How is the Myanmar transition experienced in everyday life?

On August 16-18, Oxford University hosted the EUROSEAS conference on South East Asian Studies. Seven members of the EverJust project team, including Danish as well as Myanmar researchers, gave presentations based on their fieldwork within the topic of ‘Everyday Justice and Security in the Myanmar Transition’. Annika Pohl Harrisson organized a panel on “Everyday social life in the Myanmar transition”, which explored how authority, justice and morality are being reconfigured at the local level within the wider context of political and economic changes in the country. All papers were based, on in-depth ethnographic research in provincial towns and villages (2015-2017), which gave new insights into how ordinary people in Myanmar experience both the changes and continuities that are accompanying the transition. This locally grounded perspective illustrates the prevalence of networked and informal forms of power and authority, which are activated for instance in people’s efforts to get social services, welfare, justice, and protection. Each of the papers explored these dynamics from different angles.

Mikael Graver’s (Aarhus University) paper focused on the role of religious actors in everyday life and politics, with a particular focus on an influential Karen Buddhist monk who is also connected to ethnic armed groups. Justine Chambers (Australian National University), who has done extensive fieldwork in Hpa-An, Karen state, looked at how traditional modes of obligation, responsibility and kinship are being formed in relation to new forms of value hierarchies and notions of the ‘good’ amongst young people. Staying within Karen State, Lue Htar (EMReF) spoke about the complicated pathways that people use today to try to get the land back that was grabbed from them during the military regime. Rather than using formal legal procedures, people address a range of informal and powerful local actors, including religious leaders and armed actors, to get some kind of justice. This reflects that formal positions of authority are in flux and not stable at this moment of the transition. Gerard McCarthy (Australian National University) presented a paper on non-state social welfare and explored how the moral notions and patronage networks that welfare is embedded in are changing during the current transition. His insights are based on extensive fieldwork in Bago Region, including interviews with influential economic elites. Thang Sorn Poine (EMReF) has done fieldwork in Mon State on everyday justice, both in areas administered by the Myanmar government and in an area controlled by the Mon Ethnic Armed Organization, the New Mon State Party. Her paper at the conference focused on the gendered dimensions of access to justice, and she argued that women tend to keep most disputes and crimes to themselves, due to socio-cultural and religious notions of shame, past life deeds, and male dominance. Myat Thet Thitsar’s (EMReF) paper explored everyday justice and social change in Kachin state, arguing that while little has changed at the household level in terms of how people resolve disputes, there are a lot of changes in how communal issues are handled. People now have more awareness of legal rights and have more courage to raise serious cases with the government, such as land grabbing cases. Civil society and religious organizations play a strong role in supporting people’s collective pursuit of justice. Finally, Michael Lidauer acted as discussant in the panel, raising a number of important questions about the role of everyday life in the wider Myanmar transition and how transnational connections in addition shape these dynamics.

EverJust researcher Helene Maria Kyed (DIIS) in addition presented a paper in another panel at the EUROSEAS on Violence and Political Order-Making in South East Asia. Her paper focused on the forms of ceasefire state-making that are today going on in the previous conflict areas of Southeast Myanmar, and used the expansion of the justice systems of the ethnic armed groups as illustration of this. Myat The Thitsar (EMReF) presented a paper on a panel about decentralization and governance, where she gave insightful knowledge about the state-level governments in Myanmar and how they face challenges in the current political landscape.