Rights refused: Grassroots activism and state violence in Myanmar By Elliott Prasse-Freeman. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 366 pp.

Abstract

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar ended a decade-long period of liberal reforms. The reform period saw a shift from outright military dictatorship to military-backed civilian rule, thoroughgoing market deregulation, and attempts by workers, peasants, and students to contest top-down electoralism and intensified export-oriented extractivism. The 2010s also expanded research opportunities in Myanmar's central lowlands, where restrictions under military rule prevented fieldwork for decades. Based on research conducted largely during the 2010s, Elliott Prasse-Freeman's Rights Refused is one of the first ethnographies to reopen Myanmar's lowland ethnographic archive. Establishing a critical vantage point on the reform period, Prasse-Freeman rejects the familiar liberal narrative of Myanmar, rooted in Cold War knowledge politics, which sees democracy and authoritarianism locked in timeless conflict. Instead, the book follows activists, farmers, and workers who struggle with land, labor, and resources. Crucially, these subjects not only organize against the past and present of military power, but they also refuse rights-based liberal imaginaries—pointing toward futures less bound by the antinomies of the past.

Rights Refused is an ethnography of activist life. It presents a portrait of a particular activist group, the Community Development Initiative (CDI), and some of its key figures, not least the itinerant Ko Taw. Chapter 1, however, begins by laying out the political world that CDI and Ko Taw inhabit, a world that takes the form of a specific governmental regime: blunt biopolitics. Blunt biopolitics is blunt in three senses: “uncaring for the protection of life, obtuse in its forms of knowing that life, and reliant on violence (‘blunt,’ as in ‘blunt force trauma’)” (p. xxii). This is reflected in the state's treatment of both the protesters who rose after the 2021 coup, many of whom it killed, and flood victims, whom it ignored. For Prasse-Freeman, the bluntness of this biopolitical regime is typical of postcolonial states that lack the capacity and ambition of, say, South Africa, with its basic income grants, or India, with its biometric-identification projects. Nevertheless, biopolitics names a regime of power in Myanmar, where a specific political logic still regulates or disregards life itself. Even in its disregard—a necropolitics, but a force among others—life remains an organizing feature of this governmental regime.

Part 2 shows how being an activist in Myanmar means navigating this regime. In chapter 2 activists like Ko Taw, who helped found CDI, construct their sense of self around refusing and resisting Myanmar's regime. Featured prominently are processes of radicalization, of becoming political prisoners, and impacts on family life. Ko Taw becomes estranged from his family, who struggle to understand his commitment to activist life. Meanwhile, CDI's office is a squat, two-story home on Yangon's periphery. It is a hub for activities of many kinds, from collecting donations for flood victims to free education for local youth. It is also where Ko Taw and other CDI activists plan to support those who ask for their help, such as rural farmers and factory workers. Prasse-Freeman argues that eventful moments of resistance—from the postcoup insurrection to less obvious protests against land dispossession—reflect and depend on these thicker lifeworlds of refusal, without which resistance would be impossible. These protest repertoires are further explored through plow protests in which farmers reoccupy land stolen by developers (chap. 3) and occult cursing ceremonies that aim to shame state actors, like the country's human rights icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was then in office (chap. 4).

Part 3 turns to rights discourse in Myanmar. In chapter 5, Prasse-Freeman shows that, for workers, peasants, and the poor more generally, rights are not a fixture of political life. To the extent that they enter political activity at all, they are perceived as contingent—not universal, a priori entitlements, but things that, at best, one can lose, gain, and lose and gain again during political struggle as much as everyday life. Hence the open-ended, iterative nature of political activity throughout the book: defeats are never final, but neither are any victories. At issue again is blunt biopolitics. Myanmar subjects can expect little from an uncaring, unknowing, and violent regime of power, certainly not protective entitlements. It falls to their own prerogative, instead, to build lives and political community in whatever fragile ways possible—hence the slippage in the Burmese language between rights and opportunities (captured by the same word: akwint-ayay).

Chapter 6 examines the expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar. While international organizations and NGOs use rights discourse to frame the Rohingya as part of a prefigured, rights-bearing humanity temporarily thrown off course, Prasse-Freeman argues that anti-Rohingya violence had a more specific function during the 2010s reform period. A constitutive exclusion, Rohingya expulsion secured and made palatable the generalized structural violence experienced almost daily by non-Rohingya subjects under Myanmar's blunt biopolitical regime. Anti-Rohingya violence thus shores up a remaking of the polity during a precarious period of reform. The conclusion traces how Myanmar subjects’ refusal of rights-based imaginaries might translate in the Global North, where liberalism is more deeply embedded.

Helping close a decades-long gap in Myanmar's lowland ethnographic archive, Rights Refused is part of a new generation of scholarship made possible by the reform period. Yet it is highly indebted to much earlier work on Myanmar. Before the onset of research restrictions after the 1962 military coup, anthropological research on politics orbited around peasant studies and questions of resistance, on the one hand, and studies of political culture, on the other, from the village to the national level. In Rights Refused, resistance and rebellion, alongside the cultural determinants of political activity and ideas, remain pressing themes despite obvious changes in the historical and material conditions that once drove attention to those questions (for instance, peasant wars for national liberation, decolonization and the Cold War, the anti-Communism of Cold War American area studies).

Arguably anachronistic, this approach is somewhat justified by an intense focus on a regime of power—blunt biopolitics—that Prasse-Freeman sees as roughly continuous with earlier decades’ forms of rule in Myanmar. The result, however, is a state-situated understanding of politics, one that screens out not only larger shifts in the world system's processes of extraction, accumulation, and valorization, but also shifts in the state form globally—all of which shape the political in crucial ways. Throughout the text, there is some awkwardness in how sites of extraction and dispossession, urban restructuring, and peasant livelihoods are handled, mainly locally, filtered through Foucauldian questions of state, power, discourse, and conduct. Because its analysis is scaled to the level of the state, Rights Refused is curiously compatible not only with the quasi-bounded, holistic cultural theory long associated with the anthropology of Southeast Asia (now generally criticized), but also with the liberal predisposition to view the state as the horizon for the political as such.

In addition, Rights Refused presents itself as an ethnography of activism. Yet the hinge between activism and activists is not straightforward. While plow protests, for instance, might intuitively come across as activism or as happening within social worlds associated with activism, it is striking that “activist” appears to be a term reserved for Ko Taw and CDI. Farmers, workers, and students who protest are not generally referred to as activists. What are the (unwritten) political connotations of activism here? To whom does activism belong? The activist does appear to be a recognizable social type in Myanmar, but it is worth asking more directly why it seems applicable in some settings and not others. Moreover, activist translates poorly into Burmese, and it is not widely used. It also implies proximity to a kind of political subject—self-sovereign, autonomous, agentive—held dear in the liberal tradition. One might ask what is at stake for the book's wider critique of liberal narratives and their projection onto Myanmar.

Despite these concerns, Rights Refused is essential reading for anyone interested in politics, activism, and the state in contemporary Myanmar. Especially important is its story of how Myanmar subjects refuse rights-based liberal imaginaries, given that, since the 2021 coup, the simplistic narrative of liberalism's struggle against authoritarianism has dominated international understandings of Myanmar. By turns challenging and provocative, Rights Refused pries open Myanmar politics to a much more capacious, yet much more grounded, set of inquiries.