Politics In Myanmar Research Articles

USA–Myanmar relations: democratization and beyond

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the USA's policy toward Myanmar or Burma, analyzing the bilateral relationship between the two countries from the pre-colonial period to the present day. It highlights the implications of political shifts in the system of government in Myanmar for the bilateral relationship with the USA, particularly after the 1962 coup and the emergence of rising regional powers like China. The paper also shows how the economic role of Myanmar has increased, leading to more equal relations with the United States of America.Design/methodology/approachThis paper employs a qualitative research design, analyzing data from both primary and secondary sources. The methodology includes a literature review and document analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding of the USA–Myanmar bilateral relationship. The research also analyzes political and economic developments in Myanmar and the region, placing the USA policy in a broader context.FindingsThe research finds that the USA has been an influential player in Myanmar's politics and economy. However, with Myanmar's integration into the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and its accession to Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), its economic role has become more significant, leading to a more balanced relationship with the USA. The paper also shows that the USA's policy toward Myanmar has undergone significant changes, particularly after the 2011 easing of sanctions by former President Barack Obama.Originality/valueAlthough many works have traced the history of USA–Myanmar ties, this study provides a fresh perspective by setting past events against the backdrop of contemporary geopolitical upheavals, therefore highlighting the complex evolution of their bilateral dynamics. The paper contributes to the literature on the USA–Myanmar bilateral relationship by providing a comprehensive analysis of the relationship from a historical perspective. The research also adds to the discussion of the implications of political and economic developments in Myanmar for the bilateral relationship with the USA. The findings of this study have important implications for policymakers and scholars interested in the USA's role in Southeast Asia and its relations with rising regional powers like China.

A Comparative Study of Abbreviations in Burmese and Chinese

With the rapid development of politics, science, technology, economy, and culture, people generally seek more economical and concise language expressions, and concise and bright abbreviations that cover all aspects are produced. There are many abbreviations in modern Burmese and Chinese vocabulary systems, but there has been no comparative research on them. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare the word formation and pronunciation characteristics of abbreviations in Burmese and Chinese, and then to derive the abbreviation law. On the one hand, it can improve the comparative research findings of Burmese and Chinese researchers. Language, on the other hand, is inextricably linked to social life. With increasing economic and cultural exchanges between China and Myanmar, strengthening comparative language studies promotes scholars' understanding of Myanmar's politics, economy, and culture, and has some practical implications for the friendly development of China-Myanmar relations.

The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance by Bertil Lintner

Reviewed by: The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance by Bertil Lintner Jane M. Ferguson Bertil Lintner. 2021. The Wa of Myanmar and China's Quest for Global Dominance. Chiang Mai: Silkworm. 272 pages. ISBN 9786162151705 This slim, but richly detailed, volume represents a recent installment in veteran journalist and prolific author Bertil Lintner's foundational contributions to our understanding of the complex dynamics of Myanmar's politics, and especially those of its peripheries. The areas brought to focus here are the bordering highlands of Northern Shan State and the Southwest of China's Yunnan province, territories long off-limits to other empire-building projects. These edgy zones set the context for the travails of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), the most sizable and best-equipped non-state military in Asia today. The UWSA boasts commanding around twenty to thirty thousand troops, and including weaponry has more firepower than the Communist Party of Burma ever had in the region. [End Page 138] Lintner draws upon extensive experience and direct contacts, including having visited and interviewed Wa soldiers when they were part of the Communist Party of Burma during the late 1980s, and spent months in Wa areas getting to know commanders and villagers who communicated with him in the Shan language. Lintner has returned to the area more recently, at the UWSA's northern capital of Pangkham, the headquarters and boomtown for the Wa state, now an autonomous region at the Shan State–Yunnan border. Lintner carefully traces how ongoing wars, battles for economic access, and political sovereignty have embroiled these areas of Shan State for over seven decades. The book looks outward to how this particular situation has implications for Myanmar–China relationships, past and present, but also how their development and expansion have been intertwined with the Chinese government's changing ideological and economic orientations toward its Southeast Asian neighbors. The book itself consists of six chapters detailing the social and political terrain of the Wa, from mythical histories, colonial noninterference, the Communist Party of Burma, the mutiny against the latter and subsequent foundation of the UWSA, the UWSA's relationship to narcotics and changing global economies, and finally their relationship with contemporary politics and the changing geostrategic agenda of China. One section at the back, "Dramatis Personae" is useful to refer to while reading the body chapters of the book; quite a bewildering number of players are involved. Lintner discusses the history of the Wa area as a zone off-limits to state incorporation until only very recently; part and parcel to this, the Wa were frequently described as wild, even savage. Their headhunting practices perpetuated this stereotype, though it has been argued that [End Page 139] this was more a ritual of war trophies, not making the Wa intrinsically—let alone by "nature"—more brutal or violent than their lowland counterparts who engaged in fatal warfare themselves. Lintner's examination of the historical relationship between Wa communities and Cold War geopolitics is essential background for the current situation; the Wa people themselves were not committed to the ideologies of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). In reality, the CPB had done little for the ethnic Wa troops and communities who had hardly any interest in the Party's ostensible ideological goals nor its inadequately configured agricultural plans for the area, and lack of concrete efforts to develop the region. In a tinge of irony, or perhaps as evidence that CPB ideology should not frame economic expectations, the years of the Burmese Socialist Program Party in Burma saw an increasing ramping-up of the black market in the periphery and a thriving economy for free trade in these CPB controlled areas (p. 102). From the late 1980s, Lintner saw the writing on the wall that the Wa troops themselves saw little to gain by working with the CPB, and following their 1989 mutiny, sought the relative benefits of working with the Chinese as well as establishing an autonomous region through a cease-fire agreement with the (then) Rangoon government. Through the buildup of weaponry and territory (especially following the vacuum left behind by Khun Sa's surrender of the Möng Tai...

Negotiating authoritarian law and (dis)order: medicines, drug shops, and regulators in a poor Yangon suburb

ABSTRACT Global health policymakers have identified Myanmar as a source of high drug resistance and informal pharmaceutical markets in need of tighter state regulation. The World Health Organization drafted a Global Action Plan on antibiotic resistance (often referred to as antimicrobial resistance) that seeks to address it. Myanmar is one of over a hundred countries that has followed the World Health Organization’s prescription and drafted its own National Action Plan. Through participating in the everyday life of a family pharmacy, we observed that in practice the outcomes of global plans for AMR, such as regulating access to antibiotics, are shaped by people’s limited access to affordable health care, low salaries, and the military’s authoritarian role in Myanmar politics. We followed how negotiations between state officials and drug vendors evolved towards a mutual understanding (as opposed to following written rules) after a Food and Drug Administration raid, intended to enforce the regulation of the sales of illegal medicines. Rather than uncritically pushing state-centric action, those working to promote the regulation of medicines must attend more carefully to how different modes of political authority and governance, combined with histories of health provision, shape drug policy in practice. Otherwise, they risk contributing, if not intensifying, already existing health and social injustices, whilst also failing to generate their intended outcomes, such as meaningful changes to antibiotic sales and reductions in resistance.

Negotiating antifascist solidarity across ethnic difference in Myanmar: Bhamo Tin Aung’s Yoma Taikbwe

ABSTRACT The 1989 collapse of the Communist Party of Burma through rank-and-file mutiny, and its splintering into manifold ethnic armed organizations, presaged a weakening of prospects for any leftist project across ethnic lines in Myanmar. These developments coincided with the flourishing of so-called new wars, in Myanmar and elsewhere, organized around identity politics rather than ideology. For liberal critics, such developments confirmed a belief that leftist projects could only ever be an authoritarian imposition over ascriptive ethnic difference. Considering such critiques, this article presents an alternative approach to leftist politics in Myanmar, as advanced by author and journalist Bhamo Tin Aung in his 1963 novel, Yoma Taikbwe, which narrates the emergence of antifascist struggle under wartime Japanese occupation. The book articulates a leftist politics that attends to ethnic difference as an experience grounded in uneven political economy, thus paralleling arguments from the Black radical tradition. In this way, Bhamo Tin Aung pointed to a leftist politics realized through negotiation across difference. It is a politics that remains as pertinent as ever, given worsening class inequality and enduring ethnic chauvinism, in Myanmar and elsewhere, and given the importance of cross-ethnic solidarity in the struggle against military rule following Myanmar’s February 2021 coup.

Myanmar—Politics, Economy and Society, by Adam Simpson and Nick Farrelly (editors)

Myanmar—Politics, Economy and Society, by Adam Simpson and Nick Farrelly (editors)

Refugee Policy as Border Governance: Refugee return, peacebuilding, and Myanmar's politics of transition

AbstractRefugees have been largely overlooked in analyses of Myanmar's transition, apparently considered peripheral to more prominent topics such as negotiation with armed groups, economic reform, and political elections. By analysing approaches to return and repatriation in three distinct contexts—refugees in camps in Thailand, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and Chin refugees in Malaysia and India—this article shows that proposals for the return and repatriation of refugees are a form of ‘border governance' (that is, governance in, of, and through borders). This operates at three scales: (1) global border control by keeping refugees in their region of origin or returning them to their country of origin, (2) national border control by reinforcing boundaries between Myanmar and its surrounding states, and (3) the governance of political transition by reinforcing the Myanmar government’s narrative of peacebuilding by recasting continuing conflict as conditions suitable for refugee return. Premature promotion of repatriation has a number of harmful outcomes for refugee communities: encouraging the withdrawal of international aid, escalating fear and uncertainty, and political bolstering of a Bamar-dominated government and military vis-a-vis ethnic minority groups. This analysis supports a broader understanding of repatriation and its consequences, recognising that the promotion of refugee return can have significant political implications that are apparent even before mass returns have been carried out and which may reverberate far into the future.

Emerging ‘agrarian climate justice’ struggles in Myanmar

ABSTRACT The intersection between land grabs and climate change mitigation politics in Myanmar has created new political opportunities for scaling up, expanding and deepening struggles toward ‘agrarian climate justice’. Building on the concepts of ‘political opportunities’ and ‘rural democratization’ to understand how rural politics is relevant to national regime changes in the process of deepening democracy, this paper argues that scaling up beyond the local level becomes necessary to counter the concentration of power at higher levels. At the same time, this vertical process is inextricable from building horizontal networks and rooting struggles in communities. By looking at national-level land policy advocacy for more just land laws, accountability politics in mining at a regional level in the southern Tanintharyi region, and the bottom-up establishment of local indigenous territories, this paper illustrates how expanding these struggles becomes necessary, but is also accompanied by potential fault-lines. These fault-lines include divergent political tendencies within the network and challenges to working in areas contested by the Burmese state and ethnic armed organizations.

Gender and generation in rural politics in Myanmar: a missed space for (re)negotiation?

ABSTRACT The changes that have swept rural Myanmar, transforming landscapes and affecting livelihoods, have ignited rural politics and civil society and grassroot organizations' strategies to counter, resist, negotiate and adapt to these changes. Rural politics have centred on broad calls for agrarian and environmental rights and social justice that do not address women's rights, gender and generational justice explicitly. Based on fieldwork carried out in Myanmar's Taninthary region, and engagement with grassroots organizations, I examine how gender and generational power dynamics play out, transform and are transformed in processes of agrarian and environmental change and rural politics.

Attitudes Towards Women in Politics in Myanmar

This paper explores the drivers of female participation in formal politics in Myanmar. Using data from a proprietary survey collected during September--December, 2019 (N=2889) in the states of Mon, Mandalay, Shan, and Ayeyarwady, we shed light on the following three questions: (i) What explains self-confidence to participate in politics?; (ii) What explains support for women participation in politics?; and (iii) What explains support for own daughters participation in politics? The focus of this research is to examine which factors affect differently men and women. Results show that past life experience such as physical abuse as kids have markedly different effects on men and women in the long run. Formal education, marital status, and perceptions on safety also have differential effects.

Religion, Mass Violence, and Illiberal Regimes: Recent Research on the Rohingya in Myanmar

The plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar has drawn considerable international attention in recent years but a solution to the crisis remains elusive. This article gathers pertinent research from key books on Myanmar's politics and society published during the last five years and synthesizes their contributions to our understanding of the issue. It argues that the picture emerging from these works highlights how legal infrastructure for dealing with mass violence fails to deal adequately with the realities of an illiberal state. It further shows how the conflict's religious dimension - amplified through public discourse - obscures a competition between historically oppressed peoples to be heard. Rather than a conflict between Buddhists and Muslims, the nested dynamics of Rakhine State's regional politics shaped a situation where minorities turn on other minorities. This critical reading of the issue thus implies that international intervention in the form of labeling victims to save and perpetrators to sanction would likely be unproductive.

Reconsidering the Origin of the Contemporary Myanmar Politics

Reconsidering the Origin of the Contemporary Myanmar Politics

Resolving Rohingya Crisis: Obstacles and Prospects

Despite having geographical proximity and age-old commercial and cultural ties, Bangladesh and Myanmar failed to develop a meaningful relationship. Why? The Rohingya exodus in Bangladesh, albeit, is the key impediment to extend Bangladesh-Myanmar bilateral relationship. Nations have witnessed the crime against humanity in Rakhine for long which brutally killed a lot of Rohingya and forced about 1 million of them to flee from death and enter Bangladesh lead a measurable life. It is not exaggeration to claim that Rohingya, an unorganized ethnic community, are the most persecuted and helpless ethnic minority in today’s world. What’s the future of these ill-fated people is truly uncertain. The suspicious role of Myanmar for a safe repatriation of Rohingya generates doubts and apprehension in the civilized world whether these people can eventually return to their homeland or not. Myanmar has always denied Rohingya as an ethnic minority of Myanmar, In addition, geo-political interests of big powers, military’s engagement in politics in Myanmar, lack of political will from Myanmar, mutual suspicion between Bangladesh and Myanmar ultimately complicate the issue and ultimately block to a durable solution of the Rohingya crisis. Although the neighbors have geo-economic significance and huge potential for mutual cooperation, analyzing the past record and Myanmar’s existing policy, the prospects for a safe repatriation of Rohingya are slim unless the major actors including the UN and big powers in the West, and also China use their carrot and stick policy to induce Myanmar to create a peaceful environment in Rakhine so that Rohingya can return safely and live with dignity.

The Re-ethnicisation of Politics in Myanmar and the Making of the Rohingya Ethnicity Paradox

In Myanmar, hostilities between the majority Burmese and the minority Rakhine people on one side and the minority Rohingya on the other side have been common, but violence has persisted and even increased during the unstable transition away from an authoritarian regime. Most Burmese citizens appear to be united behind the ruling elites on the Rohingya issue. Why is the violence assumed to be of ethnic origin and whose interests are served by the acceptance of such violent acts as routine events? The article attempts to seek answers by following Brass’s framework on Hindu–Muslim violence in India. Its purpose is to examine which actors, mechanisms and institutional developments have been dominant and significant in the re-ethnicisation of the political landscape in Myanmar and how this has consolidated the formation of a contentious and contested specific Rohingya group identity among many Arakanese Muslims.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Jane M. Ferguson This issue of the Journal of Burma Studies proudly presents a special collection of papers on the topic of progress and what the term might mean in relation to Burma/Myanmar studies. News reports and scholarly works on Myanmar politics in recent years, particularly following the State Peace and Development Council regime change, the elections, and the electoral wins of the National League for Democracy have used the moniker “transition” or “opening up” to describe the ongoing situation in the country. For this issue, instead, we solicited ideas around the broad—and value-laden—idea of “Progress for Whom? And for What?” This issue offers a variety of considerations of how the concept might be understood or animated at different political, social, and cultural moments. The term “progress” is surely not without its baggage; it should not be taken to represent any sort of clean escape from the broken record of transition. European colonial empires frequently justified their expansion through the promotion of ideologies of progress. Colonial officials stationed in Southeast Asia as well as advocates for empire elsewhere were often adamant that their roles as conduits of cultural contact with the West signified “progress.” The idea that contact would be of some unqualified benefit to those of the colonized “traditional” societies perhaps willfully ignored the disparities in wealth accumulation across empires. It also instilled a notion of positive historical time, which meant a measure of cultural distance between the West and non-West (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). In one study, sociologist Robert Nisbet suggests that “the idea of progress holds that mankind (sic) has advanced in the past—from some aboriginal condition of primitiveness, barbarism or even nullity—is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future. . . . It (progress) is inseparable from a sense of time flowing in unilinear fashion” (Nisbet 1984: 4). [End Page vii] For Burma Studies, discussions of Colonial-era notions of progress conjure up scenes from Rudyard Kipling poems. Colonial foresters in Burma, for example, saw the application of Western science and technology as a way to bring progress (and economic prosperity) to Burma; science would manage the forests better than people had done previously with local methods (Bryant 1996: 170). Although the pith helmet version of the juggernaut for progress has (almost) been buried in the past, Orientalist stereotypes of peaceful, simple livelihoods of farmers persist, as do the denizens of neoliberal economic integration. In economic terms, it was Latin American post-colonial scholars who started to point to a structural connection between Western progress and non-Western poverty (Owen 2005: 161). Where progress was lauded, however, it was not without its cynics. In the book Burmese Days, one of George Orwell’s characters noted, “They build a prison and call it progress” (Orwell 1962: 42). This notion of a progress toward a modern civilization emplaced in colonial contact zones of Southeast Asia, however, was not necessarily lost in translation. Prestigious locals meaningfully fused it with existing concepts. In the nineteenth century in neighboring Siam, for example, elites resignified the Khmer word charoen from meaning cultivating merit, Buddhist awakening, making (someone) happier to a word that meant worldly development and technological advance, in other words, secular progress (Thongchai 2000: 531). Secular modernity and progress became coterminous. Furthermore, the utility of progress as a term or concept has been identified at points in history in which there is a shift, a rupture between expectation and experience. This perceived gap between expectation and experience has only grown wider in modern times (Koselleck 1985; Kosselleck and Presner 2002: 128). But the term progress need not be the exclusive preserve of the powerful or those cynical of the elitist underpinnings of its usage. Social movements could reject their oppressors’ notion of progress and use it to galvanize opposition. Writer and orator Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and former American [End Page viii] slave, began his 1857 “West India Emancipation” speech with the words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Within definitions of liberalism, progress is coterminous with “social change for the better” (Fawcett 2018: 10–11). News events and their treatment by people in power in Myanmar create...

Caretaking Democratization: The Military and Political Change in Myanmar

Caretaking Democratization: The Military and Political Change in Myanmar. By Renaud Egreteau. London: Hurst & Co, 2016. Hardcover: 193pp. In Caretaking Democratization French scholar Renaud Egreteau adds his voice to growing body of literature on Myanmar's recent political transition. Egreteau already has a considerable number of publications on Myanmar under his belt, not least on role of military in country's politics and role of national-level parliament since reforms were introduced in 2011. As such, it is not surprising that, like other academics, Egreteau sees endogenous rather than external factors as key to pacted transition he says we have witnessed in Myanmar (p. 15). The title of book clearly conveys thrust of Egreteau's argument: namely, that when compared to period of direct military rule that preceded it, period between and early 2016 is one in which military limited its interventionism in Myanmar politics to that of guardian army. The Tatmadaw, official name for armed forces, remains last resort decision-maker in post-SPDC (State Peace and Development Council) hybrid system. For Egreteau, Myanmar's transition from military rule is a sui generis case (p. 3). The book consists of six substantive chapters. In opening chapter, Egreteau contextualizes recent transition with reference to Myanmar's political history. His discussion shows that pacted transition, which is also described as a settlement (p. 32), was sought by military leadership, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and National League for Democracy as well as ethnic leaders who were willing to compromise to move politics forward. As Egreteau explains, transition was long planned by military and can be re-traced at very least to 2003 political roadmap to a discipline-flourishing democracy on which then military regime embarked in aftermath of renewed detention of Suu Kyi if not to early days of State Law and Order Restoration Council. The importance of role of wider social elites and political entrepreneurs as drivers of political transition has arguably been focus of more detailed work published elsewhere. Nevertheless, Egreteau similarly maintains that the 'Third Force' has participated in shaping of 'environmental conditions' necessary to bargaining of a loose 'pact' once SPDC was disbanded in 2011 (p. 36). Chapter two describes broadening of socio-political space under President U Thein Sein. Attention is given to 2010, 2012 and 2015 elections and expansion of civil society. However, Egreteau concentrates not only on positives, and hence does not fail to mention either disenfranchisement experienced by several groups or issue of religious extremism. Drawing strongly on his previous work, Egreteau then examines role of legislators in a revived parliamentary setting. Chapter three contains very interesting data and analysis on political parties and even key legislators. Egreteau notes that there has been some reliance on foreign funds for urgent parliamentary capacity building. Beyond noting external influences, he also outlines problem of internal divisions and splits experienced by political parties. Setting out current pattern of military intervention in Myanmar politics, Egreteau looks at political violence, political fragmentation and ethnic and communal conflicts. He also devotes particular attention to role of military in legislative affairs. …

Militarization of Politics in Myanmar and Thailand

Consolidation of democracy is one common problem found in majority of Southeast Asian countries. Lack of stable democratic institutions often leads a country to hybrid regime or some form of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship or one-party rule. Myanmar and Thailand, the two immediate neighbours, are two such examples of weak democratic institutions where the role of military has been dominant in politics. Since its independence from Great Britain in 1948, there have been two military coups in Myanmar: 1962 and 1988. The military has played an important role in politics by successfully ruling the country for over four decades until the general election in 2010, which formally ended direct military rule. Despite the democratic transition and political reforms since 2011, the military continues to play a significant role in the country’s politics. Whereas in Thailand, there have been as many as 12 successful coups since the removal of absolute monarchy in 1932, with the latest coup in 2014. The article discusses the militarization of politics by examining the role of military in Myanmar, particularly under the National League for Democracy (NLD)-led civilian government which assumed power in 2016, and the entrenchment of military role in politics in Thailand, especially since the 2014 military coup. The article attempts to understand the conditions under which military intervenes and then holds on to power.

Zwischen dem Großen Erwählten und Westminster Überlegungen zum Demokratieverständnis von Aung San Suu Kyi

Abstract Between the Great Elect and Westminster – Some Reflections on Aung San Suu Ky’s Concept of Democracy. In view of the elections in Myanmar held on November 8, 2015, the article investigates the concept of democracy set forth by the country’s best known politician, Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. She invokes two traditions of “democracy” that contradict each other in terms of the role of the opposition. The Buddhist concept of the Maha-sammata, the Great Select, that the Burmese leader invokes as a Burmese model of democracy is elected unanimously and for life. The relevance of this model for Burma’s and Myanmar’s political culture is substantiated by empirical evidence like the outcome of elections since the beginning of the twentieth century until the recent elections held in 2015. On the other hand, the leader of Myanmar’s most successful party looks at a Westminster style democracy based on the idea that a loyal opposition controls the government as a model for the country’s future political development. Even after the free and fair elections in 2015, it will be one of the most important tasks of Myanmar politics to solve this “opposition dilemma”.

Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma

Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma. By Mandy Sadan. Oxford: Oxford University Press (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph), 2013. Hardcover: 49pp (including Bibliography, plus front and end material). This is one of the most important books on the history, anthropology and politics of Burma/Myanmar to be published in recent years. (1) Mandy Sadan traces the emergence and transformation of the ethno-national identity over two centuries, from the precolonial period through to the present, in northeast India, southwest China, and northern Myanmar. Sadan's account is based on archival material, particularly from the British ex-colonies, combined with profound cultural and linguistic insights derived from fieldwork among the Kachin. She mobilizes outsider and insider sources--including texts, photographs and material culture, and many first-hand primary interviews--to sustain a critical interrogation of what it has meant and means to be (and be perceived as) Kachin, in different historical and geopolitical contexts (including at the broadest level, which is covered in Chapter 5 Southeast Asia in the Cold War). A wide range of theoretical approaches are mobilized, without losing sight of the peoples' particular lived experiences. The critical interrogation of implied and explicit positions in relation to identities and interests is balanced by a deep sympathy for her subject. Some scholars of ethnic politics in Myanmar (e.g. Robert Taylor passim) have suggested that, because categories of ethnic identity (e.g. Kachin) can be shown historically to be arbitrary constructions but are often treated in discourse as natural and essentialized, such self-identifications are somehow inauthentic or at best anachronistic. While carefully exploring the positions and interests involved in the emergence of identity, Sadan never belittles her subject, but seeks to unpack these dynamics in a manner which is fundamentally sympathetic to this complex and multifaceted society. This is evident in her treatment of how the Kachin ethnonym is claimed by (or for) non-dominant subgroups. As with other ethnic nationalities in Myanmar, defining elements of identity tend to be derived from the characteristics of a particular subgroup--in this case the Jingphaw. While elites from other subgroups (e.g. Lisu and Rawang) have sometimes preferred to use more locally specific designations and markers, the identification of Jingphaw as characteristic of a pan-national identity seems to be quite widely accepted. The analysis here is deeply empirical rather than theoretically driven. Sadan explores formative literatures on the Kachin, including Edmund Leach's hugely influential (but not unproblematic) Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) and the work of Jonathan Friedman. She is critical of scholars (including James Scott) who have devised macro-theoretical anthropological-political frameworks on the basis of case studies, and often seem more interested in the resulting theoretical superstructure than in grounding their insights in the lived realities of communities. The closest Sadan comes to meta-theorizing is her argument that socio-political constructions can be regarded as fractile. The fractile metaphor illustrates how and other local polities and societies reproduce at the micro-level elements of macro-level (e.g. courtly) structures, for example, regarding patron-client networks, and the symbolism of power. This theme is accompanied by insights regarding how (Kachin) local actors have sometimes been able to game such systems, gaining the upper-hand in material and symbolic relations with ostensibly more powerful actors (precolonial Burmese kings, British colonial actors and, more problematically, the post-independence state of Burma/Myanmar). …

Ulama, State, and Politics in Myanmar

Issues related to Islam and Myanmar have become world’s attention, especially in relation to the Rohingya refugees who fled the countr y in the past few months. The 2010 government census stated that Muslim constitutes 3.9% of the total 53 million population, who are mainly Theravada Buddhists; but some Muslim leaders interviewed in September 2014 argued that the followers of Prophet Muhammad constituted 17%. This paper finds that violent conflicts involving Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine State were caused by complex issues including the historical background of the coming and evelopment of Islam in Myanmar and the authoritarian military regime, which did not open paths for dialogue. It is surprising to witness how the concept of “peace” that is at the heart of the Buddhist teaching seems to be isappeared in the whole issue of the conflicts. This paper, however, will not focus on the conflicts themselves but on the role of ulama during the Myanmar conflict.[Isu terkait Islam dan Myanmar telah menyita perhatian dunia, khususnya setelah adanya para pengungsi Rohingya yang keluar dari negeri ini beberapa bulan yang lalu. Sensus tahun 2010 yang dilakukan pemerintah menunjukkan bahwa penhanut Islam berjumlah 3,9% dari total 53 juta penduduk yang mayoritas penganut Budha Theravada; namun menurut beberapa tokoh Islam yang diwawancarai pada September 2014, penganut Islam mencapai 17%. Tulisan ini melihat bahwa konflik kekerasan antara Muslim dan Budha di Provinsi Rakhine dilatarbelakangi persoalan yang cukup komplek, termasuk latar sejarah masuk dan berkembangnya Islam di Myanmar serta rezim militer yang otoriter yang tidak pernah membuka ruang dialog. Satu hal yang cukup mengejutkan adalah konsep “damai” yang menjadi jantung ajaran Budha tampaknya hilang di telan pusaran konflik.Hanya saja, tulisan ini tidak berfokus pada isu konflik itu sendiri, namun lebih menelisik peran ulama dalam konflik Myanmar.]