16 - Democratization, Violence, and Myanmar

Summary

I propose to conclude this book by reexamining the current debate about democratization in Myanmar in terms of violence, by which I mean political violence. I have three reasons for concentrating on violence. First, most of the chapters in the book explicitly or implicitly raise questions that intersect with the problem of violence. What types of political violence are common in Myanmar today? Do they threaten democratization? How do they matter, and why?

Second, while the contents of the book raise questions about some types of political violence in Myanmar today, they omit, or pass lightly over, other types. Notably, no chapter is dedicated to communal violence, whether the violence in Rakhine State, or the growing incidence of anti- Muslim violence in other parts of the country. By concentrating on violence in this concluding chapter, I will attempt briefly to address this omission. Third, by rethinking democratization in relation to violence I hope to obtain some new perspectives on the stories and analyses offered by the book's contributors. Some of these perspectives sharpen and enhance the authors’ views. Others cast doubt on their findings. All of them speak to problems of violence as “the decisive means for politics” (Weber 2009, p. 121) in Myanmar.

The two broad categories of violence that I will use for this purpose, drawn from Johan Galtung's influential schema, are personal violence and structural violence (1969, p. 170). The categories are convenient, because they encompass a wide range of political phenomena. They also permit rudimentary analysis of these phenomena as described in the preceding chapters, and invite possibilities for further research. I begin with personal violence, and then turn to its structural counterpart.

PERSONAL VIOLENCE

Personal violence is direct. A person (or persons) commits it against another person or persons. It is visible as action, and instrumental in character (Arendt 1969, p. 46; Weber 2009). Targeted at individuals, personal violence takes the form of killing, torture, rape, and abduction, among other practices. As a collective political phenomenon it is found in war, terrorism, communal violence, pogroms, riots, and genocide, just to name a few of its most pronounced forms. I will concentrate here on collective personal violence, because the media and experts tend to point towards this sort of violence when warning of dangers to the future of democratization in Myanmar.