Reforming Exclusion, Assembling Nationalism: Racial and Religious Movements in Urban Space in Yangon

Abstract

The Myanmar military's violent crackdown on insurgents in Rakhine State in August 2017, which has caused over six hundred thousand Rohingya people fleeing to Bangladesh, is widely acknowledged as a humanitarian crisis. Later in this year, motivated by the rhetoric of nation and Buddhism in danger, tens of thousands demonstrators rallied across downtown Yangon to support military’s action, which is the first large-scale pro-army rally since the democratic government formed in 2016. By examining the entanglement between politics, religion, economy, and the intertwined productions of space in the colonial, authoritarian, and post-transitional period, it explores how the concepts of ethnicity and religion were reformed, re-appropriated, and assembled by economic and politics through spatial practices. Seeing the racial and religious conflict as colonial legacies, three specific cases in Yangon are studied: the racial conflict between Burmese and Indian in the late colonial period, the Buddhist anti-army campaign under military rule, and the recent anti-Muslim movement. The state’s preoccupation with homogeneous space consolidates the social and spatial exclusion through techniques and planning, and undermines the democratic politics not only in the colonial and authoritarian era but also in the neoliberal era. The continuities in the building of stability in three periods, although in different forms with different excluded groups, may indicate that contradictions produced by the capital rule has been reformed and redistributed in various historical context, but cannot simply be obscured or covered by the liberal market. The movements aroused from exclusion have been a foremost factor in shaping the social landscape, and the direction of this process is today’s most urgent political task in Myanmar.