"Burma/Myanmar’s postcolonial elites have established a military-state with hybrid-imperial structures, characterized by high despotic but low infrastruc- tural modes of power, and fueled by rent-extraction. Given the resulting eviscera- tion of opposition political groups, citizens understand explicit politics as dangerous. That said, cleavages between state and the polity afford vast space for “civil society” groups (CS) to form and operate. CS stabilize the political economy by managing citizen needs; conversely, CS stand as a wedge between state and masses, (potentially) constructing spaces to coordinate and magnify potential demands. Yet CS currently err toward managing needs. Opposition must politicize Burmese masses and CS through idioms that interface with CS’s material tasks—a “politics of the daily”—encouraging them to make, collec- tively, a multiplicity of non-adversarial demands. This may compel the state to pivot and seek new bargains, at which point elite advocacy-oriented CS can provide progressive policy reforms. The paper will examine recent inchoate social-political movements in Burma for models of this politics. AFTER A TUMULTUOUS FOUR years for Myanmar—punctuated by mass protests in September 2007, the devastation of Cyclone Nargis in May 2008, and a con- tentious national election in November 2010—by early 2011 many Burma- watchers were left wondering if those epic events amounted to sound and fury signifying nothing.1 Indeed, they had anticipated that 100,000 protesters and a mismanaged natural disaster would subsequently lead to the cracking of the ruling military regime and a transition to democracy (OSI 2007). Instead the ruling military-state junta created a proxy civilian party, presided over an election beset with fraud and intimidation, and installed a “new” government. This effectively normalized the 2008 Constitution and closed the book on the coun- try’s last democratic poll, which had been held in quasi-abeyance for two Elliott Prasse-Freeman ([email protected]) is Founding Research Fellow at the Human Rights and Social Movements Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights and an Advisory Board Member with the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at Harvard University. 1 Contrary to popular understanding, both “Burma” and “Myanmar” have always been used by those native to the space, the former typically in colloquial speech, and the latter mostly in the formal written language. To consciously avoid the binarism ascribed to the use of one over the other in English (where “Burma” signifies solidarity with the opposition, while “Myanmar” endorses the regime), this paper will use them interchangeably. decades.2 Most ethnic groups put down weapons to reluctantly rejoin this politi- cal process (Smith 2006), while the principal opposition, the National League for Democracy (NLD), remained irreconcilable and was officially dissolved as a con- sequence. When its leader, Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was finally released from house arrest, her political activities were initially declared “illegal” and she was threatened with reincarceration.3 Actors on the outside, too, were ineffectual in their central focus on effecting democratic change: U.N. mediation was repeatedly unsuccessful, and neither sanctions nor punitively low foreign aid4 directly coerced the junta into capitulation (Pedersen 2008, 232). China (Steinberg 2001a, 223–39), ASEAN (Tonkin 2008, 3–4), and India contin- ued to support the junta economically and covet it strategically, providing exter- nal cover from Western coercion. But beyond this, internal political challenge appeared anemic; the military-state maintained an effective monopoly over explicit political expression. And yet, despite its effective weathering of these paroxysms (protest, emer- gency, election), the military-state then began showing stunning signs of reform: by late 2011, political prisoners had been freed, the unheard-of phenomenon of public pressure leading to a change in policy (the halting of the Myitsone mega-dam project) had occurred, and the same Suu Kyi—threatened only months before to avoid politics—had been allowed to run for parliament. When this article went to print, debate was raging over what the changes signi- fied, if anything at all. Sanguine observers heralded nothing less than a new dawn in Myanmar (ICG 2011), while wary counterparts insisted that the superficial “reforms” risked papering over deeper consolidation of military control (Zarni 2011). How to reconcile these two stories? Rather than adjudicating between them, this article seeks two orthogonal objectives: first, to make the apparent contradic- tions explicable by describing the system of political economy and social regu- lation that has developed in the sixty years since independence. The second objective will be to argue that these political events risk capturing the attention of internal and external actors alike, when more important lessons generated by the events perhaps lay elsewhere. The paper will argue that recent events have illuminated actors that heretofore had been flying below the radars of many observers and policymakers: whether organizing protests, pulling bodies out of lakes, or delivering civic education seminars, civil society groups (hereafter “CS”) are literally and figuratively everywhere in Burma (Heidel 2006). As such, exploring how they function can stimulate a new way of seeing the challenges facing Myanmar: instead of making state-to-state or “international community”-to-state politics the only ways to contest an authoritarian regime, Burmese CS provide a window through which we can penetrate an opaque pol- itical economy and inform us about the way life (in the villages and urban slums) actually functions, and can also demonstrate how an alternative politics may contest the status quo. Myanmar scholars—including in a recent issue of this journal (Thawnghmung 2011)—are increasingly mining these political spaces and practices, exploring daily experiences of average citizens. This article hopes to continue this conversation, contributing to determining what role these largely forgotten actors can play in driving change from within. Indeed, if the government is serious about reform, these forgotten actors will be seminal in channeling and shaping it; if the government is not, these actors will need to emerge to help compel change. METHODOLOGIES Against simplistic binary descriptions—totalitarian accounts in Burmese commentary and classic authoritarian portrayals in political science—I describe Burma’s political space as incorporating multiple particular governmentalities (Foucault 2007); I examine those by exploring (a) the institutions or actors that de facto govern subjects (states, customary leaders, CS representatives, businesses, spiritual guides, etc.); (b) the modes that those forms of governance take (“rights”-based, negotiated bargains, implicit deals, etc.); therefore (c) the kinds of relationships that develop (patron/client, state/citizen, corporation/ employee, NGO/“partner,” “international community”/victim); through which (d) power then flows to produce, regulate, punish, discipline, or expel subjects. And finally (e) how the different zones constituted by these different fields of governmentality, with their respective intensities, intersect with and hence influ- ence one another to create a broader system or assemblage (Deleuze and Guatarri 1987 [1980]). Taking up each of these permutations is beyond the scope of any single paper, but this methodological framework informs the project. Indeed, only by more precisely understanding this system can collective political attitudes become comprehensible and social space at Myanmar’s periph- eries and within its interstices become apparent, thereby contextualizing current CS actions and animating our ability to perceive the form this potential takes. To accomplish this, inter alia, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 150 members of 61 Burmese CS and/or political organizations in December 2009 and January 2010. Organizations were identified through referrals, and cross-referenced with NGO lists compiled by the Burma Library (in Mae Sot, Thailand) and Local Resource Center in Yangon, respectively, to ensure adequate coverage. Organizations are kept anonymous due to their sensitive activities. Finally, two conceptual deviations from classic civil society conceptualizations attend my use of CS. First, I define CS as those groups making social decisions outside of direct state control and without ambition toward capture of, or partici- pation in, the state. I avoid language such as “individuals coming together” to “make collective decisions” because I neither imply quasi-democratic or even necessarily collaborative decision making, nor do I suggest that individuals are what drive CS decisions. Instead, CS often take on institutional conscious- nesses and logics that act recursively on those people who constitute them (Zizek 2008, 167). Second, CS will be used plurally—signifying a multiplicity of organizations—and will also imply an alternative space that CS both constitutes (by virtue of its operation) and enters into..."