Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropological Analysis of Political and Legal Reform in a Context of Democratization

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

American national interests and our economic competitiveness are served best when the free flow of information, ideas, goods, and services are permitted between nations. The success or failure of political and legal reform in new democracies depends on how well such developments calibrate with the local understandings about what constitute rights and obligations. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how such rights and obligations are being negotiated in a newly democratizing context. The results will be useful to policy and development practitioners who analyze the preconditions that are necessary for democratization and political stability. Elliott Prasse-Freeman, under the supervision of Dr. Erik Harms of Yale University, explores how rights are invoked and technologies of rule are engaged in a context of democratization. The research takes place in Burma (Myanmar), which appears to be transitioning to a democratic system after a half-century of military rule. The researcher's unique access to this site gives us an opportunity to explore how rights discourse and democratic transition happens in real time. As former military leaders of Burma have formed a tense pact with opposition politicians to forge reforms, rights have been subject to debate. Reformers and international partners endorse the political liberal idea of rights as reflecting absolute standards that individuals have by the mere fact of being members of a polity or which are fundamentally afforded to humanity; some Burmese, on the other hand, appear to find a concept of rights (in which rights are thought to exist outside of a specific context) as not reflecting their realities. They instead look at rights as synonymous with 'opportunities' (the words are interchangeable in Burmese language). Attaining a right is subject to social position, negotiation skill, resources, and to some extent, randomness. The project hypothesizes that in Burma 'rights' often have meaning only to the extent that actors have the opportunities to realize them. In this perspective, rather than delivering formal rights through reformed laws and policies, Burmese may demand structural transformations of the existing distribution of power and resources in their society. The project would advances scientific debates in anthropology about the state and politics, discussions of political organizations and power that earlier anthropologists had situated in Burma and Southeast Asia, and rights and law. The project connects historic anthropological debates about nonwestern political systems with contemporary discussions of governmentality. The research will use a number of methods, including: documentation and analysis of social movements and legal strategies; semi-structured interviews (of lawyers and movement members); analysis of social movement tactics; and, most importantly, ethnographic participant observation with movement members and lawyers.