The Political Economy of Myanmar's Transition

This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in the JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ASIA, 07 Feb 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00472336.2013.764143.Since holding elections in 2010, Myanmar has transitioned from a direct military dictatorship to a formally democratic system and has embarked on a period of rapid economic reform. After two decades of military rule, the pace of change has startled almost everyone and led to a great deal of cautious optimism. To make sense of the transition and assess the case for optimism, this article explores the political economy of Myanmar's dual transition from state socialism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy. It analyses changes within Myanmar society from a critical political economy perspective in order to both situate these developments within broader regional trends and to evaluate the country's current trajectory. In particular, the emergence of state-mediated capitalism and politico-business complexes in Myanmar's borderlands are emphasised. These dynamics, which have empowered a narrow oligarchy, are less likely to be undone by the reform process than to fundamentally shape the contours of reform. Consequently, Myanmar's future may not be unlike those of other Southeast Asian states that have experienced similar developmental trajectories

Two Decades of Reformasi in Indonesia: Its Illiberal Turn

There has been an accentuation of Indonesian democracy’s illiberal characteristics during the course of reformasi. The religious and nativist mobilisation that surrounded the controversial 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial elections was only one manifestation of the sort of pressures leading to such accentuation. This article surveys the impacts of a stronger recent turn towards illiberalism across diverse areas of policy making in Indonesia, including decentralisation, civil–military relations, economic and foreign policy, as well as in the approaches to recognising past abuses of human rights. We find clear variation in its impacts, produced by differing constellations of old and new forces and what is at stake politically and economically in each arena of competition, as well as the salience of coherently expressed public pressure for reform. In particular, where the state and market have failed to address social injustices, more illiberal models have emerged, some under the guise of populist discourses that nonetheless continue to serve predatory elite interests and shift attention away from the inequalities in society. Such developments could be observed all the way to the 2019 presidential contest