Myanmar, Southeast Asia’s second-largest country, has been governed predominantly through extraordinary military rule without a constitution since its independence from Great Britain in 1948. Yet military dominance has not entirely sidelined the significance of the constitution in Myanmar’s political landscape. Competing political factions, most notably the military and pro-democracy movements, have advanced divergent visions of constitutionalism, articulated through both formal state constitutions and unofficial non-state charters. These visions have been intrinsically entangled with ‘the [contested] legacies of ideas, practices, and institutions of past constitutions with present [ones].’Footnote ¹

In her latest monograph, The Palimpsest Constitution: The Social Life of Constitutions in Myanmar, Professor Melissa Crouch adroitly navigates constitutionalism in Myanmar. The monograph traces the impact, adoption, distortion, repurposing, and rejection of constitutional legacies across successive historical periods from the colonial era (chapters 2 and 3), through the struggle for independence (chapter 4) and the post-colonial era (chapter 5), to the contemporary struggle between the Tatmadaw and its opposition (chapters 6 to 9).

Crouch’s monograph reminds constitutional jurists and scholars of the inherent limitations of the normative approaches to constitutional studies, which confine the understanding of constitutionalism to textual analysis and institutional design. The monograph demonstrates that, in order to comprehend constitutional development more profoundly, it is essential to approach constitutionalism through ethnography. Crouch’s emphasis on ‘the social life of the constitution’ underscores that, beyond the constitutional text, the trajectories of constitutional development are ultimately defined within the real-world political arena, where competing interests and values contend over the endorsement and rejection of past constitutions.Footnote ² Constitution-making, or proposals for new constitutions, thus serve as sites where ruling elites and their opponents articulate their political agendas. With segments of civil society engaged in these processes, ‘collective memories’ of such texts, whether formal or informal, state or non-state, are fostered.Footnote ³

Crouch’s monograph also uses the Burmese experience as a springboard for broader debates on the convergence and divergence of palimpsest constitutionalism across Asia and beyond. For instance, the case of Thailand demonstrates the usefulness of Crouch’s thesis. Her palimpsest thesis aligns seamlessly with Tom Ginsburg’s notion of ‘constitutional afterlife’, which illustrates the posthumous impact of the defunct 1997 Constitution – embodying the collective memory of democratisation – on the military-orchestrated charters of 2007 and 2017.Footnote ⁴ However, Crouch’s thesis cautions that constitutional legacies are layered. An analysis of the impact of the 1997 Constitution alone is insufficient to explicate the institutional features of twenty-first-century Thai constitutionalism. In order to trace the roots of several elements enshrined in the 2007 and 2017 charters, one must look beyond the legacies of the 1997 Thai Constitution and instead examine the first junta-made charter, the 1947 Constitution, which laid the groundwork for the royalist-conservative establishment. These include, in particular, the royally appointed Privy Council, the unelected Senate, and the monarchised judiciary—all of which constitute the fulcrum of the royalist circle described by Duncan McCargo as the ‘network monarchy’.Footnote ⁵ The palimpsest framework also complements Eugénie Mérieau’s concept of ‘constitutional bricolage’, developed to explain post-colonial legal transplantation in Thailand. Mérieau portrays Thai constitutionalism as the product of ‘eclecticism’ – the arbitrary and elitist adoption, improvisation, co-optation, and even distortion of foreign constitutional concepts and institutional design.Footnote ⁶ Crouch’s thesis adds that understanding these phenomena is not merely a matter of legal transplantation but also one of constitutional ethnography.

The monograph leaves open some issues, which invite deeper analysis in future research. Crouch focuses mainly on the ‘large-C’ Constitution, particularly the drafting and proposal of a formal text as the supreme law of the land. Yet the functionality of a constitutional order depends not only on formal constitutional text but also on the ‘small-c’ constitution, which encompasses the ‘invisible’ or ‘unwritten’ elements – most notably constitutional conventions and religio-political influences.Footnote ⁷ Given the monograph’s primary concentration on the large-C Constitution, it would be fruitful to examine more fully how, and to what extent, constitutional conventions and other unwritten norms feature within the concept of the palimpsest constitution. Similarly, while the monograph addresses how the special position of Buddhism – especially as the state religion – occupies the centre of conflict among divergent ethnic groups in Myanmar and has shaped the constitution-making process (chapter 5), future research could theorise the entanglement between palimpsest and Buddhist constitutionalism.Footnote ⁸ A possible question includes how Buddhist concepts and teachings, such as nirvana and impermanence, navigate and frame palimpsest constitutions, particularly with respect to their functionality ‘as a gauge for determining when positive constitutional norms can be switched off and even transcended.’Footnote ⁹ It would also be valuable to examine how palimpsest constitutional features are appropriated by the Sangha, not only in Myanmar but also in other Buddhist countries, such as Thailand, as a means of consolidating political influence.

Overall, Crouch’s informative and thought-provoking monograph makes a significant contribution to the study of constitutional law. Her style of writing, which employes constitutional ethnography to narrate the unfolding story of constitutional practice, allows specialist and non-specialist readers to engage meaningfully with the monograph’s central themes.