For decades, the outside world mostly knew Myanmar as the site of a
valiant human rights struggle against an oppressive military
regime, predominantly through the figure of Nobel Peace Prize
winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And yet, a closer look at Burmese
grassroots sentiments reveals a significant schism between elite
human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects
maneuvering under brutal and negligent governance. While elites
have endorsed human rights logics, subalterns are ambivalent, often
going so far as to refuse rights themselves, seeing in them no more
than empty promises. Such alternative perspectives became apparent
during Burma's much-lauded decade-long "transition" from military
rule that began in 2011, a period of massive change that saw an
explosion of political and social activism. How then do people
conduct politics when they lack the legally and symbolically
stabilizing force of "rights" to guarantee their incursions against
injustice? In this book, Elliott Prasse-Freeman documents
grassroots political activists who advocate for workers and
peasants across Burma, covering not only the so-called "democratic
transition" from 2011-2021, but also the February 2021 military
coup that ended that experiment and the ongoing mass uprising
against it. Taking the reader from protest camps, to flop houses,
to prisons, and presenting practices as varied as courtroom
immolation, occult cursing ceremonies, and land reoccupations,
Rights Refused shows how Burmese subaltern politics compel us to
reconsider how rights frameworks operate everywhere.
General
Imprint: |
Stanford University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Stanford Studies in Human Rights |
Release date: |
September 2023 |
First published: |
2023 |
Authors: |
Elliott Prasse-Freeman
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
366 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-5036-3472-5 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-5036-3472-8 |
Barcode: |
9781503634725 |
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