Democracy burdens: the politics of Burmese Diasporic Networks in Asia

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the diversity of the Burmese Diaspora in Asia and its increasingly debated political leverage over the democratization of its homeland, more specifically under Burma’s post-2008 Constitution praetorian context. It will first identify and contextualize the plurality of the Burmese pro-democracy diasporic groups, their transnational linkages, and community-focused agendas in Asia. It will assess their policy approaches and transnational network connectivity – with a special focus on ASEAN and India – as well as the influence they gained (or not) after two decades of overseas struggle for the post-1988 democratization of Burma. It will be argued that while they had globally had a crucial role in regionally publicizing Burma’s political conundrum, human rights abuses and civil rights violation since 1988, and were extensively successful in mobilizing Asian external actors sensitive to their cause through transnational caucuses, forums or meetings, their strategies have domestically met far less successful political achievements. This paper will therefore question the adequacy between their primary objective (democracy in Burma) and the instruments, approaches, discourses and networks they have built up in a reluctantly democratized post-Cold War Asia. It will furthermore identify the rising internecine and introspective debates recently observed among Burmese exiled communities – notably after the emotional impact of the Saffron Revolution (2007) and Cyclone Nargis (2008), and the 2010 junta-controlled elections. The emergence of a rhetorical non-aligned “Third Force” articulated around the rejection of the dominant Manichean and bi-polarized perspective of Burma’s political conundrum (junta vs. democrats) underscores a new fluidity of ideological positioning and networking strategies defined by Burmese pro-democracy diasporic groups but has yet to prove its political transnational impact.