Between Transition and Revolution in Burma Studies - <i>Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement</i> and <i>Forging the Nation: Land Struggles in Myanmar's Transition Period</i> and <i>Outsourcing the Polity: Non

Rice yields have dropped in many parts of Myanmar since the 2021 military coup, as the army burns fields and farmers face droughts and inflated input costs. But 2023 brought a bumper crop for books in Burma studies. The seeds were planted in a different time, when the mood was heady in Yangon's art galleries and business towers, and activists seemed to sleep only on the tedious bus trips to Nay Pyi Taw. Along with malls and mobile internet, the short-lived reforms of the 2010s brought a flock of researchers, myself among them, into the study of Myanmar. We were the generation hailed by Robert Taylor's assessment: “From being an academic backwater in which a learned paper could empty a seminar room faster than a call to drinks, now Myanmar political studies fill whole lecture theatres with newcomers hoping to understand Myanmar's politics so that they can change them.”1We did not have much to go on. Despite notable exceptions—Ardeth Thawnghmung and Jane Ferguson come to mind—research on contemporary Myanmar had long been limited by threats, restrictions, surveillance, and propaganda. Writing of a typical day of constant shadowing and “library arrest” during archival research on Myanmar's military in the early 1990s, political scientist Mary Callahan noted: “The assumption was always that we were being watched. Whether we were or not is unclear and perhaps irrelevant. What is significant is that everyone believed we were.”2 No wonder, then, that Andrew Selth depicted the field of modern Burma studies as dominated by history and pockmarked with dubious claims.3 But as military reformers negotiated Cyclone Nargis relief, Aung San Suu Kyi's release, private telecommunications licenses, and Obama's two visits, things began to shift for contemporary research. Burma went from “backwater” to center stage in Asian studies, fueled by new scholars, both foreign and local, asking new types of questions. Our predecessors had come for palm leaf manuscripts; we wanted to know about democracy, capitalism, land, and inequality.The research rush had a fair share of naivety. Over drinks in a swanky cocktail bar, an American graduate student once introduced himself to me as “the first sociologist of Burma,” with an arrogance that would make J. S. Furnivall blush. But several in our flock learned local languages; conducted extensive fieldwork; engaged policymakers, development agencies, and activists; and even went on to write good books. This past cool season, when my host family in Myanmar's rural northwest would be taking up their sickles and heading out to the paddy fields, as air strikes rained down on Karenni in the east and the Three Brotherhood Alliance launched Operation 1027 further north, I reaped the harvest.These four books are about a time we used to call “the transition.” They were published in a moment we call “the revolution.” This creates a common tension, as observations and analyses gleaned from an era characterized by open political horizons are now read and interpreted in the wake of a military coup and resurgent civil war. The questions that animate these books—How should land be governed? How do activists mobilize? Who weaves the social safety net? And who slips through it?—are just as urgent now as they were in more hopeful times. It might be easier to understand how previous dynamics of land, labor, and law mapped onto the present if the authors did not have such opposing evaluations: Mark tells us that reforms in the 2010s “significantly changed the lives of millions” (xiii), while Prasse-Freeman states just as confidently, “While the coup delivered its stunning death knell, Myanmar's democratic transition was already appearing moribund. . . . The process had left many worse off and changed little for most” (xviii). Reading these four books together can produce the dizzying sensation of being in a hall of mirrors, as details of the democratic decade are refracted through the authors’ disciplinary conventions and pet theories. At times, I had the depressing sense that everyone suffered confirmation bias: certainly it is not hard to find capitalist exploitation in the world today, and if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The divergences and contradictions make the nature of and relations between Burma's near past and present politics difficult to assess.But looking for a verdict is the wrong way to read these texts. Given the cyclical imaginings of progress and decline in Myanmar's history,4 we shouldn't take the finality of “transition,” or even “revolution,” too seriously. In the long war unfolding now across Myanmar's countryside, and the authoritarian resurgence in global politics more broadly, it is useful to imagine both terms as analytically continuous, part of a wave sign of politics. What emerges from these texts as a whole is a picture of the everyday compromises, chronic contradictions, and structural transformations that characterized Myanmar's so-called transition. The authors ask what democracy meant in practice, probing continuity and change from the perspective of activists, community groups, policymakers, and informal settlement dwellers. These perspectives are partial, but they shed light on aspects of Burmese society, economy, and politics essential to understanding both the current resistance against the military government and the challenges of crafting a future democracy with more equity and longevity. After decades of relative stasis in Burma studies, these books offer a cacophony of hope, ingenuity, heartache, and suffering that ushers in a new era. That this scholarly renaissance occurs in the shadow of real-world violence, repression, and death is a cruel, if characteristic, irony.SiuSue Mark's Forging the Nation is the most straightforward of these books, an account of civil society efforts at land reform and a comparative examination of its effects across the country. Based on a decade of development work and scholarly research, including interviews with policymakers, donors, and farmers’ union leaders, Mark pushes back against the allegation of “failed transition” to argue that both elite-led and grassroots movements did indeed make land more democratic. At the same time, she characterizes this as a limited “land tenure reform” focused on clarifying rural property rights, rather than redistribution. The first part of the book provides a top-down analysis of a triple transition toward rule of law, ethnic peace, and open markets. Latter chapters examine local variations across three sites characterized by distinct agroecologies and configurations of authority. By comparing the lowland rice paddies of Ayeyarwady Region to the remote highlands of Chin State and the areas of Ethnic Armed Group control in Kayin State, Mark shows us how land reforms envisioned by urban policymakers, activists, and businesspeople played out across various environmental and political landscapes.Forging the Nation's strengths lie in its documentary quality. Mark's attention to legal, historical, and empirical detail is on display in chapter 2, which explores Myanmar's stacked laws related to land and considers efforts at land return and the drafting of a National Land Use Policy in this context, providing a solid primer on land and legal pluralism. Yet in reading Mark's descriptions of the reform process, I often wondered how to evaluate outcomes. Does it matter that the National Land Use Policy was mostly ignored by the National League for Democracy? Chapter 3 analyzes the different implications for contemporary land and citizenship claims when land reform is framed in terms of either Indigeneity or ethnonationalism, two options that emerge from different histories of the Union of Burma. But what should we think about the moral merits and political possibilities of choosing either framing? This contrast is instructive but lacks the urgency of Nick Cheesman's explanation of ethnicity, a genealogy of taingyintha တိုင်းရင်းသား (national races) that illuminates the double bind of the Rohingya and other groups that seek inclusion in an inherently exclusionary model of racialized citizenship.5 In chapter 4, Mark explores the different forms of domestic, military, and Chinese capital at play in Myanmar's frontier market. We meet a broad cast of characters united in their commitment to the so-called free market, whether that means removing sanctions or exporting copper. One corporate executive says: “In the business sector, we want fair competition, but we can't compete with UMEHL [a military enterprise]. They don't have to invest in land, so how can we compete with someone who gets land for free. We just want to compete equally, so that the economy is healthy” (99). It is in quotes like this that we get a sense that “democracy” carries many definitions (here, a functioning free market), and that stolen land is a different type of “problem” (here, not a challenge to justice but rather to neoliberal principles) for various actors.Quotes like these point to another strength of Mark's book: the breadth of actors interviewed and sites examined. While “civil society” takes center stage, Mark does not confine her interlocuters to a single social type. She is also the only one of these four authors to attempt a systematic comparison across sites. In part 2 of Forging the Nation, we travel to the Ayeyarwaddy Delta, to the Chin Hills, and to Karen National Union–controlled areas to witness variations in social mobilization and land control. Mark's description of the functioning of Ayeyarwaddy's farmers’ unions, and the combinations and choices between donor-driven and disruptive activism, are a highlight (here, if not elsewhere, her analysis aligns closely with Prasse-Freeman's). I was less convinced by her account of Chin State, if only because any analysis that fails to reckon seriously with the political economy of the diaspora and the church misses major drivers of agrarian change in this upland region. In Karen National Union areas, we encounter different visions of customary land but familiar calls for the clear delineation of land rights. In the long shadow of Hernando De Soto, even the ethnonationalist activists present private property as a solution to decades of conflict and impoverishment.Such glimpses are tantalizing yet sometimes frustrating, laying bare the impossibility of analyzing all of Myanmar's similarities and variations when it comes to land politics without offering a theory that emerges from the data itself rather than from the assumptions that undergird case selection. While ostensibly demonstrating “forging the nation,” the discussion illuminates the difficulties of this process, particularly when it comes to divergent struggles over resources across the country's many ethnic groups and distinct geographies. The other authors in this review will dispute Mark's optimistic interpretation of “transition.” But her framing captures a fundamental problem for forging the nation after revolution: enacting land policies that promote restorative justice and deliver rural prosperity across regions characterized by ethnic, environmental, and political and should to which on in three the book first provides a and through a discussion of an of a of activists, and with a of the contradictions of in Myanmar. Based on research conducted in and with and through the Rohingya and the of the 2021 military coup, this is the most and of the books. 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