Liberalism And Democracy In Myanmar PDF Download

Citizenship is a critical component of statebuilding and peacebuilding efforts in conflict affected states, yet it is also the most neglected. Taking a critical realist, ethnographic case study approach, this thesis investigates the problem of state fragility in conflict-affected, postcolonial Myanmar from the lenses of state formation and youth citizenship. From the photo-elicitation interviews with twenty young Myanmar citizens and an analysis of the country’s citizenship laws, the study found that contra liberal conceptions of citizenship, citizenship (i.e., the political) and identities (i.e., the social) in Myanmar are intertwined. Young people’s social identities affect and are affected by their political identity as Myanmar citizens. Furthermore, the everyday sites of citizenship that construct young people’s identities as citizens are simultaneously private and public. Young people’s agency in their volunteerism and attitudes towards social norms reflects the same entanglement between the social and the political, as well as the private and the public. This thesis argues that the liberal notion of a social contract, which imagines a political society of free-standing individuals who possess their own subjectivities, is misaligned to the socio-political realities of citizenship in Myanmar’s hybrid political order. Rather than forcefit postcolonial states such as Myanmar into the liberal democratic model, I propose that the notions of relationality and agonistic democracy offer the means of indigenizing democracy and bringing peace to conflict-affected, postcolonial states. Overall, this thesis provides a valuable opportunity to advance understandings of the relationship between democracy and peace from the lenses of state formation and citizenship and to contribute to the discussion about what democratic citizenship in present-day Myanmar is and should entail. It responds to calls by Southeast Asian scholars to study citizenship ‘from below’ and to pay attention to the particular forms that democratic citizenship takes in postcolonial states. In doing so, this thesis seeks to provoke civil society actors and international non-governmental organizations advocating for democracy into a rethinking of what democratic participation and deliberation might look like in a postcolonial state.