PRECARIOUS LIVES UNDER A VIOLENT AND UNCARING REGIME

State legitimacy is built and sustained through multiple means, including economic performance, diplomacy, and the rule of law. The use of force is an inherent element of statecraft and, under democratic ideals, is expected to be constrained by principles of proportionality, subject to judicial oversight, and deployed only as a last resort. In Myanmar, however, these constraints are largely absent, and force has become a routine mode of governance rather than an exceptional measure. Prasse-Freeman captures this condition through the notion of “blunt biopolitics” (p. 25), a form of rule that normalizes violence and entrenches impunity within the military and the state’s security apparatus. Operating through extremes, blunt biopolitics is characterised by excessive intervention through neoliberal reterritorialization, sovereign exception, and racialized differentiation, alongside an almost wilful withdrawal that permits populations to struggle among themselves over resources and survival (p. 27). Violence in this sense extends far beyond its physical manifestations. Economic development pursued without regard for human rights or social justice generates deep class-based inequalities that deprive people not just of their livelihoods but also of the capacity to respond to dispossession and impoverishment (Setiawan and Savirani Reference Setiawan, Savirani, Setiawan and Savirani2025).

Without explicitly adopting a gendered lens, Prasse-Freeman nonetheless conveys how acute this crisis of social reproduction is in Myanmar, where the state has long allocated minimal resources to basic welfare such as health and education. Beyond welfare provision, even more fundamental conditions of survival are frequently at stake, as people are routinely exposed to unsafe infrastructure, fatal electrocution, and power outages. Under such conditions, precariousness is no longer an exception but a norm, marked by the systematic destabilization of the very conduct of life and by the transfer of social risk management from the public to the private sphere (Lorey Reference Lorey2015, 13). In Myanmar, this normalization of precarity persists precisely because of the state’s historical disavowal of responsibility, forcing its people to rely on self-help measures. The stark absence of the state in ensuring even minimal welfare thus produces a vicious cycle. As NGOs, advocacy organisations, and individuals step in to compensate for state withdrawal and gradually come to accept this absence as normal, responsibility is continually displaced away from public authority. In turn, the very conditions of precariousness that necessitate such interventions continue to persist. Prasse-Freeman acknowledges the constraints of researching female activists in a political field shaped by masculine norms. His discussion of female activists and women-led advocacy, therefore, relies largely on secondary sources rather than the close ethnographic engagement that underpins his analysis of male activists. Even so, we still learn about prominent campaigns such as #Sisters2Sisters and about key female figures through the author’s careful documentation of their voices and modes of bodily performance, and through the efforts to elevate them in the broader democracy movement. Read alongside the scholarship on women-led, community-based organizing (Oo and Davies Reference Oo and Davies2021), we can better appreciate the diverse terrains of feminist activism in Myanmar, ranging from visible campaigns to grassroots efforts to confront women’s and girls’ experiences of marginalization and violence.

THE ACTIVISTS’ PARADOX

Political activists working under authoritarian and conflict settings are caught in several dilemmas. The first is strategic: they must find ways to survive and maintain their activism as political repression intensifies and funding evaporates. The second dilemma, an ideological one, is how to bridge the gap between the expectations of international donors and development agencies, who promote international and often Western principles, and the priorities of local communities. The fact that many activists operate at the intersection between the global and local spheres does not necessarily resolve the inherent tensions between them (Simion Reference Simion2021, 6); an uneven or hasty course of action may consequently disengage the local or push them further from reform efforts. The third dilemma is pragmatic: activists must find ways to respond to the needs of subaltern communities whose understandings of entitlement, harm, and justice are often at odds with formal legal frameworks. In the face of entrenched state violence and impunity, activists often find themselves working through institutions that already marginalize these communities’ interests, only to confront the widening gap between what the law entails and the actual fulfilment of justice.

These paradoxes should not be considered in isolation but as overlapping pressures shaping activists’ choices. Far from romanticizing their struggles, refusal cuts across strategic, ideological, and pragmatic dimensions. Strategically, activists refuse to yield to authoritative rule, and the flame of struggle persists in their lives and thoughts regardless of whether they are mobilizing or protesting. Mundane acts following release from prison, such as rebuilding one’s livelihood, should not be read as political withdrawal or evidence that repression has succeeded in quashing dissent, even though state violence has undoubtedly deterred some forms of activism. In one illustrative example, activists refused to sign a pledge upon release from prison, a so-called sovereign gift, as its language conveys the forgiving and supreme power of the state (p. 101). Despite the material benefits such a pledge might offer, the refusal to sign represents an effort to avoid co-optation and to withhold recognition of the state’s authority. Yet the pledge itself proves as tenuous as the regime that issues it, as it hardly prevents some signatories from returning to protesting.

Ideologically, activists refuse to submit to top-down influence by critically assessing when international discourses or aid programmes may be useful and when they risk overshadowing local priorities. A seemingly simple naming practice is revealing. Those involved in the Movement for Democracy Current Forces (MDCF) do not identify themselves as an NGO or a political party, as existing labels are either too confining or ill-suited to their cause, both ideologically and in operational terms (p. 106). Referring to themselves instead as a “force” allows them to assert political purpose without being bound by established categories of advocacy or membership. At the same time, this designation accommodates the fluidity of their participation across conventional and unconventional spheres of activism. Refusal, in this sense, operates through a rejection of pre-existing, rigid organisational forms, affirming activist identity through shared histories of action and commitment, where, as the author notes, individuals got to know each other for “who they were and what they had done rather than the particular group they were with at that moment” (p. 109). In terms of methodology, these accounts reaffirm the need to attend closely to local and diverse voices, while remaining sensitive to positionality and the uneven power relations that often, and sometimes unconsciously, shape encounters between researchers and participants.

Pragmatically, activists often refuse the law, though rarely in an outright or absolute sense. There are moments when the law appears to offer hope, only to disappoint those who attempt to work through it. Some activists seem to adopt human rights as a “way of life” (Chua Reference Chua2018, 7), undergoing forms of self-transformation and cultivating collective commitment to struggle, even when their actions are not articulated through the explicit language of rights. What remains less clear in the book, however, is how activists conceptualize law in relation to the state. If sovereign power is itself illegible, does law merely reproduce that illegibility, or does it function as an idealized force imagined standing above the state? Given the uneven history of rule-of-law projects and their troubled implementation in Myanmar (Cheesman Reference Cheesman2009), it is likely that many activists initially placed faith in law or legal reform, only to become disenchanted and turn away from it. The answer, scattered across the book, appears to be both. Law emerges simultaneously as a source of subordination and injustice, and as a tool that activists and communities may still fall back upon. Yet the narrative tracing this transformation in attitudes toward law, and whether and how such shifts align with the schemas of resistance and refusal, remains somewhat fragmented across the chapters.

THE SUBALTERN’S PARADOX

The Burmese people also confront acute paradoxes. A predatory neoliberal system has pushed farmers from landholders into a displaced proletariat, forcing them to seek alternative livelihoods that are themselves precarious. Some end up working as labourers on land that once belonged to them. To resist the regime carries significant risks, since such an act may invite further repression and be criminalized under the guise of law. People are thus forced to choose between resistance, with its emotional exhaustion and threat of punishment, and subsistence under unjust conditions. For those who refuse to be silenced, an additional dilemma lies in the pursuit of justice through a legal system that is overwhelmingly stacked against them.

The plow protest emerges as a creative resisting and coping tactic, though, as the author notes, it may be more accurate to describe these actions as plow struggles. Lacking formal documentation to prove legal ownership, displaced farmers return to their land to plow and harvest as a means of asserting their claims, drawing on longstanding beliefs that link occupation and cultivation with rightful ownership. The fact that authorities at times turn a blind eye, allowing farmers to continue their work until harvest, suggests that sovereign power is not always exercised in a purely arbitrary or violent manner, but may also be negotiated and, at times, accommodating to people’s subsistence needs (Nguyen Reference Nguyen2022). Cursing ceremonies, ritual-like practices whereby villagers curse the dictators, military officers, and those who bring despair to themselves and the community, similarly sit between refusal and resistance, yet they are grounded in an indigenous belief in cosmological authority that lies beyond the state’s legibility. When the law fails to act on behalf of the people, they turn to a transcendent force to which, in Myanmar, people across class and social background would subscribe. Rather than turning away from the state, villagers seek to draw the attention of authorities to their sufferings through moral and cosmological claims. This suggests that the regime’s governing logics are not monolithic and may, at times, make room for non-legal normative orders, thereby creating space for manoeuvre in everyday interactions between rulers and the ruled. Ultimately, this invites a broader conceptual question about the arc of refusal itself: are these practices best understood as a refusal of sovereign power, or rather as its ongoing reworking and negotiation?

For activists advocating for the Rohingya, an ethnic group whose lives have been governed through legal denial and persecution (Crouch Reference Crouch2021), the formal language of rights is viewed to be out of touch with their lived experiences. While some activists continue to attribute symbolic value and optimism to legal reform, others view rights-based strategies as ineffective or even dangerous. In this context, the language of rights itself risks reproducing an elitist frame of human rights discourse. The vernacular concept of akwint ayay, translatable as “rights” or “opportunities” (p. 207), unsettles local understandings and perceptions of justice and resonates with socio-legal accounts elsewhere in Asia that demonstrate how the meanings of rights are plural, unstable, and contested. At times, however, the analysis appears to oscillate between two analytically distinct dimensions of rights, each operating within a different schema of justice. Procedural justice concerns whether formal legal mechanisms offer feasible pathways for enforcing and claiming rights and entitlements. Substantive justice concerns the extent to which individuals and communities subscribe to rights as a moral language through which social and political relationships are understood (Waldron Reference Waldron2024). Additionally, while Prasse-Freeman introduces the concept of “devernacularization” (p. 244) to capture the semiotic process through which people, particularly those hesitant to adopt rights discourse, object to or distance themselves from rights, this move seems to reinstate, in different terms, the broader phenomenon of rights being refused or turned away.