Author: pstaniland

A mix of comparative politics and American Political Development scholars have written a valuable and important paper putting the rise of Trumpism, and current shape of the American polity, in comparative perspective. It’s grim but necessary reading:

“we argue that President Trump’s election in 2016 represents the intersection of three streams in American politics: polarized two-party presidentialism; a polity fundamentally divided over membership and status in the political community, in ways structured by race and economic inequality; and the erosion of democratic norms at the elite and mass levels”

An article with similar themes by Steve Levitsky, Rob Mickey, and Lucan Way can be found in Foreign Affairs.  It also provides a useful reminder of just how new full-ish American democracy actually is.

This bit jumped out at me in an Irrawaddy article on the Army’s views of the Rakhine insurgency:
“Deputy Chief of Military Affairs Security Maj-Gen Than Htut Thein said Parliament had rejected Myanmar Army proposals calling for necessary responses. The administration in Maungdaw had collapsed and hatred between the two communities had reached its peak, he added.”

This kind of violence is a godsend for militaries looking to maintain/expand their political influence – it lets them paint politicians as weak and ineffectual guardians of the nation, and argue that a vigorous military response is necessary to supplant broken civilian governance and hold at bay otherwise uncontrollable ethnic cleavages. Something to watch.

A fascinating, rich piece of journalism by Ben Hubbard in the New York Times.

Want to understand some of the deep historical background to the Rohingya issue? Nick Cheesman’s piece from May is invaluable reading.

“National races’ or taingyintha is among the pre-eminent political ideas in Myanmar today” but “It remained on the periphery of political language over the next decade.”

So what changed?

“But on February 12, 1964, a new day dawned for taingyintha, one in which it would go from being a term of limited political salience to the paradigm for military-dominated statehood. General Ne Win, who had seized power for a second time two years earlier, now grasped the idea of taingyintha and wielded it with hitherto unprecedented enthusiasm. . . .

By the 1980s it was orthodoxy that political texts at some point refer to national races’ eternal solidarity, their historical fraternity and their intentionality in working together for a new socialist economic order.

Although that economic order collapsed under the weight of nationwide protests in 1988, the national-race idea not only prevailed, but also emerged stronger than ever. . . .

Because taingyintha identity had trumped citizenship, the place of people belonging to non-national-race groups is precarious. Those people excluded juridically from Myanmar but living within its territory now have to find a way back in to the political community. And the only way available to them politically, as a collectivity, is to submit to the politics of domination inherent in the national races project, and insist that they too are taingyintha, which is exactly what Rohingya advocates have done. . . .

ultimately Myanmar’s problem is not a ‘Rohingya problem’ but a national-races problem: how the idea of taingyintha itself is the problem.”

A brief, accessible overview from the International Crisis Group.

This is a useful overview piece in Tablet by P.R. Kumaraswamy, the author of a major book on the relationship (and see also Nicolas Blarel’s book).

From the Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report, 1975-76:
“it is only when such activities had crossed all permissible limits that the Government was constrained to declare Emergency on June 2, 1975, as no Government worth the name could allow the country’s security, stability and economy to be imperiled. The nation’s interests demanded firm and decisive action. . . . diffidence and apathy have given place to confidence that we can face our problems successfully if we are disciplined and united” (iii)

BK Nehru held various positions in Indian government, including governor of numerous states and ambassador to the US. I’ve been going back over his notes from the amusingly titled Nice Guys Finish Second on his time in Nagaland. Some choice quotes:

“What I was faced with here was incredibly tiny groups of separate identities with problems so small that I could not grasp why they should be bothered about” (p. 477)

“the demand for Naga independence was nonsense” (p. 503)

“they [Naga rebels] should never forget that they were nothing more than a bunch of ignorant brigands living on money extorted from their own people and the charity of foreign countries” (p. 511)

“the ‘problem’ was in reality the shock inflicted on the Naga social system by the sudden removal of its protected isolation from the modern world which its status as an excluded area had provided it. . . the solution lay in the passage of time” (p. 518)

This in the New York Times, with some excellent maps. Go read it.

My excellent researchers Wenyan Deng, Winston Berg, and Cathryn Grothe have done great work tracking down disaggregated electoral turnout/vote shares, Sri Lankan Police and Army fatalities, and a map of polling divisions in Sri Lanka.

As a first-cut of what will come, here’s a map by polling division (the smallest unit we have data on) of electoral turnout in the 1988 election; the darker the color, the higher the turnout. What I’m interested in: those deep South and some Central divisions with very low turnout. Why? In our SLA fatalities data, they also show very very few SLA deaths over the whole course of 1988 (we’ll see what the Police data show – may be different). By contrast, the north continues to be a place where the SLA (and, vastly more so, the IPKF) are mixed up with the LTTE, so turnout and fatalities align more closely.

The JVP in 1988 was not yet targeting the Army, so looking at security force fatalities (with Police caveat!) proves to be a highly unreliable guide to areas of JVP influence in this period. But since the JVP wanted a boycott, turnout becomes a more useful proxy. The right indicator to use for measuring armed group presence/influence/control is likely to be highly contextual – sometimes it will be violent events, but sometimes it won’t.