"Ardeth Thawnghmung’s new book, Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar is an engaging read, particularly for those working in livelihoods or microfinance in the INGO sector, for international donor agencies creating strategies for lending, grants, or programming in Myanmar, or for anyone interested in Myanmar’s informal economy. Thawnghmung’s focus on the coping strategies employed by everyday Myanmar people across the country draws on Kerkvliet’s ‘everyday politics’, Scott’s ‘everyday resistance’, and Thawnghmung’s earlier work. Thawnghmung uses Hirschman’s (1970) framework of loyalty, voice, and exit and an adaptation of Scott’s (1985) passive resistance (“indirect, frequent, and often uncoordinated acts of resistance”, p. 11) to frame and analyze various coping strategies found in Myanmar. She calls this the LPVE framework (loyalty, passive resistance, voice, and exit). Yet, her approach is multidisciplinary, incorporating political, economic, social, and psychological coping strategies, turning the focus from politics to survival. For those familiar with her earlier work on authoritarianism and state legitimacy (2004) and the politics of “quotidian matters” (2011), by turning to the study of everyday survival, Thawnghmung is yet again pushing our conceptions of “the political” in Myanmar. Thawnghmung’s work emphasizes that the ways in which people make choices and decisions about how to make ends meet is integral to the functioning of politics and authority..."