 2011, when the reform era came into its own, the Sangha’s political
activity lurched towards the defence of sovereignty. Monks established the
association best known by the acronym Ma-Ba-Tha, for aMyo-Batha-Thathana
saungshaukye apwè, roughly speaking the group for the protection of the race
or nation, faith and the Sasana. The name echoes a colonial-era nationalist
slogan (which had a fourth element that Ma-Ba-Tha lacked: panya, wisdom or
education). Ma-Ba-Tha, which in English went by the label of the Patriotic
Association of Myanmar, rode the waves of anti-Muslim communal violence
provoked by a loose movement identifying with the numerals 969 (enumerating
attributes of the Buddhist Triple Gem, the Buddha-Dhamma-Sangha),
a movement that had predated the 2010s but spread with the uptake of mobile
phones and Facebook in this period.
Because Buddhist monks have a special duty to assess and respond to threats
to the Buddha Sasana, they find ways into politics through a variety of causes.
On the surface of it, these sometimes appear contradictory. But there is no
contradiction between monks marching against dictatorship in 2007 to drive
soldiers out of office and marching for enforcement of the 1982 Citizenship Law
in 2012 to drive alleged Muslim foreigners out of the country. The difference in
each case is just a matter of interpretation. On the first, the threat was posed by
an army bent on impoverishing devotees to whom the clergy must turn for its
own sustenance; on the second, against another faith that, the story goes,
threatens to swallow up Buddhism and, with it, the races it nurtures and on
which its survival depends. The point is not that the monkhood is at one moment
progressive and another conservative. Nor is it to belabour the obvious fact that
the monkhood is heterogeneous in its political composition, views and goals. It
is that concern with what constitutes a threat to the Buddha Sasana and how best
to defend it is inconstant. The constitution of threats and responses to them are
iterative but variable – historically referential, politically contingent.
The duty to defend Buddhism is anchored in discourse about dangers to
Myanmar’s sovereignty, but in principle it exceeds the country’s territory. It
extends to defence of Buddhism globally. Existential threats to Theravada
Buddhism might exist in all the lands where this tradition is pronounced: in
mainland Southeast Asia, through Thailand, Laos and Cambodia; and in South
Asia, including Sri Lanka, where monks in Myanmar have long gone to link up
with politically active counterparts. Buddhists to their east should be grateful,
assertive defenders of the Buddha Sasana in Myanmar say, for their efforts to
defend the ‘western doorway’ or gateway, as the country’s short border with
Bangladesh is known, against the Sasana’s enemies. This rhetoric of threat to
a mythological Buddhist golden land, visualised in the geopolitics and demo-
graphics of mainland Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century, affirms the
rightfulness of Buddhism’s special place as first faith among equals and justifies
violence against Muslims – even, if it comes to it, genocidal violence.
9 Genocide
dʒɛnəsʌɪd noun. m20. The (attempted) deliberate and systematic extermination of
an ethnic or national group.
—————————————————————————
Can there be genocidal intent on the part of a state that actively investigates,
prosecutes and punishes soldiers and officers who are accused of wrong-
doing? – Aung San Suu Kyi, addressing the International Court of Justice,
The Hague, 2019
‘Genocide’ is a word relatively new to the world that up until recently was not
much used in Burmese. The conventional neologism, lumyodôn thatpyat-hmu,
conveys its literal meaning: killing, thatpyat-hmu, to wipe out, -dôn, a race,
lumyo. This evocative usage fails to encapsulate the full range of meanings
associated with the term under the Genocide Convention. Genocide in international
law is not limited to killing. It includes the causing of physical or mental harm or
imposing conditions on a national, racial or religious group with the intent to
wholly or partially destroy it, to deliberately and systematically exterminate it.

All armies specialise in violence. Not all have opportunities to practice it
routinely. The army in Myanmar does. It is habituated to exterminating, or
aiming to exterminate, people and things classed as enemies. Its soldiers are not
trained for combat; they are trained in it. Propaganda exhorts them to ‘crush all
internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy’. This is not
just metaphor. Enemies have to be pulverised. They include millions living in
territory over which a multiplicity of armed groups have since independence in
1948 variously fought for fragmented sovereignty. It is from these territories
that allegations of genocide in Myanmar first came in the 1990s and 2000s, by
groups documenting indiscriminate attacks on villages and their occupants that
had pushed hundreds of thousands of people into Thailand and at least as many
deeper into the hills or down into the lowlands of Myanmar, away from areas
where they could be killed with impunity, their livestock slaughtered and crops
burned.
Myanmar 35
But it was with the headline-grabbing attacks on Muslims in Rakhine State in

2017 that lumyodôn thatpyat-hmu became familiar to people in Myanmar. The
campaign that drove hundreds of thousands across the border into Bangladesh,
to what soon became the largest refugee camp in the world, in Cox’s Bazaar,
followed an earlier period of atrocious communal violence. Attacks on Muslims
up and down the country in 2012 and 2013 came after inflammatory reportage
of the rape and murder, allegedly by Muslims, of a young Buddhist Rakhine
woman – a person who by faith, race and gender was a close-to-ideal citizen in
need of patriarchal protection and, in her violation, masculine revenge. That
revenge came swiftly. Though it met resistance, the outcome was never in
doubt. As melees and reprisals continued, attacks on Muslims by amorphous
organised mobs spread across the country with tacit or explicit support of police
and local officials.
In 2017 the army, police and paramilitaries attacked Muslim villages in
the northern tip of Rakhine State. Survivors who reached Bangladesh told
how soldiers and paramilitary police officers threw themselves into
a saturnalia of murder, arson and sexual violence following a number of
assaults on border checkpoints the year before. Members of the Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army, which formed after the atrocities in 2012 and
2013, reportedly were responsible for the attacks. Though militarily insig-
nificant, the attacks were a false motive for the scorched-earth operation to
follow, which recalled genocidal campaigns in other parts of the country.
But in the mountains and hills in Myanmar’s north and east, the army meets
with formidable, albeit outnumbered and outgunned, opponents in asymmet-
rical lethal combat. In the undefended townships bordering Bangladesh,

however, its soldiers and paramilitaries had little to fear. There they were
not fighting. They were hunting.
Buddhist monks backed the hunt. Ashin Wirathu was by then the best
known internationally. He had been imprisoned during the 2000s for
religious agitation (see the entry on Buddhism). He was among prisoners
whom the Thein Sein government pardoned in 2012, early in the reform
era. On his release Wirathu went back to demagoguery. Facebook had
arrived, and he along with other Islamophobes put it to use. He got a lot
more attention than he had in the past. TIME magazine’s Asia edition in
2013 pronounced his ‘the face of Buddhist terror’. But for all that, he has
neither the awza nor bôn (see the entry on Power) of other monks who
made genocide possible. One of those is Ashin Nyanissara, the abbot of
the Thidagu, or Sitagu, monastery and head of the Shwegyin Nikaya,
the second-largest order of monks in Myanmar. Nyanissara has been
more calculated than Wirathu, though over time less dissembling, in his
incitement of anti-Muslim violence and support of the military. While

posing as a lover of interfaith dialogue and a compassionate humanist in
meetings with everyone from Barack Obama to Pope Francis, through
parable and homily at home Nyanissara has likened Muslims to rats and
cockroaches and reassured army officers of the rightness of their cause.
The military commander, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, is one of his
devotees.
The outpouring of people to Bangladesh in 2017 had precedents. But
on the previous occasions that huge numbers had fled military and
paramilitary atrocity, in 1978 and 1991–2, a military installed party
dictatorship and a self-installed junta had answered or ignored allega-
tions from abroad. In 2017 international opprobrium was aimed at Aung
San Suu Kyi, who was then heading the semi-civilian government and
whom, people abroad mistakenly assumed, could be held to the same
standards that had earned her the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for, in the
words of the Nobel Committee, her non-violent struggle for democracy
and human rights.
A gulf opened between narratives in Geneva or New York and those in
Naypyidaw. Elected members of a legislature without Muslim representatives
voiced anxieties not about military impunity for atrocity but about how
Myanmar had been misunderstood or misrepresented abroad. While Aung
San Suu Kyi remained quiet her allies could plausibly insist that she did not
have the power to oppose the military. In 2019 their apologies wore thin when
she volunteered to go to the International Court of Justice to defend Myanmar’s
sovereignty against alleged genocide. Though in taking this step she destroyed
her credibility abroad, at home she was exalted for her defence of race and
religion against their enemies. Ironically, in her defence of genocide Suu Kyi
made the reasons that the military commander could not long tolerate her in
power all the more obvious. If by the 2020 election she was politically invin-
cible, then the only thing left for the military to do was to prevent politics all
over again.
Meanwhile, the Court in the Hague accepted that grounds for an inquiry exist
and made an interim order against Myanmar. Lawyers will for years argue about
the finer points of the definition of genocide and its applicability or otherwise to
what happened in Myanmar. Investigators will assess whether evidence, which
a special United Nations ‘mechanism’ is gathering and compiling, suffices to
hold the state or its individual office bearers responsible. Its remit has now
extended to evidence of the impunity with which soldiers and paramilitaries in
Myanmar have killed, tortured, raped and pillaged since the 2021 coup. Of this
there is no shortage.
Myanmar 37
10 Impunity
ɪmˈpju:nɪti noun. m16. Exemption from punishment; exemption from injury or loss
as a consequence of action, security. Freq. in with impunity, in such a way as to be
exempt(ed) from punishment or from injury or loss.
—————————————————————————
Myanmar’s transition cannot succeed without an end to the impunity that
permeates all levels of the justice system. – Yanghee Lee, Special Rapporteur
on Myanmar, Human Rights Council, Geneva, 2020
‘Impunity’ is, like genocide, a word from outside the Burmese vernacular. Like
‘genocide’, Burmese usages for ‘impunity’ are translations from English. In its
English–Burmese dictionary the Myanmar Language Commission defines
impunity as dangat magan-ya-gyin – the act of going unpunished. As far as
definitions go, this is not bad, though it is ugly – the type of verbiage that
lawyers swallow and regurgitate but that sensible folk shun or ignore.
This is not to imply that people in Myanmar don’t care or know about
impunity. They do. They just don’t talk about it that way. The nationwide
protests opposing the military’s power grab in 2021 were a resounding state-
ment against impunity. The contempt directed towards the country’s latest
dictator, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, evinces a hatred of his presumption
that he can do what he likes and suffer no consequences. The formation of
armed local and people’s defence forces to fight back was from the beginning
intended to send a message to those who think they can kill with impunity: that
they ought to know that they themselves can be killed.
Among youth activists at the forefront of the anti-dictatorship protests in

2021, the insistence that theirs be the last generation to confront the evils of
dictatorship resonates with the anti-impunity idea in international law and its
institutions. The idea’s premise is that to hold soldiers responsible for alleged
genocide or other atrocities requires a political transition. To transition is to
move from one (undesirable) condition to another (desirable) one. It is to cross
over from one place to the next. Impunity, in this way of thinking, is a thing of
the past; accountability, the way of the future.
Myanmar’s putative transition in the 2010s did not bring it any closer to an
end to impunity because the conditions did not exist for this possibility. Newly
elected members of national and subnational legislatures included many former
political prisoners and ex-combatants for para-state armies fighting for auton-
omy and federalism. Yet the National League for Democracy brought with it no
scheme for accountability for past injustices. This was not an oversight. The
League actively discouraged talk of such schemes. It warned anyone who spoke
of transitional justice that they misapprehended the transition that they were in.
The reform era was not one in which people should expect accountability. Aung
San Suu Kyi herself dismissed efforts to lay foundations for a reckoning with
history, suggesting that they could undermine development.
Consequently, despite calls from people like the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, there was in the 2010s no sustained
or coordinated attempt to reckon with the violence that accompanied decades of
military rule, let alone any efforts to memorialise it. The opposite happened. If
reform meant fixing things up, then the past had to be effaced. And it was.
Construction workers converted the torture chambers of a police interrogation
centre into luxury suites for the five-star Rosewood Hotel. Gardeners manicured
new shrubs on the embankments of the Inya Lake that were mute to the deaths of
hundreds of student protesters, whom soldiers and paramilitary cops beat and
drowned there in 1988. German experts helped to renovate the Government
Technical Institute, where soldiers, cops and thugs brought and detained scores
of protesters in 2007. No evidence remains of those conditions in which
detainees had been kept, without washrooms or toilets, being bashed and
kicked. They and countless others abducted, tortured, murdered, raped and
disappeared over decades of dictatorship were but vague outlines on the
backdrop of a new political stage upon which stood only promises of a better
future.
After the 2021 coup, the military in Myanmar affirmed through its actions
that there would be no reckoning with any past atrocities. Paramilitary cops and
soldiers dragged dead bodies of anti-dictatorship protesters around the streets
like bags of garbage. They burst into people’s lives day and night, smashing
vehicles and doors to abduct purported ringleaders of rallies, vociferous
Facebook users and members of new urban revolutionary groups. They raided
hospitals and schools, destroyed the offices of charities and killed the residents
of apartments. They drove the occupants of towns where they encountered
resistance into the countryside and burned their houses down. When they met
with armed combatants in rural areas they ceased travelling over land and began
descending on towns and villages from air to do the same (see entry on
Revolution).
All this might give the impression that soldiers and paramilitary cops in
Myanmar can get away with absolutely anything. In fact, none of it prevents
certain offenders from being made accountable. Someone can always be held
responsible for something. However, the punishment of a few can work to
exempt the many. Far from being a check on impunity, punishment can make
it durable. This was the way of things in Myanmar even before the 2010s. When
in the 1990s and 2000s the former military spymaster Lieutenant General Khin
Myanmar 39
Nyunt recited statistics on numbers of personnel convicted in military or police

tribunals for offences that included rape and assault, he was not making them
up. All he was doing, in effect, was pointing out that selective investigations and
punishments are compatible with conditions for pervasive, lasting impunity.
Khin Nyunt might also have wanted to remind his audiences that, inasmuch
as all states make monopoly claims on violence, exemptions from punishment
for those who are duty-bound to specialize in violence – soldiers, cops, para-
militaries, their proxies – are immanent to the state idea. Sometimes it might be
necessary to make an example of somebody; at other times, not. The important
thing is that those with power retain the prerogative to decide which offences
are investigated and tried, how and when. The question of who decides, not
what is decided, is politically paramount.
11 Interrogation
/ sit / v . . . 2 inspect; examine; interrogate.

/ sitkyaw / v Same as v 2.
—————————————————————————
I was interrogated [in 2007] for ten to fifteen days. They took about a week to
break me. They got harsher around the eighth or ninth day. When they had
what they needed for a case against us, they put me in the cells overnight, then
sent me to Shwepyitha police station. – Former political prisoner recounting
interrogation, 2019
This entry is the most difficult one in the lexicon, not because the term
sitkyawye, or interrogation, is untranslatable but because it defies attempts to

grasp its full significance. Like all practices associated with the captivity and
torture of people, sitkyawye falsifies what it represents. Sitkyawye has an
instrumental ring to it, as if interrogation were merely an instrument of dicta-
torship. It is much more than that. Sitkyawye reappears every time that
Myanmar’s soldiers usurp power because it is the acme of military rule.
For all the books and articles written on Myanmar’s politics, none have
conveyed the political significance of interrogation. There are biographical
accounts of sitkyawye by those who have survived it, as well as publications
on torture and extrajudicial killing as human rights problems. These list inter-
rogation sites, sitkyawye sagan, past and present in military camps and police
stations. They attempt to delineate and document interrogation, attending to its
built environment, its personnel, their methods and the numbers of victims.
Databases, survivors’ narratives and listing exercises are all important tasks
in the struggle against impunity. Yet sitkyawye exceeds the sum of their parts.
It can even be obscured by them, through the impression that this institution can
be confined to specific places, personnel and techniques. It cannot be, not
because those methods of documentation are inadequate for their specific
tasks but because those tasks do not capture its character. Sitkyawye is not
made of bricks and mortar, zinc roofing and wire fencing. It is not made up of its
interrogators, their equipment or the hours they keep. It is not its material
presences or geographical extent but in its mimicry of the ideal military state,
one in which a complaisant body politic is unthreatening to sovereignty, that
sitkyawye comes into its own.
Sitkyawye is never publicly authorised or ordered; nevertheless, it is publicly
present. Temporally, it is present every time that men who decline to identify
themselves appear to take people from their houses or off the streets without
explanation. Physically, it is present in a shifting archipelago of sites and
practices for the arbitrary abduction, incommunicado detention and systematic
torture of military targets – ‘systematic’ because if military rule in Myanmar has
any system at all then this is it: a system to prevent politics, a system that in
every respect aims to counter revolution.
Sitkyawye passes from the trays of army trucks into police lock-ups, from prisons
to military bases, from rice fields to Buddhist temples. It repurposes and reconfig-
ures what it finds. This is why specific sites for captivity and torture in Myanmar
come and go with the ebb and flow of national politics. Arbitrary detention and
torture never stopped in Myanmar during the reform era of the 2010s, but with
political detention in abeyance and people’s attention elsewhere, nobody paid much
heed to occasional reports of ordinary criminal accused getting their genitals burned
with cigarettes or electrocuted and pummelled to confess. Political captives, for

whom sitkyawye as a category of practice, an institution of power, exists, were few.
And there were other priorities like development and federalism.
Sitkyawye resurfaced the moment that the 2021 military takeover occurred.
Within a month or two, stories started filtering out of protesters and political
activists who had been tortured in custody. Families received the mutilated
bodies of children, spouses and parents. A new sagan opened in a row of
buildings inside an army compound at Shwepyitha, northern Yangon, to
which police and soldiers took captives. One at Aungthapyay, closer to down-
town, might have carried on working as it had in the 2000s. It might never have
stopped working, since even at its busiest it sits unobserved in plain sight,
a short distance from a shopping junction on the way to the airport, a small sign
next to a boom gate instructing arrivals to report to security. Another at the old
racetrack has moved elsewhere, leaving no trace. The site it occupied in 2007
has since been used by the sports ministry to house and train aspiring athletes
(see the entry on Impunity).
Myanmar 41
In the countryside, military interrogators occupying the compounds of mon-

asteries, schools and administrative offices after the 2021 coup transformed
them into interrogation centres by restraining, beating, stabbing, suffocating,
amputating, shooting and terrorising people in them whom they accused of
being members or supporters of the people’s defence forces that organised and
armed in response to killings of unarmed demonstrators. Though army interro-
gators in these structure their activities in terms of information gathering, their
function is to empty opponents of military dictatorship of their political
contents and restore normal conditions of national political order. Their actions
summon sitkyawye into existence and, with it, realise the military state in its
purest form.
To reiterate, interrogation, sitkyawye, is not an instrument of the military
state. It is the military state – or rather, it is its distillation. It is not instrumental.
It is not a means to various ends, though that is how it is made to appear. It is the
ends. It is not what the military state produces. It produces the military state. To
destroy the military state, to cut it out by its roots, citizens will have to locate and
eviscerate this behemoth. Reform is not adequate for this task. Revolution
might be.
12 Revolution
/ tawhlan / v rebel; revolt; resist.

/ tawhlanye / n 1 revolution. 2 resistance.
/ aye / n 1 writing; composition. 2 affair; business; matter.
/ ayedawbôn / n 1 [arch] historical account of a royal campaign . . . 2

social or political uprising; revolution.
—————————————————————————
/ Victory to the Revolution! – Trending hashtag on
TikTok, December 2022
Two words denote revolution in Burmese. The official encyclopedia has an

entry for tawhlanye, which it treats as an analogue for ‘revolution’ in English. In
contemporary usage it stands for any type of movement that pushes from an old
era into a new one. It is not limited to political revolutions but includes, for
instance, the Renaissance, the industrial revolution and Chinese Cultural
Revolution. It is in this sense that the nomenclature of General Ne Win’s
Revolutionary Council, the Tawhlanye Kaungzi, can be understood. It was not
politically revolutionary, but it registered an intention to lift the nation out of its
postcolonial malaise and thrust it into a new era of socialist prosperity.
The second usage is the one in the TikTok hashtag. Here politics are always at
stake. In its narrowest literal sense, ayedawbôn denotes a campaign for the
seizure of sovereign power through uprising, rebellion and war. In its wider
sense, it invokes a gamut of strategies and struggles for human freedom.
Occupy Wall Street and general strikes that have as their objective the trans-
formation of political economic order, like one in British Burma during 1938,
can all be classed as revolutionary in this latter sense.
Both usages have had currency since the military usurped power in
February 2021. Within a month, calls in Myanmar for the release of Aung
San Suu Kyi, members of her party and others whom the military had abducted
and held captive swelled and spilled out as demands for dictatorship to be cut at
the roots and destroyed for good. As the numbers of dead grew – on streets filled
with demonstrators, in apartments raided by cops and soldiers, during interro-
gation of captives – people fought back. Protesters who remained reaffirmed
their positions, built higher barricades and hardened their shields. When by the
end of March it became clear that these were insufficient, a new and hitherto
unprecedented armed uprising began. Thousands of youths took to the country-
side to seek training and arms from established para-states in frontier areas who
have for decades insisted, with greater or lesser success, that military dictates
stop where their territories begin. They were joined and trained by numbers of
defectors from the military. Many returned to form cells in urban areas and
participate in the making of hundreds of new and loosely affiliated local and
people’s defence forces.
From the outset the emphasis was on the need to arm for self-protection.
Resisters to military dictatorship were not claiming a right to bear arms. Nor
were they opting for violence because of a preference for it. Quite the oppos-
ite: theirs was violence as a last resort. Theirs was a fight for survival – and
a fight for freedom from military enslavement, sitkyun-bawa. They renamed
the State Administrative Council a Terrorist Military Junta. This appellation
put all those embarking on armed violence against the Council not in the
category of terrorists, where it would have them, but counter-terrorists. And
they fought back.
So did people in Sagaing Region, which in the wake of the uprising saw an
effervescence of autonomous self-defence forces, in townships like Kalay,
Katha, Shwebo, Tamu, Taze and Yinmarbin, as well as Sagaing town. Many
of these groups consolidated and continued to fight in loose alliances with
one another after their counterparts elsewhere could not sustain their oper-
ations. They have fought absent of any overarching command-and-control
structure, holding fast to the principles of defence – of themselves, their
families, their towns and villages—with which they began. Although poorly
Myanmar 43
armed, these and other self-defence groups have effectively forced the
military state off the ground where they are operating. In such territories,
troops from the Terrorist Military Junta fly in to destroy buildings and kill
people, then fly out again.
This is a different situation from any in the decades before it. None of the
workers’ and students’ demonstrations in 1974, the uprising in 1988 that gave
birth to the National League for Democracy, the sporadic disturbances in the
mid 1990s and the protests during 2007 in which Buddhist monks played
a frontal role tipped into self-defensive armed revolution. Though after 1988
students who fled to frontier regions in the country’s north and east formed the
All Burma Students Democratic Front, they never stimulated widespread
armed resistance of the sort that followed the 2021 uprising. And while
2007 was dubbed the Saffron Revolution, the term tethered Myanmar to
a loose chain of ‘colour revolutions’ in Eastern Europe and other parts of
the world that had preceded it, with which it had no prior relationship and little
in common.
The 2021 uprising has, by contrast, produced a revolutionary situation, one in
which there are plausible competing, exclusive claims to sovereign power, in
which state authority comes under severe assault but doesn’t collapse. The
National Unity Government has been an important element in this situation.
Though there is a risk of overstating its importance, it is an instructive case
study in revolutionary planning and action when compared to its predecessor of
the 1990s and 2000s, the National Coalition Government of the Union of
Burma. The Coalition Government formed after the State Law and Order
Restoration Council, which had usurped power in 1988, denied that the results
of the 1990 general election, called by the junta itself, gave the National League
for Democracy a mandate to govern. The Coalition Government throughout the
1990s and 2000s conducted diplomatic work of ultimately little significance,
leaving military affairs to those armed para-states with which it had relations. It
cooperated with groups like the exiled Burma Lawyers’ Council, which set to
work on one or more draft constitutions for a future federation (see the entry on
Federalism) but didn’t coordinate activities. In short, it did not act as if it were
in government.
The National Unity Government, by contrast, has. It uses the existing state
seal and issues notifications in the manner of government. Its ministries map
onto those of the state. It has supported the setting up of civil administration and
courts, reopened schools and attempted to contribute to social welfare in areas
of the country where emergent armed resistance to military dictatorship is
strongest, in particular Sagaing, and in Magway Region and Chin State. It has
blocked the usurper military from taking the country’s seat at the United Nations
General Assembly and set up diplomatic missions in a number of countries with

tacit recognition from their hosts. It has a defence ministry and has established
its own armed People’s Defence Force, under which it is struggling to draw the
multitudinous groups that formed after the military takeover into a command
structure that many of them are unlikely to accept. Be that as it may, it has not
left the war to them. It has itself declared a defensive war. It has sought to fund
the war by, among other things, setting up an official cryptocurrency, issuing
government bonds, and selling shares to land and buildings that the military
commander Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has reportedly seized for his own
use. It and its affiliates run lotteries to raise funds. Undoubtedly, the tens of
millions of US dollars they have garnered through these activities amount to
small change compared to the funds their adversaries have available through
sale of natural gas, timber, gemstones and other commodities. However, the
revolutionary Government is acting as if it is government and raising revenue to
rule through routes that are recognisably those of a plausible contender for
sovereignty. In this way it has prolonged the country’s revolutionary situation.
The National Unity Government has suffered criticism for declaring a defensive
war. This is, after all, not the non-violent way that Aung San Suu Kyi and earlier
generations of political dissidents sought. But why should it be? The reasons for
criticism are varied, but they tend to miss, or avoid, an important albeit obvious
political point: the repressive violence of military dictatorship in Myanmar and
the revolutionary violence that opposes it are not in the same category. To make
this obvious point is not to apologise for specific acts of violence in the name of
revolution – the shooting of alleged civilian informers or collaborators, for
instance. But to equate the practice of killing informers by revolutionary forces

with the killing of anti-dictatorship demonstrators by soldiers is to ignore the
relation of the two to power. It is a category error that comes from treating all
violence as alike by virtue of its instruments and instrumentalities.
Defensive revolutionary violence aims at the downfall of an existing order
and imagines a different type of political future – one in which people might not
be governed as they have been and ‘the people’ might be rehabilitated as
a political category. It is unlike the repressive violence to which it stands
opposed, not because it is itself political but because it works towards the
possibility of a future that is – not a future of political reform, in which the
military lies dormant until soldiers again make it their business to intervene, but
one in which the military’s capacity to intervene is destroyed. Defensive
revolutionary violence, then, does not occupy the same class of practices as
repressive military violence. There is in it, as collective action, a notion of
freedom that differentiates it from repressive military violence in the name of
sovereignty. Decades of state violence in Myanmar have produced the
Myanmar 45
conditions that make revolutionary violence possible. That violence is itself

premised on imagined conditions of possibility for politics. Defensive revolu-
tionary violence makes those conditions imaginable. Counter-revolutionary
violence promises nothing other than more of the same.
Revolutionary violence can descend into generalized, arbitrary violence
absent of qualities that distinguish revolutionary action from its counter-
revolutionary other. History is littered with revolutions that have gone this
way. The fear of this happening in Myanmar leads people who oppose dicta-
torship to reject violence and insist on the possibility of non-violent political
and social change. Those who have opted for defensive warfare counter that
Myanmar’s military had a decade in which to demonstrate its commitment to
this possibility, and instead it showed that it will never concede to political
change of the sort that the country needs. Nor have non-violent uprisings, like
the one in February and March 2021, succeeded on their own terms. For
revolution to succeed, they retort, violence is necessary. Reform is now out
of the question.
13 Reform
/ pyubyin / v. 1 improve; reform; rectify; set right; amend. 2 repair.

/ pyaunglè / v. change; transform.
—————————————————————————
Since taking up office less than six months ago, President Thein Sein has
moved quickly to begin implementing his ambitious reform agenda.
– International Crisis Group, Asia Briefing No. 127, 2011
The watchword of government in Myanmar during the 2010s was ‘reform’.

This was never going to be a period of revolutionary change of the sort that
General Ne Win announced when he usurped government half a century earlier,
let alone violent revolution of the sort that followed the 2021 military takeover.
As a verb, ‘reform’ refers to fixing up something that has fallen into disrepair,
pyubyin, and effecting change, -byaunglè (pyaunglè where not suffixed to
a Roman script vowel or n-). Coupled together and suffixed with –hmu to
form an abstract noun, these two words direct the addressee’s gaze forwards
and backwards, towards a planned and guided better future, while recollecting
a glorious past, to which it is impossible to return, yet one that might stand as
a model for how things could be.
The president from 2011 to 2016, Thein Sein, was a paradigmatic reformer.
As prime minister of the preceding junta that rolled its officers, him included,
over into legislative assemblies and constitutional offices, his accession to the
presidency met with scepticism. So Thein Sein worked hard to promote
a reformist agenda, talking up clean government, accountability and transpar-
ency. But talk alone would not get him reformist credentials. After all, he had
talked about the rule of law, anti-corruption measures and the like back when in
uniform. If it had sounded like bullshit then, that is because it was. How to make
it sound differently now that he was in civvies?
To earn reformist credentials, Thein Sein recruited specialists from abroad to
advise him on how to reform everything from taxation to telecommunications,
from company law to riot policing. He appointed returnee Myanmar citizens and
others who had stayed at home, who had long viewed themselves as a nascent
technocratic class, to positions of responsibility that they had craved but that, up
until then, the military had denied them. They helped his government with its
strategies to commodify land by providing tenure security for lowland small-
holders while opening everything else to capital in the name of development.
The government launched a plan to tell a new story about an old problem:
corruption. As stories go, this one is about as old as they get. The British colonisers
blamed endemic corruption on the inadequacies and immorality of native subor-
dinates. After independence in 1948, Burma’s first premier, U Nu, declared it his
goal to eradicate termites eating away at the foundations of government. Against
the odds, his administration made some progress towards this goal. Military
dictators that followed, and their subordinates, made a habit of admonishing civil
servants for their waywardness and making examples out of a few to warn others
against especially flagrant forms of graft or favouritism. Reformist governments of
the 2010s, like their predecessors, sought to target corruption and to name and
prosecute corrupt officials. Unlike their predecessors, they now had staff from
a multitude of international organisations on hand with tools and indices to measure
corruption’s size and graphically represent its shape, to define and criminalise it.
With their assistance, in 2013 the national legislature passed a new anti-corruption
law. The following year the government set up an anti-corruption commission.
For a while commentators derided the commission as a paper tiger. In 2018, in
a sign that it wanted the anti-corruption reform agenda to be taken seriously, the
legislature pushed through an amendment to the law to empower the commission
to investigate and bring cases on its own. The commission used this power to
charge senior officials in the bureaucracy, courts and public prosecution. On some
accounts, the buying and selling of outcomes in administrative matters and judicial
affairs diminished or at least became less blatant; the routine gift-giving, less
obvious. The military, of course, remained outside the commission’s purview; the
partiality of soldiers, then and since, beyond the reproach of anyone other than
those in their own ranks (see entry on Impunity).
Myanmar 47
Meanwhile, partly owing to rivalry between Thein Sein and another former
army officer, Thura Shwe Mann, who had wanted the presidency and got a house
speaker’s role as a consolation prize, the union legislature had turned out to be
livelier and at times more combative than many commentators in the country and
abroad had expected. This buoyed hopes about the prospects of Myanmar’s
putative transition. Experts jostled for seats on flights to its once sleepy inter-
national airports, and cars queued to hurry them along to seminars and workshops
in which they talked up reform and heard what they wanted to hear. Liberal state-
builders were in desperate need of success stories, and Myanmar had the trap-
pings of one in the making. The transition was not without challenges, but the
reform agenda was still on track. If things could change for the better in
Myanmar, then they could anywhere. The end of history might be nigh, after all.
On the news stands and in teashops, topics like federalism, democracy and
human rights were no longer omitted from print and speech. Citizens found that
they now enjoyed freedom to speak and act in ways that they could not only
a few years earlier. Print media were no longer subjected to the tyranny of the
censor’s pencil. Almost overnight, Facebook became ubiquitous. Before the
coronavirus pandemic took hold, people gathered daily on every conceivable
issue. Factory workers went on strike for better wages. Buddhist monks rallied
in defence of race and religion (see the entries on Buddhism and Genocide).
Bookshops sold publications that made cases for armed groups’ positions on
ceasefire negotiations and regaled readers with the groups’ heroic efforts for
their peoples’ freedom.
Looming large above other affairs was the question of land reform. Back in
the 1960s and 1970s the Revolutionary Council and its Burma Socialist
Programme Party had attacked landlordism and nationalised agricultural land
and industrial sites. Agricultural cooperatives and government ministries had
managed all aspects of crop production. Fixed-price procurement quotas con-
trolled the supply of rice and other crops. The right to cultivate was tied to
productivity and to a farmer’s capacity to contribute to the socialist economy.
After the Party state collapsed in 1988, the military kept dispossessing farmers
of land, now in the name of all-round development. The resurgent military for
a couple of decades grabbed land willy-nilly. Once reforms got going, peasants
wanted it back. They and urban allies among mushrooming civil society groups
organised nationwide protests that the news media reported in detail. The
legislature set up an inquiry commission into land grabbing. In 2014
the commission issued a report on hundreds of cases, the majority involving
the military. The report highlighted the scale of the problem but did not open
avenues for redress. In 2017 the military claimed it had returned a quarter-million
acres to aggrieved land holders. The claim went unverified.
Aung San Suu Kyi became state counsellor – a supra-constitutional role

invented for her – and de facto president in 2016. Unlike Thein Sein, she had
no need for bevies of technocrats with which to show off her reformist
credentials. She herself represented reform. She embodied it. When she
instead of an army officer stood at a podium to address assembled crowds
or attend state ceremonies abroad on behalf of Myanmar, her presence was
proof enough of change. It was in matters of development that she had to
work hard to persuade everyone that her government was making progress.
And she did. Her government picked up where its predecessor had left off. It
made things in Myanmar convenient for global capital via new investment
laws and policies encouraging competition for access to land. These added
pressure to smallholders in parts of the country where capitalists sought to
locate or expand their businesses – places like Sagaing and Magway
Regions.
Reform sometimes comes across as a natural companion of progress; how-
ever, there is nothing natural about their companionship. Progress, in Burmese,
is about increasing abundance. Development is less about the repair or renova-
tion of anything than it is about increasing the number of things. Reform is lean.
It delimits what is possible and tempers aspirations. To be developed in the
sense of punbyo is to be enlarged. Progress is fatty. How to be lean and fatty at
the same time? This was the political economic contradiction that the National
League for Democracy was trying to resolve when it won a second term in office
at the 2020 election. It was still trying to work it out when Senior General Min
Aung Hlaing usurped power the following February.
By putting Aung San Suu Kyi and her party leadership back in captivity,
along with many erstwhile technocrats, the military resolved the contradiction.
With the political and social conditions of the reform era now in the rubbish bin,
what remained for it to deal with were strictly questions of development. For
these, politics would be unnecessary.
14 Development
/ punbyo / adj prosperous; developed.

/ todet / adj improve; progress; advance.
—————————————————————————
As a latecomer to the development scene, Rakhine stands poised to reap the
advantages of astute latecomers: learning from the success stories as well as
the mistakes of those who went ahead, offering fresh openings and new
horizons. – Aung San Suu Kyi, Rakhine State Investment Fair, 2019
Myanmar 49
Inasmuch as the military junta that, in two iterations, governed Myanmar from
1988 to 2011 was against politics, it was for national development. The Burma
Socialist Programme Party state that had come before it was taken up with
building a nominally socialist economic system. The State Law and Order
Restoration Council, by comparison, just wanted to build. It wanted the trap-
pings of a developmental regime, like its East Asian neighbours, freed from the
pedantic ideology of its predecessor. In 1997 it even refashioned itself in
development’s image, as the State Peace and Development – Punbyo-ye –
Council. It set up a mass association that it later transformed into the Union
Solidarity and Development Party, for the purposes of filling seats in the first
reform-era legislature from 2011 to 2015.
In slogans the military coupled todet with its punbyo to inspire a vision of
technological progress up and away from the moribund industries of the
socialist economic system towards a post-socialist utopia bristling with high-
rises and encircled by elevated roads. Think Singapore. But what the military
vision lacked that Singapore had, in its own inimitable way, was concern for the
cultivation and promotion of human excellence. The Myanmar military’s vision
of progress was absent of people. It was obsessed with development’s material
form.
Development meant embracing what the Party state had once half-heartedly
suppressed. If back in the 1980s the problem for the Burma Socialist
Programme Party had been that the black market debilitated its socialist eco-
nomic system, then the solution for the developmental military state in the
1990s was to transform the black market into the economy. All the junta had to
do was to partly emancipate capital, to offer it a certain amount of freedom from

the strictures of the earlier economic regime by liberating capitalists from
constraints that had prevented them from legally obtaining significant returns
on their capital. To this end, it licensed an emerging class of connected entre-
preneurs to embark on projects in agriculture, mining, industry and trade.
The connected entrepreneur – in Burmese the karoni, from English
‘crony’ – became the unlikely hero of development. Among the biggest
cronies were Teza, owner of the Htoo Group, which included sawmills,
mining, building, hotels and Air Bagan among many environmentally
destructive interests; Zaw Zaw of the Max Myanmar Group, with hotels,
cement, petroleum, rubber, banking and football to his name; U Khin Shwe,
a builder of many things and notorious land grabber who was one of those
sitting in the 2011–15 legislature for the Union Solidarity and Development
Party; and Serge Pun, a property speculator, housing developer, deforester
and avid self-promoter in the Asia business media who came back to
Myanmar from abroad once the army announced that socialism was a thing
of the past. These and lesser cronies traded their connections with developing
capital from nearby countries – China, Thailand, Malaysia – and developed
capital from Singapore, Korea and Japan.
In exchange for their success, the military insisted that cronies share
responsibility for the welfare of citizens by redistributing a proportion of
what they made where capital did its work. Development, in contrast to the
socialist economic system, signalled the withdrawal of the state from provi-
sion of threadbare public goods and minimal services – the offloading of
responsibility for public welfare onto emancipated capital. In lieu of the
state, tens of thousands of local welfare associations, many built from
religious institutions – Buddhist, Christian, Islamic – offered assistance
and provided charity to the indigent. Lawyers and doctors and dentists and
drivers and people in countless other occupations across the country served
needy clients at-cost or free of charge. In emergencies, these people and
local civic groups surged into action. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of
these groups stood out after Cyclone Nargis, the massive storm that hit the
delta in 2008 killing at least 50,000 people. While soldiers stalled inter-
national rescue agencies trying to get access to the region, local groups from
all over the country drove convoys of food, water, clothing and medicines to
storm survivors. It was out of this experience that many prominent activists
of the reform era formed networks, obtained skills and accrued knowledge.
None of this is to say that the state stopped being involved. But the
character of its involvement changed. Soldiers, having said that they were
duty-bound to get things built for the nation, needed photographic evidence
that they had done this. While state agencies constructed bridges and weirs,
the junta contracted cronies and coerced others into assembling or reassem-
bling as many structures in as many places as possible: schools, hospitals,
dormitories, roads – anything that could be officially opened and go into the
inventory of hastily erected things. Though trained teachers were in short
supply, hospitals lacked medicines, dormitories had no running water or
electricity, and new roads soon rutted, so long as bricks and mortar could
be observed, documented and enumerated the evidence of development was
there to be had.
Bigger was better. Suspension bridges and hydropower dams, about which
youthful women in costumes of various national races sang on television
broadcasts, were the biggest and the best. Development was gendered: men
created, women celebrated (see the entry on Patriarchy). Concrete erections
were proof that the development dream was hardening into reality. From this
fecund dream a new developed citizen would naturally issue, ready to cooperate
in the era of reform. And what better place for the new citizen to be born than
Myanmar 51
a new high-modernist capital city? In the 2000s, emancipated economic capital

took about four years to complete the basic building blocks for Naypyidaw,
amid hilly scrubland near Pyinmana, in the country’s geographic centre.
Thousands of labourers constructed the ostentatious edifices of a new legislative
complex in which to contain party politics, alongside utilitarian buildings for
government ministries and other state agencies, as well as apartments, hotels
and shopping precincts to welcome the first reluctant arrivals from the Yangon-
based civil service in 2006.
In the country’s frontiers, development called for partnerships with armed
groups whom the military sought to co-opt by granting concessions in exchange
for ceasefires. The particulars of the deals differed, but in each questions about
sovereignty or federalism were sidelined to keep national politics free from
harm. Development was the only idiom in which the military would speak. These
agreements brought a type of peace but not any type that ended military violence
with impunity. To the contrary, in border areas development was predicated on
use of arms and capital to resolve disputes.
During the 2010s, as sanctions regimes weakened or fell away, developed
capital rushed to Myanmar from Europe and North America. Indications of
development were suddenly all over the place. Apartments sprung up in
which to house the refrigerators and washing machines of an emerging
middle class. Better-quality roads appeared quickly. Electricity supply
increased. Business consultants arrived and charged for hype and puffery.
Naypyidaw stepped out from behind the bushes and onto the international
stage by hosting international agribusiness summits and the World
Economic Forum. Government pushed for the establishment of special

economic zones and ports so as to announce to the world that development
was indeed a word with which Myanmar should be associated, along with its
neighbours. Environmental groups expressed concerns about the conse-
quences of all this for watersheds and biodiversity, not to mention climate
change. Government paid little heed. Meanwhile, life in many parts of the
country continued as before but now with mobile phones and Facebook
announcing that time was on the move and that, as promised, there was more
of everything than ever.
Capital marched across the over two-thousand-kilometre-long border that
China shares with Myanmar, materialising in new factories and roads, train
and pipe lines, ports, mines and dams, and moneylending for more of the
same. The Kuomintang army had once criss-crossed this border while
fighting and then fleeing its communist foes, as did revolutionary commun-
ists bent on the overthrow of the government in Burma. Latterly it has been
the site for movements of vast quantities of goods and people, licit and
illicit, weaving their way around and through the territories of armed groups
like the Kachin Independence Army in northern Kachin State and the Ta’ang
National Liberation Army in northern Shan State.
Noticing all this capital moving about, these armed groups and others
on the border of Thailand, like the Karen National Union and its armed
wing, wanted their share. In the reform era, development remained firmly
on negotiators’ agendas for ceasefire and peace talks, now complemented
by substantive political questions about issues like federalism. The
spokespeople of political parties claiming to represent national race
groups and subnational states complained that the areas they call home
had had valuable minerals, trees and gems taken from them for decades
without getting anything in return. For capitalists with an eye on
Myanmar, the late arrival of these states on the development scene – as
Aung San Suu Kyi characterised Rakhine State – was supposed to be an
opportunity for people in those states and those who represented them to
see if they could not turn battlefields and massacre sites into solid ground
for extractive industries.
These were happy days for development. Then things changed. Soon
came allegations of genocide. The reform era lost its shine. East Asian
capitalists kept coming, but Europeans and Americans started cancelling
visits. The coronavirus followed. It had no recent comparators, in
Myanmar or elsewhere. Though people in Myanmar have had much
experience with endemic diseases, like malaria, dengue fever and tubercu-
losis, the country’s hospitals and public health arrangements were ill
prepared for this virus. It was no longer easy to keep people in Myanmar
isolated from the disease, as it had been as recently as during the SARS
outbreak in 2003. The country was now connected to the world economy,
travel and communications in a way that it had never been before. Many
more people from Myanmar were working in the capillaries of service and
manufacturing industries abroad than a decade prior. The virus killed off
or endangered their jobs. A lot returned home, and some brought the virus
with them.
On top of all this came a constrained general election campaign in 2020 that
favoured the National League for Democracy, since other parties could not get
on the streets to be seen and heard. The party had another resounding victory,
and with it came the promise of a third post-dictatorship legislature. Few
people supposed that army officers would be stupid enough to again usurp
power. Many couldn’t believe it even when they did. But they did, and instead
of swords being converted into ploughshares, swords came out again. Once
more, freedom would have to be fought for.
Myanmar 53
15 Patriarchy
ˈpeɪtrɪɑ:ki noun. m16. . . . 2 A patriarchal system of society or government; rule by
the eldest male of a family; a family, tribe, or community so organized. m17. b A
system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are
largely excluded from it.
—————————————————————————
In Burma women are completely equal with men. – U Aung Ko, in Beyond
Rangoon, 1995
‘Patriarchy’ is not a word that is alive in the Burmese vernacular. There are
a few awkward translations, such as pogyizothaw-wada, the ideology (-wada)
of patriarchal rule. These have contributed little to political debate. But in
a manner of speaking, this is the way of patriarchy everywhere. Patriarchal
order refuses critique by denying usages with which to denote historically
produced situations for men’s domination of women. It subordinates them to
other topics deserving proper attention: democracy, federalism, citizenship,
revolution and sovereignty, topics written about by men. This lexicon is a case
in point – as are the selected works in Burmese that make up its tail. That is why
it has an entry on patriarchy: not because patriarchy is part of political discourse
but because it is not.
One way that patriarchy is denied in Myanmar is via a firm and long-standing
insistence that women there are the social equals of men – as U Aung Ko tells
his foreign guest in Hollywood’s dramatisation of the 1988 uprising, Beyond
Rangoon. In this scene a male former university professor reassures an
American woman that her Burmese counterparts are equal to their menfolk. It
is among the film’s more accurate characterisations, even if it is factually wrong.
Conservative liberals in Myanmar have long shared this view. It has colonial
antecedents. British administrators, having discovered the Burmese Buddhist
woman, declared that she was less oppressed than women in India or China.
They pointed to this as proof not of an enlightened subject society but of
enfeebled native masculinity, in contrast to European manhood (see the entry
on Race). In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, new social and political elites recast
the colonial story. They ditched racial scientism but promoted the idea that the
socially liberated modern woman could stand shoulder to shoulder with her
male brethren, even as men continued to dominate public life.
After the military takeover in 1962, the Revolutionary Council and its Burma
Socialist Programme Party congratulated women for their contributions to the
new socialist economy through agricultural, factory and office work. Though no
women occupied positions of importance in government, the men who did
emphasised that women and men had equal rights and duties as contributors to
the socialist economy. The woman socialist worker was level with her male
counterpart. Yet paradoxically, as a group, working socialist women remained
the subordinates of men. No platforms existed on which they could collectively
stand to demand equal rights.
Patriarchy reached its apotheosis in the decade after 1988. Under the watchful
gaze of the State Law and Order Restoration Council, women were reduced to
roles for the biological and cultural reproduction of national races. In 1995,
without a hint of irony, the junta sent one of its own men to Beijing, where he
told delegates at the World Conference on Women that women in Myanmar
enjoyed equality with men as an inherent right and had for two thousand years.
The government respected them for their part in national development. There
was nothing more that they wanted or asked for.
Coming to the view that, unlike civil and political rights, the category of
women’s rights was innocuous and could even be useful, since it would give
access to the material and symbolic capital of international organisations, the
junta signed Myanmar up to the UN Convention on the Elimination of
Discrimination against Women. Its successor, the State Peace and
Development Council, established the Myanmar Women’s Affairs Federation
in 2003. The Federation encouraged girls to learn to read and write and pressed
women into culturally appropriate activities, like cooking and sewing and
childcare, and gainfully employable roles as teachers and nurses and clerks.
Under the patronage of military officers’ wives and in cooperation with the
police force and international organisations, the government ran campaigns to
stop violence against women and trafficking to neighbouring countries, among

other projects. Through these it could present ideally youthful, poor, rural
women and girls with little formal education as vulnerable innocents and
virtuous objects for its paternalistic protection.
Whether the women and girls were innocent or virtuous, there was nothing
innocent or virtuous about framing them this way. The alleged rape by Muslim
men of an ideal typical youthful, poor, rural Rakhine girl with little formal
education was what sparked anti-Muslim violence in 2012 and 2013 and
anticipated attempted genocide five years later. The archetype of an innocent
woman in need of patriarchal protection always contains within it the threat of
violence towards her opposite: the type of person who would violate her or,
more exactly, the type of man who would violate the property relation between
her and her presumed menfolk that the archetype affirms.
One of the domains in which paternalistic schemes to define and protect the
innocent woman has had its fullest expression is law. This is nothing new. The
colonial-era codes that form the backbone of Myanmar’s positive law are
Myanmar 55
imbued with Victorian-era morality. Law reports from earlier years are replete
with rulings that attend to the status and defence of women and girls cast in
terms of ideal types. Concomitantly they denigrate and make vulnerable women
and girls who fail to perform moral virtues or fit racial categories that would
make them deserving of protection. But in the 2010s the politics of law as
a shield with which to protect purportedly vulnerable women and girls, and
a sword to take to the enemies of Buddhism, scaled up. Monks casting
themselves as the selfless defenders of women and girls against Muslim men
whom they caricatured as sexually depraved predators, led a campaign to pass
four laws known colloquially as the amyozaung ubade, or roughly, laws to
protect one’s kind, amyo. Dominated by the Union Solidarity and Development
Party, the legislature passed the laws in 2015, just before the end of its term.
The laws aimed, among other things, at protecting Buddhist women from
inter-religious marriage and bigamy. The package was one indication of how in
Myanmar men and monks continued in the reform era to objectify and class
women as vulnerable and in need of their oversight and intervention. That
Burmese Buddhist law has long been patriarchal, permissive of bigamy, polyg-
amy and adultery, was elided, as was the underlying conception in the law and
cultural practice of marriage as a property relation in which Buddhist men are
given exclusive access and ownership rights to Buddhist women. But if it was
elided by the law’s proponents, it was not missed by its ostensible referent
objects: Buddhist women. By the end of the 2020s, the new law on bigamy had
reportedly proved popular not among women wanting to separate from Muslims
but among Buddhist women wanting to divorce Buddhist men who had had
extramarital relationships.
If the 2010s brought with them opportunities for misogynists and chau-
vinists in the clergy and army to again try to get their way with Myanmar’s
women, then the decade also brought with it new possibilities to create
conditions in which women could challenge and counteract patriarchy.
A handful of urban feminist organizations put up a fight. These groups
called patriarchy out and celebrated radical feminist struggles and icono-
clasts. Alongside them came new efforts to advocate for non-binary people.
They were drowned out by larger, better-funded organizations that were less
threatening to patriarchy, more cooperative with its institutions. Feminists
and non-binary advocates called on the intellectual resources of movements
abroad and experiences with patriarchy of activists at home to enliven
debate. Other groups got attention for announcing that they would keep
doing the same kinds of work as government-organised groups had done
under dictatorship. They proposed anodyne technical fixes to problems like
gender-based violence and trafficking of girls through legislative reform and
better education. Rather than challenge the gender categories and social
institutions of military dictatorship, they built on them.
These groups enlisted many prominent women to their causes: organizers,
writers, and legislators who advocated old-fashioned conservative liberal
views. Aung San Suu Kyi was their paragon. Though Myanmar’s first
woman national leader, she ascended to the role dynastically. She is the
daughter of a symbol of exemplary masculinity, the national martyr Aung
San, founder of its independence army and leader of anti-colonial revolu-
tion. Throughout the reform era his portrait hung alongside hers in people’s
houses. His face haunted images of hers on calendars, T-shirts and book
covers, a ghostly reminder of her paternal lineage, along with the fact that
Aung San Suu Kyi’s name contains her father’s – an unusual practice in
a country in which the majority of people have no clan or family names. The
matriarch Suu Kyi has used her father’s name to her advantage. During her
two-decades-long stand-off with the military in the 1990s and 2000s, she
characterised theirs as a dispute between siblings. With her resumed captiv-
ity in 2021 and the army’s redoubled efforts to at last destroy her National
League for Democracy, these siblings, like Aung San Suu Kyi and her
unremarkable brother, Aung San Oo, might be forever estranged: the one
free to act with impunity, the other finding freedom within.
16 Freedom
/ lutmyaukye / n freedom; liberation; emancipation.

/ lutlatye / n independence; liberty; freedom.
—————————————————————————
Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men are the
oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to
bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which will maintain
a free society. Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives
might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means
and an end. – Aung San Suu Kyi, statement on receipt of the 1990 Sakharov
Prize for Freedom of Thought
In 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi invoked the Universal Declaration on Human Rights
to speak of the imperative for freedom from fear, an expression with which she
became internationally renowned after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the
following year. Invoking a Buddhist word for bias or prejudice, agadi (from
Pali, agati), she stressed that democracy depends on the ability to liberate
oneself from vices. The quintessential revolution, she said, is of the spirit.
Myanmar 57
This is an idea of freedom as emancipation from internal fetters, so as to be

able to take responsibility for oneself and thereby for others. It is an idea that has
defined Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal struggle against military rule. She has
claimed that dictatorship has had a debilitating effect on people’s sense of duty
or responsibility. In the 2010s she exhorted citizens to do the moral work
necessary to be able to bear the responsibilities of the reform era.
Freedom from fear as the essence of political freedom is a seductive idea. It
sets everyone a task that they themselves can accept responsibility to achieve.
Everybody has within them the means to self-liberate. However, nothing about
this idea is political. This may be why in her Sakharov Prize statement Aung San
Suu Kyi preferred to register freedom as a moral problem, a question of
emancipation from bayagadi, the partiality or prejudice that comes from fear:
fear for one’s race caused by fearsome others; or fear for Buddhism because of
a perception that Muslim power is very great, as Suu Kyi herself put it during
a television interview in 2013.
In translation, freedom from fear is freedom as lutkinye. This translation
correctly registers the original usage’s apolitical quality. It is the freedom from
danger or sickness that any sentient being seeks, with or without others, with or
without political awareness. Politically speaking, freedom is connoted by two
related but distinct words: lutmyaukye and lutlatye. They have a common root,
lut, which can be coupled with other suffixes to form related words designating
pardon, lutnyein-chanthagwin, or a loophole, lutbauk, an escape hatch through
which one passes to get out of a sticky situation. Of the two politically salient
usages, lutmyaukye denotes emancipation from a condition of enslavement or
imprisonment, of pulling or getting free from a state of confinement or oppres-

sion. It approximates the idea of liberty as libertas, in the Latin, to be exempted
or released from bondage or captivity. The other, lutlatye, denotes a condition of
liberation, in which people speak and act freely with one another, in which they
are not subjugated.
The two political usages can refer to the same events or aspirations, viewed
from different angles. The first is somewhat like the sense of ‘freedom from’;
the second, closer to the sense of ‘freedom to’ or ‘freedom for’. So while the
fight to throw off the British colonial yoke called for a struggle to obtain
political emancipation, lutmyaukye, it is commemorated on Independence
Day, Lutlatye Ne, as the achievement of freedom to decide and act for the future
as a sovereign political community.
Both these usages address freedom as an activity that happens in concert and
contention with others. In this they differ from Aung San Suu Kyi’s. There is
nothing in her notion of freedom that precludes these, but nor is there anything
in it that makes politics possible. Freedom from fear might motivate somebody
to act politically, but that need not be the case. People act politically for many
reasons. Coupling an apolitical idea of freedom to a political project for freedom
does not make the idea itself political.
The distinction is important to dwell on, because it is relevant to the era of
reform (2011–20) and the revolutionary situation that followed it (2021–2). There
are two reasons why. The first is that this conception of freedom puts the onus on
the citizen to show that they have made an effort at self-improvement. They have to
demonstrate that they are capable of taking responsibility for themselves and others
and are worthy of recognition as productive members of civil society. Their rights
as citizens depend upon their ability to do this – to externalise awareness of their
duty to transform themselves in order to contribute to the greater good. No political
rights are inalienable. Should anyone fail in their efforts, or not bother to try, they,
not those with power, have to bear the consequences. Put another way, this is
a conception of freedom in which people must first take responsibility for their own
lives in order to become worthy of recognition.
Secondly, contrary to the idea that this conception of freedom is opposed to
military dictatorship, it has affinities with how Myanmar’s military presents
itself as duty-bound to guard sovereign power in the interests of the citizenry.
On that account, the responsibility that the army bears for national politics
arises from the superior attributes, discipline and awareness of duty that entitle
soldiers to the freedom they need to act with impunity in order to accomplish
their great tasks. Army officers also impose standards and place expectations on
subjects that they have to meet individually before they are deemed ready to
accept political responsibilities. When they fail to demonstrate that they are
capable of maintaining these standards, the military reserves the right to inter-
vene and itself shoulder those responsibilities – as, it claimed in February 2021,
due to the immorality and inadequacies of the Union Election Commission (see
the entry on Reform) and the misdeeds of the National League for Democracy
and assorted others. In this way, people in Myanmar are kept in the waiting
room of history, never self-aware or disciplined enough to bear the responsibil-
ities that come with a free society.
Lutlatye and lutmyaukye oppose this situation. So do politics, which in
certain conditions give way to revolution: a collective endeavour for political
emancipation. Revolutionaries demonstrate their commitments to others not by
trying to make themselves fit to bear responsibilities but by struggling to
reconcile various responsibilities that the situation demands they bear together.
Political revolutions do not happen when the majority of their participants have
readied themselves morally or spiritually. They happen when people interpret
the conditions of possibility to act politically and act on that interpretation.
Revolutions come, and then they become what people make of them.
References
A Political Lexicon: How Come? – Works Cited

Aye Saung (1989). Burman in the Back Row: Autobiography of a Burmese
Rebel. Bangkok: White Lotus.
Ball, D., Farrelly, N., Lee, S., and Milner, A. (2007). Languages of Security in
the Asia-Pacific [Online]. Canberra: Australian National University. https://
asiapacific.anu.edu.au/blogs/languagesofsecurity/ [Accessed 8 December
2019].
Bernstein, J. M., Ophir, A., and Stoler, A. L., eds. (2018). Political Concepts:
A Critical Lexicon. New York: Fordham University Press.
Blakely, J. (2020). We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture,
Politics, and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Charney, M. W. (2009). A History of Modern Burma. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cheesman, N. (2021). Unbound Comparison. In E. Simmons and N. R. Smith,
eds., Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political
Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–83.
El-Ghobashy, M. (2021). Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fassin, D., and Das, V. (2021). Introduction: From Words to Worlds. In V. Das
and D. Fassin, eds., Words and Worlds: A Lexicon for Dark Times. Durham:
Duke University Press, pp. 1–18.

Gluck, C. (2009). Words in Motion. In C. Gluck and A. L. Tsing, eds., Words in
Motion: Towards a Global Lexicon. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 3–10.
Lawson, G. (2019). Anatomies of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lezra, J. (2018). Translation. In J. M. Bernstein, A. Ophir, and A. L. Stoler, eds.,
Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. New York: Fordham University
Press, pp. 208–31.
Lintner, B. (1990). Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy. London: White
Lotus.
Metro, R. (2011). The Divided Discipline of Burma/Myanmar Studies: Writing
a Dissertation During the 2010 Election. Southeast Asia Program Bulletin,
pp. 9–13.
Myanmar Language Commission (1998). Myanmar–English Dictionary.
Yangon: Ministry of Education.
60 References
Oxford University Press (2007). Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reynolds, C. J. (2014). Keywords for Studying Religion, Power and the Self
[lecture]. The Changing Humanities in a Changing World, Chiang Mai
University, November 27.
Seekins, D. M. (2006). Historical Dictionary of Burma (Myanmar). Lanham:
Scarecrow Press.
Selth, A. (2018). Burma (Myanmar) Since the 1988 Uprising: A Select
Bibliography, 3rd ed. Brisbane: Griffith Asia Institute.
Sewell, W. H. Jr. (1980). Work and Revolution in France: The Language of
Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Smith, M. (1991). Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity. London: Zed
Books.
South, A., and Lall, M. (2016). Language, Education and the Peace Process in
Myanmar. Contemporary Southeast Asia, 38(1), 128–53.
Tilly, C. (1993). European Revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.
Walton, M. J. (2017). Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wedeen, L. (2019). Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and
Mourning in Syria. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Wells, T. (2021). Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between
Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London:
Fontana.
Recommended English-Language Readings By Entry
1. Politics:
Aung-Thwin, M. (2018). The State. In A. Simpson, N. Farrelly and I. Holliday,
eds., Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Myanmar. London: Routledge,
pp. 15–24.
Cheesman, N. (2016). Myanmar and the Promise of the Political. In
N. Cheesman and N. Farrelly, eds., Conflict in Myanmar: War,
Politics, Religion. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,
pp. 353–66.
Crouch, M. (2019). The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis.
Oxford: Hart, ch. 3
References 61
2. Power:
Chambers, J., and Cheesman, N. (2019). Coming to Terms with Moral
Authorities in Myanmar. Sojourn, 34(2), 231–57.
Gravers, M. (1999). Nationalism as Political Paranoia in Burma: An Essay on
the Historical Practice of Power. Surrey: Curzon.
Harriden, J. (2012). The Authority of Influence: Women and Power in Burmese
History. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
Houtman, G. (1999). Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi
and the National League for Democracy. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign
Studies.
Kawanami, H. (2009). Charisma, Power(s), and the Arahant Ideal in
Burmese-Myanmar Buddhism. Asian Ethnology, 68(2), 211–37.
3. Dictatorship:
Callahan, M. P. (2003). Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Cheesman, N. (2015). Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make
Law and Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fink, C. (2001). Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule. London: Zed.
Nakanishi, Y. (2013). Strong Soldiers, Failed Revolution: The State and
Military in Burma, 1962–88. Singapore & Kyoto: NUS Press & Kyoto
University Press.
Skidmore, M. (2004). Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
4. Federalism:
Bertrand, J., Pelletier, A., and Thawnghmung, A. M. (2022). Winning by
Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hmung, S. (2021). New Friends, Old Enemies: Politics of Ethnic Armed
Organisations after the Myanmar Coup. Canberra: New Mandala.
Siegner, M. (2019). In Search of the Panglong Spirit: The Role of Federalism in
Myanmar’s Peace Discourse. Yangon: Hanns Seidel Foundation.
South, A. (2021). Towards ‘Emergent Federalism’ in Post-Coup Myanmar.
Contemporary Southeast Asia, 43(3), 439–60.
Walton, M. J. (2008). Ethnicity, Conflict, and History in Burma: The Myths of
Panglong. Asian Survey, 48(6), 889–910
5. Sovereignty:
David, R., and Holliday, I. (2018). Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 4.
62 References
Ferguson, J. M. (2021). Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and

a Nation-State Deferred. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ch. 2.
Maclean, K. (2008). Sovereignty in Burma after the Entrepreneurial Turn: Mosaics
of Control, Commodified Spaces, and Regulated Violence in Contemporary
Burma. In J. Nevins and N. L. Peluso, eds., Taking Southeast Asia to Market:
Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, pp. 140–58.
Su, X. (2018). Fragmented Sovereignty and the Geopolitics of Illicit Drugs in
Northern Burma. Political Geography, 63(1), 20–30.
Woods, K. (2019). Rubber Out of the Ashes: Locating Chinese Agribusiness
Investments in ‘Armed Sovereignties’ in the Myanmar–China Borderlands.
Territory, Politics, Governance, 7(1), 79–95.
6. Citizen:
Cheesman, N. (2015). The Right to Have Rights. In N. Cheesman and Htoo
Kyaw Win, eds., Communal Violence in Myanmar. Yangon: Myanmar
Knowledge Society, pp. 139–51.
McCarthy, G. (2020). Bounded Duty: Disasters, Moral Citizenship and
Exclusion in Myanmar. South East Asia Research, 28(1), 13–34.
Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2017). Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas.
Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 15(3), 269–86.
Prasse-Freeman, E. (2023). Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State
Violence in Myanmar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rhoads, E. (2023). Property, Citizenship, and Invisible Dispossession in
Myanmar’s Urban Frontier. Geopolitics, 28(1), 122–55.
Simion, K. (2021). Rule of Law Intermediaries: Brokering Influence in

Myanmar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 4.
South, A., and Lall, M. eds. (2018). Citizenship in Myanmar: Ways of Being in
and from Burma. Singapore: ISEAS
7. Race:
Campbell, S., and Prasse-Freeman, E. (2022). Revisiting the Wages of
Burman-ness: Contradictions of Privilege in Myanmar. Journal of
Contemporary Asia, 52(2), 175–99.
Candier, A. (2019). Mapping Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Burma: When
‘Categories of People’ (Lumyo) Became ‘Nations’. Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies, 50(3), 347–64.
Cheesman, N. (2017). How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass
Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(3),
461–83.
References 63
Ferguson, J. (2015). Who’s Counting? Ethnicity, Belonging, and the National

Census in Burma/Myanmar. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde,
171, 1–28.
Roberts, J. L. (2016). Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the
Sino-Burmese. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Thant Myint-U (2020). The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism and the
Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, London: Atlantic Books.
Venker, M. (2023). Racial Categories, Religious Distinctions: Mixed Buddhists
and the Burma Laws Act, 1898–1947. PhD Dissertation. University of
Wisconsin–Madison.
Walton, M. J. (2013). The ‘Wages of Burman-ness’: Ethnicity and Burman Privilege
in Contemporary Myanmar. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43(1), 1–27.
8. Buddhism:
Foxeus, N. (2023): Buddhist Nationalist Sermons in Myanmar: Anti-Muslim
Moral Panic, Conspiracy Theories, and Socio-Cultural Legacies. Journal of
Frydenlund, I. (2022). Buddhist Constitutionalism Beyond Constitutional Law:
Buddhist Statecraft and Military Ideology in Myanmar. In T. Ginsburg and
B. Schonthal, eds., Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 198–219.
Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016). Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar: The 969
Movement and Anti-Muslim Violence. In M. Crouch, ed., Islam and the
State in Myanmar: Muslim–Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 183–210.
Schissler, M., Walton, M. J., and Phyu Phyu Thi (2017). Reconciling
Contradictions: Buddhist–Muslim Violence, Narrative Making and
Memory in Myanmar. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(3), 376–95.
Schober, J. (2011). Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural
Narratives, Colonial Legacies, and Civil Society. Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Schonthal, B., and Walton, M. J. (2016). The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms?
Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Contemporary
Buddhism, 17(1), 81–115.
Turner, A. (2014). Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in
Colonial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
9. Genocide:
Alam, M., and Wood, E. J. (2022). Ideology and the Implicit Authorization of
Violence as Policy: The Myanmar Military’s Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
against the Rohingya. Journal of Global Security Studies, 7(2), 1–18.
64 References
Cheesman, N., ed. (2018). Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar.

London: Routledge.
MacLean, K. (2019). The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure. Journal
of Genocide Research, 21(1), 83–95.
Maung Zarni and Cowley, A. (2014). The Slow-burning Genocide of
Myanmar’s Rohingya. Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, 23(3),
681–752.
Milbrandt, J. (2012). Tracking Genocide: Persecution of the Karen in Burma.
Texas International Law Journal, 48(1), 63–101.
Wade, F. (2017). Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making
of a Muslim ‘Other’. London: Zed.
Ware, A., and Laoutides, C. (2018). Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict. London:
Hart.
10. Impunity:
Cheesman, N. (2019). Routine Impunity as Practice (in Myanmar). Human
Rights Quarterly, 41(4), 873–92.
MacLean, K. (2022). Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact
Production, and Myanmar. Oakland: University of California Press.
Verelst, S. (2021). Accountability in Myanmar: A Transformative Stepping
Stone? Global Responsibility to Protect, 13(2–3), 297–323.
11. Interrogation:
AAPP (2006). Eight Seconds of Silence: The Death of Democracy Activists
Behind Bars. Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).
AAPP (2022). Political Prisoners Experience in Interrogation, Judiciary [sic],

and Incarceration Since Burma’s Illegitimate Military Coup. Assistance
Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).
Cheesman, N. (2016). Reading Hobbes’s Sovereign into a Burmese Narrative of
Police Torture. Asia Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law, 17(2),
199–211.
Forensic Architecture (2021). Torture and Detention in Myanmar. https://foren
sic-architecture.org/investigation/torture-and-detention-in-myanmar.
Ma Thida (2016). Prisoner of Conscience: My Steps Through Insein. Chiang
Mai: Silk Worm Books.
12. Revolution:
Abuza, Z. (2022). The NUG’s Economic War on Myanmar’s Military.
Washington DC: Stimson Center.
Anonymous (2021). The Centrality of the Civil Disobedience Movement
(CDM) in Myanmar’s Post-Coup Era. Canberra: New Mandala.
References 65
Cheesman, N. (2021). Revolution in Myanmar. Arena Quarterly, 8, 60–5.

Frydenlund, I., et al. (2021). Religious Responses to the Military Coup in
Myanmar. Review of Faith and International Affairs, 19(3), 77–88.
Jordt, I., Tharaphi Than and Sue Ye Lin (2022). How Generation Z Galvanized
a Revolutionary Movement against Myanmar’s 2021 Military Coup. Trends
in Southeast Asia, 7. Singapore: ISEAS.
Kyed, H., and Ah Lynn (2021). Soldier Defections in Myanmar:
Motivations and Obstacles Following the 2021 Military Coup. Copenhagen:
DIIS.
Tin Maung Htwe (2022). Paving the Peaceful Way of Solidarity: The Role of
Nonviolent Labourers in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution. Canberra:
Australian National University.
Zöllner, H. (2009). Neither Saffron nor Revolution: A Commentated and
Documented Chronology of the Monks’ Demonstrations in Myanmar in
2007 and Their Background. Südostasien Working Papers No. 36, Berlin:
Humboldt University.
13. Reform:
Crouch, M., and Lindsey, T., eds. (2014). Law, Society and Transition in
Myanmar. London: Hart.
Egreteau, R. (2016). Caretaking Democratization: The Military and Political
Change in Myanmar, London: Hurst.
Holliday, I. (2011). Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political
Reform in Myanmar. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lall, M. (2016). Understanding Reform in Myanmar: People and Society in the
Wake of Military Rule. London: Hurst.

Mark, S. (2023). Forging the Nation: Land Struggles in Myanmar’s Transition
Period. Honolulu: University of Hawai’ press.
Mason, D., and Cheesman, N. (2023). Land and Law Between Reform and
Revolution. In A. Simpson, and N. Farrelly, eds., Myanmar: Politics,
Economy and Society, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, forthcoming.
Pedersen, M. (2014). Myanmar’s Democratic Opening: The Process and Prospect
of Reform. In N. Cheesman, N. Farrelly, and T. Wilson, eds., Debating
Democratization in Myanmar, Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 19–40.
14. Development:
Aung, G. (2018). Postcolonial Capitalism and the Politics of Dispossession:
Political Trajectories in Southern Myanmar. European Journal of East Asian
Studies, 17(2), 193–227.
Brown, I. (2013). Burma’s Economy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
66 References
Crouch, M., ed. (2017). The Business of Transition: Law Reform,

Development and Economics in Myanmar. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ford, M., Gillan, M. and Htwe Htwe Thein (2021). Political Regimes and
Economic Policy: Isolation, Consolidation, Reintegration. In A. Simpson
and N. Farrelly, eds., Myanmar: Politics, Economy and Society, London:
Routledge, pp. 105–119.
Jones, L. (2014). The Political Economy of Myanmar’s Transition. Journal of
Kenney-Lazar, M., and Mark, S. (2021). Variegated Transitions: Emerging
Forms of Land and Resource Capitalism in Laos and Myanmar. EPA:
Environment and Planning A, 53(2), 296–314.
Kim, K. (2021). Civil Resistance in the Shadow of War: Explaining Popular
Mobilization against Dams in Myanmar. PhD Dissertation, Uppsala
University.
Kramer, T. (2021) ‘Neither War Nor Peace’: Failed Ceasefires and
Dispossession in Myanmar’s Ethnic Borderlands. Journal of Peasant
Studies, 48(3), 476–96.
McCarthy, G. (2023). Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality,
and Resistance in Myanmar. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Oswald, K., and Tun Myint (2021). Myanmar: Pandemic in a Time of
Transition. In V. V. Ramraj, ed., Covid-19 in Asia. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 335–48.
15. Patriarchy:
Crouch, M. (2016). Promiscuity, Polygyny, and the Power of Revenge: The Past
and Future of Burmese Buddhist Law in Myanmar. Asian Journal of Law and
Society, 3(1), 85–104.
Hedström, J., and Olivius, E., eds. (2023). Waves of Upheaval: Political Transitions
and Gendered Transformations in Myanmar. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
Ikeya, C. (2011). Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Keeler, W. (2017). The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in
Buddhist Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Khin Mar Mar Kyi, M. (2018). Gender. In A. Simpson, N. Farrelly and
I. Holliday, eds., Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Myanmar.
London: Routledge, pp. 381–92.
Sengupta, N. (2015). The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung
San Suu Kyi. Delhi: Cambridge University Press.
References 67
16. Freedom:
Cheesman, N. (2022). An Experiment with the Island Detention of Public
Enemies in Postcolonial Burma. In R. Cribb, C. Twomey and S. Wilson,
eds, Detention Camps in Asia. Leiden: Brill, pp. 63–81.
Silverstein, J. (1996). The Idea of Freedom in Burma and the Political Thought
of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Pacific Affairs, 69(2), 211–28.
Taylor, R. H. (2002). Freedom in Burma and Thailand: Inside or Outside the
State? In R. H. Taylor, ed., The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, pp. 143–181.
Wells, T. (2018). Democratic ‘Freedom’ in Myanmar. Asian Journal of Political
Science, 26(1), 1–15.
Select bibliography of works in Burmese
/ Crony [Various Authors (2013).

Crony. Yangon: Panmyoditya Publishing.]
[Various Authors (2013). Monks and National Affairs. Yangon: Anagatkala

Literary Communications.]
Myanmar Knowledge
Society [Various Authors (2013). Social and Political Movements. Yangon:
Myanmar Knowledge Society.]
KQ [Ko Ko Gyi (2014). The New State and National Identity:

Speeches. Yangon: KQ Publishing.]
NLD
[Ko Than (2013). Prospects and Difficulties
for Cooperation between the NLD and the New Government. Yangon: Neyiyi
Publishing.]
[Kyaw
Min, U (2015). Scrutinising Rohingya History. Yangon: Panya-egari-zo
Publishing.]
[Khin Nyunt, U /‘Hmaw Wuntha’ (2017). MI,

SLORC, SPDC and I. Yangon: Panmyoditya Publishing.]
[Khin Nyunt, U /‘Hmaw Wuntha’ (2016). The Nation’s

Western Gateway Problem. Yangon: Panmyoditya Publishing.]
[Chit Win Maung
(2019). Political Essays. Yangon: Panzwemun Publishing.]
68 References
/ Chit Thet Tun ( ) [2022]

NLD / People’s Defense Forces
(PDFs): Federal Army, or NLD Army? Canberra: Australian National
University.
[Sape Biman. Encyclopedia of Myanmar. Yangon, Burma Translation Society,

vol. 1–15.]
[National Unity Party (2013). Myanmar

Women’s Political Activism, 2nd ed. Yangon: Shinmadaung Publishing.]
[Htet Myet (2013).
Whither, Wherefore NLD? Yangon: Myanma Kit Publishing.]
[Thangnou, Thomas (2013). The Chin National Front

and My Revolutionary Experiences. Yangon: Panwewe Publishing.]
[Htun Myint, U (2017 [2013]). What Is Federalism? Yangon: Neyiyi Book

House.]
[Dagon Taya (2018). Freedom, Politics, Peace and Democracy. Yangon:

Seikkugyogyo Publishing.]
[Ne Soe Htet (2017). Fragile Rakhine State, and An Analysis

of the Troubles. Yangon: Seikkuthit Publishing.]
[Naung Kyaw (2017). I, Military Dictatorship Dissident. Yangon: Kawahlemun

Publishing.]
[Pantha, Nai (2014). The Historical Experience of the Mon Political

Movement. Yangon: Zinyadanazaw Publishing.]
[Phoe Kyaw (2017). Our
Western Gateway. Yangon: Yan Aung Publishing – 2.]
[Phoe Kyaw (2014).
My History, Others’ History, the Nation’s History. Yangon: Thin Publishing.]
[Phoe Sai, ed. (2016). The Hope of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s 21st-Century
Panglong. Yangon: Journalist Publishing.]
/ Muslim Society in Myanmar
[Ba Saw (2017). Muslim Society in Myanmar, Yangon:
Yinmyo Publishing.]
References 69
[Ma Ma Oo (2013). Aunty Tells All About the 2008 Constitution. Yangon:
Panwewe Publishing.]
[MoeMaKa Media (2017). The Current

Northern Rakhine State Affair: MoeMaKa Articles (2009–2017). Yangon:
MoeMaka Book House.]
[Marn, ed. (2016). Once Upon a Time in Myanmar (1988–2015),

vols. 1 & 2. Yangon: Mo Publishing.]
[Maung Maung Soe (2016). Features of National Race

Armed Groups. Yangon: Yan Aung Publishing.]
[Maung Maung Soe (2016). The Myitsone Problem and Myanmar–China

Relations. Yangon: Maha Publishing.]
[Maung Maung Soe (2019). Political Movements of Rakhine State.

Mandalay: Dandayi Book House.]
[Maung Yekkhida (2015).
A Race of Right Belief. Yangon: Gôndu Publishing.]
[Maung Thein Nyunt (2012). The Politics of Myanmar’s Parliamentary

Democracy, and I. Yangon: Thin Publishing.]
[Maung Thwe Chun (2015). MaBaTha, 969 and the Wall of Sovereignty.
Yangon: Mangyaung Publishing.]
[Maung Thwe Chun (2016). The Danger of Islamic Jihadist Terror. Yangon:
Mangyaung Publishing.]
[Myo, U (2013). A Study of Peasants’ Affairs in Burma. Yangon:

Ninzini Publishing.]
[Myint Zaw, Maung (2012). 100 Important Words for

Myanmar’s Societal Transformation. Yangon: Gyu Publishing.]
[Myint Thu (2014). An Unanticipated Journey: The Biography of General

Soe Win. Yangon: Panwewe Publishing.]
70 References
[Myint Thein, Doctor (2013). Myanmar Politics

and Unions. Yangon: Dhammathandawsin Press.]
[Myat
Thu, Tekkatho (2013). Politics and Political Parties. Yangon: Hanthazu
Publishing.]
Ye Pone Thaik, ed. (2013?). The News Journals on the Western Gateway, vol.
1. U Kyaw Thura.]
[Yan Myo Thein, Dr (2013). NLD Post-2015 and the Story of

the Presidency. Yangon: Sanadi Book House.]
[Shwe Ohn, U
(2014). The Unbreakable Union. Yangon: Nayiyi Book House.]
/ Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi Speeches [Lin
Thet Khine, ed. (2016 [2014]). Courageous Speeches of the People’s
Leader. Yangon, Lawunyeik Publishing.]
[Win Zaw Latt, ed. (2013). The Newspapers on the 8888

Uprising. Yangon: Tomyit Book House.]
[Win Tint Htun (2013). Guide to Political

Parties, Organisations, Associations of Burma. Yangon: Zinyadanazaw
Publishing.]
[Win Tint Htun (2014). Burma in the Darkness, 3rd ed. Yangon: Panwewe
Publishing.]
The
Speaker [Wunna, “Online” (2019). Interviews with Military
Intelligence Officers. Yangon: The Speaker News Journal.]
[Tharawun (2018). The Makings of a Long War in

the Rakhine, and Articles on Rakhine Affairs. Yangon: Kangawwutyi
Publishing.]
[Tharawun (2014). The Disappearance of

Buddhism in Afghanistan, and Other Articles, Yangon: Kangawwutyi
Publishing.]
References 71
[Thet
Win Myint (2016). Is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi a Dictator? Yangon: Kaung
Thant Publishing.]
[Thant, U / Labmoswe (2013). Civil Strife and Democracy

Struggles. Yangon: Labmoswe Publishing.]
[Thant Zaw (2015). The Wrongness of the State: General Khin

Nyunt and National Intelligence. Yangon: Thin Publishing.]
[Than Win Hlaing (2016). State

Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Changing Myanmar Politics.
Yangon: Kunitsingyè Publishing.]
/ The Wars We
Fought and the Peace We Look For [Than Win Hlaing
(2015). The War They Fought and the Peace They Seek, Yangon: Lwin Oo
Publishing.]
/ The Last Days of Gen. Ne
Win [Than Win Hlaing (2014). The Last
Days of Dictator General Ne Win, 2nd ed. Yangon: Lwin Oo Publishing.]
Momentum Book Publishing [Hein Latt (2015). Interviews with the

Patriotic Association of Myanmar. Yangon: Momentum Book Publishing.]
[Ashin
Thawbaka (2014). The Second Conference. Yangon: Mizzima Patipada

Publishing.]
[Aye Thar Aung (2014). Rakhine Nationalism and the Union Problem.
Yangon: Rakhine Thagyi Publishing.]
Grace Printing House [Aung Swan (2017). The KNU

Demands Federal Democracy, and Politics Rather Than War. Yangon:
Grace Printing House.]
[Aung San Suu
Kyi, Daw (2014). 100 D-talks. Yangon: Shwebyidan Publishing.]
[Aung San Suu
Kyi, Daw (2014). Before Victory. Yangon: Kyèni Publishing Group.]
72 References
[Aung Myint, Dr (2013). Mandalay and the 8888 Uprising. Yangon:

Pinzagan Publishing.]
[Aung Shin, Monywa (2016). Annals of the National League for

Democracy, 2nd edition. Yangon: Pinzagan Publishing.]
Acknowledgements
This lexicon had many knowledgeable and interested readers before going to
print, especially in its first iteration. I benefited from their advice. Among them
I thank Melissa Crouch, Matthew Fenwick, Niklas Foxeus, Iselin Frydenlund,
Marija Grujić, Martin Krygier, Nyi Nyi Kyaw, Myat The Thitsar, Rebecca Pearse,
Elliot Prasse-Freeman, Craig Reynolds, Elizabeth Rhoads, Ben Schonthal and
Alicia Turner. I am indebted to three anonymous peer reviewers for their thought-
ful comments and to a number of other Myanmar colleagues whom I cannot name
due to the revolutionary situation in their country since mid-2021.
I sketched ideas for the lexicon at sessions of the Australia–Myanmar
Constitutional Democracy project in Taunggyi and Yangon during 2018,
which colleagues from the University of New South Wales convened with
counterparts in Myanmar. I drafted it in 2019–20 while on two fellowships
in Japan, at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. At both universities I had generous col-
leagues and hosts, among whom Yoshihiro Nakanishi, Yoko Hayami and Jun
Honna deserve special mention. I am thankful to Noemi Dupertuis for her
assistance with accessing Burmese-language books at the CSEAS library.
I revised the text in 2022–3 while on a visiting professorship at the Baldy
Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo. Invitations to give
talks to the Association of Mainland Southeast Asia Scholars in 2021 and at
Arizona State University and York University in 2022 and 2023 presented
opportunities to think my way back into the manuscript after I had set it
aside due to the coronavirus pandemic and military coup. Thanks to Patrick
Jory, Julianne Schober and Alicia Turner for these.
On top of collegiality and office space, Kyoto offered a research stipend and
Ritsumeikan a special grant, which I used to buy equipment and materials with
which to conduct work on the lexicon. Fellowships in Southeast Asian studies
are hard enough to come by these days. The fact that these two universities
provided funding on top of being outstanding places to think and read and write
is exceptional. In addition to these funds, I have been fortunate to have had an
Australian Research Council grant for work in Myanmar and Thailand and to
have been on a research team headed by Thongchai Winichakul funded by the
Japanese government. Though these grants were not for the writing of the
lexicon, I found opportunities during trips they funded to meet people and
purchase materials that contributed to the contents of this book.
74 Acknowledgements
At the Australian National University, my thinking about how to write

a political lexicon of Myanmar benefited from two communities for research
and practice. One is the Myanmar Research Centre, which I have directed since
2021. The other is the Interpretation, Method and Critique network, which April
Biccum and I convene. I am grateful to everyone involved in both, as well as to
the Department of Political and Social Change for its unwavering commitment
to grounded, critical research on politics in Southeast Asia.
Thank you also to the Politics and Society in Southeast Asia series editors,
Edward Aspinall and Meredith Weiss, for their invitation to contribute, and to
Wade Guyitt for the careful copy editing.
Lastly, to every one of my Burmese language instructors, please know that I’d
do it all over again. ေကျးဇူးတင်ပါတယ်။
Politics and Society in Southeast Asia
Edward Aspinall
Australian National University
Edward Aspinall is a professor of politics at the Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs,
Australian National University. A specialist of Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, much of
his research has focused on democratisation, ethnic politics and civil society in Indonesia
and, most recently, clientelism across Southeast Asia.
Meredith L. Weiss
University at Albany, SUNY
Meredith L. Weiss is Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her
research addresses political mobilization and contention, the politics of identity and
development, and electoral politics in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on
Malaysia and Singapore.
About the Series

The Elements series Politics and Society in Southeast Asia includes both
country-specific and thematic studies on one of the world’s most dynamic regions.
Each title, written by a leading scholar of that country or theme, combines a succinct,
comprehensive, up-to-date overview of debates in the scholarly literature with
original analysis and a clear argument.
Politics and Society in Southeast Asia
Elements in the Series

Indonesia: Twenty Years after Democracy
Jamie Davidson
Civil–Military Relations in Southeast Asia
Aurel Croissant
Singapore: Identity, Brand, Power
Kenneth Paul Tan
Ritual and Region: The Invention of ASEAN
Mathew Davies
Populism in Southeast Asia
Paul Kenny
Cambodia: Return to Authoritarianism
Kheang Un
Vietnam: A Pathway from State Socialism
Thaveeporn Vasavakul
Independent Timor-Leste: Regime, Economy and Identity
Douglas Kammen
Media and Power in Southeast Asia
Cherian George and Gayathry Venkiteswaran
The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia
Lee Morgenbesser
Rural Development in Southeast Asia

Jonathan Rigg
Fighting Armed Conflicts in Southeast Asia
Shane Joshua Barter
Democratic Deconsolidation in Southeast Asia
Marcus Mietzner
Contesting Social Welfare in Southeast Asia
Andrew Rosser and John Murphy
Myanmar: A Political Lexicon
Nick Cheesman
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ESEA

Myanmar

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Myanmar

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Myanmar

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cheesman

Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into how words

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108565523 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover image: tashechka/Shutterstock ISSN 2515-2998 (online)

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

ISSN 2515-2998 (online)

Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Abstract: Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into how

Keywords: Myanmar, Burma, politics, meaning, lexicon

© Nick Cheesman 2023

A Political Lexicon: How Come? 1

A Political Lexicon: How Come?

soldiers and paramilitary cops who approached them as robbers of sovereign

/ Down with usurper military government!

How? Well, in conditions in which army ofﬁcers claim an exclusive and

Myanmar. The remainder of the Element consists of the lexicon’s sixteen

admixture of conventional political usages, in Burmese and English (like the

occupants had had enough of decades of dispossession and oppression at the

where I consulted monographs and edited volumes, alongside those in my

The purpose of including these dictionary entries is not, as indicated, to insist on

What can a small lexicon contribute to our understanding of politics in Myanmar?

What can it say or do in an era of revolution? To these questions, I have three

The second related contribution that a lexical approach to political meaning-

Politics, naingnganye, pronounced naing-gan-ye, are matters, -ye, of a state or polity,

or constitutive of them. Politics as naingganye refer to the state but do not

naingganye and professed disinterest in them. Better to leave something unsaid

/ ana / n power; authority. [Pali ana]

Unlike the English word ‘dictator’, whose origins in Renaissance interpretations

– Nationwide Ceaseﬁre Agreement, 2015; ofﬁcial translation

The Myanmar Language Commission’s Burmese–English dictionary contains

affairs. However, governments of subnational states and regions lack autonomy.

National League for Democracy came to government in 2016. In parts of the

/ agyôk / n 1 person in full charge of an undertaking. 2 Anything of the

assigned to itself. To defend sovereign power against its enemies is the

themselves. Politically inert people endanger neither.

In 1948, almost anyone residing in Burma could opt to be a citizen: a child or

demands would be an impossible task for almost anyone in Myanmar. But

the same, in their situation?

/ lumyo / n 1 race, nationality. 2 nation (as in [for country

The categories of British colonial administration were premised on a different

As with the colonial taxonomies of native and non-native subjects, the

Were members of the political community classed exclusively as members

in one way or another, a force for Buddhist monarchy to reckon with.

wholly or partially destroy it, to deliberately and systematically exterminate it.

But it was with the headline-grabbing attacks on Muslims in Rakhine State in

rical lethal combat. In the undefended townships bordering Bangladesh,

incitement of anti-Muslim violence and support of the military. While

Among youth activists at the forefront of the anti-dictatorship protests in

Nyunt recited statistics on numbers of personnel convicted in military or police

/ sit / v . . . 2 inspect; examine; interrogate.

sitkyawye, or interrogation, is untranslatable but because it deﬁes attempts to

with cigarettes or electrocuted and pummelled to confess. Political captives, for

In the countryside, military interrogators occupying the compounds of mon-

/ tawhlan / v rebel; revolt; resist.

/ ayedawbôn / n 1 [arch] historical account of a royal campaign . . . 2

Two words denote revolution in Burmese. The ofﬁcial encyclopedia has an

General Assembly and set up diplomatic missions in a number of countries with

instance. But to equate the practice of killing informers by revolutionary forces

conditions that make revolutionary violence possible. That violence is itself

/ pyubyin / v. 1 improve; reform; rectify; set right; amend. 2 repair.