Freedom from Fear is probably Aung San Suu Kyi’s best-known statement in English on what people throughout Myanmar aspired to achieve by rising up against military dictatorship. Written in acceptance of the 1990 Sakharov Prize, and published subsequently in a book of the same title, this short essay emphasizes that it was not only economic collapse that provoked nationwide protests against army-installed one-party rule in 1988, but also people’s disgust at being forced to live fearfully for so long.Footnote ¹ Its author points to the close relationship that fear has with corruption. She extolls the rule of law as a means to punish corrupt offenders and preserve human dignity.

Though by the time Aung San Suu Kyi wrote Freedom from Fear, she was leading the National League for Democracy, hers is not so much a call for democracy as it is an appeal for liberalism. Read by the lights of one influential account, it is a quintessentially liberal appeal, inasmuch as liberalism aspires to do no more and no less than create conditions under which the members of a polity can enjoy personal freedom.Footnote ² That means, above all, that they have freedom from arbitrary interference and from unconstrained violence committed by state agents. A startlingly simple idea, it is also one that, as history has shown, is tremendously difficult to realize.

Given Aung San Suu Kyi’s three-decades-long prominence in the politics of her birthplace, and the persistence of liberal thought in her public language, one might expect that students of Myanmar’s current affairs would have taken political liberalism seriously. But the tendency has been to overlook liberalism in favour of democracy as the overarching category for interpreting and assessing what has been going on since military dictatorship formally disestablished itself in 2011, opening the path for Aung San Suu Kyi to bring her party into government in 2016.

Now a book by Roman David and Ian Holliday, simply entitled Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar, has brought liberalism in. The book’s authors have turned to liberalism because, they say, they want to go beyond “a reductionist concern with the freedom and fairness of elections, or with the intricacies of elite-level pacts,” to consider how liberal democracy is experienced as “a broad socio-political process” (p. 5). By concentrating on the changing relationship between government and citizens, and relations among religious, cultural, and linguistic groups, they aim for a thoroughgoing assessment of the prospects for liberalism and democracy in Myanmar.

To that end, from 2014 to 2018, David and Holliday led a team that in three phases surveyed over 2,600 adults about their political opinions. Of these, some 600 were living in Myanmar’s hinterlands (in Kachin, Kayin, and Shan States), the rest in its heartlands (in Yangon and Mandalay). They supplemented the survey data with 88 in-depth interviews with former political prisoners, and members of linguistic and cultural minority groups. They also seem to have read pretty much every new study of the country’s politics available in English. They have drawn on these readings very effectively in developing and refining their arguments, which they organize, after some historical scene setting, in four chapters: on the Constitution, democratization, tolerance, and transitional justice.

What did they find? Generally speaking, they found seeming and sometimes glaring contradictions in their respondents’ political views. More precisely, they found “a set of inconsistent beliefs in the tenets of liberalism” (p. 189). By “inconsistent beliefs,” they are not referring to people’s beliefs in aggregate, but rather beliefs that are contradictory in two adjacent aspects: liberal in one aspect, illiberal in the other. Among these, they highlight that “widespread tolerance of official ethnic minorities contrasts with extreme intolerance of the Rohingya” and that “Support for democracy co-exists with support for military rule” (p. 196). That is to say, they confirm the anecdotes of others: that minorities are tolerated but Rohingya are not at all, and that the military’s presence in politics is accepted, even as democracy is valued.

Instead of trying to plot the tension in their interlocutors’ views on a line of values from illiberal to liberal poles, David and Holliday propose to think about them as occupying a third point, in triangular relations with the other two. They label this location “limited liberalism” and it is the topic of the last chapter in the body of the book. Their proposition is that limited liberalism is “fundamentally different from semi-liberalism produced by splitting the difference on a linear scale of liberalism and illiberalism” (p. 201). The problem is not one of more liberalism or less, for liberalism or against it. This is a more complicated story: one of how people living in circumstances mostly beyond their control reconcile clashing ideas about rights to membership in their political community, and defend lingering ambivalence about the leadership of it.Footnote ³

Limited liberalism is, like liberalism and illiberalism, a concept that the authors have reconstructed out of ideas and values that they brought with them to their research sites. It comes from their social-scientific training and their own backgrounds. Their respondents’ and assistants’ ideas also imprecisely contributed to their thinking about the concept, and the place in which they located it. “We employed not only our own understanding of Myanmar,” they write, “but also qualitative enquiries and the native wisdom of our research assistants all of whom were born and raised in the country” (p. 8). Who were these people and what was this “native wisdom” that they provided to the project? What kind of values did they introduce to it and with what effects on its findings? The authors do not say.

Because of their method of working from general categories towards local particulars, David and Holliday also had survey questionnaires translated from English to Burmese and then back again, by two translators independently. They then worked with a third translator to reconcile perceived differences and address conceptual misunderstandings and inconsistencies. They acknowledge the difficulties with translating surveys about political values from one language to the next (and back again) and stress their concern to “ensure that the meaning of key terms was captured correctly,” adding that differences in meaning could be “carefully reconciled through discussion with three native speakers” who worked on translations with them (p. 7). How was “correct” meaning assessed? How were differences reconciled? What theory of the relation between language and knowledge informed these decisions? Again, the text is quiet on these aspects of the research design.

Notwithstanding, there are many things to like about this book. It engages enthusiastically with the burgeoning new scholarship on Myanmar. Its prose is efficient, its structure intelligent. And, on top of the extensive empirical work that the authors and their collaborators in Myanmar did, they also are at pains to build the concept of limited liberalism, which they argue has “an element of analytical precision” and provides “insights into political culture” of hybrid regimes that other available concepts do not (p. 190).

Regardless of whether or not this claim can be sustained, given the mountain of political concepts with adjectives that today are already available for social scientists to pick from, and whether or not the authors deserve praise or reproval for adding yet another concept to the pile, the merit of this book lies in its concern with how political beliefs animate public action and support for, or withdrawal of support from, the actions of others. The literatures on electoral politics and transitional pacts are deficient in this respect partly because those concepts, like the seemingly ubiquitous concept of authoritarianism, do not refer directly to political principles, but only to political processes. Liberalism invites, if not impels, attentiveness to both. So does democracy. Arguably, a comparative advantage of liberalism is that doctrinally it is relatively uncluttered, even if, for historical reasons, it carries with it much of the same baggage as democracy.

Until recently, liberalism has lingered on the intellectual periphery of inquiries into post-colonial Southeast Asia. Yet this is the fifth new book on liberalism and a Southeast Asian country in the space of a few years.Footnote ⁴ It may be too soon to declare a groundswell of interest in the idea among social scientists and historians working on the region, but, if Tomas Larsson (Reference Larsson2017) is right that the time has come to reconsider the “dismissive attitude towards liberalism” harboured by Southeast Asianists, then perhaps that day is not far off. In that event, with Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar, David and Holliday are among the happy few who are setting the terms for the debate to follow.