Introduction: Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar

Abstract

Myanmar is in a protracted revolutionary situation. State military authority has been greatly weakened but has not collapsed in the face of an array of armed and unarmed forces, new and established, which have fought against the junta that seized power in 2021. What forms of solidarity have contributed to the making of a revolutionary situation in Myanmar? How have they been sustained? Where and why has solidarity been hindered or broken? These questions animate the contributions to this Special Issue. To introduce them, this article explains the adoption of “revolution” as a category to describe and interpret events in Myanmar since the military coup. It does this by juxtaposing the period of transition in the 2010s, and interpretations of it, with the post-coup situation. It argues that as the transition paradigm became commonsense, it constrained understanding about happenings in Myanmar. Everything was debated in reference to an anticipated future state. Against that way of proceeding, the article advocates for description and interpretation of the revolutionary situation that turns on its radical contingency and eventfulness.

Key Words:

• Military rule
• Myanmar
• Revolution
• Solidarity
• Transition

Ask anyone from Myanmar where they were and what they thought when they learned of the February 1, 2021 military coup and it is likely they can recall in detail. As word of the takeover spread, it broke into people’s lives. Many felt its effects immediately. Protests began and spread quickly. Residents of apartments came onto their balconies to bang pots and bash pans. Householders gathered in laneways to share information and shout invectives. Doctors and nurses in government hospitals initiated what became known as the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), which led clerks, teachers, train drivers, engineers, judges, and police to walk off the job. Others not employed in public services caused disruption by creative collective actions aimed at “keeping the streets” (Khin Oo Thazin 2021), such as jamming busy roads and intersections with cars that drivers claimed had abruptly broken down (see Anonymous 2021; Dunford 2023).

By month’s end throngs filled streets in Yangon, Mandalay, and provincial towns and cities around the country. Myanmar was gripped by popular resistance to military rule. Protesters called for the release of the national leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and president, Win Myint, and for the semi-elected legislature to be able to sit. Some demanded that the military get out of politics once and for all; others expanded demands to include recognition and rights for historically oppressed groups. Nothing like it had happened on this scale since the uprising that in 1988 had brought down the country’s prototypical dictator, Ne Win, though not his military. Ne Win (1988) said in his parting speech that if the army shoots, it shoots to hit, not skyward to frighten. This was both a threat and a description of how the army has responded every time since 1962 when crowds have assembled to challenge its power. In 2021, the first bullets fired were made of rubber. Demonstrators defended themselves against these with bicycle and construction helmets, and hastily manufactured metal shields. Then came live rounds: initially intermittent, subsequently frequent. In March, soldiers and police fired indiscriminately, and snipers targeted members of assembled crowds with shots to the head. By April, at least 536 were dead (AAPP 2021).

The scale and intensity of the brutality shocked those who held fast to the barricades, but it was precedented. What happened next was not. The gunfire did not suppress resistance. It provoked new forms. People’s defensive groups mushroomed and armed themselves with the support of long-standing para-states on the frontiers, then consolidated in Sagaing and neighbouring lowland regions. An anti-junta government formed and declared war. The military’s authority came under severe assault. The junta was weakened but did not collapse. Instead, Myanmar entered a protracted revolutionary situation.

This situation is the setting for the ideas and practices that are the subjects of the articles in this Special Issue. What forms of solidarity have contributed to the making of this revolutionary situation? How have they been sustained? Where and why has solidarity been hindered or broken, whether through counter-revolutionary strategies or the practices of revolutionaries themselves? To introduce the contributions that follow, this article concentrates on the first word in the issue’s rubric: revolution. Why this term? To address this question the article begins by recounting what has happened since 2021. Then it explains why contributors to this Special Issue adopt revolution as a category to describe and interpret events since the coup. It does this in two sections. In the first, it revisits earlier work in English on transitional politics in Myanmar during the 2010s. In the second, it juxtaposes that period, and interpretations of it, and the post-coup revolutionary situation.

The goal of this juxtaposition is not to show how much things have changed in Myanmar since 2021 compared with before. That they have is obvious. Nor is it to interrogate the idea of transition (see Campbell 2023; Pavin Chachavalpongpun, Prasse-Freeman, and Strefford 2020) or to debunk claims that Myanmar was once transitional in order to insist that it is now revolutionary. Instead, it is to reconsider how the transition paradigm constrained thinking and delimited debate about political and social change during the 2010s in order to prepare ourselves better for the task of describing and interpreting revolution.

This Introduction does not specify the meaning of solidarity in the context of Myanmar’s revolutionary situation since the 2021 coup because it is explicated and illustrated in the contributions to the Special Issue. Solidarity, the authors show, reveals itself contingently. Even within the one revolutionary situation, it is complicated by many variables and has many valences. Rather than offer a synopsis of these, in its final section this article surveys how each of the subsequent articles’ authors have variously acquitted themselves of the task of explicating solidarity in a time of revolution and what implications these have for understanding the revolutionary situation in Myanmar today.

The 2021 Uprising

The 2021 military coup followed a decade of political and social effervescence in Myanmar. This transitional period followed two preceding decades of unmediated military rule after an uprising in 1988 against the then one-party state, and a multi-party election in 1990, the results of which the army declined to honour.

Others have recounted the events of this decade in detail (see, for example, Chambers, Galloway, and Liljeblad 2020; Simpson and Farrelly 2021). Briefly, the standard narrative runs like this: military regime passes new constitution through sham 2008 referendum; the constitution paves way for circumscribed 2010 election; partly-elected legislatures start work with military oversight in 2011; in 2012 an elite pact opens door for Aung San Suu Kyi and National League for Democracy to enter legislatures; the League wins the 2015 election; the army honours election results, and in 2016 the government changes hands; during the period from 2016 to 2020, Aung San Suu Kyi concentrates on a nationwide peace deal with armed groups in frontier areas; Muslims, and in particular, Rohingya, are targets of communal and genocidal violence (2012–2014, 2016–2017); Aung San Suu Kyi and League win elections again in 2020; legislators prepare to reassemble (2020–2021); in February 2021, the army carries out third – or fourth, depending on how they are counted – coup d’état since independence from imperial Britain in 1948.

Pedersen (2023, 51) has observed that it is unlikely we will ever know for certain why the coup happened after a decade of political and social transition. There are a few plausible explanations. Suffice to say that Myanmar’s military elite has for over half a century acted as an exclusive class both in and for itself. Unlike militaries in settings where coups split public opinion (as in Thailand in 2006; see Connors and Hewison 2008), Myanmar’s military does not have significant or dependable constituencies beyond its own institutional limits and immediate clients (such as military families, business cronies, and allied warlords). This is why, though people in certain parts of Myanmar were more vigorous in their response to the coup than others, nowhere did civilians autonomously assemble to defend the military after its takeover. Instead, they assembled to rebuke it. Then they assailed it. The task of defending the military, including through efforts to organise counter-revolutionary militia and mobilise Buddhist monks fell to the military itself (see Frydenlund et al. 2021; Frydenlund and Phyo Wai 2024).

In the earliest days and weeks following the coup, demonstrators sought the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of her party taken captive on or after the day of the coup. Aung San Suu Kyi’s abduction and detention, along with the president and assorted others, was what brought people onto the streets. But public demands soon went from being for the release of political prisoners and restoration of democracy to the eradication of military dictatorship. These were not appeals on an incumbent state to meaningfully reform itself, as Bayat (2017) has described the “refolutions” in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen of a decade earlier. Demonstrators in Myanmar had no expectations of reform. Nor were they any longer interested in it. The prior decade had been all about reform (see, for example, Crouch 2017; Khaing Phyu Htut, Lall, and Howson 2022; Mason and Cheesman 2023; Venkiteswaran, Yin Yadanar Thein, and Myint Kyaw 2019). Though demonstrators in Myanmar had in common with their North African and Arab counterparts that few had strategised for revolution, unlike them, their movement grew on the strength of calls to cut military authority at the roots. The time for reform was over.

As the numbers of dead grew, these calls became more urgent. When by the end of March 2021 it became clear that the fight could not be won on the streets against soldiers and policemen shooting to kill, a new and hitherto unprecedented armed uprising began and speedily evolved. Digital communications meant that word about military violence spread quickly (see Kim and Rød 2021; Ryan and Tran 2024). Faster and easier overland transport provided routes to safety and comradeship for the emerging generation of activists (see Chambers and Saw Ner Dhu Da 2024; Jordt, Tharaphi Than, and Sue Ye Lin 2022). By April, thousands of youths had taken dangerous routes into the countryside to seek training and arms from the militaries of groups such as the Karen National Union and Kachin Independence Organisation, which for decades have fought against the military and practiced para-statehood in Myanmar’s frontier areas. They were joined and trained by defectors from the military (see Kyed and Ah Lynn 2021, 2024); and, by numbers of Buddhist monks (see Frydenlund and Phyo Wai 2024).

By mid-2021 hundreds of new people’s defence forces were proliferating and then consolidating in areas of the country away from the frontiers where armed conflict had been normalised (see Medail, Wells, and Seto 2023; Jolliffe 2023). Sagaing Region, west of Mandalay, became a major battleground. Decades of resentment at the structural violence of crony capitalism and the lack of public services there hardened into a counter-attack the likes of which the junta-commanded army had not seen for decades (see Callahan 2022). The violence that followed was, consistent with the army’s established methods for pacification and their British imperial antecedents, both responsive and pre-emptive (see MacLean 2022). Once more, Myanmar’s army demonstrated that it excels at making enemies, and that war is the only method of state building it has mastered (see Callahan 2003).

The National Unity Government (NUG) formed to act as a proxy for the government of Aung San Suu Kyi that the military blocked from sitting. In September 2021 it declared a popular defensive war against the junta and its armed forces. The declaration gave the NUG’s claim to sovereign power credence. It affirmed the right of people to defend themselves against the existential threat posed by the junta-commanded army. And it echoed long-standing sovereign claims of para-state armed groups in frontier regions representing cultural and linguistic minorities, extending them nationwide.

The NUG has attempted to establish a command structure over those people’s defence forces willing to co-operate with it, and supply them with ammunition and equipment. This has not been easy. But even with meagre resources these and other dispersed and loosely allied armed groups have revealed the junta-commanded army to be less formidable than it had once appeared. At the turn of the century, Selth (2002, 296) had estimated the army to be 370,000 strong, with tens of thousands more in the air force, navy, and paramilitary police. It now looks to have been an over-estimate. Ye Myo Hein (2023) now estimates the total number of personnel to be no more than 150,000, of which around 70,000 are active combat troops. Not only is this less than half of what had previously been supposed, but the number is falling because of casualties, desertions, and a lack of recruits. If Ye Myo Hein’s estimate is reliable then the combined people’s defence forces and established armies of para-states that are either actively fighting or withholding support for the junta might well be numerically larger than the troops the junta commands (see Hmung 2021; Ye Myo Hein 2022).

Numbers of troops form but one part of the situation. The picture is complicated by the multitude of loosely affiliated groups opposing the army or remaining disengaged (see Williams 2023). And though the junta has lost control of large parts of Myanmar, it remains uncontested in the air. The damage wrought by drones of the regime’s enemies does not compare to the mass murder that the pilots of its jet fighters and helicopter gunships have repeatedly committed (Cheesman 2023, 70). The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which has consistently been most detailed in documenting junta-driven atrocities, at the start of June 2024 put the number of activists and civilians killed since the coup at over 5280 (AAPP 2024). These numbers do not include all those who have died taking up arms against dictatorship. In addition, there were over 26,000 captured and detained, of which over 20,000 remain captive. The number of political prisoners has strained the regime’s jails. Detainees have held multiple protests across a constellation of sites in 2021, 2022, and 2023 (see Martin, Jefferson, and Anonymous 2024). Those it could not capture or kill the junta has rendered stateless, stripping citizenship from dozens of opponents: among them, NUG ministers, and writers, singers, and actors who joined or lent support to revolutionary forces (see Nyi Nyi Kyaw 2022).

There are many other aspects of the current situation that might have been set out in this Introduction that have been addressed in recent burgeoning work on Myanmar: foreign affairs and international policy (see Connelly and Loong 2023; Passeri and Marston 2023); labour’s part in civil disobedience to the military takeover (see Ma Moe Sandar Myint 2021; Tin Maung Htwe 2022); the perspective and role of the diaspora (see Ma Thida 2023), and economic hardship and accommodation of dictatorship (see Thawnghmung et al. 2023), to name a few. Other issues, addressed in the contributions that follow, include: dilemmas for humanitarian aid agencies (see Wells and Pyae Pyoe Maung 2024); the gendered embodiment of opposition to military dictatorship (see Khin Khin Mra and Hedström 2024); and the situation of non-official minorities in the time of revolution (Aung Ko Ko, Rhoads, Nan Tinilarwin, Win Bo Aung, and Yoon Thiri Khaing 2024).

If this is a time when academic research on Myanmar is urgently needed then it is also one in which researchers need to explain the choices they have made about what to study and how. The categories they use to describe and interpret social worlds have effects not only on their descriptions and interpretations but on those worlds themselves. For this reason the social or political scientist has a different burden of responsibility when choosing and using their concepts from that of a chemist or physicist. Chemists’ and physicists’ concepts are not interpreted or appropriated by the molecules or matter that they study. Social and political scientists’ concepts are. To discharge the burden, researchers need to identify and spell out the relationships between their concepts and the socially mediated facts that they contribute to making reality (see Blakely 2020).

The remaining sections of this Introduction address that need by making clear the reasons for the choice of revolution as a category for description and interpretation of events in Myanmar today. The following section revisits the now redundant category of political transition. What lessons can be drawn from a decade of observations about Myanmar in transition for conceptualising and studying it in revolution? This question motivates the juxtaposition of political transition and a protracted revolutionary situation.

From Commonsensical Transition …

“Transition” was a keyword for political change in Myanmar during the 2010s; a word significant and binding in certain activities and their interpretation, and indicative of certain forms of thought (see Williams 1983). How, and why, was that the case?

In its rudiments, a transition is nothing other than “a movement from something toward something else,” and a political transition, an interval “between one political regime and another,” which might be different or similar in type (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 6 and 65). Conceptualised in this way, political transitions are little more than invitations for description and comparison. But this is not the way that they were conceptualised in Myanmar during the 2010s. There, transition was characterised, understood, discussed, and promoted as a sequenced, elite-led gradual political process that would take the country from dictatorship to democracy via multiparty elections (see, for example, Skidmore and Wilson 2012; Thant Myint-U 2012). Even if it was “not – or not yet – an outright transition to democracy,” as Min Zin and Joseph (2012, 105) put it, Myanmar was, the commonsense went, headed in that direction.

This way of talking about transition was not unique to Myanmar. The country was arriving at its transitional moment in the backwash of a wave of democratic transitions that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, cheerleaders for American world order such as Huntington (1991) had once made out to be an unassailable historical fact rather than a foreign policy prerogative (see Cox, Ikenberry, and Inoguchi 2000). Though as early as a decade before Myanmar’s transition one of the transition paradigm’s biggest promoters, Carothers (2002) had declared that the evidence did not support assumptions about a trend toward sequenced, elite-led movements of countries from dictatorship to democracy via elections, a lack of evidence did not deter advocates for US-backed democratisation from coming to talk it up to anyone in Myanmar who would listen (see, for example, Diamond in Aung Zaw 2015).

To be sure, the mood was not one of euphoria, neither at the start of the decade and nor at the end of it, even if there were moments of excitement. The military had rigged the 2010 election to install its own party and men in the union legislature under the terms of a constitution that were designed not to displace the military state but to entrench it (Crouch 2019, 11–13). Sceptics thought the legislature would be a rubber-stamping operation, and that social change would be slow and limited (Kean 2014, 43). But when in 2012 the military permitted Aung San Suu Kyi and a cohort from her party to contest and win by-elections, it looked to many as if “a drawn-out game of political transition” had at last begun (Diamond 2012, 138).

Or did it? Almost as soon as they were made, predictions like this one led to speculation about whether the transition, having been announced, was progressing or backsliding, and with anti-Muslim communal violence and attempted genocide in Rakhine State whether it had failed (see Cheesman 2017b; Lee 2021). There were those who thought that political changes would be “difficult to reverse” (Jones 2013, 12). Others thought them “utterly reversible” (Slater 2014, 181; see also O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 70). The point here is not to make an assessment of who was right and who wrong; to applaud the foresight of one view and sneer at another for misapprehending the situation, nor to ask, with Dunford and Adikari (2023, 333) whether all this transition speculation was in bad faith. Instead, it is to observe that the transition paradigm had the effect of containing and shaping debate about political change in Myanmar. Everything significant that happened in the 2010s was interpreted on its terms. Was Myanmar progressing or regressing? Reversing or not? These and other questions invited argument, yet they made Myanmar’s political transition commonsensical.

When something becomes commonsensical it is a matter of social reality. It does not stand in need of further verification (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 37–38). In this way, commonsense helps people to get on with things where they can afford to suspend doubt, such as public transport or midwifery. But if a complex phenomenon such as political transition becomes self-evident then there are problems. Alternative ways of thinking and talking about what is happening and what ought to be done are elided. Sometimes they are denied or refused because they are not commonsensical or are untimely (see Pavin Chachavalpongpun, Prasse-Freeman, and Strefford 2020, 5). Certain kinds of knowledge are privileged. Others are dismissed because they are irrelevant, or occluded because they are inconvenient to the conventional narrative – such as feminist readings of the gendered politics of transition and patriarchy (see, for example, Aye Thiri Kyaw and Miedema 2020; Hedström and Olivius 2023; Faxon, Furlong, and May Sabe Phyu 2015; Agatha Ma, Poe Ei Phyu, and Knapman 2018).

Additionally, because the transition paradigm explains events in the present with reference to an anticipated future, the past loses significance, except insofar as it can provide answers to the question of what caused transition. Once transition has become commonsensical it is no longer necessary to know anything much about what preceded it. Instead, periods before the transition are cast in negative terms, portrayed, as Rhoads and Wittekind (2018, 172) wrote in an important critique of the transition paradigm in Myanmar, “in terms of what is presumed to have been lacking.” This is convenient for experts coming from abroad to a country denoted transitional such as Myanmar, who work from the premise that there are no institutions or skills for democratic life and that these have to be built “from scratch” (Bünte 2018).

Rhoads and Wittekind (2018) did not object to the idea of transition itself. Like everyone, they recognised that the political and social changes of the 2010s were consequential. What they objected to was the transition paradigm’s linearity; to its short sightedness, and surface vision. Against the paradigm, they made a case for transition as recurrent: less about difference from the past, more about continuity with it. In this way, Myanmar’s transition might be understood not as “a moment of emergence from isolation … but a moment that articulates with previous claims, authorities, and ruptures” (Rhoads and Wittekind 2018, 172). For Rhoads and Wittekind, rupture is an epistemological opportunity; a chance to observe how people in transitional times recognise and respond to one another politically, not by setting aside context and history but by attending to them.

This is a useful prompt for thinking about Myanmar’s protracted revolutionary situation. For if it was obvious in the 2010s that time was on the move and Myanmar was no longer as it had been in the decade before then it is even more obvious that since 2021 the country has transitioned, in a manner of speaking, from a decade of political reform to a new period of revolution. It has again been marked by a rupture with the past that again articulates with previous claims, authorities, and ruptures. The next section discusses a few of these and considers how Myanmar’s revolutionary situation is temporally unlike the prior transitional period, and what implications this has for the study of it.

… To Eventful Revolution

As transition was a key word for the 2010s, revolution has become one since 2021. “Revolution” is not just an analytical category. It is a term that became commonplace among resistance actors in the months after the coup. More correctly, two Burmese usages did. Though meanings of the two slip and slide, broadly speaking, one, tawhlanye, is analogous to “revolution” in English. It stands for any type of movement, political or social, from an old era to a new one. The other, ayedawbôn, denotes a campaign for the seizure of sovereign power through uprising, rebellion, and war. Over time it has come to connote a gamut of strategies and struggles for human freedom (see Cheesman 2024, 41–42).

Though commonplace, neither usage is commonsensical. Both are contested, as is the English denotation of the post-coup struggle as revolutionary. Neither the Burmese nor English usages have the self-evident quality that transition had. This is one advantage that revolution has as a category for description and interpretation of events in Myanmar today when compared with transition in the 2010s. Revolution now, in contrast to transition then, is not taken for granted as social reality. It is not self-evident. Though it has political and social traction, it has to be fought for, and is fought over: physically, and intellectually (see Sai Latt 2023). This is one reason for the need to explain the choice of revolution as preferred category for description and interpretation, and in particular, the choice of the sub-category of revolutionary situation.

The term “revolutionary situation” comes to us from Tilly (1978) via El-Ghobashy’s (2021) recent work on Egypt, and Lawson’s (2019) comparative historical sociology. For Tilly, this is a situation in which two or more groups advance plausible competing, exclusive, claims to the same state. Tilly himself took the idea from Trotsky’s history of the Russian revolution. On Trotsky’s account, a revolutionary situation is one in which more than one bloc exercises control over a significant part of the state apparatus. Tilly reorganises the idea, removing Trotsky’s requirement that the blocs be class-based, and concludes that the identifying feature of a revolutionary situation is multiple sovereignty. “A revolutionary situation,” Tilly (1978, 191) writes, “begins when a government previously under the control of a single, sovereign polity becomes the object of effective, competing, mutually exclusive claims on the part of two or more distinct polities [and] ends when a single sovereign polity regains control over the government.”

That describes the situation in Myanmar today. Arguably it has been the situation for all Myanmar’s post-colonial history. Armed, state-like organisations have since the withdrawal of British imperial troops acted as suzerains in territories they control. Many of these groups have also fought against the military for decades in what they refer to as wars or revolution or resistance. The difference of the current situation to nearly all that preceded it in Myanmar is that the NUG and its various allies in the field do not assert claims over portions of the territory that constitutes the Union of Myanmar but over the whole thing. The NUG, like the Burma Communist Party before it, makes claims that map onto those of the central government, and as long as either they or the junta’s claims remain effective the revolutionary situation will continue. This is not to overstate the role of the NUG or its capacity to co-ordinate and unify disparate interests, armed and unarmed, in opposition to military dictatorship. It is only to register that the revolutionary situation today is unlike anything that preceded it in recent decades. The configuration of actors has changed, as have the statements of aspiration.

Nor is it to overstate the uniqueness of the situation. This is a situation that, as Rhoads and Wittekind argued of transition, articulates with previous claims, authorities, and ruptures even as it departs from them. None of the workers’ demonstrations or U Thant affair in 1974, the uprising in 1988 that gave birth to the National League for Democracy, sporadic protests in the 1990s, and economic protests during 2007 in which Buddhist monks played a frontal role produced a revolutionary situation of this sort, even though they registered political demands and generated social phenomena that partly inform events since 2021. After 1988 students who fled to frontier regions in the country’s north and east formed their own armed resistance, the All Burma Students Democratic Front; however, they never succeeded in energising widespread armed resistance of the sort that followed the 2021 uprising. Nor were the claims of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, which was a proxy for the National League for Democracy government that the military prevented from forming after the 1990 election, effective. The Coalition Government began its work years after the army denied the 1990 election results, and restricted its activities mainly to diplomacy and advocacy.

The NUG, by contrast, moved swiftly to establish ministries, set up civil administration, and contributed to social welfare in areas where emergent armed resistance to military dictatorship has been strongest: in particular, rural parts of Sagaing and Magway Regions, and Chin State. It has acted as if it is the government and raised revenue to rule through lotteries and taxation in the manner of a plausible contender for sovereignty. It has had more progress diplomatically than its predecessor, successfully blocking the usurper military from taking the country’s seat at the United Nations General Assembly three years running. It has set up diplomatic missions in several countries with tacit albeit unofficial recognition from hosts (see Renshaw 2023).

But it is not only for descriptive reasons that the category of revolutionary situation is useful; there are interpretative reasons for its use. What makes revolution interesting as a category for description and interpretation is the situation itself. For El-Ghobashy (2021, 33) concentrating on the situation means accounting for Egypt’s failed 2011 revolution without an inquisitorial or “prosecutorial narrative,” which works to attribute blame or credit for revolutionary outcomes. Instead, El-Ghobashy orients her inquiry toward multiple overlapping forms of politics (elections, judicial politics, parliamentary contention, mass protests, constitution making), and their contingencies. In this way she treats revolution as an historically specific process, not an abstract concept existing outside history or a bundle of attributes that produces observable patterns and from which we can make causal inferences regardless of context (as in Goldstone 1991; see also Lawson 2019, 55).

Moreover, following Sewell’s (2005) essay on three temporalities in sociology, the teleological time of transition can be distinguished from the eventful time of revolution. Both transition and revolution in Myanmar began with ruptures, which had the effect of dislocating a prior social and political order. Both were, or have been, disorienting. In the former case, the rupture involved many happenings over a number of years, including the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from detention and her election to the legislature, whereas in the latter it began with the coup and accelerated through the CDM to, in a short time, a new type of armed uprising.

However, the two differ in that in transition events are explained with reference to a future state of affairs, reached sequentially. This gives transition a temporal uniformity. Events tick along, with an eventual outcome of one type or another: successful or failed transition. The clock is sometimes paused or set back but time passes with reference to an imagined future. Contingency rests on the surface; deep moving forces beyond the control of participants determine transition’s end. Eventful temporality, by contrast, lacks uniformity. Events do not tick along. Unthinkable things happen when nobody expects them. Other things that people expect do not happen, or they happen when they are not expected. There is no future state of affairs in relation to which a clock is set and adjusted. This is not to say that in eventful temporality people lack goals; however, these goals are radically contingent. They cannot be approached stepwise. They resist the application of general rules.

That is why revolutionary situations are, as Lefebvre (2009, 292) once pointed out, “always new, specific, and therefore conjunctural.” To talk of them in these terms is not to refuse to compare or to decline to look for patterns. It is not a retreat to relativism of the sort that is sometimes used as a bogey by positivistic social scientists troubled by the idea that locally valid knowledge claims cannot be related to one another with the ease that their research designs presuppose. However, it is to insist on an understanding of conjuncture that attends to the interplay of meanings, and to their cultural peculiarities, without chaotically “thrashing around to locate origins and causes” (Wagner-Pacifici 2017, 76). It is to resist the urge to try to be the first to predict which side in a revolutionary situation will win.

This calls for a research practice of leaving revolution open to scrutiny, whether through participant observation, the recording of ethnographic narratives or other approaches (see Chambers and Saw Ner Dhu Da 2024; Cherstich, Holbraad, and Tassi 2020, 4–5). It calls for attention to the situation’s “ongoingness” (Wagner-Pacifici 2017, 5), and to how people “make meaningful life” in a time of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence (Hedström et al. 2023). It deliberately bypasses the question of whether, as El-Ghobashy (2021, 36) has put it, “this or that uprising is really a revolution,” not because it is irrelevant but because it is not a fruitful question for research on revolutionary situations (see also Goldstone 1980, 450). Instead, it concentrates on multiple sovereignty as the defining feature of a revolutionary situation and its eventful temporality (El-Ghobashy 2021, 38; Tilly 1978, 191). It otherwise is agnostic about the methods that political or social scientists use to explore that situation.

In summary, studying revolution eventfully, by attending to the significance of the revolutionary situation instead of causes or outcomes, obviates the need to engage with the impossible task of reliably predicting revolutionary outcomes, and forestalls temptations to plot manoeuvres among contending factions. It turns off the teleological clock and toward how ideas and practices emerge and change from within a revolutionary situation, articulating with those of previous uprisings and events. These include ideas and practices of solidarity that vitalise revolution, and make revolutionaries. It is with those that the contributors to this Special Issue are variously concerned. The concluding section outlines these contributions.

Revolution and Solidarity

Against the reduction of revolutionary movements to negative coalitions of groups with shared enemies and their supporters (Dix 1984), the contributions to this Special Issue converge on the view of Htet Min Lwin and Walton (2023) that revolutionary solidarity does not arrive from “a shared enemy” but “is achieved gradually and provisionally” through alliances of identity and interest. Whereas writing on Myanmar has suffered from a tendency to get bogged down in old questions about long-standing ethnic or racial grievances and the difficulties of overcoming these in search of commonality, one of the most striking aspects of the revolutionary situation in Myanmar today is in how it has brought to the political foreground the possibilities for new alliances that at once articulate with previous claims but break with established conventions.

The article by Khin Khin Mra and Hedström (2024) is an exemplary case in point. They discuss how women’s leadership in the initial protests infused revolutionary action with feminist claims for gender equality. Women made their bodily presence felt through culturally distinct, ritually powerful practices such as by stringing their sarongs, or htamein, on wires and poles above roads along which soldiers and police had to march, now at danger of being emasculated by objects that had been in contact with women’s menstruating or menopausal bodies. Khin Khin Mra and Hedström show how in using their bodies and objects such as htamein to attack military patriarchy women in Myanmar’s revolutionary situation have rejected the terms of their gender assignment (see also Butler 2015, 30). By challenging traditional ideas about their role as cultural bearers of the nation whose proper place is the home they have attracted the support of many young men who are disgruntled with many of the same ideas (see Marlar, Chambers, and Elena 2023). Indeed, women who have actively participated in revolutionary struggle have been frustrated by the persistence of conservative gendered norms in anti-dictatorship forces old and new. On top of that, they have been the targets of misogynistic and sexualised attacks through traditional and platform media, as have women accused of collaborating with junta-commanded troops.

With women, young people animated the protest movement and armed revolt against the junta (see, for example, Beyer 2021; Jordt, Tharaphi Than, and Sue Ye Lin 2022; Su Mon Thant 2021). In their article, Chambers and Ner Dhu Da discuss how young people drove revolutionary struggle by creating new forms of solidarity across generational lines. They not only challenged the military but with it traditional divides that run along ethnic, class, gender, and religious lines. With Thomassen (2012, 684) they advocate for the study of revolution “from below,” by analysing the specificities of youth experience as a site of revolution. Through case studies from southeast Myanmar they examine how youths have created new forms of solidarity through collective action, which are complicated by their experiences of violence and inertia. They document and interpret expressions of frustration among young revolutionaries, and the sense that their lives and aspirations have irrevocably changed or will remain on hold while the military stays in power.

Whereas women and youth had an inspirational part in resistance to the coup from the earliest days of February 2021, the role of Myanmar’s vast Buddhist clergy, or sangha, was less obvious, more ambivalent. In their contribution, Frydenlund and Phyo Wai (2024) examine the divergences in responses of monks to Myanmar’s revolutionary situation and document the forms that both revolutionary solidarity and collusion with the junta have taken. Members of the Buddhist elite, like their military counterparts, have viewed the revolution as a threat to their vested institutional interests and the conservative social order on which they depend. Many of these monks are ritually and economically entangled with army officers. Others who are not central to what the authors call the “military-monastic complex” have remained silent. They make up the obedient majority. Activist monks, the disobedient minority, have formed a Revolutionary Sangha Network to support demands for a new social order. Members of the network and other monks who have spoken and acted against dictatorship use lectures and sermons online, and to assembled laypeople, to communicate a distinctly Buddhist ethos for a future Myanmar in which natural law, or dhamma (in Pali; dharma in Sanskrit and conventional English romanisation), has been restored through the junta’s downfall. To that end, many of these monks walk a fine line between showing solidarity with revolution and justifying armed resistance, including, for example, by raising donations to aid resistance fighters.

Another forceful development since the coup is that around 4000 soldiers have defected from the military in solidarity with the resistance movement. This is a topic that Kyed and Ah Lynn have been researching assiduously since the coup (see Kyed and Ah Lynn 2021; Kyed 2022). In their article they explain how revolutionary groups have responded to the military state’s characterisation of defectors as traitors and criminals by portraying them as heroes, and as victims of a deeply corrupt and violent military system (Kyed and Ah Lynn 2024). Some of these defectors are aiding the resistance fighters, while others have disarmed, taken refuge in areas administered by groups such as the Karen National Union and the Kachin Independence Organisation, and are engaged in campaigns to attract more defections. The NUG, para-state armed groups in frontier regions and various people’s defence forces have put a lot of effort into building a network on the ground to encourage and support soldiers and police to defect. As Kyed and Ah Lynn describe, online communications, including chat forums, have given revolutionaries opportunities to reach out to military and police personnel and express solidarity with them as a strategy to abet defections. Those who defect sometimes make public statements about their personal transformation, and self-identification as the “people’s soldiers” (see Cheesman 2023). Their narratives of suffering and injustice experienced by the junta-commanded soldiers and auxiliary militia feed into revolutionary imperatives for a complete overhaul of the country’s armed forces.

In their article on prison protests, Martin, Jefferson, and Anonymous (2024) draw attention to another group of revolutionary actors and an overlooked dimension of the political resistance to revivified dictatorship. Since British imperial domination, Burma’s and latterly Myanmar’s prisons have been places for brutality, torture, and killing. But, additionally, they have been iconic sites for political resistance and performed solidarity, including solo and collective protests and hunger strikes (see Cheesman 2022; Gaborit and Jefferson 2019; Poe Kyaw 2014, 208). Martin, Jefferson, and Anonymous highlight the life-threatening risks political prisoners are taking today to show their solidarity with comrades on the outside. Prisoners sometimes take action in response to prison conditions, and in support of other detainees. At other times they join nationwide political actions, holding hunger strikes and silent strikes to mark the date of the coup or Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday, and in opposition to the execution of political prisoners. While revolution does not rise or fall on these actions, the authors argue that they are no less significant for that. Prison protests are instances of how revolution is experienced eventfully and in quotidian happenings that disrupt daily routines and prevent the military junta from being able to claim that it has successfully restored law and order after a period of public disorder (see Cheesman 2015, 192–225).

The revolutionary situation has also dramatically changed how international aid and development agencies work in Myanmar, not only because of difficulties with access but because of changing perceptions among local groups of their counterparts from abroad. Wells and Pyae Pyoe Maung (2024) examine critiques of international organisations among members of community-based organisations in Myanmar, who have traditionally mediated access and delivered aid to conflict-affected areas. Members of local groups who risk their safety to do their work are concerned that donor funding from abroad is declining. At the same time, they are expected to meet stringent and sometimes unrealistic compliance requirements. Culturally specific principles such as sedana (goodwill), parahita (charity), and metta (loving kindness) shape how members of local agencies perceive international agencies. Despite valuing their relationships with international agencies, they sometimes perceive those agencies to be self-interested (rather than animated by goodwill), focused on relationships of compliance (rather than charity), and practicing an ethics of suspicion (rather than loving kindness). The importance of these observations is that international agencies whose staff are inattentive to the moral economy of humanitarian aid in Myanmar’s revolutionary situation risk frustrating their local counterparts and damaging their reputations. And they put themselves at risk of being seen and classed not as friends of Myanmar in a time of need but as counter-revolutionaries.

The role of digital communications and online platforms in Myanmar’s revolutionary situation is the subject of the article by Ryan, Tran, and Swan Ye Htut (2024). They consider how online platforms might work to facilitate solidarity-building in a country that has long been divided along religious and linguistic lines. In particular, they examine whether expressions of post-coup inter-ethnic solidarity in online forums are empathetic or instrumentalist: do they indicate that members of majority communities are more aware of the injustice and suffering experienced by minorities? Or are they calculated to get the support of minorities for revolutionary action? The authors acknowledge that Facebook and other platforms have caused harm in Myanmar, not least of all in generating hatred toward Muslims and Rohingya in particular (see Schissler 2016; Nyi Nyi Kyaw 2020; Whitten-Woodring et al. 2020). Nevertheless, they cautiously suggest that in the current revolutionary situation they can play an important role in promoting solidarity through deepened awareness of why members of minority groups have nursed long-standing grievances at their maltreatment and discrimination.

Medail and Saw Chit Thet Tun (2024) share with Ryan, Tran, and Swan Ye Htut a concern with empathetic and instrumentalist solidarity, and with how Myanmar’s revolutionary situation might bring sustained change to inter-ethnic relations. Through analysis of text and interview data they show that while new forms of institutional solidarity have emerged in the post-coup period, it is not obvious that they will be transformative. Members of the majority Bamar community in leadership roles for the NUG and other revolutionary institutions have shown a new willingness to work with organisations representing ethnic minorities, and awareness of their privilege in relation to other groups. But doubts remain about how committed they are to building an inclusive federal union. Youth leaders such as Thet Swe Win or Maung Saungkha, long-time advocates for the rights of ethnic minorities, have more cachet than their older counterparts when it comes to the ideals of social justice for all peoples in Myanmar; however, members of the older generation occupy senior positions in the NUG. And, Medail and Chit Thet Tun caution, inter-ethnic solidarity is contingent on reconciling divergent positions on the future of Myanmar among people and para-state organisations in frontier areas.

The persistent and troubling lack of regard for the status and concerns of minority communities in articulating a future federal Myanmar is made even more obvious in the contribution by Aung Ko Ko, Rhoads, Nan Tinilarwin, Win Bo Aung, and Yoon Thiri Khaing (2024) on unofficial minorities in Myanmar’s protracted revolutionary situation. The authors suggest that institutional and social prejudice against unofficial minorities, or non-taingyintha remains prevalent (see Cheesman 2017a). A disproportionately large number of people in these groups lack documentation, making it difficult for them to travel, and putting them at higher risk of official harassment, arbitrary detention, and human trafficking. The authors argue that while the revolutionary situation has brought its participants to rethink federalism, historical discrimination and institutional exclusion continue to determine the position of unofficial minorities in the post-coup period. Further, they highlight the gendered and inter-generational impacts of discrimination on these groups, showing how in particular women and youth from unofficial minorities have been excluded from discussions and decision-making on the direction and goals of the revolution.

In aggregate, the articles in this Special Issue invite readers to reflect on their own research practices, and on the meaning of solidarity in and through the academy. Academic solidarity with Myanmar’s anti-dictatorship forces means, among other things, speaking with them rather than for them. It calls for a commitment to work alongside people in Myanmar’s revolutionary situation instead of on behalf of them. Here that commitment is demonstrated by researchers from the Anglophone and European academies collaborating and co-authoring with counterparts from and in Myanmar, rather than treating them as fonts of information and ideas who are undeserving of recognition and credit, as was once the case. That commitment is tested by the situation being described and interpreted. The authors and editors of this Special Issue have discussed the security risks that contributors from and in Myanmar face, and in some cases have opted for the use of pseudonyms to protect their identities. Hopefully, it might be possible one day soon for them to identify themselves, and that in the meantime this Special Issue will serve as an example for how collaborative research might continue to be done with all those Myanmar intellectuals, academics, students, and researchers who have refused to acquiesce to “military slave education,” which is no education at all (Metro 2021).

For academic solidarity with revolution to amount to anything then the work that it produces must contribute to critique of those colonial forms of knowledge that continue to set terms for how Myanmar is seen and heard in Anglophone scholarship. It must contribute to thinking about how academic research practices and outputs are decolonised (see Chu May Paing and Than Toe Aung 2021; Metro 2023; Tharaphi Than 2021). Myanmar’s revolutionary situation not only contains within it material with which to re-evaluate and even destroy the hierarchies on which its military dictators have depended. It contains, moreover, material with which to demolish what Becker (1967, 242) identified as the “hierarchy of credibility” on which culturally conservative, intellectually regressive, and factually wrong accounts of Myanmar’s politics and society have relied. That demolition job is underway. Let’s hasten it.

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from discussions with Nicholas Ross for the June 2021 workshop held synchronously at the Australian National University and Danish Institute for International Studies that was the genesis for this Special Issue. We thank all the participants at that workshop and Helene Maria Kyed for hosting the Copenhagen cohort. We are grateful to the participants at the workshop and contributors to the Special Issue for their comments on this article and the others, and to the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the workshop that initiated this Special Issue was provided by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, through its Myanmar Research Centre; the Danish Institute for International Studies; and the International Development Research Centre (Canada).