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Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar analyses prison life in Myanmar during a short-lived period of democratic transition. The accounts of former prisoners reveal the realities of everyday life illuminating survival strategies, landscapes of emotion, and power dynamics.
Making a significantly different kind of contribution, this is the first in depth, empirically based, systematic study of imprisonment practices in Myanmar between 2015-2020, a period believed by many to herald a new democratic dawn for Myanmar before the subsequent military coup. Based on rich data gathered across four sites and examined collaboratively by a team comprised of experienced prison scholars and a local research team, the authors do not simply document the dynamics of prison governance; they analyse and contextualise them, utilising a bottom-up perspective informed by the most recent scholarly trends on prison governance in the Global South.
Filling an important gap in the scholarship about prisons in South East Asia and expanding the scope of the field of prison studies ‘beyond the west’, the authors provide important counterpoints to dominant understandings of imprisonment based on Western sources.
Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar is the first major study to go beyond the celebrated world of the country’s political prisoners and deep into the relations, emotions and travails of its ordinary detainees. Through close descriptions and affecting narratives, it carries the reader along with the rhythms of petty bureaucracy, mundane brutality and the exchange economies of imprisonment in this erstwhile British colony. Painstakingly documented, thoughtfully presented and persuasively argued, this is a model of collaborative ethnographic research and writing on one of the most consequential yet misunderstood institutions in our time.
Andrew M. Jefferson is a senior researcher at DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, Denmark.
Co-authors are Myanmar-based researchers protected by pseudonyms. They were core members of the research team, and they continue to engage in work that promotes justice in Myanmar.
Foreword; Tomas Max Martin
Chapter 1. Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar
Chapter 2. The Bureaucratic Architecture
Chapter 3. Mundane Survival and Exchange Economies
Chapter 4. Debasing and Sustaining Penal Encounters
Chapter 5. The Emotivity of Prison Experience
Chapter 6. Punishment, Discipline, and Violence: The Exercise of Power
Chapter 7. Prison Subjects