"All public assemblies that power holders have not themselves organized or endorsed pose them some kind of political challenge. In a democratic system, unauthorized public assemblies are part of the political process. The ruling group is obliged to accommodate such assemblies and not resort to needlessly coercive methods in dealing with them. The political symbolism of an authoritarian system, by contrast, carries with it, as James Scott has written, an implicit assumption that subordinates gather only when they are authorized to do so from above.1 Where subordinates defy this assumption, they threaten the political order, and risk juridical sanction. The British authoritarian regime in its Asian colonies assigned public assembly an inherently criminal quality. A full chapter of the Indian Penal Code, which it brought with it to Burma, sets out offences against public tranquillity and their punishments. The terms used in the code evoke the innate criminality of unauthorized gatherings: ?criminal force?, ?rioting?, ?affray?. The colonial-era police and courts read between these lines so as to enable liberal use of violence. Police and magistrates responded to unauthorized assembly under cover of the empire?s criminal codes with lathi charges and rifle fire. When they failed to keep things under control, behind them came the army. And so, a template was set for what historian Mary Callahan has described as the ?coercion-intensive? state in Burma.2 1 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990) 61. 2 Mary P. Callahan, "State Formation in the Shadow of the Raj: Violence, Warfare and Politics in Colonial Burma," Southeast Asian Studies 39.4 (2002): 521. 2 But the colonial template has, as the years have passed, become less and less familiar. Whereas the coercive parts of the criminal juridical apparatus in Burma, now officially Myanmar, have expanded in size and strength under successive military or military-established governments, the authority of the courts has greatly diminished. Whereas the criminal codes have remained in force, the manner of their application has changed markedly. And meanwhile, other ill-defined elements that were not part of the original template have also entered the mix. In this paper, I briefly explore the shifting character of the containment and criminalizing of unauthorized assembly in Myanmar through a case study of the juridical and extrajuridical response to large-scale protests in 2007. I argue that the criminalizing of unauthorized assembly and its participants was, compared to earlier periods, highly ambiguous, because the juridical and extrajuridical elements of the response were throughout purposefully intervowen. The ambiguity was, I think, paradigmatic of how power has in recent years been exercised through the criminal juridical system of Myanmar, such that today we can only talk of the juridical and extrajudicial in the singular, as a composite of practices rather than two contrasting sets of practices..."