Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
Myanmars recovery from half a century of military rule has been fraught. As in other religiously, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous countries where a dictatorship has loosened a tight grip, people there have wanted for democratic institutions to express and manage conflict. Under these circumstances, mundane and seemingly apolitical events sometimes unfold into moments of intense violence.
Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar addresses one such violent chapter in Myanmars recent past: the communal violence that shook the country between 2012 and 2014. The violence, most of it involving Buddhists attacking Muslims, ranged from localised, fleeting, inter-group melees, to large scale, apparently well-organised, statesupported killing and destruction of property of a targeted community, running over a number of days.
The books seven chapters comprise a response to the violence by a group of Myanmar and Southeast Asia experts. Their contributions trace the histories and contemporary features of the violence, and the legal and political arrangements that made it possible. Their interpretations, while specific to Myanmar, also contribute to broader debate about the characteristics, causes and consequences of communal violence generally.
The chapters were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.
Nick Cheesman is a Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Australia, and author of Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmars Courts Make Law and Order (2015).
Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
Edited by
Nick Cheesman
First published 2018
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2018 Journal of Contemporary Asia
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Contents
Nick Cheesman
Gerry van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung
Matt Schissler, Matthew J. Walton and Phyu Phyu Thi
Gerard McCarthy and Jacqueline Menager
Chit Win and Thomas Kean
Lisa Brooten and Yola Verbruggen
Nick Cheesman
The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Introduction: Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
Nick Cheesman
Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017) pp. 335352
The Contentious Politics of Anti-Muslim Scapegoating in Myanmar
Gerry van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung
Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017) pp. 353375
Reconciling Contradictions: Buddhist-Muslim Violence, Narrative Making and Memory in Myanmar
Matt Schissler, Matthew J. Walton and Phyu Phyu Thi
Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017) pp. 376395
Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmars Transition
Gerard McCarthy and Jacqueline Menager
Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017) pp. 396412
Communal Conflict in Myanmar: The Legislatures Response, 20122015
Chit Win and Thomas Kean
Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017) pp. 413439
Producing the News: Reporting on Myanmars Rohingya Crisis
Lisa Brooten and Yola Verbruggen
Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017) pp. 440460
How in Myanmar National Races Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya
Nick Cheesman
Journal of Contemporary Asia, volume 47, issue 3 (July 2017) pp. 461483
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Su Mon Thazin Aung is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Lisa Brooten is Associate Professor at the Department of Radio, Television and Digital Media, Southern Illinois University, USA.
Nick Cheesman is a Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Australia, and author of Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmars Courts Make Law and Order (2015).
Thomas Kean is Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Myanmar, a weekly magazine based at Yangon, Myanmar.
Gerard McCarthy is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Australia.
Jacqueline Menager is a graduate student at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Australia.
Matt Schissler is a doctoral student at the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, USA.
Phyu Phyu Thi is Co-founder, Research and Development Manager of the Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO), Myanmar.
Gerry van Klinken is a Professor at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden, the Netherlands.
Yola Verbruggen is an independent journalist based in Yangon, Myanmar.
Matthew J. Walton is a Senior Research Fellow in Burmese Studies at St Antonys College, University of Oxford, UK.
Chit Win is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Australia.
Nick Cheesman
ABSTRACT
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as communal, in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation enabling it. Eschewing methods aimed at producing a purportedly coherent picture of what happened, interpretive research raises questions about conventional readings of violence, and seemingly self-evident categories for its analysis. But as the articles in this special issue show, interpretivists do not repudiate the search for factual truth. The contributors all make strong truth claims, but claims recognising that factual truths are always contingent. They establish these claims by attending variously to the processes, narratives, histories and typologies that have contributed to the production of communal violence in Myanmar.
