Article title: Blackouts, whitelists, and ‘terrorist others’: The role of sociotechnical imaginaries in Myanmar
Authors: S. Bächtold
Journal: JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2022.2152940
When the article was first published online, incorrect paragraph have been placed on Rethinking state formation in Myanmar with a technology lens & Leapfrogging to a connected nation
It should be:
Rethinking state formation in Myanmar with a technology lens
Although Myanmar is the site of the world’s longest running armed conflict that has spanned more than seven decades, the country has received comparatively little attention from scholars of international relations (Brenner and Han 2022). Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) continues eschewing the categories and seemingly established knowledge1 of how (Western) scholars traditionally think state formation. Speaking of ‘the’ state is already problematic in Myanmar, as they are multiple: Besides the central government and military, there are several areas controlled by ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) that over decades of armed conflict have formed into polities contesting the centre’s legitimacy. Some of these EAOs are dotted with formal, bureaucratic structures in the form of their own ministries of health or education – while others may be less formalised, but are still involved in governing through their military structures or practices of taxation (South 2017; Callahan 2007; Brenner 2019; Ong 2021).
The central state – the entity that most easily compares to Westphalian ideas of statehood – never established full control over all the territories comprised within Myanmar’s international borders. State formation in Myanmar thus appears not as a linear process towards a coherent whole, but as a continuous process of contestation among multiple state-like structures (South 2017), emerging political complexes (Callahan 2007), or mosaics of overlapping control and authority (Woods 2011). Consequentially, authority or government happens through a complex interplay of different forces in Myanmar’s borderlands, involving not only the Myanmar government, but also the fully-fledged state-like administrations of EAOs, the military, various militias, international development projects, or businesses (South 2017; Kiik 2016; Sadan 2013; Brenner 2019).
While this arrangement of actors stabilised to a certain extent over the decades (Smith 1999), the peace process initiated by the military in 2011 (Holliday 2011) has drastically shifted the landscape of where active hostilities took place, and has given rise to new alliances and rifts between a multitude of armed actors (Ferguson 2021; South 2017). The military’s coup in February 2021 has thoroughly upended this landscape again: A country-wide popular uprising against the coup in the form of street protests, strikes, and increasingly, (urban) guerrilla warfare has brought a plethora of new actors to this mix. Counter this fractionalisation, new alliances of actors emerged that are (re)united in their opposition to the military: Most prominently, the NUG – an exile government comprising elected parliament representatives deposed with the coup, but also EAOs, and PDFs that emerged in response to the military’s violent reaction to the protests (South 2021; Thawnghmung and Noah 2021).
Even before the coup, the ways in which authority was performed differed from locale to locale, and this variation in itself became a way of governing (Callahan 2007). It is not a coincidence that the rugged highlands of Myanmar are part of what Scott (2009) described as ‘Zomia’ – the spaces in which he studied the ‘art of not being governed’ among populations that have actively evaded the grasp and gaze of nation states. As puzzling as Myanmar’s authority structures may be to internal and external observers, they offer an opportunity to analyse different ways in which states (or state-like entities) are imagined, (per-)formed, or discarded. Hence, Myanmar has drawn scholars’ attention to specific, local arrangements in which (state) authority is performed, and how they are often linked to material elements (Sarma, Faxon, and Roberts 2022): land and agriculture (Woods 2011; Mark 2016); timber and jade (Brenner 2019); dams (Kiik 2016); opium and methamphetamines (Meehan 2015); oil palm (Bächtold, Bastide, and Lundsgaard-Hansen 2020); or arms (Buscemi 2021). In this paper, I argue that digital technologies and infrastructures of mobile internet have become an important part in performing authority and building state(s) in Myanmar.
In the literature on digital technologies in conflict, the digital has often been examined in terms of its potential to organise popular movements that could challenge repressive regimes (e.g. Barkai 2012; Tufekci and Wilson 2012; Earl and Kimport 2011; Milan 2015; or, for Southeast Asia, Tapsell 2013; Lim 2017a; Sinpeng 2021). In the same vein, digital technologies have been thought to potentially revitalise liberal ideals by strengthening public participation and transparency (Diamond 2010). In contrast, other authors argue that digital technologies are mainly providing states with new tools to increase surveillance and policing (Morozov 2011); or to censor and crush protest movements with government-ordered internet shutdowns (e.g. Howard, Agarwal, and Hussain 2011; Lim 2020).
More recent scholarship emphasises governments’ orchestrated use of social media to influence public opinion via networks of accounts pretending to be citizens – practices known as ‘astroturfing’ (Baulch, Matamoros-Fernández, and Suwana 2022; Johns and Cheong 2019). In a similar vein, scholarship has also started to attend to the broader, global (power) relations and political economies that structure our increasingly digitally permeated lives in the current age understood as surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015), platform capitalism (Srnicek and De Sutter 2017), or data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2018). An important part of this critical strand are analyses highlighting how (digital) technologies are involved in reproducing and reifying racialised identities targeting individual bodies (Benjamin 2019), or in constituting nationalisms (Lim 2017b).
In this paper, I draw on this recent scholarship’s sensitivities to analyse how digital technologies have become entangled with performing authority and state formation Myanmar. More precisely, this paper is interested in the role of socio-technical imaginaries of Myanmar’s future. Jasanoff and Kim (2015, 4) define such imaginaries as ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and public performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.’
Such imaginaries play an important role in how communities, nations, regions are imagined, (per)formed, and practiced in today’s inter-connected world (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2015; Barry 2013; Carroll 2012). Similar to (technological) infrastructures (Bowker and Star 2002; Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018), such imaginaries are deeply entangled with power structures in society – and hence, best understood as multiple and contested (Mager and Katzenbach 2021).
At the same time, we can observe that through these entanglements, digital technologies are enlisted in the assemblages that perform state authority (Tsinovoi 2022) and become part of the mundane socio-technical practices through which the state becomes present in everyday life (Painter 2006). In the words of Scott (2009, xii), they become ‘distance-demolishing technologies’ that are thought to reduce the friction of terrain and to project the central state’s power to its territorial borders. These claims resonate with scholarship in international relations and social anthropology that conceptualise the state not as an object apart from society, but as an effect of particular social practices that make it appear as such (Mitchell 1999; Gupta 1995). The state, in this understanding, is always in the making (Lund 2016, 1200; Hagmann and Péclard 2010). And, it is produced from people’s imaginations of the state through everyday performances like the distribution of public goods (Ciro Martínez and Eng 2017) or people’s interaction with the state’s bureaucracy (Gupta 1995); but just as much from the locally specific arrangements of governing revolving around material elements (e.g., jade, methamphetamines, arms) mentioned above. From these considerations, I will now explore how a specific socio-technical imaginary and the digital technologies it is entangled with came to be involved in Myanmar’s state formation(s).
Leapfrogging to a connected nation
After more than six decades of armed conflict and a succession of authoritarian regimes, the Myanmar military announced a set of calibrated reforms towards a ‘discipline-flourishing democracy’ in 2011 (Holliday 2011) and appointed a former general, Thein Sein, to head a quasi-civilian government (Kyaw Yin Hlaing 2012). Despite being given little credit initially, the Thein Sein administration signed a number of bi-lateral ceasefires with EAOs, lifted censorship, and released opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest (Callahan 2012). This led to a rapid change in the international community’s discourse on Myanmar: Considered a place of authoritarian stasis before, the country suddenly became portrayed as a place of dynamic and promising reforms (Bächtold 2015; Décobert and Wells 2019).
In his inauguration speech, Thein Sein stipulated that
‘[l]ip services and talks are not enough to achieve national unity. So, it is required to build roads, railroads and bridges to overcome the natural barriers between regions of national races […]. The greater number of roads, railroads and bridges the nation sees, the smoother transport there will be between one region and another, and friendlier relations there will be among national races’ (Global New Light of Myanmar 2011, 3).
This statement ties the unity of Myanmar – and its diverse array of ‘national races’ – to a promise of development by connecting its parts with infrastructure. Connecting infrastructures here are purported to overcome the multitude of armed conflicts that Myanmar has seen over decades; thus fostering a positive socio-technical imaginary. At the same time, the statement echoes the list of Scott’s (2009) ‘distance-demolishing’ technologies that allow the centre to project its power into the borderlands.
Similar developmental projects elsewhere to unite a country and to gloss over internal differences have been well documented (e.g. Scott 1998; Li 2007; Bowman 2015). What sets Myanmar’s imaginary apart, though, is its peculiar image of rapid progress. Emboldened by the fast pace of successful initial reforms, it became popular to evoke the image of a ‘leapfrog’: Because of its late arrival on the stage, as this narrative goes, Myanmar will be able to learn from other countries’ development processes and jump certain stages. As then presidential economic advisor Aung Tun Thet put it:
‘There are advantages to being a latecomer […] We went straight to colour television, skipping the black and white phase of other countries’ (UNESCO, 2014).
This ‘leapfrogging’ has often been evoked for the telecommunications sector: Access to internet in Myanmar before the transition had been minuscule, with a single-digit percentage of the population being able to go online (Htaike Htaike Aung and Wai Myo Htut 2019). With the liberalisation of the telecommunications market in 2013, SIM cards that used to cost up to US$ 2500 suddenly sold around US$ 1.50; making mobile connectivity and internet affordable and soon, an integral part of daily life for a large part of the population (McCarthy 2017; Whitten-Woodring et al. 2020).
While the use of mobile internet has soared with the construction of 3G and later 4G infrastructure, internet via landlines has remained marginal in comparison (Norbhu 2015). Again, the metaphor of the leapfrog emerged here, this time in the words of Eric Schmidt (then CEO of google) during a visit to Myanmar:
‘The country will leapfrog 20 years of difficult-to-maintain infrastructure and go straight to the most modern architecture […] We have a chance to see how a new nation can shape itself, […] its economic growth and what I believe will be its extremely rapid social development’ (Schmidt 2014).
The country’s transition was not only a passage from one abstract political regime to another one; for many, it equally was the more palpable ‘leapfrogging’ from struggling to access emails to effortlessly streaming videos via 4G. This change quickly translated into soaring use of apps for online money transfer, ride-hailing in urban areas, or in the government’s ambitious ‘master plan’ for e-government, which aspired to develop the countries in ‘leaps and bounds’ (Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communication 2015).
The notions of rapid (technological) progress and that ‘connectivity can overcome conflict’ underpinning this imaginary were particularly effective in enlisting a range of actors beyond the government. The Thein Sein government’s imaginary strongly resonates with corporate imaginaries based on Silicon Valley’s digital utopianism (Turner 2006) and technological solutionism (Morozov 2013). When compared to, for example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statements where ‘connecting everyone’ becomes ‘the fundamental challenge of our generation’; and conflicts come from a ‘lack of connectedness’ (cit. in Haupt 2021, 245), these parallels become evident.
International companies such as mobile telecommunication providers Telenor and Ooredoo, or large tech companies like grab2 and – most prominently – Facebook entered the market. Internet in Myanmar is mostly accessed via smartphones that come with Facebook as a pre-installed app when bought, and Facebook rolled out their ‘free basics’ programme that would waive data charges for using their app (Trautwein 2016a). For many in Myanmar, Facebook de facto equalled the internet: Rather than using a browser, it is common to search for information within the social network (Htaike Htaike Aung and Wai Myo Htut 2019). In a sense, Myanmar has thus not only leapfrogged landline-based internet and its localised arrangements of access via overlapping WIFI hotspots for the more centralised 4G networks. It has equally leapfrogged a more open and de-centralised internet architecture by going straight to enclosed, feed-based ecosystems controlled by large tech corporations.
Yet, this enlisting effect went beyond the tech world: The triptych of economic growth, stability, and peaceful relationships that forms the core of Myanmar’s socio-technical imaginary also proved highly compatible with the dominant approach of international organisations to so-called ‘conflict-affected states’.3 In international organisations’ statements, ‘technological fixes’ with the latest tech became closely associated with ‘solving’ Myanmar’s political woes and conflicts; and neatly aligned the Thein Sein government and international development actors in the initial euphoria of the early years of the transition (Bächtold, Bastide, and Lundsgaard-Hansen 2020). International development actors reproduced the imaginary by funding local tech-hubs, start-ups, and ‘smart solutions’ to ‘harness the potential of technology’ (Trautwein 2016b) or, in the words of the World Bank, ‘leverag[ing] modern information and communication technology (ICT) as a platform for socioeconomic development’ (Norbhu 2015).
This has been corrected online.