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Why veterans lose: the decline of retired military officers in Myanmar’s post-junta elections
Abstract
Retired military officers often continue to wield significant influence in regimes built after the end of junta rule, sometimes helping to bridge enduring civil–military divides. Myanmar’s recent legislative elections offers a counterintuitive case. There has been a rapidly decreasing influence of military retirees in the electoral landscape shaped in the 2010s. I reveal this decline using data on the sociological background of candidates for the 2015 and 2020 elections. Then, building on field interviews with retired officers who ran for office, I offer five explanatory propositions: (1) the depletion of moral capital held by soldiers; (2) military socialisation and the difficulties for veterans to transition to political life, with rivals from other sectors emerging as better equipped; (3) the existence of worthier avenues for power, influence and wealth acquisition; (4) the failure of the authoritarian successor party to manipulate votes and be voted back into office; and (5) the lingering authority and political sway of serving officers. The findings illuminate the persistent insulation from Myanmar society of its active military – even before the 2021 coup – and challenge the claim that veterans can help close the widening gap in Myanmar’s civil–military relations.
Burmese politicians of all persuasions … seem to be equally bereft of inspiration for negotiating a path to a peaceful and inclusive state in which the hopes and aspirations of non-Burman and non-Buddhist communities would be protected.
In an attempt to better grasp the realities of Myanmar's national legislature, which was formed after the 2010 elections, this paper examines the personal profiles and social backgrounds of its elected and appointed members. I have sought to record data on the social composition of Myanmar's first “post-junta” parliament and provide a dataset for further comparative research on the resurgence of legislative affairs in the country. The study draws on official publications containing the biographies of 658 national parliamentarians. Focusing on six socio-demographic variables, the findings suggest that the typical Burmese legislator still closely mirrors the conventional image of Myanmar's characteristic postcolonial leader: a man, in his mid-fifties, ethnically Bamar, Buddhist, holding a Myanmar university degree, engaged in business activities or in the education sector (in the case of the 492 elected legislators) or in the security sector (for the 166 military appointees). However, I argue that the profile of Myanmar's first post-junta legislature offers a quite unexpected level of diversity that may augur well for the emergence of a new civilian policymaking elite in Myanmar.
This article asks how rebel leaders capture and lose legitimacy within their own movement. Analysing these complex and often uneasy relations between elites and grassroots of insurgency is important for understanding the success or failure of peace processes. This is because internal contestation over authority between rival rebel leaders can drive a movement’s external strategy. Based on ethnographic research on the Karen and Kachin rebellions in Myanmar and insights from Political Sociology, the article suggests that leadership authority is linked to social identification and the claim to recognition among insurgent grassroots. If rebel leaders manage to satisfy their grassroots’ claim to recognition, their insurgent orders are stable. Failing this, their authority erodes and is likely to be challenged. These findings contribute to understanding insurgency and peace negotiations in Myanmar and civil wars more generally by showing how struggles over legitimacy within rebel groups drive wider dynamics of war and peace.
https://fngnews.co/2017/02/02/myanmar-the-military-commercial-complex/
Myanmar: the military-commercial complex
by FNG on February 2, 2017
https://www.ft.com/topics/authors/Michael_Peel
https://www.ft.com/content/c6fe7dce-d26a-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0
Burma's recent election was clearly not free and fair. However, it can also be seen as improving a uniquely unrepresentative government, creating greater pluralism, and institutionalizing differences within the ruling junta. Even the rigged election may have created opportunities for further opening in the future.
The government of Myanmar is today publicly committed to building a 'modern developed democratic nation'. It has initiated a number of measures aimed at political and economic liberalization. This article examines the military's perception of the ongoing process of liberalization. It
argues that, on the basis of mutual understanding and smooth relations between the government and the military at both individual and institutional levels, the military is likely to continue its support for the political liberalization measures initiated by the President and supported by the
National Assembly. However, the military is not yet prepared to tolerate any structural changes that would undermine its national political role, the basic principles it has laid down for national unity, or its institutional autonomy.
In January 2011, parliament was restored in Myanmar after two decades of military rule. Startlingly, it began to repeal obsolete laws, scrutinize government expenditures, summon ministers to the floor, and discuss the state’s annual budget. It also allowed its elected representatives to make public the grievances collected from constituents infuriated at enduring practices of land confiscation, petty corruption, and everyday abuses of power. Yet ten years later in February 2021, parliament was shut down, again, by another coup d’état. What has been learned in the span of a decade of post-junta legislative resurgence? How could an elected legislature resurface—and function—in a country that had only limited experience with parliamentary affairs and representative politics since its independence from British rule? What lessons can be drawn from the Myanmar case for parliamentary institution building and legislative developments (and decay) in post-authoritarian and praetorian contexts? This book offers a compelling account of Myanmar’s halting efforts to develop the institutional framework and practice of a parliament-based democratic governance between 2011 and 2021. It charts the stages of such a parliamentary resurgence, tracing its causes and exploring how various institutional and political legacies both informed and constrained the re-establishment and operations of the Union legislature, or Pyidaungsu Hluttaw . Embracing both ethnographic observations and a methodical engagement with legislative proceedings and historical material, Renaud Egreteau investigates how parliamentary life has (re)emerged in the 2010s. His analysis concentrates on key legislative mechanisms, processes and tasks pertaining to government oversight, budgetary control, representation and lawmaking and interrogates how they have been learned, (re)appropriated, and performed by Myanmar’s new breed of civilian and military legislators until the 2021 army takeover.
This article re-examines the relationship between military intervention on the one hand, and civilian supremacy over the military and the enduring popularity and potency of suffrage and legislative politics, on the other. It shows how these two enduring features of Philippine politics have proven to be quite effective deterrents in neutralizing extremist acts like the coup. As “performative acts,” they help stabilize the Philippine polity by providing an alternative outlet for mass resentment or protest and help to neutralize rival radical rebellions. These also enable a weak state to reform or rejuvenate after periods of profound political crisis, albeit only partially. The coup, however, is a poor rival:its history is far shorter and littered with failures. It has since ceased to be a weapon of choice by military actors who now prefer cacique democracy as the arena in which to pursue their interests. This was evident during the term of Pres. Fidel Ramos and while the military leadership did launch a de facto coup by withdrewing its support for Pres. Joseph Estrada, it immediately reverted to the proverbial backroom deals and patronage relations with its civilian superiors under Pres. Gloria Arroyo.
It has become the conventional wisdom that the transition from authoritarian rule to a more democratic form of government in Myanmar was due to the efforts of Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy, the pressures applied against the military regime by Western democracies and belated recognition by the ruling generals that Myanmar could not continue down the path of political and economic isolation. This narrative suits many of the key actors in this drama, but it denies independent agency to the most important player of all, namely the country’s armed forces. The paradigm shift which has occurred in the country’s political landscape over the past decade can more accurately be described as the result of a long-term plan drawn up by Myanmar’s military leadership, which surrendered absolute power in a calculated move to advance its own agenda through the controlled transition to a “disciplined democracy”.
What happens to authoritarian ruling parties when they accept democracy and reinvent their organizations, symbols, and programs to comply with the norms of free political competition? The consequences of such reinvention have been neglected empirically, yet they are critical for our understanding both of the costs and benefits of party transformation and for the health of democratic party competition. Using a novel data set comprising 81 countries over 1945–2015, and a structured comparison of two prominent cases of authoritarian reinvention, this article makes three contributions. First, it distinguishes among the different strategies available to authoritarian ruling parties after the collapse of their monopoly regimes, including exit, dissolution, and reinvention. Second, it finds that the cruel paradox is that the biggest boosters and builders of party democracy—the reinvented authoritarian successor parties—eventually suffer the most electorally. Third, this paradoxical fate follows from their initial decisions to reinvent and transform themselves.
What explains why some authoritarian governments fail to take all the steps they can to preserve their positions of power during democratic transitions? This article examines this question using the example of the leading pro-military party in Myanmar, which lost badly to the National League for Democracy (NLD) in the transitioning elections of 2015. This article argues that a key to understanding how the military failed to perpetuate its power in the electoral sphere resides in its choice of electoral system. In 2010, the military junta chose an electoral system, first-past-the-post, that was distinctly ill-suited to preserve its power. We explore several hypotheses for why this occurred and ultimately conclude that the military and its allies did not understand electoral systems well enough to act strategically and that they overestimated their support relative to the NLD. This failure of authoritarian learning has important implications for understanding authoritarian politics, democratic transitions, and the challenges faced by authoritarian governments seeking to make such transitions.
Modern authoritarian regimes have held power in countries of widely diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, suggesting that there is nothing particular about Burmese culture which made Burma more susceptible to military rule. The leaders of authoritarian regimes, however, naturally seek to emphasize those historical, cultural and religious traditions which help legitimize or bolster their power. This book illustrates how successive regimes in Burma manipulated Burmese history and exploited certain cultural norms and popular beliefs both to legitimize military rule and to marginalize detractors. It also shows how successive regimes used violence and a climate of insecurity to instill fear and political passivity in the people they ruled. In addition, the book considers what kinds of resistance emerged and in what spaces, through an examination of households and communities, prisons, schools, military barracks, and religious centers. Finally, it considers the roles of private businesses, independent organizations, and international actors in Burma's affairs.
On November 8 the vast majority of Myanmar's citizens participated in what official observers – international and domestic – widely hailed as the most genuinely competitive, free, fair, and orderly parliamentary elections in the nation since 1990. Yet the poll, which resulted in a resounding victory for the National League for Democracy (NLD), surprised many observers, who expected that members of the ruling party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), would have done better through widely anticipated vote-rigging and manipulation of the results. Right up to a few days before the vote, observers were concerned about the possibility of a cancellation of the election as a result of politically motivated violence or, in the event they went ahead, administrative chaos resulting from errors in voters’ registration information and large-scale vote-rigging and manipulation by the ruling party. These fears were well-founded given that only 3 weeks prior to the elections, the government's Union Election Commission (UEC) proposed delaying the polls, citing recent floods that had devastated 12 out of Myanmar's 14 states and regions, killing 103 people and displacing 1 million others. This proposal predictably met strong resistance from the NLD and other opposition parties, which expected a strong public support for them in the poll.
General Ne Win's state reformation in the name of the "Burmese Way to Socialism" contributed to the expansion of the political role of the Myanmar Armed Forces, the tatmadaw, but the underlying dynamics of this change remain poorly understood. Drawing on propaganda publications, profiles of the country's political elites, and original documents in Burma's military archives, Yoshihiro Nakanishi offers a fresh look at the involvement of the tatmadaw in Burma's ideological discourse and civil-military relations. The tatmadaw's anti-communist propaganda during the 1950s was a key element in state ideology under the Ne Win regime, and the direct participation of tatmadaw officers in the Burma Socialist Programme Party and government ministries at the national and local level transformed the political party system and civilian bureaucracy. Personal relationships - between Ne Win and the tatmadaw officer corps, and within the military - were central to the growing influence of the military, and to the outcome of the political crisis and subsequent military coup d'état in 1988. Nakanishi's discussion of these processes reveals many heretofore-unknown facts about this "dark age" in the country's political history, and highlights its institutional legacy for the post-1988 military regime and the reformist government that succeeded it. His thought-provoking conclusions are significant for Southeast Asia specialists and for students of politics generally, and his insights will be useful for anyone seeking to engage with Myanmar as it comes to terms with an outside world it once kept at arm's length.
Contributors A note on Thai and Vietnamese names Introduction Muthiah Alagappa Part I. Legitimacy: Explication and Elaboration: 1. The anatomy of legitimacy Muthiah Alagappa 2. The bases of legitimacy Muthiah Alagappa 3. Contestation and crisis Muthiah Alagappa Part II. Legitimacy: Case Studies: 4. Malaysia: aspects and audiences of legitimacy William Case 5. Singapore: political legitimacy through managing conformity Cho-Oon Khong 6. The Philippines: the languages of legitimation John T. Sidel 7. Burma: the depoliticization of the political Chaeo-Tzang Yawnghwe 8. Thailand: the evolution of legitimacy Saitip Sukatipan 9. Indonesia: historicizing the New Order's legitimacy dilemma Mochtar Pabottingi 10. Vietnam: the changing models of legitimation Thaveeporn Vasavakul Part III. Conclusion and Observations: 11. Seeking a more durable basis of authority Muthiah Alagappa Notes Bibliography Index.
Wendy Hunter explores civil-military relations in Brazil following the transition to civilian leadership in 1985. She documents a marked, and surprising, decline in the political power of the armed forces, even as they have remained involved in national policy making. To account for the success of civilian politicians, Hunter invokes rational-choice theory in arguing that politicians will contest even powerful forces in order to gain widespread electoral support. Many observers expected Brazil's fledgling democracy to remain under the firm direction of the military, which had tightly controlled the transition from authoritarian to civilian rule. Hunter carefully refutes this conventional wisdom by demonstrating the ability of even a weak democratic regime to expand its autonomy relative to a once-powerful military, thanks to the electoral incentives that motivate civilian politicians. Based on interviews with key participants and on extensive archival research, Hunter's analysis of developments in Brazil suggests a more optimistic view of the future of civilian democratic rule in Latin America.
This article explains the persistent influence of General Augusto Pinochet in Chilean politics. After leaving the presidency in 1990, he managed to fuse his personal position with that not only of the institution of the army but of the armed forces as a whole, making Pinochet and the military almost indistinguishable. By doing so Pinochet sought to equate any attack on him with an attack on the institution. The military, in turn, accepted him as its spokesman and defender. He viewed his role as that of Cincinnatus, an emperor twice called to save ancient Rome. Throughout the 1990s Pinochet represented a serious obstacle to democratisation. With his intimate ties to the military institution, his influence - perhaps even after death - can never be discounted.
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