This is a timely book in light of contemporary developments in Burma,Footnote 1 with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest and other political prisoners in 2010–2011, her party's victory in the April 2012 by-elections, and the reinvigoration of international relations with the United States and other democracies. Focused on the pro-democracy movement after it was violently quashed by the military regime in 1988, the book examines how activists deployed legal strategies to reshape Free Burma into a transnational social movement for human rights. It offers important lessons for scholars interested in the country itself or in law and society, especially at its intersection with social movements.
These lessons stem from Dale's two-part thesis. Using institutional ethnography to map out the processes through which Free Burma activists deployed legal strategies in three connected cases—the enactment of selective purchasing laws in 13 U.S. municipalities and Massachusetts to isolate by local governments corporations that did business with the military junta, the campaign to de-charter the California-based Unocal Oil Corporation for its use of forced labor to build a gas pipeline through Burma, and the lawsuit filed under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act by peasants in Burma against Unocal for human rights abuses—Dale argues that economic sanctions that demand for corporate accountability, such as the municipal- and state-selective purchasing legislation, are more effective toward Burma's democratic reform than “constructive engagement” by the U.S. federal government. This first argument raises broader questions concerning economic engagement with repressive states. Written before contemporary developments in Burma and the 2010 elections, activists and academics, the author included, worried about the military government's reactions to the election results. They also did not predict what appears, at press time for this review, to be a transition into the beginnings of a civilian and more democratic government. Dale's findings on Free Burma, therefore, complicate the question of how legal strategies matter to pro-democracy movements, and how the latter consequently influence democratic reform.
The issue takes us to the second prong of the thesis and its contributions to law and society. The significance of Free Burma and its legal strategies to the country's political transition depends on how we conceptualize movement outcomes and the role of law, particularly rights. These are familiar themes in law and society to which Dale's study speaks, by elevating the debate to a transnational context; in doing so, it contributes to an area of the scholarship that is growing, but remains relatively unexplored (see, e.g., Reference Goodale and MerryGoodale & Merry 2007). When Free Burma activists shifted the targets of their “blame” and “claim” (Reference Felstiner, Abel and SaratFelstiner, Abel, & Sarat 1981) from the Myanmar government to U.S.-based corporations, Dale finds that they changed the meanings of human rights. As a result, the movement shifted from being a failed domestic endeavor to a successful transnational one, despite the latter's mixed results in formal legal institutions.
This is because, Dale argues, the legal strategies to achieve the aforementioned economic sanctions generated a transnational legal discourse that offers an alternative and a challenge to the authoritarian-democratic dichotomy between the top-down approach on globalization and the bottom-up approach focused on the role of social movements in shaping the former. In a transnational legal discourse, when actors—nation-states, governments, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and activists—interact with one another as a result of participation in and responses to the legal strategies, they create a transnational legal space in which the meanings of law and human rights are contested. Dale's constitutive perspective, thus, regards the power of top-down institutional actors over legal meanings as unsettled, and pays attention to the agency of localized actors in countering such power by reclaiming the law and reshaping its meanings in their favor.
Overall, Free Burma is a theoretically rich and multilayered account, but the amount of theoretical discussion and unpacking of concepts in each chapter, including the case study chapters, sometimes overwhelms and obscures the study's central thesis. The shifting meanings of human rights were also not fully explicated, although the author explains in the conclusion that efforts to do so form part of an ongoing project. Nevertheless, as it stands, the book offers exciting challenges for law and society to engage and advance its debates in transnational contexts.
