New York: Routledge, 2022. 182 pp. (B&W photos.) US$128.00, cloth. ISBN 9781003011316.
Yukiko Nishikawa’s International Norms and Local Politics in Myanmar is one of the first monographs published with the stated goal of evaluating what went wrong with Myanmar’s so-called democratic transition, and the rationale behind the February 2021 coup d’état. Focusing on the role of international norms, Nishikawa argues that the post-Cold War liberal world order has inadvertently reinforced illiberal norms in Myanmar’s domestic politics. More specifically, Nishikawa argues that socio-political liberalization during the country’s so-called disciplined democracy years (2011–2021) has strengthened the country’s resistance against the ideals of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. The book suggests that the Myanmar state’s response to these externally promoted norms has been to structure its institutions and laws in a way that promotes the interests of the political establishment and the Bamar Buddhist majority, to the detriment of political challengers and certain minority groups.
Excluding the introductory and concluding chapters, the book is divided into five chapters. The first two chapters provide a comprehensive overview of Myanmar’s political economy, with a state-centric focus on the role of the military and how it has responded to domestic and foreign challenges regarding its political agenda of nation and state building. Chapter 3 then moves toward a review of Myanmar’s state-societal relations. It begins with a chronological discussion of Myanmar’s contested centre-periphery relationship and positions ethnic politics as a reaction to the military’s Bamar-centric violent state-building exercise. The chapter advances Nishikawa’s core argument regarding how Myanmar’s military has utilized the two major principles of “disciplined democracy” and “law and order” to further justify their state-building agenda, which has exacerbated political violence in the country, particularly against the Rohingya and other ethnic minority groups. The chapter concludes with a dense, critical theoretical review of contentious politics in Myanmar, drawing heavily on the seminal works of Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. However, Nishikawa’s empirical study of Myanmar remains underdeveloped. Beyond the critical role of ethnic politics, chapter 3 fails to consider other important stakeholders in shaping Myanmar’s domestic politics. For example, the country’s most popular political party, the National League for Democracy, although briefly mentioned, is largely absent from the author’s analysis. Peculiarly, the oversized role of the deposed Aung San Suu Kyi on Myanmar’s contemporary politics is completely omitted in this chapter.
Chapters 4 and 5 provide the most theoretically dense discussion about how citizenship and sovereignty is understood in Myanmar, from the military/political establishment’s perspective. As correctly pointed out by Nishikawa, an exclusive, restrictive understanding of citizenship emerged from Myanmar’s state- and nation-building exercise. Not unlike many other multiethnic postcolonial states, Myanmar’s powerful military justifies its use of coercive power against perceived domestic enemies as the “exception”—with the author referring to Carl Schmitt—and therefore effectively supporting the military’s political agenda to develop the ideal sovereign state.
For a book that poses a critical question regarding how international norms influence domestic politics, the focus areas of the volume seem somewhat unbalanced. Chapter 2, for example, dedicates a significant amount of attention to China’s alleged influence over Myanmar’s domestic politics. These views are suggestive, and potentially overstate China’s influence, without considering the role of other external stakeholders including transnational advocacy groups, diaspora politics, the United Nations, and global capital, in shaping the power dynamics in Myanmar. In a somewhat off-tangent section, Nishikawa dedicates several pages to evaluating the changing regional dynamics with the emergence of a great power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific, without making it immediately clear how this issue directly relates to the main research puzzle, or how it further enhances our understanding of the changing domestic political dynamics inside Myanmar as a response to the external environment. In every chapter, the author has, in earnest, engaged with a wide range of theoretical debates to inform the book’s analysis. However, several critical works on Myanmar that directly address the book’s core research query are omitted. For example, monographs including Roman David and Ian Holliday’s Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and several critical works by Tamas Well that engage with competing understandings of democracy and freedom in the Myanmar context are all excluded from the book.
Beyond these substantive issues regarding content, careful copyediting would have enhanced the book’s readability. There are a noticeable number of factual errors, for example suggesting that Myanmar’s first coup took place in 1959, as well as several missing references in the bibliography. Further, there are several critical typological and word choice errors, as well as poor expression, which at times can become confusing for the reader: for example, the inconsistent use of the derogatory term kala/kara (including in the index). The book’s core argument is also undermined by erroneous usage of the word “resilient,” presumably used to argue that Myanmar has grown resistant to democracy, the rule of law, and human rights (5). The author also incorrectly attributes the foundations of the 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement to the efforts of Ne Win’s military government, when these ceasefire agreements were spearheaded by Khin Nyunt. Most baffling, the book also makes what is presumably an editorial misjudgement in the way Myanmar names are presented. Generally, there are no surnames in Myanmar and individual names should always be presented in full. The elementary mistake of using the first syllable of Myanmar names further diminishes the author’s otherwise suggestive thesis.
While Nishikawa’s fundamental argument is suggestive, the overly ambitious book attempts to cover too much ground. The evident efforts to engage with an eclectic range of theoretical literature is regrettably not matched by a sophisticated empirical analysis of Myanmar’s political developments. In short, despite bold claims, Nishikawa has not convincingly demonstrated the linkages of the liberal world order, the international norms it promotes, and its direct influence on the resurgence of violent military authoritarianism in Myanmar.
Roger Lee Huang
Macquarie University, Sydney