Renaud Egreteau’s research while affiliated with City University of Hong Kong and other places

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.

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.

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.

This article investigates the legislative activity of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's iconic dissident, during her inaugural tenure as opposition MP in the country’s first post-junta parliament (2012–2016). How did such a totemic figure behave in a legislature dominated by an army-backed party and military-appointed MPs? What legislative tools did she use? The study draws evidence from Burmese-language proceedings of Myanmar’s Union legislature and field interviews. The findings point to a largely marginal, yet disciplined, involvement of Aung San Suu Kyi in legislative business. She neither acted as party whip nor openly criticised government record or took disruptive action in the context of Myanmar’s ‘discipline-flourishing democracy’. Yet, she joined policy debates through the occasional motion, used her position as a catalyst for engaging the government and the world, and successfully marshalled her party to win the next two general elections in 2015 and 2020. The findings have implications for understanding how the strategies of such near-mythical figure can explain subsequent electoral or political (mis)fortunes.

Shedding light on an understudied aspect of Myanmar's institutional history, this study interrogates the perpetuation of parliamentary rituals in the country's successive postcolonial legislatures. It focuses on two ritualised ceremonies: the oath taken by new members of parliaments and the mace-bearing spectacle marking the opening of the daily session. Their maintenance, re-appropriation and re-designing under Myanmar's different post-independence regimes reveal a persistent linkage between institution-building, state formation and the reinvention of royal symbols and religious traditions of the country's dominant ethnic group, the Bamar. Furthermore, drawing on document analysis, archival research and interviews with MPs and parliamentary staff carried out in Myanmar's Union legislature, this article argues that the continuing performance of such parliamentary rituals has served two other purposes: conferring hegemonic powers and status on the parliamentary speakers, while ensuring loyalty, discipline and deference in the house.

This article investigates the patterns of parliamentary change observed in Myanmar since a constitutionally sanctioned, partially elected legislature was revived in January 2011. In particular, it poses the question as to whether processes of legislative institutionalisation have taken place in the course of the 2010s. Grounded on ethnographic work carried out between 2013 and 2018 in Myanmar’s Union parliament, established in Naypyitaw, the article explores how in the two post-junta legislatures elected in 2010 and 2015 a number of institutional legacies and parliamentary procedures and functions have been both reintroduced and also reappropriated. The findings point to emerging patterns of routinisation of some legislative tasks and duties performed by neophyte lawmakers and parliamentary staff alike. It is argued that, despite persistent capacity and efficiency problems, and a continuing dominance of the executive and the armed forces in the post-junta context, a parliamentary culture has re-emerged in Myanmar. The article concludes by drawing attention to how a process of legislative institutionalisation has been developed, albeit cursorily.