This chapter reveals that a special relationship between two states is founded on their two sources of closeness — that of the two states’ common identities and shared strategic interests. It subsequently discusses about the expressions of a special relationship. This chapter then brings to light the understanding that two states bound by common identities each needs to own a necessary amount of power before they could share a special relationship. After defining a security community, this chapter demonstrates that a special relationship and a pluralistic security community are basically different from each other, yet they are essentially interlinked — the two concepts each represents a relationship of common identities as well as power between two sovereign states. Finally, the chapter reveals that certain conditions need to be in place before a special relationship can transform into a pluralistic security community.

THE CONCEPT OF A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

The Coming About of the Conception of a Special Relationship

The concept of a special relationship is generally being understood as a closer friendship between two states when compared to their other bilateral relations, where such a relationship is founded on the two states’ closely shared interests and their sentimental assertion of shared identities. The idea of a “special relationship” entered into the discussion of international relations when the term was coined by Winston Churchill in his “iron curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946. Churchill in his speech warned that permanent peace would not be achieved without “the fraternal association of the English Speaking People. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”

The notion of a special relationship between Britain and the United States was a century in the making, amid the ripening of their friendship since the late eighteenth century. The sense of closeness between the two states was naturally and consistently generated by their common identities, rooted in the two states’ shared culture, common language, historical ties and shared political values and institutions. In 1782, after it was reminded by Britain of the possibility of French pursuing deceptive tactics, the United States had decided to ignore its treaty with France, which obliged them not to make separate peace with other states.

I have a fantastic old Burmese cookbook on my bookshelves, which proudly informs me that there is no need for feminism in Myanmar.

Great stuff, I think. Things must be totally equal here. So, why's that, then? Ah. Hang on.

There is no need for feminism, I learn, “because it is every Burmese woman's sole aim to become a wife.”

The situation for women in Myanmar is actually even more complicated, and multifaceted, than this suggests. Take the country's 2008 constitution. While article 348 proclaims: “The Union shall not discriminate any citizen of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, based on race, birth, religion, official position, status, culture, sex and wealth”, elsewhere, some government jobs are described as being “naturally suitable for men only”.

While Aung San Suu Kyi is currently the country's de facto leader, she first rose to prominence thanks to her famous father, the country's independence hero General Aung San.

While the country is 80th out of 159 countries in the United Nations’ most recent gender equality index, it is higher than many of its neighbours: Cambodia (112), Laos (106), and even India (125).

And looking at the situation in the past does not clear things up much, either. There is an amazing article in The Atlantic from 1958 by Mya Sein, former head of the Burma Women's Council. It recounts how she was surprised by how fiercely the British colonialists fought back against attempts by the more emancipated Burmese women to get some female representation in the Legislature in 1927.

The backward Brits didn't hold out, though; the first Burmese woman was elected in 1929. But some would argue the situation since then has gone backwards. As the country unravelled in the hands of the generals in the latter half of the twentieth century, women's rights took a similar nosedive.

As such, there are still effectively no laws protecting women from domestic violence, and rape is routinely used as a weapon of war in regional ethnic conflicts. In some rural areas, women have no inheritance rights, no sexual education, and no access to contraception.

WHEN I go to meet Devi Thant Cin, I get lost — even though she lives on one of the most famous roads in Yangon, metres away from the Buddhist symbol of a nation, the shining, golden Shwedagon Pagoda, and next to the tomb of the country's last queen.

I call in a panic, and a small, friendly woman appears at a gate close to a small stall selling 3-in-1 coffee sachets. She waves at me from behind a grinning betel nut vendor.

“Come in, come in, here I am,” she beams, taking my arm and ushering me in to her two-storey half-wooden, half-concrete house. It's homely, but basic; you go in through a part-glass lean-to, and then snaking wooden stairs lead past boxes of papers and shelves groaning with pictures, rocks, and small statues.

In a way, that's what threw me in the first place. You see, before I met Devi Thant Cin, I already knew she was a princess. She is descended from Myanmar's last royals, King Thibaw and Queen Supalayat, who were deposed and exiled by the British colonialists nearly 150 years ago in 1885.

I'd been told that her family had been given the house by the former British governor of Myanmar (then Burma), Sir Reginald Hugh-Dorman Smith, in the 1940s. Given the general British respect for royalty (once they have stripped them of any actual power, of course, and at the safe distance of a few generations), I'd assumed that the descendants would have been given something a bit more, well, palatial.

Devi thinks this is funny.

“I have lived here for fifty years,” she says simply. “It was given to my grandfather for religious purposes, to look after the tomb of Queen Supalayat [the last queen of Burma, and Devi's great-grandmother].”

She shares the house with two other royal descendant families. Her attitude gives me a clue about her general attitude towards her glittering genealogy. It's a fact, and she is proud of it, but she doesn't really expect anything because of it; and in fact, she would be horrified if she was treated differently because of it.

THERE IS a persistent Western myth that the Burmese language has no word for vagina. It's a convenient symbol for journalists, often used to represent Myanmar's sexual repression and lack of reproductive rights for women.

Unfortunately for the neatness of the analogy, the myth is not true. There are direct translations for vagina in Burmese and in many of Myanmar's other languages. And in rapidly developing, worldly Yangon, sex is often on show: condoms are on sale in some corner shops, some bold young women have started to dress as sexily as they like, and couples canoodle under strategically placed umbrellas at sunset by Kandawgi lakeside.

There's a dark side to this too; there are brothels in many towns, and even so-called tinsel bars, where men pick their women by throwing strings of glittery paper around their necks and paying for their time and “attention”.

However, none of this means that talking about sex in this country is easy.

Mu Tha Paw is thirty-four years old. She is Karen, part of an ethnic group who live mainly in Myanmar and Thailand. They have a different language, traditions, and even dress than the ethnic Bamar people who make up around 70 per cent of Myanmar's population.

And the Karen approach to sex is about as taboo as it gets. While the Karen language does have a word for vagina — poe tha klayi, which literally means “the way that the baby comes out” — it's basically unmentionable, rarely used even in a family or health setting.

That's why it's a shock to hear Mu Tha Paw breezily talking about vaginal exams, IUDs and the contraceptive implant (often using the English terms) within two minutes of sitting down next to me, in a bamboo-shack café on the roadside next to Mae La refugee camp in Thailand.

But then, Mu Tha Paw is no ordinary woman. She is a sexual health nurse and a refugee, one of hundreds of thousands of Karen who fled war in their homeland of Myanmar, and she has trained herself out of embarrassment because she wants to help other women.

MI MI was riding her bike home from work with her father in Thanbyuzyat, Mon state, when it happened.

It was dark.

“When I turned around, I saw his face,” she says. “I was talking to my dad while we rode home on our bikes. I knew there was a bike behind us, but I hadn't turned around yet to see who it was. I thought it was just people on their way home like us.

“Then there was a splash. The first splash was on my chest. I turned around to see what it was. Then I saw his face. He splashed the second time right to my face.”

The liquid that was splashing was acid, and the “he” splashing it was Mi Mi's ex-boyfriend.

“I cannot find the words to describe the pain,” says Mi Mi.

I meet Mi Mi (she does not want to give her real name) in September 2016, six months after the attack, and her injuries are still horrific.

Seriously scarred down one side of her face, she has lost one eye and nearly her ear as well, and her arms and chest are also badly damaged. The injuries are blue and purple and vivid. Her father was also hit during the attack, on his back.

Mi Mi and I meet in a Mon monastery in the centre of Yangon. She stays here when she comes into the country's biggest city for treatment, around once a month.

It's a warm day at the end of rainy season, but it's not too hot, and as we enter the red and gold monastery, my translator and I pass men outside playing chinlone, a kind of keepy-uppy/volleyball with a straw ball that is extremely popular in Myanmar. We're welcomed in by a friendly older lady and taken behind a curtained-off section of the monastery. We later find out this is because Mi Mi does not want to go outside, at least not while there are people there.

WHEN I first meet Cheery Zahau, she's pregnant with her first child, and so am I. She's about one month further along than me, and we share a little whine about morning sickness before she reassures me that it will get better soon, which is a lifeline I cling to for some time. I feel sheepish because while she had morning sickness, she travelled Myanmar interviewing youth groups and rape survivors, while I mainly stayed in my flat in the air conditioning, eating my way out of the nausea.

There's another coincidence too: both of our sisters are also pregnant. But that's where the similarities end, because a few months after we meet, her sister gives birth.

Her baby is healthy, but her experience is horrible, and it stems from the racism in Myanmar that Cheery has been fighting against her whole life. Cheery and her family are Chin, an ethnic group from the north of the country. Her people are no longer at war with the Burmese government, but they have been widely discriminated against for decades, and their region remains amongst the poorest and most neglected in a country where there is stiff competition for that miserable crown.

Cheery's sister had her baby in Yangon, where Cheery's family now live. First of all, the electricity went out, leaving her sister to deliver by torchlight for two hours. She was bleeding too much, cold and frightened, but there were no doctors to help. When Cheery went to find some doctors, she was told: “You Chin people, you all come in the labour room, are you bringing your whole nation here? You can't be here, get out.”

The next intervention from a medical professional came from a nurse, shouting: “Where is that Chin?” and handing Cheery a file. Hours later, when she was trying to stay because her sister (who speaks Chin but not Burmese) needed an interpreter, Cheery was told: “This hospital is not for those who can't speak.”

Cheery, shocked by the whole experience, wrote online: “Because of this type of people, I am disgusted [by] this country.”

The term “special relationship” has been used by many states to characterize a specific set of their bilateral ties with other states: for example, the ties between the United States and the United Kingdom; the United States and Canada; the United States and Israel; France and the Sub-Saharan African states; and Spain and the Latin American states. The meaning of a special relationship is centred on the term “special”. It usually means a quality that is exceptional in a positive sense. Consequently, a special relationship between two states is generally being understood as a close friendship.

The concept of a special relationship remains under-defined and underconceptualized. A large part of the meaning of this concept has been introduced by politicians, which often entails sentimental expressions. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reiterated her understanding of the Anglo-American special relationship during her speech in Washington in 1985: “[i]t is Special. It just is. And that's that!” she asserted. Margaret Thatcher's assertion reflects politicians’ instinctive understanding of the concept of a special relationship. Such instinctive tendency contributes to the opacity of the concept. Feldman has pointed out that an obvious reason for the absence of a definition of a special relationship is “the brevity with which journalists are forced to write or with which politicians and government are obliged to speak”. Systematic disentangling of what has been said about a special relationship, therefore, is necessary in order to establish an understanding of the concept which best reflects its real meaning.

The essence of a special relationship is reflected by its association with close friendship. As Aristotle had noted, “no one can have complete friendship with many people”. A friendship fundamentally means a relationship that is different from other relations. Friendships are commonly understood as “a relationship satisfying cognitive and emotional needs and characterized by reciprocity, trust, openness, honesty, acceptance, and loyalty”. In other words, a friendship is an intimate relationship that is “necessarily exclusive”.

The intimate nature of a friendship means that friends depend on each other for creating “a stable sense of Self”, in which they constantly confirm and adapt their ideas of order. Berenskoetter has pointed out that throughout history, “friendships have been identified as being capable of both strengthening and undermining order”.

A theory needs concepts to formulate its explanations. To develop a theoretical framework of a special relationship, this chapter seeks to outline the definitional concepts that constitute such relationships. Based on the review of literature in Chapter 2, this study defines a special relationship as follows:

The above definition brings to light the key conceptual components that constitute a special relationship: the concepts of power, identity and expectation. This chapter hence begins with the explanations of the three concepts.

As this study looks at how a special relationship could evolve into a pluralistic security community, the defining feature of such a community, namely, dependable expectations of peaceful change, therefore also stands as one of the key conceptual components of a special relationship.

The most obvious characteristic of a pluralistic security community is the absence of war among the states involved. As such, such a community is founded on the war avoidance norms shared by the states involved. States have to learn to avoid war between them before being able to renounce their defense gesture against each other. Viewed in this light, the concept of norms has to be among the key conceptual components of a special relationship.

At the beginning of this book, I talked about hope, and how the world's hope in Aung San Suu Kyi has all but died as her government oversees what has all the hallmarks of genocide against the Rohingya in Rakhine State.

But I also talked about how, for all her faults, it was a speech by Aung San Suu Kyi that first set me on the path of meeting the remarkable women whose stories you have just read.

“Democracy is belief in the people,” she said, speaking at the rally I mentioned in the Preface, as the sun beat down on the crowds in the fevered last few days before the November 2015 election.

A few days later, I was in the throng outside the NLD's headquarters in Yangon as the election results came in.

This time, it was raining, proper big droplet, soak-you-to-the-skin rain, but the mood was jubilant. Many were wearing NLD red, and some had bandanas knotted around their heads. Everyone was singing, and some were crying with joy as they watched the results arrive in Myanmar's first openly contested election in decades.

One man looked at the sky behind us. “Rain?” he said in English. “No problem!”

But for me and my kit, it was a slight problem, so I headed off to find shelter for a few hours until the rain eased off. Actually, as I walked towards a nearby café, the rain only got more intense; really hammering it down as my friend and I nudged past the human chain of volunteers forming a protective barrier between the revellers and the traffic.

With hopeless umbrellas and flooded streets, trousers plastered to our thighs and flip-flops in hand (nearly washed away by the flood), we pushed open the café doorway.

There was a beauty salon upstairs where we thought we could possibly borrow towels. Walking meekly up the staircase, leaving little rivulets of rainwater cascading down behind us, we were seized and bundled into a side room.

Switching on the air-con to the highest setting (to heat us up and take away the moisture from — well, us), the beauticians grinned and gestured at hairdryers and towels.

They didn't speak much English and I hardly speak any Burmese, but the message was clear: get in here, you silly foreigners, and let us help you.

IN MYANMAR, one of the most common everyday sights is a line of Buddhist monks, barefoot, shaven headed, clad in scarlet robes. Early in the morning, they queue up outside shops, houses and restaurants to receive alms — food and support from lay people.

For foreigners, they are also one of the most exotic sights, eagerly snapped on smartphones and cameras. But you don't just see monks. There are nuns too, also with bare feet and shaven heads. They normally wear pink robes with an orange sash.

However, according to the type of Buddhism practised in Myanmar, they are not really nuns at all. According to Theravada Buddhism, women cannot be ordained as nuns, because their order is basically extinct. They are, at best, known as “renunciants”, lay women who have taken vows to live according to Buddha's teachings — and there are 60,000 of them in Myanmar (despite their official non-existence).

But these nuns can't preach, become senior members of the Buddhist community, or even enter some parts of pagodas. They also don't get anywhere near the respect afforded to monks in this deeply religious country, and often even struggle for food donations. It's hardly the image of equality, tolerance and harmony that Buddhism often has in the West.

Ketu Mala is a Burmese nun, and she's not happy about this inequality. She's not just any nun, either. She founded the incredibly successful Dhamma School Foundation, which brings Buddhist teachings into education in Myanmar. She recently met UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and leads lectures all over Asia. And she's a feminist — a feminist nun.

We meet in one of her friend's houses near Yangon airport.

“Let's face it,” she says, speaking partly in English and partly Burmese.

“Myanmar has and has had a male-dominated, patriarchal society, which also means the majority of religion is also dominated by men. The role of women in the religious sector can sometimes even be remarked upon as non-existent. It's that small. Why? Because the patriarchy is deep-rooted in Myanmar, this is the main point.”

To even say these kinds of things in Myanmar is pretty incendiary. Ketu Mala explains that the leading monks in Myanmar, known as the Bhikkhu Sangha, find this kind of talk threatening.

YIN MYO Su is probably Myanmar's most famous cat-lover. This makes it a little disconcerting when she tells me, moments after we meet for the first time at her floating hotel on Inle Lake, that she doesn't like cats.

“You will laugh, but I hate cats,” she says, looking down at the bluegrey felines slinking affectionately around her legs. “When I was little, kittens near my house would come and hurt my puppy's nose.”

The cats blink their golden eyes and look back up at her. “I do not like cats,” she repeats, firmly.

But love them or hate them, she has become known for them — not just in Myanmar, but across the world. Yin Myo Su, a hotelier by trade, found out in 2007 that the world-renowned Burmese cat barely existed at all in its homeland, Burma. So she began a mission to bring them back.

Working with a couple of heritage organizations, and starting off with just seven cats bought from collectors around the world at eye-watering expense — including breeders in Australia and the pet department of London's Harrods department store — she now has around forty felines, living on an island of their own (I'm not joking) on the picturesque lake in Shan State, attached to the hotel she runs. She lives at another hotel, across the lake.

The cats are housed in mini-replicas of Burmese royal palaces, a nod to their rumoured heritage as palace guards for Burma's ancient kings and queens. Their home is called the Burmese Cat Village, and signposted as such. They have pedicures and manicures, family planning, a dedicated staff, and even a honeymoon suite. One of them even tweets (@Phyuley).

Some are given away to locals, and foreigners can also buy the beasts, at a price-tag of US$600. Aung San Suu Kyi even had one, but she had to give it back because her dog was jealous

The project is about more than just pet cats, though.

“I see Burma losing the things we have, like jade, and as the country opens up we could do something that would preserve our heritage,” says Yin Myo Su, a petite, forty-four-year-old bustling businesswoman, who usually dresses in jewelled colours and is known to most as Misuu.