Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar

Picture: Phoe Thar

In an article by New Mandala, Justine Chambers and Nick Cheesman discuss Myanmar’s “revolutionary situation.”

When something becomes commonsensical it is a matter of social reality. It does not stand in need of further verification. Alternative ways of thinking and talking about what is happening and what ought to be done are elided. Sometimes they are denied or refused because they are not commonsensical or are untimely. Certain kinds of knowledge are privileged, while others are dismissed because they are irrelevant, or occluded because they are inconvenient to the conventional narrative—such as feminist readings of the gendered politics of transition and patriarchy.

Additionally, because the transition paradigm explains events in the present with reference to an anticipated future, the past loses significance, except insofar as it can provide answers to the question of what caused transition. Once transition has become commonsensical it is no longer necessary to know anything much about what preceded it. Instead, periods before the transition are cast in negative terms, portrayed, as Elizabeth Rhoads and Courtney Wittekind wrote in an important critique of the transition paradigm in Myanmar, “in terms of what is presumed to have been lacking”. Rhoads and Wittekind did not object to the idea of transition itself; like everyone, they recognised that the political and social changes of the 2010s were consequential. What they objected to was the transition paradigm’s linearity, to its short sightedness, and to its superficial vision. Against the paradigm they made a case for transition as recurrent: less about difference from the past, more about continuity with it; not by setting aside context and history, but by attending to them.

This is a useful prompt for thinking about Myanmar’s protracted revolutionary situation. For if it was obvious in the 2010s that time was on the move and Myanmar was no longer as it had been in the decade before, then it is even more obvious that since 2021 the country has transitioned, in a manner of speaking, from a decade of political reform to a new period of revolution. It has again been marked by a rupture with the past that again articulates with previous claims, authorities, and ruptures.