No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Marginalisation of Student and Youth Politics in Myanmar
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Days after Myanmar’s February 2021 coup, young people took to the streets. The protests were tongue-in-cheek at first, but soon gave way to a grave civil war. Understanding this shift from nonviolent protests to armed resistance requires shedding two frames that have been applied to Myanmar in the past: those of liberal democracy and state failure. Doing so brings into focus how, to an extent unprecedented in Myanmar, the anti-coup movement is challenging entrenched divides between “democracy” and “ethnonationalism,” and between “conflict” and “politics.”
The Thai 2020 anti-government protests were the first large-scale pro-democracy protests in Thailand mediated on Twitter. How has Twitter been used by anti-government supporters and to what effect? This article examines the use of hashtags by activists during the early stages of the Thai 2020 anti-government protests. Using an original dataset of 27,233 Twitter data points drawn from the #FreeYouth (FYM; #เยาวชนปลดแอก) campaign, the article argues that Twitter was used primarily to build collective narratives and disseminate movement information, rather than to mobilize offline protest activities. The key topic conversations within the Free Youth networks focus on discontent towards the government and demands for democracy, suggesting that Twitter was central to mobilizing pro-democracy collective action frames. The article further argues that the Free Youth networks on Twitter were loosely connected through community clusters of weak ties, not tight crowds. The challenge for FYM activists going forward is to support ties across its online networks that will strengthen over time, or risk becoming an ephemeral network of convenience that can only be mobilized on an ad hoc basis.
This article discusses the motivations behind the involvement of high school students in the anti-government protests across Thailand in 2020. Drawing on 150 school and 150 university student interviews, focus groups, and observation of sixteen protests conducted around the country, it argues that protesting youths were motivated by grievances against repressive, authoritative and unaccountable conservative education systems and political institutions, particularly the monarchy.
The coup was ostensibly aimed at addressing electoral fraud and protecting democracy, but it was likely more of a shameless (and personal) grab for power. The coup has swiftly triggered powerful protests and a resistance movement of national proportions that form a significant “social opposition” to the military take-over. With support from their elders and professional groups, the “Gen Zers,” young people aged between 16 and 30, are involved in a myriad of creative and peaceful actions around the country, demonstrating people power, expressing their dissent, and raising awareness of their plight.
The way this young generation is leading the nonviolent protests and resistance artistically, symbolically, and with creative and catchy slogans reveals how the political culture amongst the youth in Myanmar has changed over the last ten years of political transition. And with this changing political culture of youth, the military is being pressured to rethink its strategies to rule the country.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
• Following the government's use of high-pressure water cannons against demonstrators on 16 October, the student uprising in Thailand has morphed into decentralised protests springing up in Bangkok and different parts of the country.
• The mass protests are rooted in a crisis of legitimacy due to the failed return to democracy after last year's general elections, the court verdict disbanding the Future Forward Party in February, the abduction of a political activist in June, and the waning popularity of the monarchy.
• The Internet is not a public sphere privileging rational and ideal speech that leads to consensus. Rather, it is mediated space with human and non-human actors acting in heterogeneous relations to amplify and aggregate allies.
• One of these actors is popular culture, which serves succinctly to communicate complex issues to a global audience.
• Thailand's young protestors have transgressed the realm of fear and entered unchartered territory, reconfiguring along the way the conversations necessary for the future that they envision.
Hong Kong student movements before the Umbrella Movement showed a political outlook of voicing within norm of the establishment, using “peaceful, rational and non-violent” approaches, acknowledging the authorities of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and mainland Chinese governments and recognizing attachment to the motherland China. Today’s new emerging political outlook of the Hong
Kong student movement has a profile of anti-establishment, using more assertive means and not excluding radical behaviour, distrust of the HKSAR and mainland authorities and assertion of radical localism. In the last two years, Hong Kong students have undergone a rapid change in their orientation, resulting in today’s outlook. This paper argues that the Umbrella Movement is the key for the turnaround and it testifies to the birth of a new social and political consciousness amongst Hong Kong students.
The study examines the role of social media during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong that lasted from September to December 2014. By interviewing a random sample of 1011 respondents over the telephone before the end of the Umbrella Movement, it was found that social media had become an insurgent public sphere (IPS) in the protest movement. Data showed that acquisition of political news through social media was related positively to support for the Umbrella Movement and adversely with satisfaction and trust of established political authorities, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, the Hong Kong police, and the Chinese central government. The insurgent public sphere role of social media, its implications, and likely development vis-à-vis the state and the market are discussed. © 2015 The Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication Research, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
SAY GOODBYE TO TAIWAN, " wrote political scientist John Mearsheimer in a widely read article in the March-April 2014 issue of The National Interest. 1 Threatened by China's rising economic might and abandoned by a weakening United States, one of Asia's most vibrant democracies was facing, in his " realist " analysis, an almost inevitable annexation via economic if not military force. " Time, " he wrote, " is running out for the little island coveted by its gigantic, growing neighbor. " But only days after publication, on March 18, activists and armchair analysts alike said hello to a new reality. That evening, the assembly hall of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan was stormed by a motley crew led by students from the " Black Island Nation Youth, " a loosely organized student political action committee formed the previous year. The several hundred occupiers repelled police efforts to eject them, escorted out the few officers on duty, and barricaded the doors with seats tied together with rope. None of them expected that the occupation, later known as the 318 or Sunflower Movement, would last twenty-four days, spawn the biggest pro-democracy protest rally in the island's history, reframe popular discourse about Taiwan's political and social trajectory, precipitate the midterm electoral defeat of the ruling party, and prefigure unprecedented protest in nearby Hong Kong.
"This paper will therefore address these scholarly lacunae. First, it will provide a sufficient explanation of pre-colonial and British education prior to 1920. Second, it will distill the nationalist movement down to the components that were influenced by the student movement. And, by doing so, it will provide a specific answer to the initial research question: how did colonial education and the student movement influence the nationalist movement in Burma? " Thesis: "this paper will argue that the activity of the Burmese student movement—itself a response to the decline of monastic education and its replacement with secular education under the British—was vital to the success of the Burmese nationalist movement, providing it with a crucial spark and a young generation of nationalists."
This profile sheds light on the recent episode of contention triggered in Myanmar by the coup of 1 February 2021. Building on Tilly’s concept of repertoire, it maps out and describes some of the ways anti-coup protesters have been mobilized into contentious collective action. It points to inherited patterns of protest that are culturally specific to Myanmar. Historically forged repertoires of contention, such as call-and-response chants, silent strikes, and armed resistance have been (re)constructed and deployed in the weeks that followed the coup. Yet a new generation of Burmese activists has also tested, refined, and diffused innovative tactics and gendered strategies, such as the htamein protest and pots and pans protests. The hybridisation of Myanmar’s repertoire of contentious performances has typically derived from the evolving political environment, a collective memory of past cycles of protest, and new online opportunities for protesters to learn, borrow and adapt to local cultures several tools or tactics from global repertoires.
The rigidity of the 2008 Constitution of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar is rightly notorious, as this rigidity was proven at least three times through failed attempts at reform. Despite these failed attempts, the military disputed the results of the election held in November 2020, and conflict ostensibly over that issue led to a military coup on 1 February 2021. This coup purported to have been undertaken constitutionally as an ‘emergency’ but was the object of popular rejection. In this article, we focus on the struggle over constitutionalism that had its origins in earlier attempts to achieve democracy. In our focus on the current nature and implication of ‘constitutional struggle’ in Myanmar, we make use of analysis based on factual data collected by the second author, located in Mandalay, one of the epicentres of struggle against the military and their actions following the coup. Our argument is that this ‘praetorian constitutionalism’ in Myanmar absent a pre-agreed pact between the military and the civilian defies the basic logic of democratic or liberal constitutionalism and hence is unconstitutional in both spirit and text. This explains how a constitution drafted in order to protect the position and privileges of the military was ultimately in effect rejected by that same military. The article will argue that the praetorian constitutionalism of Myanmar during 2010–21 contains a necessarily built-in struggle between the civilian and the soldier that remains unresolved.
This article offers a preliminary analysis of the hundreds of youth-inspired mass protests staged in Thailand during 2020. It argues that while calling for reforms and flirting with revolutionary rhetoric, the protestors lacked a clear programmatic agenda and were primarily engaged in disrupting dominant narratives about the country’s politics, especially in relation to the previously taboo question of the political role of the monarchy. Despite the ad hoc and sometimes incoherent nature of the protests, the students mounted a dramatic challenge to Thailand’s ruling elite. Ultimately, the conflict exemplified a generational divide: people from Generation Z, aged under 25, have radically different understandings of power, deference and legitimacy from older population groups. Whatever happens to the protest movement in the short term, the demonstrators have made a decisive break with the old social consensus that existed during the long reign of the late King Bhumibol (1946–2016).
In recent months, masses of Hong Kong citizens have taken part in a remarkable wave of protests, known as the Water Revolution. Ignited by the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, and later in response to police brutality and rights abuses, hundreds of thousands of protestors abruptly gathered in various parts of the city to rise up against the encroachment of the incumbent regime. Through novel uses of social media and mobile technology, they acted in concert to confront riot police in wildcat actions. In effect, they exhibit a contemporary type of smart mob, as digitally savvy citizens engage with each other in largely ad hoc and networked forms of pop-up protest. This article illustrates both the continuity and changes in the recent development of a nascent smart mob in Hong Kong. It fleshes out how its protest repertoires and movement objectives have emerged and evolved vis-à-vis state suppression in the global city of East Asia. With a focus on changing contours, this article brings to the fore the pragmatic and temporally emergent properties of the smart mob to consider the widespread and protracted movement in Hong Kong.
This article, which is based on a comparative survey conducted in late 2014, explores public opinion in Taiwan and Hong Kong on the Sunflower and Umbrella movements. We find that public support for the local movement in each place was almost equally divided. As for the other movement, the supporters outnumbered opponents. The basic patterns of the relationship between socio-demographic attributes, political attitudes, as well as the evaluation of the “China impact”, and public support for the two movements were consistent in both societies. Those most likely to support the Sunflower and Umbrella movements were: the young; Minnanese, Hakka, or Hong Kong-born people; those who support the “Pan-Green” or “Pan-democracy” camps; those who agreed that democracy is the best political system; those who had a negative view of the “China impact”, especially its harmful influence on local democracy. Notwithstanding these similarities, in Taiwan, support for the Sunflower Movement was mainly divided by ethnic group and for the Umbrella Movement by gender; while in Hong Kong, support for both movements was largely divided by age, and the perceived “China impact” on local economic growth had no independent effects.
:During the democracy uprising in 1988, Paw Oo Htun, whose nom de guerre, Min Ko Naing, means Conqueror of Kings, emerged as one of the movement's most prominent student leaders. Together with other student leaders, he revived the umbrella students' organization, the All Burma Federation of Student Unions. Today, while serving out a twenty year prison sentence, Min Ko Naing remains a symbol of the Burmese student movement. In this essay, interviews with close friends and student colleagues help document his story.
Postcolonial, developmental states recognize the need for higher education to generate both ideas and skilled human resources. Many seek too, though, a level of state control incompatible with ideals of academic freedom. This dilemma is all the more keen for semidemocratic states such as Malaysia and Singapore, which can neither curb protest as coercively as their more authoritarian neighbors do nor accept free-wheeling criticism as more politically liberal ones do. Presumed morally “pure” and entitled to speak, students across Southeast Asia are heir to a tradition of political engagement, based largely on their identity as students. Despite crackdowns, students have been central to political change across the region. They remain so in much of Asia—but not, for instance, in Malaysia. The muting of student protest there may be traced in large part to a post-1969 process of intellectual containment, or normative delegitimation and historical erasure of student activism, with far-reaching implications.
“Malaysia needs this kind of spirit.” With these words, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman, responded to a student demonstration supporting the nation against the 1968 territorial claims to Sabah put forth by the Philippines. Although he toned down his enthusiasm somewhat when later he learned that the same students had forced their way into the Philippine Embassy compound and had torn down its flag prior to their demonstration in front of his residence, there is no denying that this was another example of political change in Malaysia which is causing its leaders to come to grips with a comparatively new phenomena, students as participants in the political process.
Beyond the Coup in Myanmar: The Emerging New Politics of Gen Z
- Saw Kapi
KAPI, Saw, 2022, "Beyond the Coup in Myanmar: The Emerging New Politics of Gen Z",
International Human Rights Clinic -Harvard Law School,
https://humanrightsclinic.law.harvard.edu/beyond-the-coup-in-myanmar-theemerging-new-politics-of-gen-z/.
Legacy of the Fighting Peacock: Analyzing the Role of Student Activism in Burmese Democratic Movements
- Dan Koon-Hong
- Chan
KOON-HONG, Dan Chan, 2014, "Legacy of the Fighting Peacock: Analyzing the Role of
Student Activism in Burmese Democratic Movements", The Journal of Politics and
Society, https://doi.org/10.7916/D80R9NPV.
Outrage: Burma's Struggle for Democracy
- Bertil Lintner
LINTNER, Bertil, 1990, Outrage: Burma's Struggle for Democracy, London: White
Lotus.
Death of a Hero: the U Thant Disturbances in Burma
- Andrew Selth
SELTH, Andrew, 2018, "Death of a Hero: the U Thant Disturbances in Burma, December
1974", Griffith Asia Institute,
www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0032/483827/AS-death-of-a-hero-U-Thant-disturbance-web-final.pdf.
Burmese Student Politics in a Changing Society
- Josef Silverstein
SILVERSTEIN, Josef, 1968, "Burmese Student Politics in a Changing Society",
Daedalus, vol. 97 (1), pp. 274-292.
In the Wake of the Coup: How Myanmar Youth Arose to Fight for the Nation
- Su Thant
- Mon
THANT, Su Mon, 2021, "In the Wake of the Coup: How Myanmar Youth Arose to Fight
for the Nation", Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, https://eu.boell.org/sites/default/files/2021-12/Myanmar%20youth_FINAL.pdf.
Students Take a Leading Role in Protests against the Coup
- Naw Waa
- Say
WAA, Naw Say Phaw, 2021, "Students Take a Leading Role in Protests against the Coup",
University World News,
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210212142743135.
The Face of Resistance: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Fight for Freedom
- Aung Zaw
ZAW, Aung, 2013, The Face of Resistance: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Fight for
Freedom, Chiang Mai: Mekong Press.