“How, in both the traumatic moments of dispossession and abuse and in the banal maneuverings through the challenges of quotidian existence, do subjects survive and object to their daily experiences with sociopolitical power? If contestation and survival strategies are not founded on rights, then what animates them?” (Rights Refused, p. 199).
During his twenty years of living in, working on, and writing about Myanmar, anthropologist Elliott Prasse-Freeman has observed very different periods of political rule. First there was the military junta in power until 2011, followed by years of transition and optimism about the possibility of democratic reform. A campaign of genocide against Myanmar’s minority Rohingya population and a military coup in 2021, however, have ushered in a new era of repression and uncertainty.
Across these changes in government, political activists and community organizers have worked tirelessly to improve conditions. Sometimes their activism is indirect and subtle—tutoring students for their annual exams, for example, to supplement the insufficient public education system. At other times, their activism is direct and confrontational, such as by staging a “cursing ceremony” to condemn those in power who have seized land from ordinary people without proper compensation. In his recent ethnography, Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar (Stanford University Press, 2023), Prasse-Freeman brings readers along with him as he accompanies various activists to the front lines, observing their work and the state’s response. With rigor and nuance, Prasse-Freeman navigates the dynamics among the activists he trails, the communities they work with, and the representatives of the state they encounter.
What do Myanmar’s grassroots activists fight for? Prasse-Freeman dives deep into this question, exploring the meaning of “rights” for groups that do not necessarily understand them as public goods held intrinsically by all. Instead, he writes, “Burmese activist practice is as much about attempting to redress the absence of care, evade obtuse and harmful forms of state knowledge, and blunt the effects of violence as it is about directly contesting unjust institutions” (p. xxii). In flowing prose that conveys both sophisticated theoretical contributions and deeply affecting stories, Prasse-Freeman offers a rich ethnography that will be of interest to anyone working on the topics of human rights and political activism in the face of an authoritarian state.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham (MEC): Elliott, thank you for the opportunity to read Rights Refused, which is an incredibly powerful and intellectually productive book. I’d like to start with a question about the project’s origins: how did you come to work on the topic of political activism in Myanmar, and on this network of activists in particular?
Elliott Prasse-Freeman (EPF): Thank you so much for your interest and for the opportunity to expand on the book here. As for my Myanmar origin story, I became interested in the country through my mother’s work in the Thai/Burma border region in the early 2000s, and I moved to Yangon in 2004 right after finishing my undergraduate degree. This was before the vaunted “transition to democracy” (2011-2021), and hence a time of intense government repression, in which the power of the totalitarian military-state worked its way into every fiber of daily life—or, at least, that’s what I had read (in both scholarly and journalistic accounts). Yet, when I arrived in Yangon, where I would live for more than a year (that time), I was struck by how absent the state was—people suffered by the state’s lack of services, attention, care, and presence in general. This sparked the beginning of my more serious intellectual interest in the place: how could the state be both present enough to wage war, stage coups, oppress activists, but be absent enough to be completely unavailable in many Burmese people’s everyday lives?
Fast forward a decade, and I was back in Yangon hoping to explore some of these questions as part of a PhD. The political milieu was much freer—and this had spurred an enormous amount of civic engagement, much of which centered around the question of land (as a key means of production to so many people’s livelihoods; as a symbol of justice attained; etc.). I was working with a legal aid NGO that was supporting land grab cases, many of which precipitated the military suing those trying to get their land back. Almost as soon as I arrived, however, the NGO basically collapsed and I was left all dressed up with nowhere to go. It was then I managed, through sheer luck (the patron saint of all successful anthropological projects) to fall in with a group of social activists who were working on similar issues: restitution claims advanced by the victims of land grabs. But land was not the only thing these activists worked on. They also assisted union formation and workplace struggles in industrial zones (mostly in Yangon but in upper Burma as well). Finally, they dealt with daily struggles to survive faced by Burmese people living in in peri-urban Yangon where they also lived. This principally meant serving the community through informal education classes and what can loosely be called “legal aid”—protecting and assisting ordinary people as they tried to navigate otherwise dangerous, unavailable, and byzantine state administrative processes.
I realized, while finishing a very-not-good dissertation, that these activists helped reveal those state dynamics that had confused me much earlier: they were a hinge of sorts linking the excluded or neglected masses with this imperious and absent state. In fact, one could describe their activist work—in activities as diverse as writing complaint letters, accompanying someone to the local administrative office to get a proper identity document, holding protests, or making speeches in courtrooms—as trying to suture the people and state together, by getting people to reimagine the challenges of everyday life as political choices that could be made differently.
MEC: Throughout the book, there are four Rs that come to the fore: rights, resistance, refusal, and Rohingya. Given the span of time that your research covered (2010-2019) and the events that took place in Myanmar over those years, in what ways did your thinking about those four Rs change over time? Or, in other words, what was it like to write a dissertation and then a book about a situation that kept changing?
EPF: My main fieldwork period was from 2014 through the 2015 election—a particularly hopeful time. Much of my research felt like pushing on an open door: could I video this protest, attend this court case, visit this prison, sleep in this village … without getting in trouble? It turns out I could, and I took my cues from the activists who were themselves pushing the parameters of the politically possible, always reminding me that what could be done “depends on the situation” (a continual refrain that I interpret as revealing the pliability of the possible in a context where one cannot rely on, but thus one is also not constrained by, legible rights frameworks).
But this door began slamming shut almost immediately after the National League for Democracy (NLD)—Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s long-suffering opposition party—won those elections and came to power in early 2016. I returned to Yangon in June 2016 and was surprised and sad to observe how depressed my activist comrades were. The NLD had told them, in no uncertain terms, that the role of the people (and activists like them) in the future of the country was as a silent partner: one meant to vote for the NLD and otherwise get out of the way (see here for a dispatch from the field during that period). But Suu Kyi’s authoritarianism, while frustrating, was nothing of course compared to the genocide and the coup.
In 2017, nearly 800,000 Rohingya people were forced from their homeland in western Arakan into Bangladesh. 10,000 were killed and hundreds of villages burned, later to be bulldozed and lands nationalized. We of course do not know why senior general Min Aung Hlaing made this choice—it could have been general genocidal sociopathy, something betrayed by the fact that he evoked genocidaires past and ongoing when describing the Rohingya as an “unfinished job.” But regardless, the Rohingya issue was divisive politically: Burmese of all ethnicities shared an unreflective animus towards the Rohingya, even though they had likely never interacted with one. Fed a diet of Islamophobic scapegoating nurtured in the ambient post-9/11 Global War on Terror discourse, many Burmese reflexively feared the Rohingya as the thin edge of a broader Islamic wedge surging east from an over-populated South Asia to steal their lands and “swallow” their races (Burma’s immigration department has, as its official slogan, “a race does not face extinction by being swallowed into the earth, but from being swallowed up by another race.”) This unpopularity makes me suspect that Min Aung Hlaing et al. were trying to use the Rohingya genocide to undermine the NLD’s popular support: Suu Kyi would be forced to condemn the military and defend the Rohingya, thereby forfeiting the backing of anxious masses. It was here that Suu Kyi had a choice. When under house arrest for decades she had become a global icon by imploring the world: “Use your liberty to promote ours” (I remember this quotation by heart because it was on an Amnesty International poster in my home growing up; I even brought it to university with me).* The worm had turned and she had a chance to use her liberty to promote that of another. Instead, not to be outflanked on the right by the military, she declaimed that the Rohingya were making up accusations of fake rape, and that the military had done nothing wrong, and so forth. She even personally defended the country at the International Court of Justice trial against Myanmar.
While in some ways the genocide was disconnected from the struggles I was tracking in lowland Burma, I also knew that I could not tell the story of this period and what politics meant there without somehow incorporating the violence into the analytical frame. This was also the case for the coup, which put the final nail into the coffin of the so-called transition—already staggering along at that point, the peace process with the many ethnic nationalities essentially dead, and the economic reforms benefitting people more and more unequally all the time. Hence, to return to your question, while the coup commenced a radical new phase of Burmese activism—which I do try to weave into every chapter of the book—it also concluded an era, and allowed me to take that decade as an object of analysis. Simultaneously, it allowed me to develop the theme of immanent change—that the situation is always evolving, as mentioned earlier—as central to activist praxis. In other words, to write a story of a moving target is poetically consistent—in Roman Jakobson’s sense of poesis as form drawing attention to content—with activist life.
MEC: You riff on Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to develop a concept of “blunt biopolitics,” which you use to describe how Myanmar’s military governs with violence. I won’t ask you to explain blunt biopolitics in full here (readers who are interested should listen to this episode of the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies podcast), but I’m interested in how you started to think about biopolitics and then how you realized that the Burmese context called for a somewhat different take on it. How do you think blunt biopolitics could be of use to scholars who focus on other places—or times?
EPF: As with all things in academic work, it started with frustration and spite. Just kidding (kind of). I suppose I was frustrated with what I saw as a somewhat inappropriate application of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to Burma. And while I wanted to avoid throwing that entire baby out with the bathwater, I wanted to refine some of the theoretical tools to make that baby better work for Burma’s context, a context I think might be more similar to many situations around the globe than the “standard” biopolitical one that Foucault developed from his analysis of Western Europe.
I was concerned with two things. First, I objected to the normative presumption that states exist to care for their people, such that when Burma’s military-state was found to not conform to that paradigm, it was taken as a mistake to be corrected rather than an analytical problem to be explored. Second, many scholars borrowed from the inspiring work done on British colonial rule of South Asia to argue that in Burma governmentality, through the work of particular representational projects (maps, censuses, museums), “reified” sub-population groups into durable ethnicities. I found that argument to not reflect the reality in Burma, where ethnicity remains mutable, categorization projects themselves are subject to appropriation by grassroots mobilizations, and so forth.
At this point, you might ask, why not throw that baby out? In other words: perhaps Foucault’s tools are not the correct ones for thinking about this particular apparatus of power. But, I did find elements of the paradigm to exist: regarding the first problem, while Burmese states have neither promoted nor protected life, they still have taken population groups (rather than individual rights-bearing subjects) as their object of governance. Second, the shell of a biopolitical state—with maps, censuses, museums—did exist; it just wasn’t invested with the same amount of resource and commitment as in other contexts. And so, I wanted to know: what happens when a state retains these institutions—for example, Burmese people do have ethnicity inscribed on the ID card that they are ostensibly required to carry—but does not infuse them with political will? And how, finally, does excessive violence fit into all of this? Can violence itself play a governmental role—in the sense creating population groups, dissolving others? I believe that Burma shows it can, and that one of the ironies of mass violence is that it often creates the very mass that it seeks to eradicate. In some senses, my on-going research on the Rohingya is an attempt to refine and better explain these various phenomena and how they interact in a regime of “governance.”
MEC: Your most intensive fieldwork took place in 2014-15, which were years when the growing numbers of international NGO staffers coming to Myanmar seemed to feel that there was real possibility for change. In Rights Refused, Burmese community activists regard those foreign organizations with ambivalence, and you describe a funding partnership that ultimately didn’t really work for the local group. I’m curious to hear more of your thoughts on this local/international divide, and how you think foreign aid organizations could engage with community groups in productive ways.
EPF: My book critiques the use of rights frameworks and indeed “rights” themselves, and in doing so there are moments when it drifts into the polemical (I’m told!). But I am actually not so interested in dunking on international actors for their inability to perceive how their rights frameworks are rejected by many grassroots Burmese people. This is because I do not believe that this inability comes from a place of dunkability—in other words, dunking should occur when arrogance, bad faith, contempt for local ways of doing things are dominant. And this is not to deny that those elements were present in Burma’s transitional era; it’s quite possible that a very important book on these topics will emerge in Burma studies—I have a colleague, Kirt Mausert, who is drafting The Carpetbaggers of Rangoon as we speak. But my point about rights is slightly different. Rights are so hegemonic that they are considered axiomatic—things that are simply not available for choice, but which are rather mere descriptions of characteristics that inhere in the world. Rights are seen as the political analogue of properties of physics—such as the rate at which an object falls to earth or the area of a circle. I once had a lawyer scoff at my project: “Do the Burmese have laws? Yes? If they have laws, then they have rights.” Just as the earth orbits the sun, they had rights by dint of having politics.
But I was interested in the inverse: what could it mean to have laws but not have rights? What would politics look like as a result? Because I am lucky enough to have the freedom to explore such things, I ran with those questions, and I think unearthed some interesting findings. But many members of the international NGO horde don’t have that luxury, and proceed with the presumption that their frameworks are universal. I sat in several meetings over the years in which I began to suspect that “rights” was being mistranslated—not in the sense that there was a better word to be used, but rather that one belief system about the world was refracted through another, and what came out was a distortion of fundamental understandings.
Therefore, the book’s recommendation is not to perceive the attempt to translate as futile, but rather to see what is created by the refraction I just mentioned: what does Burma’s approximation of “rights” look like? Specifically, this meant to look at “rights” and “opportunities” (they are a single word in Burmese—akwint-ayay) as conjoined, not pried apart as they have been in Anglo-American political ontology. I prefer the Burmese way of understanding rights, and I think it has potential consequences for the Anglo-American version—in other words, it gets at something true about the version deployed in the West, even as that truth is often either not seen or seen but disavowed. Therefore, rather than telling international groups that they need to learn more about local contexts (which of course they do, but that’s obvious), we could say that they need to learn more—or be more honest about—themselves: the way that their concepts actually function in the world.
MEC: The book is filled with political cartoons, many of them requiring both local and linguistic knowledge to convey their message. What was your process for collecting those cartoons and then discerning their meaning? Can you describe one for #AsiaNow readers that you find especially thought-provoking?
EPF: I read a lot of cartoons in part because Burmese people read a lot of cartoons. The way they were read and how they circulated—even becoming the object of several political incidents (such as when a cartoonist was condemned by the military for depicting military men shooting peace doves for target practice)—demonstrates their importance. In fact, they were often used to adorn political protest camps or festivals—the cartoon featured below for example was blown up and printed on vinyl as part of a rally in Mandalay in 2014.
And it is one of my favorite cartoons, as it reveals an additional dimension of the Burmese conception of rights. Rather than inalienable possessions—“yours” even when you don’t have them—in Burma rights/opportunities are alienable: they can be snatched and stolen, and you might never get them back. Note how this is expressed linguistically: in the West, we fight for our rights even when we do not have them; and it barely bears repeating that you must fight for your right to party. In Burma rights are not as likely to be described this way—as yours even when they are absent. They are turned into a kind of noun that can be severed from the body: and so the man on the right in the cartoon above runs off with the rights. One additional note here is that he leaves a bag of opportunities (taa-wun) behind. Taa-wun was also a touchstone in the research, as it became a way of reminding people in power to live up to the expectations that people have for them.
I don’t want to overstate the importance of cartoons—in fact, as I argued in chapter 4 on cartoons and cursing rituals, cartoons often created a fantasy space that was more a form of “wish casting” than reflection of reality. But much of politics is that kind of perlocutionary performative: the laying down of alternatives to the way things are right now to create a new future, even while working through the resonant idioms of the present.
Finally, I featured so many cartoons because they are funny in the way that so much of Burmese politics is funny too—and funny from the perspective of those who live it! One of my objectives in the book, as I put it in the acknowledgments, was to convey the “ebullience and love” that the activists featured in the book themselves brought to their praxis. I may have failed in my attempts to get right the balance between deadly serious politics and the levity activists brought to it, but it was a goal of mine continually held in mind: to show the humor and play that defines activist life.
MEC: To wrap up, what has been engaging your attention these days?
EPF: As mentioned briefly above, I’ve been working on the Rohingya genocide, and what Rohingya life after mass violence looks like in places across greater Asia. One part of the book (or the book that will hopefully emerge from this research) is an old-school anthropology project set to figure out Rohingya social structure—political economy, migration, marriage markets, inter-ethnic relations—with the objective to explore how those dynamics could help illuminate internecine conflict in Arakan in the context of intensifying racial capitalism and state formation over the last half-century. Another part of the research is to ethnographically trace Rohingya attempts to make sense of Rohingya-ness as they interact with diverse local contexts—whether in Bangladesh, Malaysia, or Thailand (the places I’ve been doing research with Rohingya communities since 2018 now). Part of this latter research has involved working with a Rohingya-led social enterprise which is using emergent technology—such as blockchain—to try to create new forms of identity (at both the individual and ethnic group levels). The work is hence both historical and futuristic—but also seeks to be present, in the sense of trying to put Rohingya voices back at the center of a general narrative that tends to reduce them to victims.
* (although perhaps that was as much to signal worldliness and sensitivity than anything else, if I’m being honest)