Keywords

control, public, community

Objectives

Since the Ne Win coup d’état in 1962, Myanmar has experience three types of government (socialist, military, presidential) and two economic regimes (socialist-centralized and market driven under economic sanctions). But whatever the system, strict control of the movement of goods, people and information has been the rule. This research examines “control” from a comparative perspective that includes religion and gender as well as government policy, paying attention to both invisible ideology and coercive mechanisms. It will also examine mutual surveillance by members of neighborhood organizations and the embodiment of control through language and other mechanisms. In contrast to these forms of control, we have seen the emergence in varied communities of “publics.” In Myanmar these include religious networks and family associations that bring together believers in religion or spiritual powers, ethnic minorities and international or domestic NGOs. In all of these cases gender and kinship ties become of strategic significance when escaping control and creating alternative networks. This research will examine these alternatives from a practical perspective that includes both control and community, primarily in Myanmar, now undergoing a sudden liberation from control, in an effort to clarify the processes shaping and reshaping communities as society is restructured.

Research Results

During the research period, we had fourteen study meetings. We invited five special lecturers including researchers from overseas, and held two general discussions in the first and the last meetings, in addition to sixteen individual reports by joint researchers.
In recent years, we have seen significant changes in the political system and organizations in Myanmar, and a civilian administration was born for the first time in half a century. Having endured strict censorship, the media have now been granted new and substantial freedom of expression, and with the diffusion of cell phones, information distribution via SNS has become more prevalent than ever. With the changes in information distribution and the expansion of media for expressing opinions came a material change in the way the public sphere operates.
When this research group was formed, control and publicness stemming from a relatively powerful governmental regime, such as that of Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam, were assumed to be the subject of our research. However, we decided to refine the concepts and discussions through the study meetings, to reflect the said changes in circumstances. Our first achievement is the research results of the transformation of the local meaning of politics and the concepts of governance, or the restructuring of governance technologies. For instance, while the control of speech has been loosened and information has become increasingly available, a new demand for monitoring and a movement for self-censorship have arisen. Moreover, in Myanmar, Indonesia, and elsewhere, security has become increasingly privatized. It has shown us how privatization restructures governance technologies in the form of military and police forces, i.e., monopoly of violence by the state.
Our second achievement is that various studies have been conducted to identify access to publicness from a micro point of view. Habermas' concept of a “public sphere” was a civil society as opposed to the government. However, in this research, we focused on how publicness, and not a civil society, emerged under strict governmental control. It is important to discuss how opportunities to experience publicness arise in a community and what publicness is, based on studies of communities and intermediary groups (e.g., religious networks, ethnic groups, etc.) In addition, social movements and networks in forms different from those in the past have come to exist in communities and groups, and the ways people are mobilized by such movements and networks have been explained. On the other hand, the principle of publicness is not limited to the act of communication in the form of free verbal discussion. In a community where multiple ethnicities cohabitate, there are examples where commonality seen in the community leads to strategies for the minority. On the contrary, movements by a group or network formed around ethnicity or religion to intentionally and actively express and promote its views have also been observed.