Title: Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism & State Violence in Myanmar
Author: Elliott Prasse-Freeman
Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2023
Up until the 1960s, the field of Burma Studies benefited from the grounded, village-level work of scholars such as American cultural anthropologist Melford Spiro, but little anthropological work by foreigners had been possible or ethically desirable since that time. Yet from 2011 to 2020, the partial political opening in Myanmar led a new wave of foreign scholars and students to embark on new field work in Myanmar.
Further, as I noted back in 2014, ten years ago, studies of law in Myanmar have until recently been very thin. There were four broad themes to the literature: custom, religion, and the law; public law and governance; corporate law; and the politics of law.[1] For an entire country and legal system of over 50 million people, the English-language literature was limited, to say the least. Of course, there were a small but important group of scholars who worked in this area, including Andrew Huxley (Burmese Buddhist law), Myint Zan (judicial independence), Nick Cheesman (rule of law, political science), David Williams (federalism) and Susan Wiliams (women’s rights), and others.
Since 2014, the field has grown enormously as scholars have published a range of significant monographs along three of the four themes. For example, on custom, religion and law there is Christian D Lammert’s book, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, c. 1250–1850 C.E (2018). On public law and governance there is Reneau Egreteau’s book Caretaking Democratization: The Military and Political Change in Myanmar (2016) and my own The Constitution of Myanmar (2018). On the politics of law and rights, there is Nick Cheesman’s Myanmar: A Political Lexicon (2024) complimenting his earlier focus on criminal law in Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (2015); on the international human rights law industry there is Kristina Simion’s, Rule of Law Intermediaries: Brokering Influence in Myanmar (2021); and on LGBT rights there is Lynette Chua’s The Politics of Love in Myanmar (2018).
Beyond law to politics and society more broadly, the field of Burma Studies has grown with a range of new monographs on Myanmar by scholars including Judith Beyer, Michael Breen, Marco Bunte, Justine Chambers, Ariel Croissant, Jane Ferguson, Chie Ikeya, Gerard McCarthy, Andrew Ong, Elisabeth Rhoads, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung, Alicia Turner, Matthew Walton, Tamas Wells, among others. In addition, many Burmese scholars have undertaken, or are in the process of undertaking PhD thesis overseas (though few are in Law Schools). We have also seen the establishment of the Independent Journal of Burmese Studies, and a new generation of scholars publishing in the Journal of Burma Studies. The past decade since 2014 has indeed been a time of enormous growth for English-language scholarship on law and politics in Myanmar.
The book by Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Rights Refused, forms part of this exciting wider body of emerging literature in law, rights, politics, and society in Myanmar. The book is based upon the author’s PhD thesis and is informed by 18 months extensive fieldwork between 2014 and 2018 during a key time in the reform era.
I read the book in the hopes of learning more about how people understand the relationship between rights and duties. My attention was drawn to this topic while teaching in Myanmar. The conversations on constitutional rights inevitably turned to a discussion of duties, which has been a feature of constitutions in Myanmar since the 1970s. For example, when teaching at Yangon University, I pointed out that while it is common for constitutions to include rights, citizens duties to the state were often associated with socialist constitutions. I asked students their view on whether duties belonged in a constitution. Should constitutions impose on citizens duties to the state? If so, what kind of duties were reasonable? And how do duties affect the idea that a constitution is to protect citizens from the state? One by one, my students expressed the view that of course duties should be in the 2008 Constitution because duties and rights belonged together, you could not have rights without duties. While Prasse-Freeman’s book does not explore whether activists’ rejection of rights is because of the conceptual entanglement of rights with duties tied to the military-state, there is much else to attract a reader to this book.
In the book, Prasse-Freeman primarily focuses on the experiences of the Community Development Initiative (CDI) as a case study of civil society tactics and responses to state violence during a period of democratic reform. As the author so aptly reminds us, during these years, state violence continued with intensity, from the physical violence faced by the Rohingya to the myriad forms of structural state violence. In addition to drawing upon fieldwork, Prasse-Freeman also offers fascinating insights into popular culture on rights through an extensive analysis of cartoons.
The book is ambitious in its contribution to political economy and political theory, engaging with the extensive and well-known scholarship on peasants including James S Scott but also the wider subaltern studies literature such as Partha Chatterjee. The book is perhaps the first major monograph on Myanmar to engage with subaltern studies. This book is also steeped in the literature on biopolitics, and Prasse-Freeman’s idea of ‘blunt biopolitics’ will be food for thought for scholars of Foucault (p24). Further, the book will be of interest to scholars concerned with a semiotic approach, with its close attention to language and forms of expression.
Prasse-Freeman frames his contribution as one of contrasting the tactics of resistance with strategies of refusal. A key insight of Prasse-Freeman, I suggest, is his stress on the importance of attention to resistance ‘even and especially in times of democratic reform’.
The book is written for a Western or specifically American audience, with its reference point being a Western conception of rights (p220, 223, 270). The author refers to the liberal tradition of rights (p28), although much of the scholarship now acknowledges there are multiple liberal traditions. Rights talk does not only ‘saturate the West’, as he suggests, but is also prevalent in many countries in the Global South from India to Colombia. There is future opportunity, then, to connect the book’s insights on Myanmar to other parts of the Global South.
In the book, I appreciated the insights generated by reflexivity as a technique of ethnography. For example, the author acknowledges the ‘masculinity’ of activist life among peasants and the fact that the spaces such activists inhabit are often hostile to women (p 152). This points to the inherent tensions within activist communities that claim to work for the people but may in fact perpetuate the structural exclusion of certain people such as women.
In terms of organisation, the book is centred around ideas and the literature, and so ranges back and forth in time, and across incidents ranging from land grabs to the plight of the Rohingya. A key insight from the various vignettes is that knowing law is a strategy to intimidate local authorities (p117). The book shares with law and society scholarship the insight that law is an ‘unequal terrain’ (p118).
The book demonstrates Prasse-Freeman’s deep knowledge of the scholarly literature and the depth of his local knowledge and language skills. Drawing on this expertise, Prasse Freeman develops three main claims throughout the book – he reconceptualises the notion of refusal as a strategy to deflect state violence; he suggests that blunt biopolitics is a form of state organisation that perceives people as objects rather than rights-bearers and whom it responds to with violence; and he argues that such state action refashions rights as opportunities, that in turn prompts activists to use their bodies against structural state violence (pp 34-5).
There are some minor statements that need clarification, such as the claim that the military did not prevent the National League for Democracy (NLD) from moving the General Administration Department (GAD) from the Ministry of Home Affairs to the presidents’ office (p13). Asking why the military allowed the NLD to undertake this reform is to pose the wrong question given that the NLD was in government and the military objected to the NLD’s attempt to demilitarise the administration. After all, in 2021, the military defiantly passed a decree to ‘legally’ move the GAD back to the Ministry of Home Affairs squarely under its control, undoing the NLD’s efforts at demilitarisation of the state.
Overall, there is much in the book to attract scholars of law, rights and politics in Myanmar. The book both compliments the growing literature and offers a distinctive account of grassroots activism at a critical time in Myanmar’s history. Prasse-Freeman has delivered a significant ethnographic account of rights, one which scholars’ will engage with and debate for some time to come.
Reviewed by Melissa Crouch
Professor, UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice
President, Asian Studies Association of Australia
NOTES
[1] Melissa Crouch (2014a) ‘Rediscovering ‘Law’ in Myanmar: A Review of Scholarship on the Legal System of Myanmar’ 23(3) Pacific Rim Law & Policy Review 543-77.