Bounded duty: disasters, moral citizenship and exclusion in Myanmar

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, Myanmar has been wracked by repeated disasters that have prompted extraordinary civilian-led relief efforts. This article situates non-state aid and relief as a product of the military junta’s outsourcing of responsibility for welfare following the end of the socialist dictatorship in 1988. Drawing on historical accounts of Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and ethnographic fieldwork during Cyclone Komen in 2015, the article argues that the outpouring of aid during natural catastrophes exposes moral conceptualizations of citizenship – often actively encouraged by government officials – in which commercial elites, welfare groups and ordinary people, rather than the state, have moral duties to render aid and relief in the wake of catastrophe. Focusing on the idioms and mechanisms through which non-state actors stretch the boundaries of moral duty from the local to the translocal needy, the paper asks: who gets included, and how, in visions of moral community which symbolically enable non-state relief efforts? Despite the emancipatory promise of moral citizenship, this research shows that non-state relief can also exacerbate social hierarchies and entrench exclusion, as it renders access to emergency aid contingent on inclusion in socially bounded imaginaries of reciprocity.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster
• citizenship
• inequality
• Buddhism
• Myanmar
• Burma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The independence government of U Nu advanced a form of vernacular developmental socialism throughout the 1950s. While envisioning contributions from the virtuous citizenry, the form of socialism proposed by the Pyidawtha plan was ‘a welfare state with a heavy emphasis on large-scale state interferences and controls’. See Mya Maung (1970, 535). Private enterprise and foreign investment were projected to expand, providing the financial basis for expanding state-mediated social protection for formal sector workers. The plan was abandoned following the 1962 coup, with the envisioned expansion of foreign investment used as a pretext for the coup by General Ne Win and the Revolutionary Council, who claimed it simply perpetuated ongoing imperial and colonial extraction. For a more detailed discussion of these dynamics, see chapter two of McCarthy (2018c).

2 For useful descriptive and analytical treatment of these events, including chronologies and estimated death counts, see accounts by Kyaw Yin Hlaing (2003, 53–57) and Federico Ferrara (2003, 323). The SLORC was reorganized into a more hierarchical structure of military administration in 1997 and renamed the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).

3 Two laws – the Foreign Investment Law (November 1988) and the State-owned Economic Enterprises Law (March 1989) – were passed during this period, enabling private foreign capital after 25 years and allowing authorized private enterprises to be engaged in all but 12 stipulated industries. For analysis of the laws, see Kudo (2005, 12).

4 Government officials also had wide discretion in levying corporate tax, resulting in significant formal tax relief for business people perceived as ‘loyal’ (Cook 1994, 132). Selective prosecutions for corruption or money laundering for those who had been perceived as disloyal to regime priorities or their military patrons were also repeatedly used as a means of ensuring pliancy of clients.

5 See McCarthy (2018a) for problematization of the ‘apolitical’ framing of social welfare groups and discussion of the visions of citizenship and nation they enact in contemporary provincial Myanmar.

6 A widely referenced 2006 study found an estimated 214,000 community-based organizations (CBOs) – including neighbourhood organizations, native-place and ethnic organizations and welfare groups – operating in every corner of the country (Heidel 2006, 60). See also Helen James (2005), Jasmin Lorch (2006, 2007, 2008), Khin Zaw Win (2006), Kyaw Yin Hlaing (2001, 2007a, 2007b), Charles Petrie and Ashley South (2014) and South (2004).

7 Civil servants were also often involved in the management of religious and welfare groups. According to records seen by the author, the founding committee of a free funeral association in Taungoo, Bago Region, for instance, included a senior civil servant from the Department of Railroads along with members of the local Rice Merchants Association and with the owners of numerous local restaurants, hotels and other small businesses.

8 Assistance would sometimes be repaid in the form of a measurable reciprocation such as a full tank of petrol for a week of using their vehicle. For more significant aid such as construction of a road or school, which would then be donated to the relevant military commander, military officials would provide an official letter supporting a commercial licence or permit application (Interviews with trader, 3 August 2015). Kyaw Yin Hlaing’s (2001, 261–262) study of state–business relations in late 1990s Myanmar provides vivid insights into the transactional dimensions of these patron–client relationships, including the allocation of plots of land in rural areas by junta officials to business people. Economist Sean Turnell describes these contributions as ‘implicit taxes’ ‘mainly enforced […] at the township and village level’ (2011, 143). Similar dynamics of transactional patronage, often involving land transfer, were observed by other scholars conducting research during this period, though largely in borderland conflict areas (see Callahan 2007; MacLean 2008; MacLean 2010; Woods 2011).

9 Rose argues that as many Western governments abandoned the notion that they had a responsibility to shape the citizenry or deliver the ‘good life’, regimes began to encourage ideologies and modes of governance that framed individuals and ‘community’ as responsible for social functions from which the state wished to withdraw. Central to the reconfiguration of entitlement was state support for strategies of ‘citizen formation’ that relied on ‘practices, techniques and styles of self-reflection and self-management’ and reframed ethical conceptions of individual and collective responsibility (Rose 1999, 191).

10 See McCarthy (2018a) and Hsu (2018) for a discussion of the moral, symbolic inflections of welfare work in contemporary provincial Myanmar.

11 Scholars of America’s welfare state development, for instance, trace the New Deal passed in the aftermath of the ‘social disaster’ of the Great Depression to the language, ideology and legal powers of disaster intervention accrued and used by the Federal government during city fires in the 1910s and 1920s (see Brandes 1976; Dauber 2012). Disasters can also place a spotlight on systematic corruption, social inequality and discrimination (Schneider and Hwang 2014), eroding the authority and legitimacy of a regime or government and mitigating the value of formal citizenship.

12 See Adams (2013) for an examination of how Hurricane Katrina and subsequent relief efforts shaped popular notions of fictive kinship.

13 The initial report of the Tripartite Core Group, comprised of representatives from the UN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Myanmar Government, cited the official death toll on 24 June 2008 as 84,537 with 53,836 missing and 19,359 injured. Most of the missing were later considered deceased, bringing the total number of dead to over 138,000.

14 Officials claimed that 92.4% of voters approved of the constitution, with 26 million out of 27 million eligible voters casting ballots.

15 It was not until two weeks after Nargis that responsibility was transferred from the MSWRR to the much better funded and staffed Ministry of Finance (Howe and Bang 2017, 72).

16 Some of this aid was confiscated and placed in storage by the authorities, but later released. Aid workers were subjected to long visa application processes at the Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok and elsewhere, planes waited at airports in neighbouring countries for permission to deliver their supplies and relief personnel already in the country were given little or no assistance by the government in getting to the worst-hit areas. See Seekins (2009).

17 A 2009 study based on hundreds of interviews with local relief workers during Nargis similarly described how ‘the patient building of relationships’ within and across communities prior to the cyclone ‘greatly benefited […] relief work’ (CPCS 2009, 21).

18 Anthropologist Benedicte Brac de la Perriere (2010) recounts that Yangon middle-class networks were some of the first private groups to respond, collecting in-kind donations from street and neighbourhood groups as well as companies and then forming convoys of cars for the Delta to disburse the aid to survivors.

19 Videos from some of these trips were even being sold at traffic lights in Yangon in the weeks following landfall (Brac de la Perriere 2010).

20 Brac de la Perriere (2010) recounts groups using the language of ‘meritorious donation’ (Burmese: hlu) and ‘misfortune’ (Pali: dukkha), but notes that some teams enlisted more neutral discourse – potentially in an attempt to avoid contention with junta officials.

21 A number of large international companies operating in Myanmar during this period also provided donations of fuel as well as the transportation and distribution of aid to impacted communities, framing this aid as a form ‘corporate social responsibility’ (Trocaire 2011, 25–26).

22 For detailed accounts of the spontaneous nature of some of these appeals, see CPCS (2009) and Brac de la Perriere (2010).

23 These successive reforms were consistent with the military’s ‘Seven Step Roadmap to Discipline-flourishing Democracy’. For a discussion of the ‘Roadmap’ and the 2010 elections, see Pedersen (2011, 53).

24 The worst impacted regions were Rakhine State, Chin State, Sagaing Region and Magway Region.

25 Emergency response teams comprised of technical specialists were deployed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as twelve UN agencies and American, Australian and Japanese governments (Howe and Bang 2017, 73).

26 Community organizations in affected areas also used Facebook to source donations from Yangon and overseas as well as to inform relatives abroad about the progress of recovery efforts (Pursch et al. 2018, 38).

27 For analysis of the civilian flood response, see Chambers and McCarthy (2015).

28 The concept is commonly deployed in everyday life to describe grave suffering over which an individual has little or no agency, reflecting a notion of misery intimately tied to Buddhist notions of lack of control (Pali: anatta) as well as the impermanence and finitude of this world (aneitsa) (see Walton 2016, 40–42). The term dukkhatheh is also used in Burmese discourse to refer to people displaced internally or to border areas of Thailand or China as a result of Myanmar’s ongoing civil conflicts and carries connotation of ‘suffering’ as a result of misfortune devoid of agency – a notion of ‘victims’ that cannot be blamed for their situation but who must rely on themselves and others for aid and assistance. The mobilization of aid for the blameless suffering in largely lowland areas and its encouragement by authorities stands in contrast to the limited assistance mobilized from central Myanmar for conflict areas where state violence and propaganda often imply or explicitly impute blame for conflict on impacted and displaced communities.

29 An ‘*’ after a name indicates that the interlocutors’ identity has been anonymized.

30 Aung Ko Win was sanctioned by the US until October 2016 for links to the SLORC/SPDC junta. Media reports named him as the ‘top donor’ during the 2015 floods, claiming he had contributed more than USD$3.6 million to relief efforts in the form of flight services and donations from his charity group, the Brighter Future Myanmar Foundation. See reporting in The Irrawaddy (2015).

31 This suggests a notion of merit as earned only through social recognition, but also a lack of trust in institutions of redistribution – especially of the state, which was already perceived as having disrupted or diverted aid in its own interests during the devastation of Cyclone Nargis in 2008 (see Jaquet and Walton 2013).

32 Ethnographic research conducted in upper Burma during the 1950s suggested that contributions to non-religious social projects were rarely considered ‘meritorious’ by Buddhists. Melford Spiro noted from his fieldwork that many Buddhists viewed donations and the patronage of Buddhist structures and monks as attracting the highest form of spiritual merit, thereby improving the chance of ending the cycle of rebirth and reaching Nibbana. In contrast, contributing to more socially oriented causes attracted little or no merit according to his interlocutors (Spiro [1970] 1982, 463).

33 These understandings of ‘democracy’ and political community echo those encountered by political scientist Tamas Wells in extensive interviews with democracy activists in Myanmar since 2011. Wells (2018, 4) notes that his Buddhist ethnic Bamar interlocutors often understood the liberty offered by democracy as ‘freedom for moral conduct, freedom to bear moral responsibilities, rather than freedom for the exercise of individual entitlements’.

34 The official schedule of ‘sons of the soil’ or ‘national races’ is comprised of groups which the state recognizes as having resided in Myanmar prior to 1823 when British forces first invaded Burma. The list has fluctuated over decades from over 140 down to the present 135. Cheesman conceives of the national races concept as a ‘trope for Myanmar’s many linguistic and cultural groups pulled together in a state-building enterprise’ (2017, 470). In the absence of inclusive institutions capable of bridging social distance and generating shared social imaginaries, the notion of national races contentiously frames Myanmar’s diversity in ‘a mythic unity that has never emerged’ (Holliday 2014, 410).

35 See Rochanakorn (2015). There were some welfare groups from Yangon who travelled to Kayah State in the weeks following the initial landfall of Cyclone Komen. However, no groups mobilized from Taungoo despite the immediate geographic proximity to the flooded areas.