Expanding the Southern urban critique: Elite politics, popular politics, and self-governance in the wards of Mandalay

Jérémie Sanchez,Su Su Myat

doi:10.1177/2399654421989703

Jérémie Sanchez, Su Su Myat

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654421989703

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Abstract

This article explores everyday urban governance and politics in Mandalay, Myanmar. We examine this through a focus on state-society interactions within Mandalay’s ward offices, which are the lowest tier of the administrative backbone of the Myanmar state known as the General Administration Department. This reveals the existence of three intertwined forms of urban ‘politics’ in Mandalay: elite politics, which echo the practices of civil society in the sense of Partha Chatterjee; popular politics, which echo the practices of political society; and self-governance, which is an approach to politics culturally and historically situated in Theravada Buddhism and Myanmar’s authoritarian legacies. The situatedness of the case prompts us to argue in favor of expanding the southern urban critique beyond its conventional focus on liberal democratic metropolises of the global South, in order to enrich our understanding of what constitutes postcolonial urban politics. We suggest this could be achieved, as we attempt here, by adopting collaborative research methodologies and by extensively building on southern area scholarship in ways that mediate epistemic expropriation.

Highlights

Urban Studies increasingly acknowledge that cities of the global South are not “pathological and in need of development interventions” (Schindler, 2017: 47) but rather spaces from which we have much to learn
More generally research on urban governance in the global South, have not extensively questioned, is whether everyday postcolonial politics necessarily involve an interaction between state and society, let alone one characterized by negotiation, contestation or conflict
This article draws material from a series of interviews conducted in Mandalay with the General Administration Department (GAD) at the district, township and ward levels

Summary

Introduction

Urban Studies increasingly acknowledge that cities of the global South are not “pathological and in need of development interventions” (Schindler, 2017: 47) but rather spaces from which we have much to learn. The works of Truelove in Delhi (2020) and of Benit-Gbaffou and Oldfield in southern Africa (2011) showed how the heterogenous ways in which urbanites made their claims heard with regard to service delivery challenged conventional definitions of ‘state’ and ‘state power’ and turned the state-society interface into a “gray zone” (Truelove, 2019) What these works, and more generally research on urban governance in the global South, have not extensively questioned, is whether everyday postcolonial politics necessarily involve an interaction between state and society, let alone one characterized by negotiation, contestation or conflict. Before delving into the case, we describe our methodology

Methodology

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Conclusion