The Paradox Of Myanmar S Regime Change

This book analyzes Myanmar’s contemporary political history, arguing that Myanmar’s so-called "democratization" has always been a calculated regime transition, planned by the military, with every intention that the military to remain the key permanent political actor in Myanmar’s political regime. Using the period since Myanmar’s regime change in 2011 as an extended case study, this book offers an original theory of regime transition. The author argues that Myanmar’s ongoing regime transition has not diverged from its authoritarian military roots and explains how the military has long planned its voluntary partial withdrawal from direct politics. Therefore, Myanmar’s "disciplined democracy" contains features of democratic politics, but at its core remains authoritarian. Providing an original contribution to the theoretical literature on regime change by developing a theory of trial and error regime transition, the book engages with and challenges the popular democratization theory by arguing that this theory does not sufficiently explain hybrid regimes or authoritarian durability. Additionally, the book adds to an alternative understanding of how the regime transition was initiated by examining the historical evolution of Myanmar’s post-colonial regime and offers a fresh perspective on contemporary political developments in Myanmar. An important contribution to the study of authoritarian durability and the dynamics of regime change in Southeast Asia, this book will be of interest to academic researchers of comparative politics, international relations, and Southeast Asian studies.

Updated by popular demand, this is the fourth edition of this important bibliography. It lists a wide selection of works on or about Myanmar published in English and in hard copy since the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, which marked the beginning of a new era in Myanmar’s modern history. There are now 2,727 titles listed. They have been written, edited, translated or compiled by over 2,000 people, from many different backgrounds. These works have been organized into thirty-five subject chapters containing ninety-five discrete sections. There are also four appendices, including a comprehensive reading guide for those unfamiliar with Myanmar or who may be seeking guidance on particular topics. This book is an invaluable aid to officials, scholars, journalists, armchair travellers and others with an interest in this fascinating but deeply troubled country.

Examines how intermediaries work on rule of law assistance in authoritarian Myanmar, based on interviews with 100 individuals.

This interdisciplinary book offers a new analysis of the concepts, spaces, and practices of activism that emerge under diverse authoritarian modes of governance in Asia. Demonstrating the limitations of existing conceptual approaches in accounting for activism in Asia, the book also offers new understandings of authoritarian governance practices and how these shape state-civil society relations. In conjunction with its tripartite theoretical framework, the book presents regional knowledge from an array of countries in Asia, with empirically rich contributions from both scholars and activists. Through in-depth case studies, the book offers new scholarly insights that highlight the ways in which activism emerges and is contested across Asia. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, law, and sociology.

Presidentialism and Democracy in East and Southeast Asia examines the impact of presidential systems on democracies by examining three distinct literatures – the perilousness of competing legitimacies of the executive and legislative branches, issues of institutional design (particularly regarding semi-presidentialism), and the rise of executive aggrandizement. Despite often intense political conflict and temporary instability in the East and Southeast Asia, presidential systems of various types – from relatively "pure" forms to semi-presidentialism and other hybrids – have largely been resilient. Although there are signs of growing autocratization in several cases, presidentialism, associated with both accommodation and conflict, has usually not driven it. This book’s contributions to presidentialism debates will be of interests to students and scholars of comparative politics while it also offers detailed analysis of the presidency in these East and Southeast Asian cases.

In the midst of the political upheavals that engulfed Myanmar from 2010 to 2011, international attention was fixed upon the military regime and its dissident opponents. But away from the cameras, a very different set of struggles were unfolding across the country. These struggles were manifested not as violent clashes, but as everyday interactions involving taxi drivers, community organizers, farmers, heads of domestic NGOs, and many more. A product of five years' research, during which the author conducted over five hundred ethnographic interviews across the country, Pathways that Changed Myanmar provides a voice for those ordinary Burmese whose trials and aspirations went unheard and unnoticed during this pivotal moment in the nation's history.

This book provides an in-depth study of the moral economies emerging from within conditions of precarity in rural communities in contemporary Myanmar. James C. Scott’s seminal work on ‘The Moral Economy of the Peasant’ argued that peasant notions of subsistence and expectations of reciprocity formed the basis for subsequent rebellion as economic conditions changed and new market forces were introduced. Now, nearly a century on, Michael Griffiths argues that the conditions faced by rural communities in Myanmar remain precarious, but different forms of moral economy shape their responses. In the contemporary context, the moral economy of rural communities is characterized by the emergence of localized, self-organized community welfare associations which adopt a sophisticated iteration of self-help framed by the Buddhist concept of parahita (altruism). This book analyses the performative nature of these welfare organizations as a form of politics, asking how notions of citizenship expressed in these organizations promote more inclusive, or more exclusive practices towards non-Buddhist minorities. At a time when discourse on identity in Myanmar has been dominated by practices of othering and exclusion, this book provides an important analysis of what citizenship and reciprocity means in contemporary rural Myanmar. This book is a critical resource for researchers working on rural development and the social sciences in Southeast Asia.

On February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military coup abruptly ended a decade of a civilian-military hybrid regime – a massive setback for the democratisation process. Citizens from all walks of life took to the streets and protests erupted over the following weeks, and Myanmar became the centre of global attention. This book brings up to date how the story of Myanmar’s experiment with democracy unravelled over the last few years. This second edition: ● Traces the political transition of Myanmar from a military rule of nearly five decades to a short-lived democratic experiment; ● Outlines the factors that contributed to this transition and the circumstances in which it took place; ● Shows how political groups – especially Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) – and the military worked together and paved the way for democratisation and what led to the failure of the NLD government; ● Examines the 2020 general election and the declaration of national emergency following the NLD landslide electoral win. Bringing together a balance of primary ethnographic fieldwork and nuanced analysis, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Asian and Southeast Asian Studies, politics and political processes, democratisation process and democratic transitions, international relations and peace and conflict studies, especially those concerned with Myanmar.