Myanmar and the postcolonial nation-state: beyond democracy
David Brenner shows why postcolonial perspectives are key to understanding Myanmar and its military coup of 2021.
Since the military coup in February 2021, Myanmar has descended into what the United Nations described as an ‘endless spiral of military violence’. Tens of thousands of revolutionaries have taken up arms against a junta that seeks to terrorise its restive population into submission with atrocious violence. The crisis has quickly become one of the deadliest in the world, displacing more than 2.4 million people and bringing state, society and economy to the brink of collapse.
What is this devastating war about? In this blogpost, I build upon my recent article in International Affairs to unpack why understanding Myanmar through its political system is insufficient for explaining political processes, including the military coup of 2021 and subsequent dynamics of war and revolution. Rather, to find solutions to end violence and authoritarianism, it is essential to question Eurocentric categories and the role of the modern nation-state itself.
Why the lens of democracy is problematic for understanding the crisis in Myanmar
In mainstream discourse, western politicians, researchers and journalists explain away the burgeoning conflict in Myanmar through claims that are intriguingly simple: Myanmar’s war is a ‘battle between democracy and authoritarianism’. On the face of it, the revolutionary war indeed appears to be the most recent episode of a protracted conflict between the country’s authoritarian generals and a democracy movement propelled to international prominence in the late 1980s by its charismatic leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And surely, many of the young revolutionaries fighting in Myanmar are motivated by a genuine desire to live in a democratic society.
However, interpreting the crisis in Myanmar through the lens of democracy is reductionist to the point that it risks misunderstanding the drivers, dynamics and potential solutions for the conflict. For one thing, focusing on the political system is insufficient for making sense of Myanmar’s strongest resistance forces: Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs). These movements recruit from marginalised ethnic minorities, have fought against the military for decades and operate the most powerful non-state armies in Asia. The fight for a democratic political system is secondary to their concerns. Rather, their struggle is focused on remaking the state itself and building a federal union with significant autonomy for ethnic nationality territories.
Moreover, the lens of democracy is not only inadequate for understanding such fundamentally important actors and their politics, but also works to render them invisible with undesirable consequences. For instance, during the 2010s, western donors engaged with a transitioning Myanmar through the prism of democracy promotion. Escalating ethnic conflict and violence were often brushed aside as irritant outliers compared to the alleged wider trend of democratization, development and peacebuilding, rather than understanding the former as intrinsically linked to the latter. This narrative was instrumental for allowing western peacebuilders to engage in a deeply flawed peace process, including interventions that supported a militarized bureaucracy to territorialize contested spaces. The same lens also undermined atrocity prevention programmes.
If not democracy, then what?
A more suitable analytic framework foregrounds questions of postcolonial state formation, specifically how colonial rule has fortified ethnic boundaries and enmeshed ethnic hierarchies into the trajectory of state-making across south-east Asia. This led to the emergence of what can best be conceptualized as ethnocratic states. Such states organize access to power along the lines of ethnic kinship. In Myanmar and elsewhere, this has also produced competing ethnic nationalisms, with multiple groups demanding self-rule or independence from the ethnocratic state. Postcolonial states have responded with a mix of counter-insurgency campaigns and development policies seeking to pacify such restive populations. Attention to these processes allows to us move beyond the predominant concern with the political system and focus on the problem of the postcolonial nation-state itself.
Furthermore, rethinking the very parameters within which we understand and engage with Myanmar is also important to support genuine democratization without revisiting the escalation of conflict and violence seen in the past decade. Indeed, any serious attempt at unravelling military power and supporting democracy must focus on transforming the ethnonational conflict that has haunted the country since independence. Put differently, ethnonational conflict cannot be viewed as a second-order reality that will eventually be resolved through democratization. Rather, the 2021 military coup shows us that democratization, without transforming the ethnocratic state, produces more violence and begets further authoritarianism.
Rethinking Conflict and Peace Studies
The deployment of allegedly universal but actually Eurocentric categories produces problematic interpretations of politics in the global South and is nothing new. The deep dive into the case of Myanmar, however, provides an opportunity for engaging Conflict and Peace Studies (CAPS) in two critical ways.
First, it problematises the Eurocentric conceptualisation of the state within CAPS, including the dedicatedly critical scholarship in this field. Second, it adds to debates on knowledge production in CAPS by exploring how decades-long armed conflicts can be rendered invisible, not because of general disinterest, but because of the very analytical frameworks that make these issues relevant and accessible to a western audience in the first place.
Read more about this topic in the full article ‘Misunderstanding Myanmar through the lens of democracy’. It was published in the March issue of International Affairs and is free to access.
David Brenner is Senior Lecturer in Global Insecurities in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is also author of Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology of Myanmar’s Borderlands, published with Cornell University Press in 2019.
