4 - Time Changing Hands in Myanmar: On Former Prisoners’ Journeys into Politics

Summary

During a public lecture and panel debate in Stockholm in 2019, Nick Cheesman outlined an agenda for a reinvigorated critical Myanmar studies. Myanmar studies, he implied, needs to move beyond the familiar tropes used to characterise the country and its history, for example, Bamar versus minorities, liberal democracy versus military dictatorship, and so on. Cheesman invoked Wittekind and Rhoades (2018) to challenge scholars to move from a focus on isolation, decline, decay and inertia towards agency, interaction and everyday life. He spoke against a deficit-oriented approach and called for the production of more compelling historical narratives.

As a newcomer to Myanmar studies I identify with Cheesman's sentiment, echoing Mbembe's call to scholars of Africa to take the continent seriously on its own terms and cease ahistorical theorising couched only in terms of what it is not (Mbembe 2001). Cognizant of the fact that increased levels of access for research give increased possibilities and raise the stakes around what is feasible and desirable, this chapter seeks to contribute to a reinvigorated critical Myanmar studies through an analysis of the development of political consciousness in the lives of eight former prisoners now occupying positions of political authority in Myanmar.

The chapter draws on interviews conducted in 2017 as part of the Legacies of Detention in Myanmar research project. This is a collaborative project that aims to explore the historical and contemporary role of detention in Myanmar and its significance for the reconfiguration of state and society, utilising an ethnographic sensibility (Schatz 2009; Shore et al. 2011; Stepputat and Larsen 2015). Focused on a small sub-set of national and regional parliamentarians, I explore how they came to be who and where they are today, and I argue that the interruptions and disruptions that characterise and constitute their lives are best understood as links rather than breaks. The analytic lens developed and demonstrated has implications for how we think about change in Myanmar, a topic preoccupying many scholars and commentators as previous Myanmar Update volumes and other works testify (Chambers et al. 2018; Cheesman et al. 2012, 2014; Cheesman and Farrelly 2016; Crouch 2014, 2016; Egreteau and Robinne 2016; Lall 2016; Simpson et al. 2018; Slater 2014).