Search results for ""Author Renaud Egreteau""

In January 2011, parliament was restored in Myanmar after two decades of military rule. Startlingly, it began to repeal obsolete laws, scrutinize government expenditures, summon ministers to the floor, and discuss the state's annual budget. It also allowed its elected representatives to make public the grievances collected from constituents infuriated at enduring practices of land confiscation, petty corruption, and everyday abuses of power. Yet ten years later in February 2021, parliament was shut down, again, by a coup d'état. What has been learned in the span of a decade of post-junta parliamentary resurgence? How could an elected legislature resurface - and function - in a country that had only limited experience with parliamentary affairs and representative politics since its independence from British rule? What lessons can be drawn from the Myanmar case for parliamentary institution-building and legislative developments (and decay) in post-authoritarian and praetorian contexts? This book offers a compelling account of Myanmar's halting efforts to develop the institutional framework and practice of a parliament-based democratic governance between 2011 and 2021. It charts the stages of such a legislative resurgence, tracing its causes, and exploring how various institutional and political legacies both informed and constrained the re-establishment and operations of the Union legislature, or Pyidaungsu Hluttaw. Embracing both ethnographic observations and a methodical engagement with legislative proceedings and historical material, Renaud Egreteau investigates how parliamentary life (re)emerged in Myanmar in the 2010s. His analysis concentrates on key legislative mechanisms, processes, and tasks pertaining to government oversight, budgetary control, representation, and lawmaking and interrogates how they were learned, (re)appropriated, and (mis)performed by Myanmar's new breed of legislators and parliamentary staff until the 2021 army takeover.

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This book examines the political landscape that took shape in Myanmar after the 2010 elections and the subsequent transition from direct military rule to a quasi-civilian 'hybrid' regime. Striking political, social, and economic transformations have indeed taken place in the long-isolated country since the military junta was disbanded in March 2011. To better construe -- and question -- what has routinely been labelled a 'Burmese Spring', Egreteau examines the reasons behind the ongoing political transition, as well as the role of the Burmese armed forces in that process, drawing on in-depth interviews with Burmese political actors, party leaders, parliamentarians and retired army officers. The study also takes its cue from comparative scholarship on civil-military relations and post-authoritarian politics, to look at the 'praetorian' logic explaining the transitional moment. Myanmar's road to democratic change is, however, still paved with daunting obstacles.As the book suggests, the continuing military intervention in domestic politics, the resilience of bureaucratic, economic and political clientelism at all levels of society, the iconification of Aung San Suu Kyi, the shadowy influence of regional and global powers, as well as enduring concerns about interethnic and interreligious relations, all are strong reminders of the series of elemental conundrums with which Myanmar will have to deal in order to achieve democratisation, sustainable development and peace.

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