During a hot, breezy afternoon in Guba — a Malay Muslim village in southern Thailand — a schoolchild halted and reoriented a routine conversation at a roadside pavilion by bringing in a decorated, footed tray. The tray had been made for the opening ceremony and parade for Tadika Samphan, an intramural sports game among members of Taman Didikan Kanak Kanak (Tadika) in Raman district of Yala Province. The tray contained tricoloured sticky rice that inscribed a sentence, “เรารักนายหลวง” (rao rak nay luang), purposely meant to mean “We love the king”. It would not have drawn much attention from those at the pavilion if the word for “king” had been spelled as it should have been. Instead of “ในหลวง” (nai luang), “the king” — the most commonly used phrase for designating the Thai monarch — what was inscribed instead was “นายหลวง” (nay luang), a term that literally means “Mister Luang” and that, for Thai-speaking people, has nothing to do with the Thai monarch.

After my remarks on the title nay luang, the others at the pavilion had various reactions. Some were surprised and said they had never before realized that the nay spelling was incorrect, despite the virtual omnipresence of the phrase rao rak nai luang nationwide, especially after state-supported campaigns in 2006. Others — especially those who had been involved in making the decorated tray — seemed embarrassed, as they had been particularly attentive in making it, and it had already been displayed in the parade and at the official opening ceremony, where senior government officials had been present. “It should not have happened”, one of them said in disappointment. Still, although some wondered if the incorrectly spelled phrase nay luang could be considered blasphemous to the highly revered Thai monarch, most of them did not take the issue seriously, considering it a small mistake they could joke about among themselves.

The misspelled rao rak nay luang would have simply passed as an illiteracy issue, a failure of formal education, or an unintended consequence of the state's propaganda had it not been written by a group of Malay Muslims from southern Thailand, in a period when Malay Muslims were attempting to negotiate their subjectivity in questions relating to the state, their ethnicity, and religion.

The separatist movements in Thailand's Deep South, which reached their peak in the late 1960s and 1970s, started to decline in the 1980s (Forbes 1982, p. 1061). On the one hand, the decline was brought about by changes in central government policy towards the region. The forced assimilation policy of the Phibun government was discontinued, Malays’ cultural rights and religious freedoms were encouraged, many separatists were offered amnesty, and a “development as security” approach was implemented in the region. On the other hand, the decline also resulted from conflicts and ruptures within the separatist movements themselves and from the movements’ failure to gain the broad support of the local Malay population (Croissant 2005, p. 23). This led observers to describe the separatist movements as “waning” (Rabasa 2003, p. 55) and “relatively quiet” (Tan 2003, p. 109). However, the unrest was resurrected around the turn of the millennium. A total of 1,975 violent incidents were recorded between 1993 and the end of November 2004. Of these, 21 per cent occurred before 2001, and 79 per cent took place from 2001 onward (Croissant 2005, p. 24). On 4 January 2004, about thirty armed men stormed Krom Luang Narathiwat Ratchanakarin Military Camp in Narathiwat Province, stealing 300 weapons and killing four soldiers. Incidents that occurred at Krue Se Mosque in Pattani and in Tak Bai, Narathiwat on 28 April and 25 October 2004, killing thirty-two and eighty-five Malay Muslims, respectively, aggravated the situation. These incidents combine to mark the year 2004 as the beginning of a new round, or “dramatic upsurge” (Askew and Helbardt 2012, p. 779), of unrest in the Deep South, which from 2004 to 2016 claimed 6,850 lives and 12,547 wounded and still goes on unabated (Deep South Incident Database 2016; Srisompob and Supaporn 2016).

Guba has not been immune to the resurrection of southern unrest. Drive-by shootings, roadside bombings, arson, and the distribution of threatening leaflets have not been uncommon to the settlement. However, Guba's specificity — its division into three different parts (northern, central, and southern), the “wildness” of its recent past, and its cordial memories and bonds with the Raman Sultanate demonstrated in the previous chapter — differentiates the ways in which the unrest has played out in the area.

INTRODUCTION

Myanmar has undergone significant reforms in recent years. A commonly accepted view is that, unlike many of the political shifts experienced elsewhere in the world in the twenty-first century, their impetus came not “from below” but from national elites, prompted by military decisions to open the country to the world and begin to democratize (Pederson 2012, Fink 2014). Much of the literature on Myanmar's transition thus focuses on national dynamics, seeking insights on what has changed, why, and how, by examining shifts among political elites, the business community, and the upper echelons of the Tatmadaw (see Pederson 2012; ICG 2012; Jones 2014). These changes emerged from a variety of elite-led processes, including the drafting of a new constitution in 2008, and accelerated under the Thein Sein-led government starting in 2011. Yet while analysing the motives and strategies of elites is vital for understanding the national impetus behind Myanmar's reforms, it leaves little space for assessing how the transition has played out among the broader populace, particularly in the rural villages where seventy per cent of Myanmar's people live. It also overlooks how the prevailing social institutions at the local level have responded to the various forms and sources of contention (actual and/or potential) inherently accompanying such major changes, and the associated implications for policy and practice in Myanmar.

This paper seeks to contribute to research on Myanmar's social transformation by analysing how governance reforms and changes in the life experiences of people in rural communities are altering the social contract at the village level. The paper argues that the nature and extent of the “social contract”—i.e., the terms on which citizens interact with one another, and the basis on which contending views of citizens’ core rights and responsibilities are negotiated with and legitimately upheld by the state—is being re-written in Myanmar. Three areas of change, especially since 2011, have affected how citizens in rural areas interact with the state: village governance, citizens’ expectations of the state, and connectivity. Responding to these challenges will require strategies informed by the best available evidence.

A key principle underpinning Myanmar's peace process has been the principle of “all-inclusiveness.” Initially, this principle represented a commitment to the inclusion of all ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in a nation-wide ceasefire agreement (NCA) that would serve as a basis for reconciliation, political dialogue and negotiation over constitutional reform. When President Thein Sein's transition government (2011–16) began making peace overtures, the principle was widely embraced by EAOs and the military, and ultimately enshrined in the text of the NCA. When Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) came to power in 2016 and made the peace process its top priority it, too, championed the principle of “all-inclusiveness.” However, as the NLD and the military struggle to convince more EAOs to sign the NCA, it has become apparent that, for all its good intentions, the principle of “all-inclusiveness” has become an obstacle to the peace process. This chapter reviews the peace process to date to examine the problems that have emerged around the concept of “all-inclusiveness.” Drawing on interviews with signatories of the NCA and other key stakeholders, the chapter highlights a central challenge confronting the government in its efforts to advance Myanmar's stalled peace process.

THE ORIGINS OF INCLUSIVENESS

When the NLD was elected in 2015 as Myanmar's first civilian government in more than half a century, NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi declared that reconciliation with the country's fractured and warring ethnic groups would be her government's top priority. The NLD assumed leadership of a peace process initiated under Thein Sein's Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP)-led transition government (2011–16). As part of wider efforts to end six decades of conflict and to build a new political culture based on compromise and consensus, President Thein Sein made peace overtures to the country's multiple ethnic armed organizations (EAOs). The USDP government acknowledged that peace could not be achieved if the central government refused to negotiate political settlements with EAOs or provide stability and development opportunities for the frontier regions. From 2011 the government initiated a series of talks and confidence-building measures designed to eventually lead to peace agreements and political integration into a reformed federal democratic system of government.

Myanmar is currently undergoing significant political and social reforms, in a context of ethnic and religious diversity, growing inequalities and ongoing armed conflict. Critical to the success of reforms, and to the ongoing peace process, is sustained political legitimacy. Where previous governments have sought legitimacy based on notions of security, the challenge for current and future governments is to build legitimacy on a foundation of equitable pluralism. In such a context, social protection offers a pathway to build public trust, and establish legitimacy based on consent, consistent with social contract theory which obliges mutual benefits and responsibilities between the state and citizens. Although Myanmar has a rich tradition of non-formal social protection and norms of reciprocity, the wider implementation of social protection is still in its infancy. However, the policy direction and implementation approach followed in developing social protection mechanisms are crucial to the success of building public trust and a sustainable peace process. This includes ensuring adequate state funding, potentially through: appropriating mineral revenues; giving sufficient attention to inequalities; identifying and building on existing repositories of social capital; facilitating a more devolved and localized approach to planning and delivery of social protection; and developing more localized approaches to accountability and transparency.

This paper is organized in five sections and is based on existing literature, reports by relevant government departments, development partners, and media as well as personal observation through interactions with ordinary citizens. The first section outlines the key issues of political legitimacy in the Myanmar context, including why political legitimacy is important in the current power structure in Myanmar. The second section considers the “trust deficit” which currently challenges the development of political legitimacy in Myanmar. The third section introduces the general concept of social protection, and the fourth section summarizes historical trends and the current status of social protection in Myanmar. The final section draws on both international evidence and evidence from Myanmar on how social protection acts to build trust and legitimacy and concludes with recommendations on the future direction of social protection in Myanmar, in particular approaches to social protection policy which can contribute to building public trust.

In the last five years the Rohingya community has been subject to renewed waves of anti-Muslim propaganda and accompanying violence, killings and systematic marginalization that aim both to permanently disenfranchise and to displace them from their native land. The relaxation of media restrictions alongside the ongoing political liberalization in Myanmar has exacerbated this situation. The brutal “clearance operations” inflicted upon the Rohingya community in 2017 saw more than 750,000 people flee across the border to Bangladesh amidst reports of extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and arson by Myanmar's state military Tatmadaw. While the United Nations has declared this to be a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” (UNOHCHR 2017a), the attacks on government targets have validated many Myanmar citizens’ long held belief that the Rohingya pose a threat to their nation and an existential threat to Buddhism, the majority religion.

As a result of the attacks on border police posts by the Aarakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) in October 2016 and August 2017, widespread misinformation and propaganda has inflated the threat of “terrorism”, fuelling Myanmar people's sense of insecurity and mistrust towards the Rohingya people. Part of this attitude is embedded in the colonial experience (1824–1948), and the view that Rohingya people came to Rakhine State under the British from neighbouring Bangladesh to address labour shortages on agricultural plantations. In line with global events, people in Myanmar also see the latest string of attacks from ARSA as part of a wider phenomenon of global terrorism taking root in many parts of the world. However, the situation now facing the Rohingya is located in a much more complex history of violence and the ongoing securitization of their community by Myanmar's successive military dictators.

So why has the Rohingya problem become so intractable? This paper explores how people's attitudes to recent events in Rakhine State builds off decades of systemic persecution and institutionalized discrimination of the Rohingya on the pretext of threats to national sovereignty. This article draws on recent literature which describes the way Muslims, and the Rohingya in particular, have been constructed as “other” in Myanmar (Gravers 2015; Nyi Nyi Kyaw 2016; Schissler et al. 2017). In this article I advance this argument, demonstrating how over time successive governments in Myanmar have securitized the Rohingya community based on a narrative of the Rohingya as a foreign “enemy other” and an existential threat to state and society.

In early February 2016 crowds gathered around televisions in tea shops across Myanmar to watch their new representatives be sworn in to positions in the Pyithu and Amyotha Parliaments, the lower and upper houses, in the capital Naypyitaw. In a country ruled by soldiers for over five decades, many doubted whether the military would hand legislative and executive power to a government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, given its refusal to do so when the party won the elections in 1990. Watching NLD representatives take seats in Myanmar's parliament brought tears of cautious optimism to the eyes of many of these self-proclaimed democrats. Their hopeful sentiment was reinforced a few weeks later when U Htin Kyaw, a close aide of long-time democracy campaigner and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, was made President. Soon after, Suu Kyi herself assumed the newly-created position of “State Counsellor”, a role she claimed would place her “above the President” (Marshall and Mclaughlin 2015).

Since the heady months of early 2016, the limits of Myanmar's transformation from military junta to alleged beacon of democratization have become tragically clear. Levels of poverty and household debt remain catastrophic for many households. Meanwhile, on-budget funding for the armed forces, or Tatmadaw, in 2017–18 almost exceeded financing for health, education and welfare combined. In contrast to the vibrant political environment and growth in civil society between 2011–15, hopes that the NLD's election would herald a more progressive and inclusive Myanmar have faded rapidly since 2015. Civil liberties have come under repeated attack, with Myanmar declared the “biggest backslider in press freedom” across the globe by the Committee to Protect Journalists as a result of the escalating imprisonment of reporters and social media users during Suu Kyi's tenure. Protests by students in support of education reform have been suppressed, and land disputes remain intractable with little hope for justice or compensation for those dispossessed over decades. Furthermore, the status of religious minorities and progressive activists has become increasingly precarious, as exposed by the blatant assassination of prominent Muslim lawyer and architect of Suu Kyi's “State Counsellor” position U Ko Ni in January 2017.

In Myanmar, the failure to fulfil the needs and aspirations of the country's ethnic minorities in the wake of independence caused the outbreak of some of the world's longest-running civil wars. The process of democratization in plural societies is often fragile because different political actors who influence the transition may articulate potentially incompatible conceptualizations of national identity (Linz and Stepan 1996, p. 16). This can be particularly challenging when a majority group dominates the political landscape and attempts to impose its vision of the nation on other minority groups. This is the case in Myanmar where since independence ethnic people have aspired to the recognition of their cultural identities and the implementation of self-rule. This view has often clashed with the vision of the Tatmadaw, the military group that took power in 1962. Indeed, the Tatmadaw, which is predominantly comprised of members of the dominant “Bamar” ethnicity, imagines the country as a centralized state with a unified Bamar national identity, as opposed to the Bamar as one ethnic group among many.

The military government's resolve to strengthen the Burmanization or “Myanmafication” of culture and history as described by Gustaaf Houtman (1999, p.142–8) is a main cause of the gradual suppression of Myanmar's distinct cultural identities. The case of the Mon, one of Myanmar's main ethnic groups, illustrates this situation well. The 2017 decision of the NLDdominated parliament to rename a major bridge in Mon State after General Aung San despite strong local opposition is representative of the many ongoing challenges ethnic nationality groups still face (Htet Naing Zaw 2017). The renaming of this major infrastructure link after the “father of independence” was indeed strongly criticized for celebrating a Bamar hero rather than local identity. This controversy illustrates the incompatibility of ethnic aspirations with a particular notion of national identity promoted by the Bamar militarized elite, which is one of the reasons why civil war has been raging for more than half a century. In this light, building an inclusive national identity that respects the multinational character of Myanmar instead of presenting the nation as an expression of the Bamar alone would positively support peace.