Land and Law, Between Reform and Revolution
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These 15-minute videos contain the highlights of talks delivered in the Myanmar Dialogue Series, a platform enabling public debate about the pressing political and social conditions in Myanmar since the 2021 military coup. Where Dialogue Series speakers give their permission, we will create a Dialogue Short which condenses the core points of their presentation.
The Shorts are perfect for undergraduate classes and other educational settings where students need concise information on current pressing political and social issues in Myanmar. Policymakers and people working in settings with a lot of time constraints might also find that they usefully summarize issues about which they need to be abreast in order do plan and make decisions on Myanmar — and that they draw attention to the many promising new scholars of Myanmar emerging both from within the country and abroad.
Title: Land and law: Between reform and revolution
Date: Fri 11 March 2022
Speaker: Dorothy Mason
Dorothy Mason is a recent ANU Honours graduate interested in the politics of land and natural resources in Myanmar. Her current research explores the links between land reform and state-making under Myanmar's semi-civilian government.
Chair: Tony Neil
This talk interprets changes to land governance during Myanmar’s semi-civilian period through the twin lenses of ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’, where reform suggests a circular logic of repairing something that once worked, and revolution connotes rupture with the past and a drive to begin anew.
Precisely because it seeks to rebuild and repair, the logic of reform limits possibilities for radical transformation. I outline the structural and ideological constraints on land law reform under the USDP and NLD governments, and consider how the reversion to authoritarianism — with its accompanying resistance couched in explicitly revolutionary terms — might affect land claims and patterns of dispossession in the medium to long term.