Local Justice and Security Strategies in Myanmar

How do ordinary people in Myanmar get their social disputes and crimes resolved? Who are the main justice and security providers and how do they operate across different localities? What do these practices imply for access to justice and feelings of safety? The DIIS coordinated 4-year research project, “Everyday Justice and Security in the Myanmar Transition” (EverJust), explores these questions from a bottom-up, empirical perspective. It situates everyday strategies and avenues for seeking justice and security within the wider context of peacebuilding and the transition to democracy in Myanmar.

On 24 June in Yangon, the EverJust project researchers from Denmark and Myanmar jointly presented their preliminary research findings to 50 key international and national stakeholders, including NGOs, embassies and development aid agencies who work with Rule of Law programs and policing in Myanmar. The Deputy Head of Mission from the Royal Danish Embassy in Myanmar, Ms. Dorte Chortsen, gave welcoming remarks, highlighting that the EveryJust project is one of the first international social science research projects in Myanmar to strengthen research capacity.

The project has completed its first round of ethnographic fieldwork in two sites in Yangon and in the former conflict-affected Mon and Karen states in South East Myanmar. Research insights illustrate high levels of legal pluralism, meaning that a variety of actors, procedures and rules are present in the resolution of disputes and crimes. Justice providers do not only include actors who have the formal authority to deal with crimes and civil cases, like the state courts and the police, but also includes religious leaders, informal village authorities, astrologers, diviners and ethnic armed organizations. Often a mixture of written laws and customary rules are present in dispute resolution procedures, and religious beliefs also play a strong role in how people perceive and act upon security risks, crimes and misfortune. The project has also found that security strategies encompass spiritual and supernatural forms of protection, along with more physical forms of security like patrolling. Therefore justice and security strategies are often highly hybrid, making it at times difficult to discern what aspects derive from the formal state and the bureaucracy and what is more based on local customs and cultural or religious beliefs.

A core finding is that people in Myanmar seldom deliberately seek justice with the official state courts, which are associated with high costs and inefficiency. Due to decades of military governance, people also refrain from going to the courts due to the fear of authority, lack of familiarity with the law and the deeply ingrained perception that it is the elite who stand a better chance of winning cases. Overall ordinary people prefer either to not make any complaints at all, as doing so is associated with shame and the loss of dignity, or to seek assistance from local authorities, religious leader and in Mon and Karen state with Ethnic Armed Organizations. This sometimes involves forum shopping, whereby people draw on a multiplicity of authorities and personal connections to enhance their chance of getting a favorable outcome. Again this reflects mistrust in formal justice institutions.

The research findings shows that the main problems encountered in South East Myanmar are land disputes, marriage disputes, domestic violence, debt traps, drugs and neighbor quarrels between people of different ethnicity or religion. Intriguingly, insecurity is associated less with property crimes, like theft and robbery, and much more with situations where a mixture of people with different ethnicity and religious faith co-habit. Homogenous communities are associated with security and peace. This finding reflects the long history of ethnic and religious tensions in the country. Land disputes can also be seen as an effect of conflict-related displacement and illegal dispossessions by armed actors. Resolving these disputes is inherently difficult for local justice providers, and requires longer-term political solutions.

Finally, the research looked into the differences between areas controlled by the Myanmar government and those that are still controlled by Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs), which today have ceasefires with the government. The EAOs have quite extensive state-like justice institutions and written laws, and although most disputes in their areas of control are still resolved at the village level, they do constitute an important back-up or last resort that is seen as legitimate by ethnic villagers. They have well-organized transferal mechanisms linking them to village justice committees, and a punitive system linked to prisons. Intriguingly, the ceasefires with the government have not led to a withdrawal of these EAO justice systems, but rather opened a space for strengthening and reforming them. Ceasefires have therefore not led to an increased engagement with Myanmar state courts. This finding is important to consider in the ongoing peace process and political dialogue on federalism in Myanmar.

The discussion at the information meeting revealed high interest among the key stakeholders in the research findings, which can also feed into wider Rule of Law and Access to Justice programming in Myanmar, besides contributing to academic debates.