Dorothy Mason and Nick Cheesman. “Land and Law Between Reform and Revolution.” In Myanmar: Politics, Economy and Society. Eds, Adam Simpson and Nicholas Farrelly, pp. 60-74. Oxfordshire, U.K.: Routledge, 2023.
This chapter explores how land law in Myanmar functions as a tool of governance, dispossession, and contestation, particularly during the semi-civilian government of the 2010s and in the wake of the 2021 military coup. Focusing on the agricultural lowlands—where the state’s legal presence is strongest—it examines how overlapping laws and policies form an unstable assemblage used to assert control over territory and subjects. Legal frameworks around land are shown to facilitate extraction and exclusion, reinforcing what the authors term a “dirty money state.”
For attorneys operating in backsliding or authoritarian contexts, this analysis reveals how law is neither neutral nor coherent, but an instrument of political economy shaped by competing state actors and popular resistance. Legal professionals are implicated in both the enforcement and contestation of land regimes. The chapter introduces the dual concepts of reform (pyubyin-byaunglè-hmu) and revolution (tawhlanye) to describe how people in Myanmar navigate and resist land control mechanisms—sometimes working within the law to fix what’s broken, and other times seeking to overturn the entire legal-political order.
In backsliding democracies, attorneys must contend with such tensions—between legalism and revolutionary rupture—while deciding whether to serve the system or challenge its foundations.