Announcements by nick cheesman
Call for expressions of interest for a fully funded one-month research fellowship in Australia fo... more Call for expressions of interest for a fully funded one-month research fellowship in Australia for a Myanmar academic or researcher working on humanitarian aid, human security or public health policy
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Books by nick cheesman
Cambridge Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia, 2023
Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into how words animate politics. Across sixtee... more Myanmar: A Political Lexicon is a critical inquiry into how words animate politics. Across sixteen entries, the lexicon stages dialogues about political speech and action in this country at the nexus of South, East and Southeast Asia. It offers readers venues in which to consider the history and contingency of ideas like power, race, patriarchy and revolution. Contention over these and other ideas, it shows, does not reflect the political world in which Myanmar's people live -- it realises it.
NOTE: This is the Open Access pre-publication manuscript. Published text available on the CUP website via provided link.
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All public assemblies that power holders have not organised or endorsed themselves pose a latent ... more All public assemblies that power holders have not organised or endorsed themselves pose a latent political threat to the domi- nant group. Political domination contains an implicit assumption that subordinates mobilise only when authorised. Hence, succes- sive governments in Myanmar, and before it, Burma, have been persistently concerned to manage, control, and prohibit public assemblies.
The British colonial government assigned public assembly an inher- ently criminal quality. The colonial template for its management through courts and police has remained over subsequent decades, but the manner of its application has changed. This chapter explores that change across three events of large-scale protest under successive mili- tary governments, in 1974, 1988, and 2007. Concentrating on events during 2007, it discusses how protestors inadvertently crossed a thresh- old into what Giorgio Agamben describes as a ‘zone of anomie’, which is neither fully inside nor outside the juridical order, but is a zone where legal determinations are deactivated.
In 2007, two extrajuridical institutions realised the anomic zone that enveloped protestors. A proxy police force, ‘the gang’, enabled the movement of people into spaces where officials could detain and inves- tigate them without ordinary rules applying. These spaces I designate, reading Agamben, as ‘the camp’...
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Asian Journal of Law & Society, 2018
This is a commentary on the book, "Opposing the Rule of Law" by Nick Cheesman (my commentary is t... more This is a commentary on the book, "Opposing the Rule of Law" by Nick Cheesman (my commentary is the second piece).
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Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL:
Nick Cheesman's much praised Opposing... more Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL:
Nick Cheesman's much praised Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order is the first major study of courts and politics in contemporary Myanmar. It advances both general theory and close empirical description at the highest level. Opposing the Rule of Law contributes significantly and distinctively to the theory of the rule of law and to legal and political theory more generally. It develops a persuasive argument that the rule of law is opposed to law and order, a concept with which it is commonly conflated–in Myanmar but more widely as well. Regimes that 'lack' the rule of law rarely encounter an absence, but the presence of something else, opposed to the rule of law, which has its own characteristics that need to be explored and understood. Such understanding matters both intellectually and practically: to how we think and to what we should do. At the same time, by paying close attention to the Burmese-language records of 393 criminal cases supplemented by findings from fieldwork and archival research of hitherto unutilised or underutilised published and classified official documents, the book pushes the study of politics in contemporary Myanmar beyond the binary of democracy movement versus military dictatorship, and also disrupts conventional thinking about how authoritarian rulers use courts for political ends. As a result of its layered and sophisticated complexity, then, Opposing the Rule of Law not merely advances our understanding of politics and law in Myanmar, but significantly advances contemporary discussion of the rule of law.
Symposium table of contents:
Introduction: Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL
Ronald Janse Pages 1-2
Rule of Law Inside Out in Myanmar
Frank Munger Pages 3-10
What Is the Rule of Law? Perspectives from Myanmar
Sally Engle Merry Pages 11-14
Enlivening Rule of Law Through Law and Order
Jothie Rajah Pages 15-18
The Rule of Law and Its Rivals
Martin Krygier Pages 19-27
Taking the Rule of Law’s Opposition Seriously
Nick Cheesman Pages 29-44
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Reviews of Nick Cheesman, Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Camb... more Reviews of Nick Cheesman, Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society, Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Scholarly journals
1. Lynette Chua, Sojourn, 32.2, 2017, 419-23
2. Melissa Crouch, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 37.2, 2015, 305-07
3. Bruce Matthews, Pacific Affairs, 89.3, 2016, 719-21
4. Keally McBride, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 14.3, 2018, 542-46
5. Mahdev Mohan, Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 10.2, 2015, 383-86
6. Maria Popova, Perspectives on Politics, 14.3, 2016, 902-04
7. Susanne Prager-Nyein, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47.3, 2017, 484-86
8. Jothie Rajah, Law & Society Review, 50.4, 2016, 1046-48
9. Robert H. Taylor, Asian Studies Review, 40.4, 2016, 649-50
10. Gerry van Klinken, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde, 172.4, 2016, 552-53
Online
11. Reshmi Banerjee, Tea Circle, 15 March 2016
ျမန္မာစာနယ္ဇင္း
12.ေဒါက္တာဆူဇန္နာပရာဂါၿငိမ္း၊ ေဒါက္တာထြန္းေက်ာ္ၿငိမ္း (ဘာသာျပန္)၊
13.The Sun Rays, 1 & 8 October 2016
14.စာၾကမ္းပိုး၊ The Voice, 6 August 2015
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Interview 1. Myanmar Musings podcast (with Luke Corbin)
Interview 2. New Books in Southeast Asian... more Interview 1. Myanmar Musings podcast (with Luke Corbin)
Interview 2. New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel (with Jothie Rajah)
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Articles by nick cheesman
Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2024
Myanmar is in a protracted revolutionary situation. State military authority has been greatly wea... more Myanmar is in a protracted revolutionary situation. State military authority has been greatly weakened but has not collapsed in the face of an array of armed and unarmed forces, new and established, which have fought against the junta that seized power in 2021. What forms of solidarity have contributed to the making of a revolutionary situation in Myanmar? How have they been sustained? Where and why has solidarity been hindered or broken? These questions animate the contributions to this Special Issue. To introduce them, this article explains the adoption of “revolution” as a category to describe and interpret events in Myanmar since the military coup. It does this by juxtaposing the period of transition in the 2010s, and interpretations of it, with the post-coup situation. It argues that as the transition paradigm became commonsense, it constrained understanding about happenings in Myanmar. Everything was debated in reference to an anticipated future state. Against that way of proceeding, the article advocates for description and interpretation of the revolutionary situation that turns on its radical contingency and eventfulness.
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Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2022
OPEN ACCESS VIA LINK -- Like other commonplaces, the meaning of law and order cannot be pinned do... more OPEN ACCESS VIA LINK -- Like other commonplaces, the meaning of law and order cannot be pinned down. Nevertheless, there are three characteristic ways of talking about it in scholarly work on the Americas, Europe, and Asia over the last four or five decades. These are: as a juridical solution to the social fact of naturally recurrent public disorder; as a political reaction to changed social conditions threatening dominant groups; and, as a neoliberal technology of power. A fourth way of talking about it is to query the very conjunction of law with order. The latter ways are variously superior to the first, which effaces the part that intellectuals for law and order have in its own creation. The literature generally could benefit from more creative comparisons of unalike cases, and conceptual juxtaposition of law and order with the rule of law, with which it is sometimes wrongly associated, as well as with other ideas about political and social order.
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Law & Social Inquiry, 2022
ONLINE: https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2022.3 -- How do courts mediate the relationship between the ... more ONLINE: https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2022.3 -- How do courts mediate the relationship between the practice of torture and the content of law in places where torture is neither explicitly criminalized nor authorized? If torture is recounted in court, then what happens? Drawing on sixteen months of observation and documentary research in Thailand, this article outlines a jurisprudence of torture in which judges accommodate the practice by denying the facticity of narratives about torture, or accepting the narratives’ facticity but denying that anyone can be held responsible, or accepting that someone might be held responsible but excusing them of responsibility in the name of duty or by holding only one or two of them, or their employer, in some way liable. Through this jurisprudence, judges in Thailand have kept torture at the limits of law: not on a boundary between the legal and illegal, but on a line between the legally ordered and unordered, which is to say, in the realm of the alegal.
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History and Anthropology, 2022
ONLINE: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1607731 -- Bureaucratic paperwork seems to be self-... more ONLINE: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1607731 -- Bureaucratic paperwork seems to be self-evidently banal. But why does it matter that paperwork has this appearance? What work is banality doing? This article addresses these general questions by attending to three specific material qualities of banality in files from Myanmar's Supreme Court under military dictatorship, for the years 1992–1998: namely, their uniform typeface, frequent tabulation, and strenuous concatenation. Each has a corresponding value for bureaucracy: typeface connotes authority; tabulation, legibility; and concatenation, orderliness. Together these qualities permitted interventions into lives and events about which the court's judge-bureaucrats knew precious little. The files’ contents were banal so that uninformed, prompt, and more-or-less arbitrary decisions would be rendered easy and seemingly rational. Their banality at once enabled and occluded a distinctive brutality.
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Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2021
FIRST 50 DOWNLOADS OPEN ACCESS: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3RHB4K2MKIIUNCMKXBIR/full?targ... more FIRST 50 DOWNLOADS OPEN ACCESS: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3RHB4K2MKIIUNCMKXBIR/full?target=10.1080/21565503.2021.1960869
According to Steven Lubet, documentation freezes facts in time. For this reason, it is, he thinks, more reliable than other kinds of evidence. That makes it especially useful for fact checking. However, this is not a realistic way to read for evidence in documents. It ignores or downplays a crucial fact that inheres to all paperwork, which ethnographers have long heeded: documents do not report on facts; they render them. Ethnographically informed readings of paperwork that attend both to facts and to how they are rendered are, by contrast, realistic. In this contribution, I discuss why and illustrate with reference to two studies of policing and law in Thailand.
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Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 2019
OPEN ACCESS: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40803-019-00131-0
Why did Martin Krygier become a rule of ... more OPEN ACCESS: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40803-019-00131-0
Why did Martin Krygier become a rule of law guy? This Introduction to a Special Issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, which consists of 33 short essays celebrating Krygier as a colleague, mentor and friend, discusses some of the fac- tors which prompted him to develop a distinct and influential body of work on the rule of law over the past three decades: the rule of law revival, especially in Central and Eastern Europe; his involvement with Philip Selznick; and his dialogue with other prominent theorists, including Gianluigi Palombella and Jeremy Waldron. The Introduction gives a sense of the importance of Krygier’s personal background and history, and it also discusses some of the key features of his theory, and how these have developed over the past decades.
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Human Rights Quarterly, 2019
Whereas impunity is typically known by the absence of accountability, this article attends to imp... more Whereas impunity is typically known by the absence of accountability, this article attends to impunity's presence. It does so via two instances of impunity drawn from research in contemporary Myanmar. In these, police and soldiers contained and managed demands for accountability for torture and killing, even as political and social conditions seemed to change in favor of human rights. Through them, the article invites a rethinking of impunity beyond the parameters of projects for accountability in the case of past, massive human rights violations, so as to take the recurrent, routine practice of impunity seriously.
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Sojourn, 2019
In post-dictatorship Myanmar, authority rests uncertainly on a host of proliferating appeals to m... more In post-dictatorship Myanmar, authority rests uncertainly on a host of proliferating appeals to morality. It depends on authorities’ enactment of moral claims. The claims are not uniform. Nor are the authorities that make them self-evident. For both these reasons, this article foregrounds these moral authorities in its discussion of authority. It asks how religious beliefs and cultural norms inform authoritative work in Myanmar today, and what practices people adopt when relating to moral authorities. Pointing to the articles in this special section, it stresses the variability of moral authority, and the diversity of encounters with it in towns, villages and armed groups’ enclaves. The recent ethical turn in anthropology, it suggests, can inform research on moral authorities by drawing out the multiple and seemingly contradictory ways that people come to know and relate to them. In so doing, it invites ethical questions about the study of moral authorities and their relationship to violence in Myanmar, particularly in light of the massive atrocities visited on Muslims in Rakhine State, and widespread anti-Muslim sentiment across the country.
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Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2018
ONLINE: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101317-030900 -- This review outlines an emergi... more ONLINE: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101317-030900 -- This review outlines an emerging agenda for ethnographic interpretation of the rule of law. From a survey of studies done on the rule of law in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the review identifies four general characteristics of this mode of inquiry, namely, that it is located, relational, and comparative and has extrinsic value. It offers three nonexhaustive reasons for interpreting the rule of law ethnographically, which are as a counterhegemonic practice, in response to counterintuitive observations, and as a means to do constitutive theorizing. Contending that ethnographic work on the rule of law involves some kind of stance toward both research subjects and object of inquiry, the review advocates for the exercise of passionate humility: a conviction about the rule of law tempered by willingness to be proven wrong through inquiries in critical proximity with socially and politically mediated facts. Rule-of-law ethnography's possibility lies in its attending to the relationship between what is claimed in the rule of law's name and what is realized, not to make the idea look foolish, but to show how it emerges and why it persists through struggle.
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OPEN ACCESS: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2017.1305121
SYNOPOSIS: http://... more OPEN ACCESS: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2017.1305121
SYNOPOSIS: http://www.newmandala.org/interpreting-communal-violence-myanmar-2/
(or) http://frontiermyanmar.net/en/understanding-communal-violence
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation enabling it. Eschewing methods aimed at producing a purportedly coherent picture of what happened, interpretive research raises questions about conventional readings of violence, and seemingly self-evident categories for its analysis. But as the articles in this special issue show, interpretivists do not repudiate the search for factual truth. The contributors all make strong truth claims, but claims recognising that factual truths are always contingent. They establish these claims by attending variously to the processes, narratives, histories and typologies that have contributed to the production of communal violence in Myanmar.
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SYNOPSIS: http://www.newmandala.org/myanmars-national-races-trumped-citizenship/
or
http://www.... more SYNOPSIS: http://www.newmandala.org/myanmars-national-races-trumped-citizenship/
or
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/05/15/myanmars-national-races-trump-citizenship/
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar’s contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, in this article I give national races their due. Adopting a genealogical method, I trace the episodic emergence of taingyintha from colonial times to the present. I examine attempts to order national races taxonomically, and to marry the taxonomy with a juridical project to dominate some people and elide others through a citizenship regime in which membership in a national race has surpassed other conditions for membership in the political community “Myanmar.” Consequently, people who reside in Myanmar but are collectively denied citizenship – like anyone identifying or identified as Rohingya – pursue claims to be taingyintha so as to rejoin the community. Ironically, the surpassing symbolic and juridical power of national races is for people denied civil and political rights at once their problem and their solution.
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Throughout February 2012, a court sitting at Myanmar's central prison recorded a defendant's narr... more Throughout February 2012, a court sitting at Myanmar's central prison recorded a defendant's narrative of torture by policemen to have him confess to a bombing two years prior. How was this record made possible? What does the narrative reveal about the relationship of police torturers to the political community giving them authority to act? Working from Agamben's intuition that in the moment of violence the policeman occupies an area symmetrical to the sovereign, inasmuch as his use of violence is justified in the name of public order, I suggest the account of police torture in this case can be explained in terms of Hobbes's theory of attributed action. Like Hobbes's sovereign, the Burmese policemen had the prerogative to decide when and how to use violence against the detained subject on behalf of the state. That the defendant could later recount to a judge the torture done to him was only because he lacked standing to lay claims against sovereign police, who he himself, as a member of the political community, had authorized. Ironically, the record of his narrative was possible precisely because his claims were without efficacy.
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Work done internationally to address impunity concentrates on removing blanket amnesties and esta... more Work done internationally to address impunity concentrates on removing blanket amnesties and establishing commissions of inquiry into past atrocities. Everyday impunity—the impossibility of bringing state officers to account for routinized violent crimes against other individuals—gets less attention, even though its effects on public life are insidious. Studying the 2014 killing of a journalist, we identify modes for the production of everyday impunity in Myanmar that emerge from earlier periods of unmediated military rule but that today are coming to resemble practices in neighbouring countries. Accounts from Bangladesh and Thailand reveal how impunity can persist in new political conditions, producing insecurity and hampering efforts for more inclusive forms of government. We close by urging scholars to remain attentive to their responsibilities in the face of impunity, calling on them not to participate in projects that have the effect of concealing violent crime by state officers, and denying victims justice.
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Announcements by nick cheesman
Books by nick cheesman
NOTE: This is the Open Access pre-publication manuscript. Published text available on the CUP website via provided link.
The British colonial government assigned public assembly an inher- ently criminal quality. The colonial template for its management through courts and police has remained over subsequent decades, but the manner of its application has changed. This chapter explores that change across three events of large-scale protest under successive mili- tary governments, in 1974, 1988, and 2007. Concentrating on events during 2007, it discusses how protestors inadvertently crossed a thresh- old into what Giorgio Agamben describes as a ‘zone of anomie’, which is neither fully inside nor outside the juridical order, but is a zone where legal determinations are deactivated.
In 2007, two extrajuridical institutions realised the anomic zone that enveloped protestors. A proxy police force, ‘the gang’, enabled the movement of people into spaces where officials could detain and inves- tigate them without ordinary rules applying. These spaces I designate, reading Agamben, as ‘the camp’...
Nick Cheesman's much praised Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order is the first major study of courts and politics in contemporary Myanmar. It advances both general theory and close empirical description at the highest level. Opposing the Rule of Law contributes significantly and distinctively to the theory of the rule of law and to legal and political theory more generally. It develops a persuasive argument that the rule of law is opposed to law and order, a concept with which it is commonly conflated–in Myanmar but more widely as well. Regimes that 'lack' the rule of law rarely encounter an absence, but the presence of something else, opposed to the rule of law, which has its own characteristics that need to be explored and understood. Such understanding matters both intellectually and practically: to how we think and to what we should do. At the same time, by paying close attention to the Burmese-language records of 393 criminal cases supplemented by findings from fieldwork and archival research of hitherto unutilised or underutilised published and classified official documents, the book pushes the study of politics in contemporary Myanmar beyond the binary of democracy movement versus military dictatorship, and also disrupts conventional thinking about how authoritarian rulers use courts for political ends. As a result of its layered and sophisticated complexity, then, Opposing the Rule of Law not merely advances our understanding of politics and law in Myanmar, but significantly advances contemporary discussion of the rule of law.
Symposium table of contents:
Introduction: Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL
Ronald Janse Pages 1-2
Rule of Law Inside Out in Myanmar
Frank Munger Pages 3-10
What Is the Rule of Law? Perspectives from Myanmar
Sally Engle Merry Pages 11-14
Enlivening Rule of Law Through Law and Order
Jothie Rajah Pages 15-18
The Rule of Law and Its Rivals
Martin Krygier Pages 19-27
Taking the Rule of Law’s Opposition Seriously
Nick Cheesman Pages 29-44
Scholarly journals
1. Lynette Chua, Sojourn, 32.2, 2017, 419-23
2. Melissa Crouch, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 37.2, 2015, 305-07
3. Bruce Matthews, Pacific Affairs, 89.3, 2016, 719-21
4. Keally McBride, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 14.3, 2018, 542-46
5. Mahdev Mohan, Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 10.2, 2015, 383-86
6. Maria Popova, Perspectives on Politics, 14.3, 2016, 902-04
7. Susanne Prager-Nyein, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47.3, 2017, 484-86
8. Jothie Rajah, Law & Society Review, 50.4, 2016, 1046-48
9. Robert H. Taylor, Asian Studies Review, 40.4, 2016, 649-50
10. Gerry van Klinken, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde, 172.4, 2016, 552-53
Online
11. Reshmi Banerjee, Tea Circle, 15 March 2016
ျမန္မာစာနယ္ဇင္း
12.ေဒါက္တာဆူဇန္နာပရာဂါၿငိမ္း၊ ေဒါက္တာထြန္းေက်ာ္ၿငိမ္း (ဘာသာျပန္)၊
13.The Sun Rays, 1 & 8 October 2016
14.စာၾကမ္းပိုး၊ The Voice, 6 August 2015
Interview 2. New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel (with Jothie Rajah)
Articles by nick cheesman
According to Steven Lubet, documentation freezes facts in time. For this reason, it is, he thinks, more reliable than other kinds of evidence. That makes it especially useful for fact checking. However, this is not a realistic way to read for evidence in documents. It ignores or downplays a crucial fact that inheres to all paperwork, which ethnographers have long heeded: documents do not report on facts; they render them. Ethnographically informed readings of paperwork that attend both to facts and to how they are rendered are, by contrast, realistic. In this contribution, I discuss why and illustrate with reference to two studies of policing and law in Thailand.
Why did Martin Krygier become a rule of law guy? This Introduction to a Special Issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, which consists of 33 short essays celebrating Krygier as a colleague, mentor and friend, discusses some of the fac- tors which prompted him to develop a distinct and influential body of work on the rule of law over the past three decades: the rule of law revival, especially in Central and Eastern Europe; his involvement with Philip Selznick; and his dialogue with other prominent theorists, including Gianluigi Palombella and Jeremy Waldron. The Introduction gives a sense of the importance of Krygier’s personal background and history, and it also discusses some of the key features of his theory, and how these have developed over the past decades.
SYNOPOSIS: http://www.newmandala.org/interpreting-communal-violence-myanmar-2/
(or) http://frontiermyanmar.net/en/understanding-communal-violence
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation enabling it. Eschewing methods aimed at producing a purportedly coherent picture of what happened, interpretive research raises questions about conventional readings of violence, and seemingly self-evident categories for its analysis. But as the articles in this special issue show, interpretivists do not repudiate the search for factual truth. The contributors all make strong truth claims, but claims recognising that factual truths are always contingent. They establish these claims by attending variously to the processes, narratives, histories and typologies that have contributed to the production of communal violence in Myanmar.
or
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/05/15/myanmars-national-races-trump-citizenship/
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar’s contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, in this article I give national races their due. Adopting a genealogical method, I trace the episodic emergence of taingyintha from colonial times to the present. I examine attempts to order national races taxonomically, and to marry the taxonomy with a juridical project to dominate some people and elide others through a citizenship regime in which membership in a national race has surpassed other conditions for membership in the political community “Myanmar.” Consequently, people who reside in Myanmar but are collectively denied citizenship – like anyone identifying or identified as Rohingya – pursue claims to be taingyintha so as to rejoin the community. Ironically, the surpassing symbolic and juridical power of national races is for people denied civil and political rights at once their problem and their solution.
NOTE: This is the Open Access pre-publication manuscript. Published text available on the CUP website via provided link.
The British colonial government assigned public assembly an inher- ently criminal quality. The colonial template for its management through courts and police has remained over subsequent decades, but the manner of its application has changed. This chapter explores that change across three events of large-scale protest under successive mili- tary governments, in 1974, 1988, and 2007. Concentrating on events during 2007, it discusses how protestors inadvertently crossed a thresh- old into what Giorgio Agamben describes as a ‘zone of anomie’, which is neither fully inside nor outside the juridical order, but is a zone where legal determinations are deactivated.
In 2007, two extrajuridical institutions realised the anomic zone that enveloped protestors. A proxy police force, ‘the gang’, enabled the movement of people into spaces where officials could detain and inves- tigate them without ordinary rules applying. These spaces I designate, reading Agamben, as ‘the camp’...
Nick Cheesman's much praised Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order is the first major study of courts and politics in contemporary Myanmar. It advances both general theory and close empirical description at the highest level. Opposing the Rule of Law contributes significantly and distinctively to the theory of the rule of law and to legal and political theory more generally. It develops a persuasive argument that the rule of law is opposed to law and order, a concept with which it is commonly conflated–in Myanmar but more widely as well. Regimes that 'lack' the rule of law rarely encounter an absence, but the presence of something else, opposed to the rule of law, which has its own characteristics that need to be explored and understood. Such understanding matters both intellectually and practically: to how we think and to what we should do. At the same time, by paying close attention to the Burmese-language records of 393 criminal cases supplemented by findings from fieldwork and archival research of hitherto unutilised or underutilised published and classified official documents, the book pushes the study of politics in contemporary Myanmar beyond the binary of democracy movement versus military dictatorship, and also disrupts conventional thinking about how authoritarian rulers use courts for political ends. As a result of its layered and sophisticated complexity, then, Opposing the Rule of Law not merely advances our understanding of politics and law in Myanmar, but significantly advances contemporary discussion of the rule of law.
Symposium table of contents:
Introduction: Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL
Ronald Janse Pages 1-2
Rule of Law Inside Out in Myanmar
Frank Munger Pages 3-10
What Is the Rule of Law? Perspectives from Myanmar
Sally Engle Merry Pages 11-14
Enlivening Rule of Law Through Law and Order
Jothie Rajah Pages 15-18
The Rule of Law and Its Rivals
Martin Krygier Pages 19-27
Taking the Rule of Law’s Opposition Seriously
Nick Cheesman Pages 29-44
Scholarly journals
1. Lynette Chua, Sojourn, 32.2, 2017, 419-23
2. Melissa Crouch, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 37.2, 2015, 305-07
3. Bruce Matthews, Pacific Affairs, 89.3, 2016, 719-21
4. Keally McBride, Law, Culture and the Humanities, 14.3, 2018, 542-46
5. Mahdev Mohan, Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 10.2, 2015, 383-86
6. Maria Popova, Perspectives on Politics, 14.3, 2016, 902-04
7. Susanne Prager-Nyein, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47.3, 2017, 484-86
8. Jothie Rajah, Law & Society Review, 50.4, 2016, 1046-48
9. Robert H. Taylor, Asian Studies Review, 40.4, 2016, 649-50
10. Gerry van Klinken, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde, 172.4, 2016, 552-53
Online
11. Reshmi Banerjee, Tea Circle, 15 March 2016
ျမန္မာစာနယ္ဇင္း
12.ေဒါက္တာဆူဇန္နာပရာဂါၿငိမ္း၊ ေဒါက္တာထြန္းေက်ာ္ၿငိမ္း (ဘာသာျပန္)၊
13.The Sun Rays, 1 & 8 October 2016
14.စာၾကမ္းပိုး၊ The Voice, 6 August 2015
Interview 2. New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel (with Jothie Rajah)
According to Steven Lubet, documentation freezes facts in time. For this reason, it is, he thinks, more reliable than other kinds of evidence. That makes it especially useful for fact checking. However, this is not a realistic way to read for evidence in documents. It ignores or downplays a crucial fact that inheres to all paperwork, which ethnographers have long heeded: documents do not report on facts; they render them. Ethnographically informed readings of paperwork that attend both to facts and to how they are rendered are, by contrast, realistic. In this contribution, I discuss why and illustrate with reference to two studies of policing and law in Thailand.
Why did Martin Krygier become a rule of law guy? This Introduction to a Special Issue of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, which consists of 33 short essays celebrating Krygier as a colleague, mentor and friend, discusses some of the fac- tors which prompted him to develop a distinct and influential body of work on the rule of law over the past three decades: the rule of law revival, especially in Central and Eastern Europe; his involvement with Philip Selznick; and his dialogue with other prominent theorists, including Gianluigi Palombella and Jeremy Waldron. The Introduction gives a sense of the importance of Krygier’s personal background and history, and it also discusses some of the key features of his theory, and how these have developed over the past decades.
SYNOPOSIS: http://www.newmandala.org/interpreting-communal-violence-myanmar-2/
(or) http://frontiermyanmar.net/en/understanding-communal-violence
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation enabling it. Eschewing methods aimed at producing a purportedly coherent picture of what happened, interpretive research raises questions about conventional readings of violence, and seemingly self-evident categories for its analysis. But as the articles in this special issue show, interpretivists do not repudiate the search for factual truth. The contributors all make strong truth claims, but claims recognising that factual truths are always contingent. They establish these claims by attending variously to the processes, narratives, histories and typologies that have contributed to the production of communal violence in Myanmar.
or
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/05/15/myanmars-national-races-trump-citizenship/
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar’s contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, in this article I give national races their due. Adopting a genealogical method, I trace the episodic emergence of taingyintha from colonial times to the present. I examine attempts to order national races taxonomically, and to marry the taxonomy with a juridical project to dominate some people and elide others through a citizenship regime in which membership in a national race has surpassed other conditions for membership in the political community “Myanmar.” Consequently, people who reside in Myanmar but are collectively denied citizenship – like anyone identifying or identified as Rohingya – pursue claims to be taingyintha so as to rejoin the community. Ironically, the surpassing symbolic and juridical power of national races is for people denied civil and political rights at once their problem and their solution.
But is it necessary to designate a method to study politics comparatively? And even if it is, need it be some variant on Mill’s (1882) system of comparative logic? Not everyone who studies politics as a vocation thinks so. Among them are contributors to this book. Also among them was Benedict Anderson (2018, 130), who late in his life insisted that comparison of the sort he undertook was not a method at all, but a discursive strategy. Anderson, who taught comparative politics at Cornell, often spoke and wrote of how he had learned to compare not by being trained in the comparative method but by spending time with like- minded others being forced to speak and “think more or less comparatively” (1998, 10; see also Aguilar et al. 2011). Anderson was for this reason more interested in the explanatory potential of juxtaposing cases, and in the possibilities for unanticipated journeys that follow from surprising discoveries, than in scientific rigor.
Four miles later the road ends at Pazigyi, a dot among the constellation of villages stretching across upper Myanmar’s lowlands. The people here are far from the hills and mountains where, in the three quarters of a century since the country pulled free of the decrepit British Empire, scores of armed groups have resisted lowland authority. They are as distant from those places culturally and historically as they are cartographically. Pazigyi is not on the periphery of Myanmar’s imagined community. It is at its centre. It sits in its mythological heartland. From this region, Burma’s last great empire-builder, Alaungpaya, hailed. This has been a place of state building from ancient times to today. If a state cannot build here, it cannot build anywhere. That makes what happened in Pazigyi on the morning of 11 April 2023 all the more startling.
https://www.routledge.com/Interpreting-Communal-Violence-in-Myanmar/Cheesman/p/book/9781138504448
Review by Dulyaphak Preecharush: https://www.irrawaddy.com/culture/books/book-review-conflict-myanmar-war-politics-religion.html
Review by Aidan Gnoth: http://cesran.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/JCTS_Vol6_No1_BR1.pdf
Bilingual (English & Burmese) publication of papers from the Myanmar Update Research Colloquium held in Yangon, March 2014
The origins of the criminal juridical system in Myanmar lie in the authoritarian imperatives of the British colonial regime. These imperatives the regime expressed legalistically. A formalistic rule-of-law idea took hold and carried over into the postcolony. It expanded to encompass notions of substantive rights; however, after a military takeover of the state apparatus in 1962 it lost credence. When the rule of law re-emerged strongly in political and juridical language during the 1990s, under a new military junta, it was as a synonym for law and order. Yet, semantically “law and order” in Burmese does not refer to “law” at all. It describes an ideal society that is subdued administratively, not one governed juridically.
Reading records of 340 court cases, accompanied by findings from research among legal professionals and extensive study of published and unpublished government documents, I argue that law and order has subsumed the rule of law in Myanmar both as an idea and in practice. I advance the argument by exploring some of the system’s key features, including its pursuit of public enemies, and the role of the policeman as bearer of sovereign authority. I show how the criminal juridical system operates as a marketplace for the buying and selling of case outcomes, and how this feature of the system is consonant with the maintenance of order. I examine how the making of complaints against officials is possible within the system’s pragmatic frame, and to an extent is encouraged. And I reveal how in response to protests during 2007 courts in Myanmar, rather than sanctioning police officers and other officials for violating law instead functioned as gatekeepers on a juridical threshold, across which people could be taken at will, but from which they could also be returned, through trial and sentencing.
The thesis constitutes an empirical response to conceptual debate about the rule of law. It argues that this debate can be enriched through more effort to construct and critique opposing concepts, and through research of systems animated by principles of government other than the rule of law or its likenesses. By positing law and order as one opposing concept, the thesis queries the seeming ubiquity of rule-of-law discourse. It also illuminates the contradictory qualities of “law and order” itself, alerting us to the persistent difficulty of attempting to reconcile the normative and general properties of law with the pragmatic and particular properties of order.
Myanmar in the 2010s was one such place. Up until then its military dictatorship had had two basic methods of meeting armed enemies: in combat and in bilateral negotiations. It brokered unstable settlements with opponents that granted them some autonomy in areas where they operated. It did not like multiparty deals. Nor did it entertain big political questions such as whether the country should be a federation, and if it should, then what?
In 2011, the military relinquished some of its control over government to a partially elected legislature, which formed under the terms of the dictatorship’s 2008 Constitution. Peace negotiations went from backrooms to ballrooms. Big political questions were asked and debated. In 2015, the government of former General Thein Sein committed to a nationwide ceasefire with eight groups. The following year, Aung San Suu Kyi became the country’s de facto president. Suu Kyi’s father had made the Union of Burma a reality seven decades earlier by crafting the Panglong Agreement with representatives of Chin, Kachin and Shan peoples. Now his daughter looked to be on the cusp of forging a grand unifying pact all over again. Yet by 2021, when Senior General Min Aung Hlaing usurped power and brought Myanmar’s decade of political and social reform to an abrupt end, negotiators were hardly any closer to achieving a settlement than they had been five years before.
What happened? Why was it that, despite superficially favourable conditions prior to the 2021 coup, a decade of efforts to resolve Myanmar’s many conflicts accomplished precious little? In Winning by Process, Jacques Bertrand, Alexandre Pelletier and Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung have an answer to these questions.
Chua does not theorize these politics of love in their abstractions. Instead, she describes and theorizes them via their particulars. She does so by giving voice to her interviewees as they recall lost lovers, recount winding journeys to human rights practice, and reveal the emotional contents of their activism. Emotions are, Chua writes, “the LGBT movement’s genesis for political action, its heart and soul” (p. 18). Emotions generate fealty to human rights and comprise bonds among the activists themselves. They make possible what Chua denotes at the outset as “the book’s central concept: the practice of human rights as a way of life” (p. 11). This she designates a “key component” of the movement’s “distinctive emotion culture” (p. 103). The emotion culture is distinctive, Chua says, because, by infusing human rights ideas with feelings of suffering and transforming these to hopeful emotions, the LGBT movement departs from established queer communities in Myanmar, which, in offering a refuge from society, decline to do anything significant to change it...
Though by the time Aung San Suu Kyi wrote Freedom from Fear, she was leading the National League for Democracy, hers is not so much a call for democracy as it is an appeal for liberalism. Read by the lights of one influential account, it is a quintessentially liberal appeal, inasmuch as liberalism aspires to do no more and no less than create conditions under which the members of a polity can enjoy personal freedom.2 That means, above all, that they have freedom from arbitrary interference and from unconstrained violence committed by state agents. A startlingly simple idea, it is also one that, as history has shown, is tremendously difficult to realize.
Given Aung San Suu Kyi’s three-decades-long prominence in the politics of her birth- place, and the persistence of liberal thought in her public language, one might expect that students of Myanmar’s current affairs would have taken political liberalism seriously. But the tendency has been to overlook liberalism in favour of democracy as the overarching category for interpreting and assessing what has been going on since military dictatorship formally disestablished itself in 2011, opening the path for Aung San Suu Kyi to bring her party into government in 2016.
Now a book by Roman David and Ian Holliday, simply entitled Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar, has brought liberalism in...
From this we might conclude that constitutions, let alone constitutionalism, matter pre- cious little for affairs of state in Myanmar, and even less for the country’s military. In The Con- stitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis, Melissa Crouch disabuses us of any such idea. To the contrary, she shows how the foundations of the 2008 Constitution have been ‘articulated, enacted and embodied through military rule’ there since the 1990s (2). That is to say, through time spent in office usurping power and disregarding the independence constitution of 1947 and later the nominally socialist one of 1974, both of which Crouch discusses in Chapter 2, the army committed itself, verbally, physically and bodily, to a brave new constitutional order....
In the background, more nuanced but no less fascinating stories have waited to be told. Enter Schonthal’s Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law, a book that turns a new page in comparative constitutional law by tracking how and explaining why the Buddhist clergy in Sri Lanka has since the 1940s been embroiled in disputes over the place of religion in national affairs...
Elsewhere, police and soldiers burst into people’s lives day and night, smashing vehicles and doors to abduct purported ringleaders of rallies and vociferous Facebook users. They raid hospitals and schools, breach the offices of charities, remove their contents, and kill occupants of apartment buildings. They force captives to clear protest barricades. They snatch people at random from street corners, or on tip offs — such as a group of bank clients arrested while withdrawing cash with which they were allegedly going to help fund the uprising.
The incrementally increased intensity of beatings, killings, raids, forced labour, and the removal of bodies is not circumstantial. Undoubtedly it is strategic. By means of seemingly arbitrary, though actually systematic physical and symbolic violence, state terror wears people down. It produces endemic uncertainty about what is happening as well as what anyone’s part in it is, or can be. It renders people inert. Targets it does not eliminate, it exhausts...
In fact, Myanmar’s citizenship law contains no reference to the 135 ethnic groups that today make up the country’s official “national races”. Nor does it include any specific sections to deny Rohingya citizenship. The law does privilege people belonging to certain loosely defined racial categories over others—that is to say, people classed as ostensibly being among the original, pre-colonial inhabitants of the country. But the present-day statelessness of Muslims in the west of Myanmar is essentially a result of de facto, rather than de jure, measures...
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ လြတ္လပ္ေရးရၿပီးေနာက္ ေရးဆြဲေသာ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံ ဥပေဒသံုးခုရွိခဲ့ၿပီး အေျခခံ ဥပေဒတစ္ခုခ်င္းတြင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု၏အဖြဲ႔ဝင္ျဖစ္သည္၊ မျဖစ္သည္ သတ္မွတ္သည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး အေတြးအေခၚ မ်ား၏ အေျခအေနကို ဤေဟာေျပာပြဲတြင္ ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္ျပထားသည္။ အဓိက ႏိုင္ငံေရးအေတြးအေခၚမွာ “ႏိုင္ငံသား” ႏွင့္ “တိုင္းရင္းသား” ဆိုသည့္ အေတြးအေခၚမ်ားျဖစ္သည္။
၁၉၄၇ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒတြင္ “ႏုိင္ငံသား” ျဖစ္ျခင္းသည္ အလြန္အေရးႀကီးသည္။ ျပည္ေထာင္စု သည္ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ ျပည္ေထာင္စုျဖစ္သည္။ မည္သူက ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို ေရးဆြဲသလဲ။ ျပည္ေထာင္စု၏ ႏုိင္ငံသားအသစ္ျဖစ္လာမည့္သူမ်ားက ေရးဆြဲပါသည္။ “ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ျပည္သူမ်ား” သည္ “ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားျဖစ္ၾကေသာ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔” ျဖစ္ၾကသည္။ ဤအခ်က္သည္ အလြန္ရွင္းလင္းပါသည္။ “တိုင္းရင္း သား” ဟူေသာ အယူအဆသည္ ဆီေလ်ာ္မႈမရွိပါ။
၁၉၇၄ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒတြင္ “တိုင္းရင္းသား” ဟူေသာ အယူအဆသည္ ပိုမို၍ ဆီေလ်ာ္သည္။ အျခားေသာအယူအဆျဖစ္သည့္ “လုပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ား” ဟူေသာ အယူအဆသည္လည္း အေရးပါသည့္ေနရာ တြင္ရွိသည္။ ဘယ္သူက ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို ေရးဆြဲပါသလဲ။ လုပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ားက ေရးဆြဲပါသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ လုပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ားသည္ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားလည္းျဖစ္သည္။ ဤအေတြးအေခၚႏွစ္ခုၾကား မည္သို႔ ဆက္စပ္မႈရွိသလဲ မရွင္းလင္းပါ။ “ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ျပည္သူမ်ား” သည္ “ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔တိုင္းရင္းသား ျပည္သူအေပါင္းတို႔” ျဖစ္ၿပီး ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ လုပ္သားျပည္သူအေပါင္းတို႔” လည္း ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ တစ္ခါတစ္ရံတြင္ ဤအယူအဆႏွစ္ခုသည္ တစ္ခုတည္းျဖစ္သြားၿပီး တိုင္းရင္းသား လုပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ား ျဖစ္သြားသည္။ ရွင္းလင္းသည္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံသား ဟူေသာ အယူအဆကို ဖယ္ရွားလိုက္ၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒတြင္ လုပ္သားျပည္သူမ်ားဟူေသာ အယူအဆမရွိေတာ့ပါ။ တိုင္းရင္းသားဟူေသာ အယူအဆသာ က်န္ရွိေနပါသည္။ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို မည္သူေရးဆြဲလဲ။ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားက ေရးဆြဲပါသည္။ ၁၉၄၇ ခုႏွစ္ႏွင့္ ကြာျခားေသာ္လည္း ဤအခ်က္သည္ ရွင္းလင္းပါသည္။ “ကၽြန္ုပ္တို႔ျပည္သူမ်ား” သည္ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္တို႔ “တိုင္းရင္းသားျပည္သူမ်ား” ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံသား ဟူသည့္ အယူအဆကို အစားထိုးလိုက္ပါသည္။ ဤျပည္ေထာင္စုတြင္ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားသည္ ပထမျဖစ္ၿပီး ႏုိင္ငံသား မ်ားသည္ ဒုတိယျဖစ္ပါသည္။
ဒီအေျခအေနကို မည္သို႔ေရာက္လာပါသနည္း။ ေဟာေျပာပြဲတြင္ တိုင္းရင္းသားဟူသည့္ အယူအဆ၏ အေျခအေနေျပာင္းလဲသြားပံုႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ အေရးပါသည့္ အခ်ိန္မ်ားကိုေဖာ္ျပၿပီး မည္သည္ေၾကာင့္ ထိုသို႔ အေရးပါေၾကာင္းေဖာ္ျပပါ။
ဒီမိုကေရစီ၏ အက်ိဳးေက်းဇူးမ်ားမွာ မည္သည္တို႔ျဖစ္ပါသလဲ။ နိဂံုးခ်ဳပ္တြင္ ဤေမးခြန္းကို ေဆြးေႏြးၿပီး အၾကံဥာဏ္တစ္ခုေပးပါမည္။