Prefiguring a democratic state: student activism and the National Education Law in Myanmar

ABSTRACT

This article aims to contribute to contemporary understanding of student activism dynamics by using insights from prefiguration literature. We use practical prefiguration and conceptual prefiguration to analyse student protests against education reform in Myanmar in 2014–2015. Using in-depth interviews with student activists, their list of educational demands, and secondary sources regarding educational legislation, we unpack the complex relationship between educational claims and national politics that characterised the students’ struggle. We show how the students reimagined a new and better version of the Myanmar state by using both educational practice and theory to fuse the future with the present, the desired with the possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Prefiguration
• student activism
• Myanmar
• education reform
• democratisation

Acknowledgments

We would first of all like to thank the student activists for sharing their stories and the interpreter for invaluable research assistance. We are grateful to the TRANSFORM research team for comments and discussions on previous versions of the article. We presented the paper at the Political Agency and Moral Action in Times of War academic workshop organized by the TRANSFORM project at PRIO, October 2019, and would like to thank the participants of this workshop. Thanks also to Christopher Butler for language editing.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Research Council of Norway under Grant 261718 and the Fritt Ord Foundation under Grant 17-1966.