Until 2011 Myanmar had been as if asleep for quite some time. When Myanmar woke up, it was abruptly faced with a world economy in crisis, including the sovereign debt crisis in the European Union and economic recession in the United States. While the economies of many countries in the Southeast Asian region (except, perhaps, for countries that had an adequate level of domestic consumption, such as Indonesia) suffered various impacts as a result of these developments, particularly because of their effect on international trade and investment, for Myanmar the blows were shattering.

In addition to these external factors, which have had both direct and indirect impacts on the national economy as well as on regional economies, Myanmar has been struggling to address internal multi-dimensional problems that had developed over past years. Myanmar was isolated for many decades, but despite this, the Myanmar government did try systematically to tackle development issues in various sectors. The quick fixes and short-term therapies that were practised in the past caused these inter-connected issues to become more complex, which means that now systematic multi-dimensional policies are needed to address them adequately. Aiming at developing a more systematic approach for resolving these issues, the Myanmar government has drafted a reform framework, under which sectoral priority areas for people-centered development have been identified through a multi-dimensional approach. Among these priority areas are some in which quick wins for the nation and the people have been further identified.

Among all the priority areas for development identified in Myanmar's overall reform framework, numerous measures were specified for early action, taking into account the proper sequencing for development. If you were to ask me whether or not this process has produced a perfect reform framework for Myanmar, I would have to say that that goal is still a long way off, and the framework far from perfect. However, with sustained commitment on the part of the government and others, tremendous efforts are being made to move things forward in every possible way.

Perceptions of Myanmar's reforms vary, and expectations for Myanmar's socio-economic development are great. There are many people, including the majority of the international community, who appreciate the significant progress in the area of political and economic reform that the government of Myanmar has already achieved, with the result that the majority of international sanctions against Myanmar have been either lifted totally or suspended.

Five decades ago Ne Win set Burma on the way to socialism, with a development plan that sought to reduce foreign influence and put the military-controlled government at the centre of the economy. Under President U Thein Sein, an ambitious reform agenda is seeking to undo the legacy of isolation and set Myanmar on the way to capitalism by opening up the country to foreign trade and investment.

After decades of military rule and ethnic conflict, a civilian administration was sworn in on 30 March 2011, following elections held in November 2010. The new government immediately embarked on a range of political and economic reforms aimed at attaining national reconciliation, improved governance, and economic development. With a quarter of its citizens living below the poverty line, considerable weaknesses in transport infrastructure, and one of the lowest rates of access to modern telecommunications in the world, Myanmar faces a tremendous development challenge.

Reform achievements to date have been significant, but have largely addressed macro-economic issues and have not required additional budgetary spending. Expectations for real welfare improvements have built up, but little effort has been made to address poverty, fulfil the population's unmet needs for healthcare and education, or upgrade Myanmar's infrastructure to improve domestic competitiveness. Addressing these problems will require massive funds that can only be found through donor support, improved mobilization of internal revenue from those with a taxable surplus, reform of the loss-making state-owned economic enterprise sector, and mobilizing sub-national governments to implement reforms.

The purpose of this economic update is to provide an overview of major economic developments since the government of President U Thein Sein assumed office on 30 March 2011, and to survey trends and outline expectations for future economic development. In this chapter the authors analyze the reforms, their impact, and the needs and prospects for further economic change during the run-up to the 2015 election. Particular attention is paid to the obstacles that will be faced by reformers when they seek simultaneously to develop the economy, reduce the role of state-owned economic enterprises and improve the business climate; to transform the national budget from an instrument for mobilizing funds for the armed forces to a driver of economic development; and to activate sub-national governments.

For a long time, analysts and commentators have labelled the various army-dominated types of government that Myanmar has experienced since General Ne Win first seized power in 1958 as “military dictatorships”, without making much of a distinction between them. Little effort has been made to differentiate the various forms of political intervention the Burmese armed forces (or Tatmadaw) and its successive leaderships have favoured over the past six decades. To better grasp the diverse realities of the Tatmadaw’s enduring interventionism—and, more particularly, the landscape shaped by the transition that began in 2011—this chapter rediscovers old theoretical models of the “praetorian state”. The literature on praetorianism highlights the patterns and drivers behind the military's intrusion into state policy-making, and examines plausible paths towards military disengagement. Above all, it distinguishes different forms of political intervention by armed forces (from direct rule to indirect forms of influence and policy control) and evaluates their impact on political stability, governance, and democratization.

I argue hereafter that Myanmar has long been a “praetorian state”, with its armed forces enjoying various degrees of policy control. All the requisites of a praetorian state can be identified in the country since its independence in 1948: an unruly political and civilian scene; a fragmented, if not polarized, post-colonial society constantly at war with itself; and extensive perceptions of domestic and external threats, all clearly formulated by a leviathan-type army institution able to deal with its internal differences and appear as a unified, cohesive, and disciplined organization with vested interests.

These praetorian patterns did not vanish with the startling transformations initiated by President Thein Sein's administration after 2011. Therefore, drawing on classical categorizations of praetorian regimes may help us better to construe the militarization of Burmese political affairs, and understand in particular the implications of the military-civil transition observed after the disbanding of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in March 2011.

The passage from direct military rule to a quasi-civilian government is a classic example of “praetorian transition”. Over time, military institutions move up, or down, the scale of praetorianism, according to their interests and ability in seeking more or less control over policy-making. In the post- SPDC landscape—which had been foreshadowed since the adoption in 2003 of a “Road Map” towards a “discipline-flourishing democracy”—the Burmese military institution has transferred to civilians much of the power it had monopolized during the years since 1988.

In March 2011 ex-General and former State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) Prime Minister Thein Sein became President of Myanmar, under the banner of reform and transition to democracy. The international community hailed this news as fundamentally positive after decades of military rule. However, the response of the people inside Myanmar was more sceptical, as was the response of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), who initially advocated a response of “cautious optimism”. On 9 June 2011, three months into the presidency of Thein Sein's quasi-civilian government, what has been described as the largest military offensive in modern-day Myanmar (KWAT 2013, pp. 11–12) was launched against the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), breaking a seventeen-year ceasefire. Within the first year of Thein Sein's presidency the country saw the forced displacement of over 200,000 civilians in Kachin and Shan States in the north and Rakhine State in the west.

This chapter explores the on-going use of violence and terror as a means to force the objectives of the Myanmar government and its army on the Kachin people. It highlights the continuing historical patterns of the Myanmar government and military or both acting simultaneously, and their attempt to exert centralized power and control over ethnic areas through the use of violence and terror. In the case of the Kachin there are two processes at work: the first is the Myanmar state's systematic use of terror against its citizens, based on enduring ethnocentric ideologies; and second, the Kachin struggle for political self-determination and equality. In tracking the future trajectories of Myanmar's stated reform, it is essential to address the Myanmar government's systematic and institutionalized culture, mentality, and tactics of state terrorism.

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF STATE TERRORISM

A spirit of resistance was impressed upon me from an early age by my parents. I had, of course, grown up with stories of how my father, former Prime Minister U Nu, General Aung San, and countless other Burmese patriots had fought against British and Japanese imperialism, and won independence for the nation. In my father's case, his long career in resistance started at the tender age of fourteen, when he was part of a group of villagers that had assembled to give some visiting British colonial officers a less-than-warm reception at the local docks. He was arrested for his part in this incident, the first of many sojourns in prison over the course of his life (Butwell 1965; U Nu 1975). I was fifteen years old when armed soldiers loyal to General Ne Win stormed into our house in Rangoon in the early hours of 2 March 1962. In order to avoid any violence, my parents did as they were told, and my father was led away to prison that night. As soon as the soldiers and tanks moved away from our house, however, my mother made sure my brothers and I went to school as though nothing had happened. This was her way of showing any who supported the military's actions that we were not cowed by the previous night's events, and that we had nothing to fear either.

As we all know, General Ne Win's actions on that night have had a deep and lasting effect on the course of modern Burmese history. In the years following my father's release from prison, in October 1966, we lived in exile, initially by the Thai-Burma border. It was during the five years spent at various rebel pro-democracy camps in these forests that I met my husband, U Aung Nyein, who was at the time an officer in the rebel army. At the invitation of the Government of India, my parents and I moved to Calcutta, and then to Bhopal. My parents were allowed to return permanently to Burma in 1980, and my husband and I settled down in New Delhi in the same year.

WORKING IN INDIA AND THE 1988 UPRISING

At the time of the 1988 student uprising in Burma, I was working as a translator-announcer in the Burmese Language Unit of All India Radio, the state-owned national radio service of India.

Myanmar is, at last, entering a period of democratization. However, a great deal of uncertainty remains, as the contents of this book reveal. What sort of democracy Myanmar might eventually become remains unclear, and we cannot make many assumptions about the intentions of many of the individuals and organizations central to the process of democratization. The reform process is neither smooth nor certain, and much uncertainty remains about the prospects for implementation of policies, even where the will for genuine change exists on the part of at least some in the national leadership.

Experts on democracy and democratization talk about the need both to enable and to consolidate democratic practices, so that new forms of social and political behaviour are “routinized” and become habitual (Linz and Stepan 1996). The democratization process in Myanmar has not yet had sufficient time for us to speak of democratic practices being habitual; nevertheless, participants at the 2013 Myanmar/Burma Update Conference, whose contributions comprise the contents of this book, have been keen to explore the extent to which the new government in Myanmar has so far succeeded in its pursuit of ambitious reforms.

Key questions asked at the conference that have made their way into this volume address whether or not the government's reform agenda will fully embrace democratization, and if so, in what ways, or whether the government might attempt to push back against public aspirations for improvements and reforms. Some observers of the political changes that have occurred since the previous conference in May 2011, such as Morten Pedersen, were inclined to concur that the reform program was a calculated long-term strategy and seemed irreversible. They pointed to the many new policy initiatives from the centre, the apparent sincerity of elite actors about the need for consensus on democratic transition, and the growing popular sentiment for social and political change, as evidence that the country is firmly on a democratizing path. In holding this view, Pedersen is joined by other prominent Myanmar watchers (see, for instance, Callahan 2012; Emmerson 2012; Min Zin and Joseph 2012).

In his foreword to this volume, Deputy Minister of National Planning and Economic Development and former academic Winston Set Aung notes the complexity of reforms, and the potential for one reform or set of reforms to be derailed by set-backs in others, due to the interconnectedness of the overall agenda.

On every available index, Myanmar is still one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, and it has been one of the most conflictridden countries in modern times. Women represent more than half the population of approximately of 59.13 million. This means the active participation of womenfolk in social, economic, and political life is crucial for the country's sustainable economic development and peace initiatives— and, inevitably, that gender is an important matter, particularly in the current historical transformative reforms under the current President U Thein Sein. Yet to date the prospects for peace and alleviation of poverty in Myanmar have not often been analysed from a gender perspective. Whilst women are overrepresented among the poorest of the poor, they are underrepresented in political administration, privileged positions, and decision-making, and have unequal access to power and resources. Like women in many other countries, they are the sole bearers of gender-specific responsibilities as the primary producers of food and caretakers of the family. They also have an extra burden due to lack of infrastructure and modern technologies, such as domestic equipment or a regular supply of electricity. What is more, over half a century of militarization has created a gender hierarchy, and patriarchal ideologies create structural inequality between women and men.

This ethnographically-informed paper is drawn from multi-sited fieldwork carried out from 2009 to 2012 in Myanmar, Thailand, and Australia, and includes interviews, life stories, and surveys. It will focus on how militarization has affected the power and status of women, and how women suffer in their everyday lives from gendered discrimination and widespread poverty. I discuss how women in Myanmar struggle daily for subsistence—san, si and sa, which is to say, rice, oil and salt. I associate their dire poverty with both gender inequality and failed development, and discuss how patriarchal ideologies, policies, inflation, lack of modern technology, collapsing infrastructure, and inadequate health care impact on the lives of women.

MILITARIZATION, POVERTY AND GENDER

Militarization since 1962 has made Myanmar into one of the world's biggest producers of refugees, trafficked persons, forced migrants, and child labourers. It is among the poorest nations, even by regional standards (Lintner 1990; Fink 2001). In 1988, under the pressure of nation-wide protests led by students, and after twenty-six years in power, General Ne Win was forced to admit that his “Burmese way to socialism” was a failure (Lintner 1990).

Introduction

Networks of cross-cultural exchange served as channels for the movement of Buddhism across Asia. Just as trade networks facilitate long-distance economic transactions, religious networks contribute to the mobility of beliefs and practices, as well as dynamic processes of migration, conversion, pilgrimage, and monastic expansion. Network analysis has been applied more extensively to the natural and social sciences, particularly economics, but scholars in the humanities, in general, and religious studies, in particular, tend to suspect that network models are overly functional, reductionist, and deterministic. Critics of network analysis observe that extreme applications severely limit the role of intention and agency since models aim to show how actors are governed by systematic patterns in a structured system. However, Buddhist monks, missionaries, pilgrims, and other religious agents are not merely acted upon by static structures but create their own networks of religious mobility. Thus, parallel networks of religious exchange and transmission overlap with but are not necessarily embedded within exogenous economic, political and social networks. Religious and economic networks often share routes and hubs since centres of power and wealth have multiple functions as places of veneration and cultural production. By linking monastic communities with sources of economic and social support, Buddhist networks act as catalysts for expansion and long-distance transmission.

Buddhist archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence demonstrates links between regional networks of shrines and monasteries that facilitated religious transmission and long-distance trade networks. From the earliest periods, wealthy and powerful donors funded stūpas and monasteries in locations near cities and in prosperous rural areas with surplus resources to support monastic communities. Patterns in the distribution of Buddhist material remains reflect symbiotic relationships between the growth of trade networks, the support of rulers, and the expansion of Buddhism across geographical and cultural boundaries. As the establishment and survival of residential Buddhist monasteries depended on basic material conditions, the growth of the samgha was directly tied to the generosity of wealthy donors, including merchants involved in commercial exchanges. While Buddhist institutional expansion is not fully determined by economics alone (since other social and cultural factors are also necessary to stimulate donations in exchange for religious merit), religious and economic spheres are mutually imbricated.

INTRODUCTION

Most of the Indian Abhidharma texts available in Tibetan translation were produced in the ninth century by the Tibetan translators Ska ba dpal brtsegs, Ye shes sde, and Cog ro klu'i rgyal mtshan in collaboration with the Indian panditas Jinamitra, Śīlendrabodhi, Prajnāvarman, Dānaśīla, and Viśuddhisim{ ha. They prepared translations of the Abhidharmasamuccaya (P 5550) and its commentaries, the Abhidharmasamuccayabhāsya (P 5554) and the Abhidharmasamuccayavyākhyā (P 5555), of parts of the Prajnaptiśāstra (P 5587-5589), of the Abhidharmakośa(bhāsya) (P 5590 and 5591) and its commentary, the Sphutārthā Abhidharmakośavyākhyā (P 5593), of the Sārasamuccaya (P 5598), as well as of the Pancaskandhaka (P 5560) and its three commentaries, namely, Sthiramati's Pancaskandhakavibhāsā (P 5567), Gunaprabha's Pancaskandhavivarana (P 5568) and *Prthivībandhu's Pancaskandhabhāsya (P 5569). The latest translation of an Indian Abhidharma treatise into Tibetan was probably produced by the Tibetan grammarian and translator Chos skyong bzang po (1441-1527/28), also known by his Sanskrit name Dharmapālabhadra, who rendered into Tibetan Sthiramati's extensive commentary on the Abhidharmakośabhāsya, the Abhidharmakośabhāsyatīkā Tattvārthā (P 5875).

Despite the existence of a great variety of Abhidharma works in the Tibetan canon, only two of these texts made their way into the general curriculum of Tibetan monastic education and were transmitted in a continuous lineage: the Abhidharmakośa(bhāsya) and the Abhidharmasamuccaya. Remarkably, the teaching transmission of the Abhidharmasamuccaya is considered to have continued uninterruptedly from the ninth century, even through the “grey period” of Tibetan history (i.e. through post-imperial times from 842 until the end of the tenth century), while the Abhidharmakośabhāsya was reintroduced to Tibet by the Indian pandita Smrti in the late tenth century after a gap in the early transmission lineage.

Besides the Abhidharmasamuccaya, the Abhidharma of the Yogācāras is also represented in the Tibetan tradition by a collection of indigenous works that deal exclusively with the Yogācāra concepts of the “notion of ‘I’” (klistamanas, nyon mongs pa can gyi yid) and the “store mind” (ālayavijnāna, kun gzhi rnam par shes pa).

INTRODUCTION

Buddhism, and no less so Theravāda Buddhism, has been a transnational movement right from its beginning. The Mauryan king, Aśoka's sending of monks to the regions adjacent to India in the third century bce is a well-known and oft-quoted example, and the spread of Buddhist texts and artefacts in subsequent centuries has been the subject of numerous studies. This expansion to the east culminated in the period between c. 800 and 1200 ce, when Buddhism gradually disappeared in its Indian homeland but simultaneously resurged as a mass religion in mainland Southeast Asia. It is important to note that this relationship was by no means unilinear, as Buddhists from outside South Asia regularly returned to the “Middle Country” to visit its sacred places, study in one of its monastic centres such as Nālandā or Anurādhapura, and exchange ideas, texts, ordination lineages and all kinds of artefacts.

At the heart of this exchange system lies the Bay of Bengal. Ever since Fernand Braudel's pioneering study of the Mediterranean, historians have recognised that the sea cannot only separate people but also bring them together and provide for the transfer of goods and ideas, as well as facilitate any other sort of exchange and communication. The ocean as a platform for intercourse, exchange and communication in all their forms – one could as well call it a “sea square” for this purpose – has thrilled historians ever since, making the study of oceans and their sub-systems, as well as the social and economic networks which they bear, an important field of historical research. Even though it is less closed than the Mediterranean, the Bay of Bengal seems to fit Braudel's model quite well. Landlocked on its northern and eastern sides, the Bay is open on its southern side, opening not only the Indian east coast for communication with Southeast Asia, but also serving as a link between the Indian Ocean in the west and the China Sea in the east. This maritime route was part of the larger “silk road of the sea,” which stretched from China through Southeast Asian waters and the Malacca Straits to south India into the Indian Ocean and further west towards the Red Sea and the east coast of Africa.