Table of Contents for Rights Refused
Introduction
Through ethnography of contentious politics drawn from the anticoup uprising and during Myanmar's political "transition" (that began in 2011 and was unceremoniously forestalled by that coup), the introduction presents the book's themes. First, it outlines how lives committed to refusal of the prerogatives of power allow forms of postcolonial governmentality in Burma to come into focus; second, it illuminates how that apparatus of power informs particular modes of resistance and strategies of refusal defined by "absent presence"—the need to hail a desultory and indifferent state but to steal away before that state responds by annihilating them; third, how activists' novel perspectives on rights—in particular how activists refuse those rights that are denied them—provides insight into this dynamic; and fourth, how attention to these struggles in Myanmar can inform both students of empirically based political theory and other movements around the world.
1.Variegated Violence
Through ethnography of both military brutality during the anticoup uprising and quotidian activities and peripheral spaces traversed in typical activist existence during the transition, the chapter defines the book's theoretical vocabulary: the slippery form of sovereign power deployed by the Myanmar state as it variously grasps hold of and then relinquishes the bodies of the governed and how the various modes of violence constitute the regime of "blunt biopolitics" that Burmese people must navigate. It shows how mass violence faced by the country's ethnic minorities works to somewhat naturalize the structural violence faced by the country's Buddhist masses. In the penumbra of this blunt biopolitics, activists draw on resonant cultural idioms to advance critiques of state violence and articulate alternative ways of organizing collective life.
2.Living Refusal
The first part of chapter 2 describes how activists construct a life of refusal—from moments of radicalization, the political prisoner experience, and the effects on social reproduction. Through activists' stories—about their time in prison, in the black-market economy, and in both underground movements and aboveground civil society organizations—the chapter shows how activists have built a social infrastructure that enables current resistance. The second part focuses on tactics, where activists approach law as a tool rather than as a normative good in itself; on how they circulate their performances, hailing publics to hear their appeals as disciplined, respectful, and just; on their projection of a sense of commitment to the people, evidenced by the fact that they are always prepared to go (back) to prison; and on how they exploit fragmented state elite by bargaining with various authorities.
3.Plow Protests
Chapter 3 explores one of the most common activist interventions—opposition to land grabs—describing how activists assist in specific peasant tactics for reclaiming stolen land while also exploring the forms of ownership that can persist amid dispossession. As one farmer put it, "I am the owner of the land, but I have no right to it"—an apparently paradoxical statement that becomes explicable when we consider, historically, the reticulate relationships that constitute Burmese peasant social life: one can lose rights to land vis-à-vis the state while maintaining them with the community. The state has the power to eliminate the right but not the ownership; farmers are still the ones who invest their sweat into the soil. The chapter concludes by considering the political economy of activist life and the ethical dilemmas many do, and some do not, engage in.
4.Cartoons, Curses, and the Corpus
Chapter 4 uses accounts of occult cursing ceremonies to demonstrate how Burmese activists use body and speech acts to etch out spaces to conjure publics and shame state actors. The chapter presents activist-led cursing rituals, séances that hail ancestor- and land-spirits to come judge the rightful owners of stolen land and condemn thieves. While these appear aggressive and confrontational, they operate analogously to the cartoons, relying on persuading their targets to see themselves and Burma's politics in a new light. The activists explain that elites can steal land and ignore customary morality, but they cannot escape curses, which operate on a different cosmopolitical plane. The chapter then explains how activists' bodies makes interpellation from below possible: when figuratively and literally standing in front of the people, activists point not to transcendent guarantors (such as law or rights) but to their scars, to their bodily presence before certain violence.
5.Taking Rights, Seriously
The chapter conducts a historical and linguistic analysis of the Burmese term most often translated as rights: akwint-ayay. The chapter shows that akwint-ayay are not possessed as rights in the liberal tradition, where they are imagined as inalienable possessions, like arms or mothers, still possessed after they are severed from the individual (your mother is still your mother even if she happens to die). This is not so in Myanmar, where akwint-ayay are not given to everyone; they can be stolen and never returned; one person getting awkint-ayay means another may not. When scholars observe hybridized understandings of rights, analyses merely attenuate rights with other relevant political concepts, keeping rights itself fixed. The chapter suggests, by contrast, that what is produced may be so meaningfully divergent as to make rights no longer the appropriate sign under which to categorize the phenomenon.
6.Rights in Desperation
Chapter 6 examines the Rohingya genocide of 2017, first providing a political history of the Indigenous group as it has managed a half century of military-state abuse and oppression and then focusing on how Rohingya elites have used rights discourse to contest denials of their indigeneity and even their basic humanity that have come from Burma's state and polity. The polity's endorsement of Rohingya expulsion as a dialectical outcome of shored up violence against the Rohingya and made the mass violence and structural violence endured by normal citizens palatable. Noteworthy here is how the state is strong enough to create a system of discretionary citizenship in part by disciplining the economy and supporting richer classes but weak enough to foster identity battles without accountable legibility. It concludes by describing "devernacularization," defined by the particular political changes necessary for a resignification of rights rhetoric: from emancipatory to threatening.
Conclusion: Rights Erosion and Refusal beyond Burma
While the book has outlined Myanmar's own unique features, it has also rendered in stark relief dynamics that exist elsewhere. First, the conclusion clarifies how refusal acts as a theoretical tool that synthesizes different aspects of resistance theory: it focuses more on broader assemblages of power rather than a solid and coherent object to be resisted; it acknowledges that the refusing subject is mutable and must be enrolled into existence; and it argues that resistance happens only if it creates a trace, whether by impacting that which is being resisted or interpellating publics to understand politics differently. Second, it outlines the similarities with other contexts through a comparison of different forms of biopolitics and how those afford different kinds of refusal that nonetheless share a common substrate of oscillation. Third, the conclusion turns to rights.