Revolution and solidarity in Myanmar

Ask anyone from Myanmar where they were and what they thought when they learnt of the 1 February 2021 military coup and it is likely they can recall in detail. As word of the takeover spread, it broke into people’s lives. Many felt its effects immediately. Protests began and spread quickly. While Aung San Suu Kyi’s abduction and detention, along with the president and assorted others, was what brought people onto the streets, public demands soon went from being for the release of political prisoners and restoration of democracy to the eradication of military dictatorship.

These were not appeals on an incumbent state to meaningfully reform itself, as Asef Bayat has described the “refolutions” in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen of a decade earlier. Demonstrators in Myanmar had no expectations of reform. Nor were they any longer interested in it. The prior decade had been all about reform. Though demonstrators in Myanmar had something in common with counterparts throughout history in that few had strategised for revolution, unlike them, their movement grew on the strength of calls to cut military authority at the roots. The time for reform was over. The time for revolution was now.

Myanmar’s “revolutionary situation” is the setting for the ideas and analysis that are the subject of a new special issue in the Journal of Contemporary Asia. While the contributions to the special issue focus on and analyse different aspects of the revolution, including the role played by women, youth, monks, defectors, prisoners, digital media, unofficial minorities, inter-ethnic solidarities and the international aid and development sector, in our introduction we concentrate on the first word in the issue’s rubric: revolution.

Why this term? Why does it matter? We argue that if this is a time when academic research on Myanmar is urgently needed, then it is also one in which researchers need to explain the choices they have made about what to study and how. The categories they use to describe and interpret social worlds have effects not only on their descriptions and interpretations, but on those worlds themselves. In making a case for using the term “revolution”, we revisit earlier work in English on the now-redundant category of political transition that dominated scholarship on Myanmar during the 2010s. From this we then juxtapose that period, and interpretations of it, with the post-coup revolutionary situation.

The goal of this juxtaposition is not to show how much things have changed in Myanmar since 2021 compared to before. That they have is obvious. Nor is it to interrogate the idea of transition from a post-coup vantage point, or to debunk claims that Myanmar was once transitional in order to insist that it is now revolutionary. Instead, it is to reconsider how the transition paradigm constrained thinking and delimited debate about political and social change during the 2010s in order to prepare ourselves better for the task of describing and interpreting revolution.

From commonsensical transition…

As anyone working on Myanmar will know, “transition” was a keyword used to describe political change in Myanmar during the 2010s—a word significant and binding in certain activities and their interpretation, and indicative of certain forms of thought. Characterised, understood, discussed, and promoted widely as a sequenced, elite-led gradual political process, the commonsense went that Myanmar was headed along a certain linear direction that would take the country from dictatorship to democracy via multiparty elections.

To be sure, the mood was not one of euphoria, neither at the start of the decade nor at the end of it, even if there were moments of excitement. Almost as soon as reforms were introduced, much ink was spilt about whether the transition, having been announced, was progressing or backsliding—and with anti-Muslim communal violence, conflict raging in Kachin and Shan States, and attempted genocide in Rakhine State, whether it had failed.

The point here is not to make an assessment of who was right and who wrong, to unravel the transition paradigm, or to applaud the foresight of one view and sneer at another for misapprehending the situation. Instead, it is to observe that the transition paradigm had the effect of containing and shaping debate about political change in Myanmar. Everything significant that happened in the 2010s was interpreted on its terms. Was Myanmar progressing or regressing? Reversing or not? These and other questions invited argument, yet they made Myanmar’s political transition commonsensical.

When something becomes commonsensical it is a matter of social reality. It does not stand in need of further verification. Alternative ways of thinking and talking about what is happening and what ought to be done are elided. Sometimes they are denied or refused because they are not commonsensical or are untimely. Certain kinds of knowledge are privileged, while others are dismissed because they are irrelevant, or occluded because they are inconvenient to the conventional narrative—such as feminist readings of the gendered politics of transition and patriarchy.

Additionally, because the transition paradigm explains events in the present with reference to an anticipated future, the past loses significance, except insofar as it can provide answers to the question of what caused transition. Once transition has become commonsensical it is no longer necessary to know anything much about what preceded it. Instead, periods before the transition are cast in negative terms, portrayed, as Elizabeth Rhoads and Courtney Wittekind wrote in an important critique of the transition paradigm in Myanmar, “in terms of what is presumed to have been lacking”. Rhoads and Wittekind did not object to the idea of transition itself; like everyone, they recognised that the political and social changes of the 2010s were consequential. What they objected to was the transition paradigm’s linearity, to its short sightedness, and to its superficial vision. Against the paradigm they made a case for transition as recurrent: less about difference from the past, more about continuity with it; not by setting aside context and history, but by attending to them.

This is a useful prompt for thinking about Myanmar’s protracted revolutionary situation. For if it was obvious in the 2010s that time was on the move and Myanmar was no longer as it had been in the decade before, then it is even more obvious that since 2021 the country has transitioned, in a manner of speaking, from a decade of political reform to a new period of revolution. It has again been marked by a rupture with the past that again articulates with previous claims, authorities, and ruptures.

…to eventful revolution

As transition was a key word for the 2010s, revolution has become one since 2021. “Revolution” is not just an analytical category. It is a term that became commonplace among resistance actors in the months after the coup. Though meanings of the two in the Burmese language slip and slide, broadly speaking, one, tawhlanye, is analogous to “revolution” in English. It stands for any type of movement, political or social, from an old era to a new one. The other, ayedawbôn, denotes a campaign for the seizure of sovereign power through uprising, rebellion, and war. Over time it has come to connote a gamut of strategies and struggles for human freedom.

Though commonplace, neither usage is commonsensical. Both are contested, as is the English denotation of the post-coup struggle as revolutionary. The term “revolutionary situation” comes to us from Charles Tilly via Mona El-Ghobashy’s recent work on Egypt, and George Lawson’s comparative historical sociology on the “anatomies of revolution”. Myanmar has arguably experienced a “revolutionary situation” for all of its post-colonial history. Armed, state-like organisations have, since the withdrawal of British imperial troops, acted as suzerains in territories they control. Many of these groups have also fought against the military for decades in what they refer to as wars of revolution or resistance.

The difference of the current situation to nearly all that preceded it in Myanmar is that the various groups within the resistance do not assert claims over portions of the territory that constitutes the Union of Myanmar, but over the whole thing. As the articles in the special issue of Journal of Contemporary Asia highlight, the configuration of actors has also changed, as have the statements of aspiration. This is not to overstate the uniqueness of the situation. This is a situation that, as Rhoads and Wittekind argued of transition, articulates with previous claims, authorities, and ruptures even as it departs from them.

But it is not only for descriptive reasons that the category of revolutionary situation is useful; there are interpretive reasons for its use. What makes revolution interesting as a category for description and interpretation is the situation itself. El-Ghobashy, for example, orients her inquiry of the revolutions in Tunisia, Yemen and Tunisia toward multiple overlapping forms of politics—elections, judicial politics, parliamentary contention, mass protests, constitution making—and their contingencies. In this way she treats revolution as an historically specific process, not an abstract concept existing outside history or a bundle of attributes that produces observable patterns and from which we can make causal inferences regardless of context.

Moreover, following William H. Sewell’s essay on three temporalities in sociology, the teleological time of transition can be distinguished from the “eventful time” of revolution. Both transition and revolution in Myanmar began with ruptures, which had the effect of dislocating a prior social and political order. However, where in a “transition” events are explained with reference to a future state of affairs, reached sequentially, revolution’s eventful temporality, by contrast, lacks uniformity.

This calls for a research practice of leaving revolution open to scrutiny, whether through participant observation, the recording of ethnographic narratives or other approaches, as can be seen in some of the contributions to the Journal of Contemporary Asia special issue. It is to call for attention to the situation’s “ongoingness”, and to how people “make meaningful life” in a time of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence. It deliberately bypasses the question of whether this is or is nor a revolution according to an arbitrary list of causal components—not because it is irrelevant, but because it is not a fruitful question for research on revolutionary situations. Instead, it concentrates on multiple sovereignty as the defining feature of a revolutionary situation and its eventful temporality.

In summary, studying revolution eventfully, by attending to the significance of the revolutionary situation instead of causes or outcomes, obviates the need to engage with the impossible task of reliably predicting revolutionary outcomes, and forestalls temptations to plot manoeuvres among contending factions. It turns off the teleological clock and toward how ideas and practices emerge and change from within a revolutionary situation, articulating with those of previous uprisings and events.

For example, one of the most striking aspects of the revolutionary situation in Myanmar today is in how it has brought to the political foreground the possibilities for new alliances that at once articulate with previous claims but break with established conventions. These include ideas and practices of solidarity that vitalise revolution and make revolutionaries. It is with those that the contributors to the Journal of Contemporary Asia special issue are variously concerned.

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