Interrogating Myanmar's 'transition' from a post-coup vantage point

• Main Author: Campbell, Stephen
• Other Authors: School of Social Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Sociology; Capitalism; Democratization
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/170262
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar appears to have rendered null the many projections, proposals and prognostications that academics advanced over the preceding decade—the period of ‘democratic transition’, as it was then optimistically regarded. But perhaps when considered from a post-coup vantage point those earlier analyses, which tell of the tensions and trajectories of the transition-era, can be made to speak to the political knots and contradictions that underlay the coup and that continue to haunt the post-coup moment. So motivated, this article revisits the 2020 volume Unraveling Myanmar’s Transition, edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Patrick Strefford. The article proposes three overlapping frames for making sense of Myanmar’s transition: seeing that period as one of structural adjustment, of an inter-elite pact and of an imperialist project.