HIS031000 Archives

On 1 February 2021 Myanmar’s military conducted a coup putting an end to a decade of reforms. Although it was the third coup in Myanmar’s history, it was received as a moral shock by a large part of the population, and the response was an unprecedented resistance movement branded as the Spring Revolution by the young people who are leading it.

Myanmar’s Spring Revolution is about the students and academics who played a key part in the post-coup protests and who are still fighting the Myanmar military, both by taking up arms and by creating their own higher education institutions. It aims to give Myanmar students a place to offer their views on their revolution and the future they are fighting for. In light of wars in Ukraine and Gaza the conflict in Myanmar has largely been forgotten and the youth-led resistance that is fighting the Myanmar military seems to have no witnesses. This book is a way of giving voice to those most affected by the coup, and those who are giving their lives for the future of their country. The protagonists here explain why the resistance is different this time, and how this revolution goes well beyond the protests against a military regime.

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.