Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance, running to about 230 pages of text, opens by making the important analytical point that in any political system the visible record, or “public transcript”, is unlikely to tell the whole story about power relations. Rather, it is typically the self-portrait of dominant elites, reflecting how they would like their subordinates and the wider world to see them.

Alongside the public transcript is always a “hidden transcript” constituting what the powerless really think of the powerful. This finds expression in a wide variety of social practices, including rumour, gossip, folktale, song, gesture, humour and theatre. In many societies, it is the channel through which matters that often cannot be voiced aloud do in fact find an outlet. Infrapolitics, as Scott calls it, is disguised, unobtrusive and resistant. It is also the foundation on which visible political outbursts are built.

As an example, Scott cites (on page 212) the formation of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in August 1980: “Behind 1980, then, lay a long prehistory, one comprising songs, popular poetry, jokes, street wisdom, political satire, not to mention a popular memory of the heroes, martyrs, and villains of earlier popular protest. Each failure lay down another sedimentary layer of popular memory that would nourish the movement of the 1980s.” The Burmese pro-democracy uprising in 1988 is a direct parallel.

While those who lived through it still have solid memories, it is surely important to gather as much data as possible about the Ne Win era. What were the social spaces in which offstage dissent could be uttered? How were they reshaped as the powerful and the powerless struggled to control territory? What were the key social practices through which the hidden transcript was assembled? How did they change over time? What was contained in that transcript? By the end of the period, which sentiments were predominant? What were the slogans that captured the mood of the people?

I don’t know of any systematic attempt to create an archive of this kind. In democratizing Myanmar, where universities are slowly being reconstructed from the ruins left by the junta that dissolved itself in March 2011, I hope it will be possible to focus on this critical dimension of national history.

It’s taken me a very long time to report that the week after his “palimpsest problematic” public lecture at the University of Hong Kong, Professor Ekiert delivered a series of three workshops on the challenges of collective action, using them to survey new perspectives on civil society and social movements. Running in each case to an hour and a half, the sessions together formed the kind of master class more usually given by a great musician, actor or painter.

One point to make, then, at the outset: if any university in Myanmar is seeking academic input on this broad topic, Ekiert is the person to contact. There’s really no need to look any further. Moreover, it is critically important that collective action be fully examined inside the country, for it has long been a central feature of the political landscape.

I don’t try here to summarize the wealth of material conveyed in several hours of detailed analysis ranging across four overlapping domains of everyday forms of resistance, grassroots politics and social movements, civil society politics, and formal institutionalized politics. Instead, I preview two key areas in which I feel local research projects could and should be launched.

The first relates particularly to the Ne Win era of state socialism. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, published in 1990, James C Scott examines what he calls infrapolitics. Noting that relations of domination are at the same time relations of resistance, he argues that political explosions never emerge from nothing or nowhere. Rather, they have a base in everyday forms of resistance. Such forms could be investigated in many phases of Myanmar history. As it recedes rapidly from memory, however, the pivotal period of Ne Win’s Burma cries out for attention.

The second focuses on the mass 1988 outburst that brought an end to that era. In Theory of Collective Behavior, published in 1962, Neil J Smelser seeks to explain why political explosions take place when they do. He presents a six-part process theory of collective action, thereby generating an analytical framework for empirical research. As the most significant political eruption in national history, the 1988 democracy uprising again demands detailed analysis.

Over the next two days, I will write at greater length about these two landmark books and the Myanmar research projects they could be used to underpin. One day soon, I hope it will be possible to form local research teams to take forward both projects.

“Myanmar is more advanced than China?!” is the reaction of my friend when I tell her President Thein Sein suspended construction work on Myitsone Dam, financed by China, insisting that the government must “respect the will of the people”. She works as a consultant on environmental and social impact assessments in Hong Kong and Mainland China, and laments how they rarely prevent projects from being carried out. In the name of economic development, environmental and social concerns are often shuffled off. The Nu River Dam suspension, called by former Premier Wen Jiabao, is a rare exception.

The ​Myitsone Dam case was isolated, and by itself is not a fair indicator of Myanmar’s level of political advancement. In many ways, though, it did usher in a new era, signaling the new quasi-civilian government’s commitment to reform and opening to the West. This is said to undermine the relationship with China, which for decades extended political protection and economic support to Myanmar. Certainly China was caught by surprise when the decision was unilaterally announced, and some key actors, including the state-owned enterprise China Power Investment, are still trying to revive the project.

​Another new beginning is Myanmar’s road to environmental governance. ESIA laws are not yet in place, but civil society actors’ awareness of their participation rights as stakeholders is high. Activists and NGOs are not content with CSR programs that are only “PR” or “for show”. Projects characterized by the building of schools and clinics have not worked well partly because many end up being empty buildings (companies say it is the Myanmar government’s responsibility to hire teachers and doctors). More fundamentally, they have not gone through proper, participatory design, monitoring and evaluation processes to generate real community benefit.

​Even if some villagers do gain from such hardware, activists demand that people’s rights be respected right from the initial planning stage of projects, rather than losing their dignity along with their land and livelihoods. In Slavoj Zizek’s words, they are not satisfied with corporate charity efforts that “repair with the right hand what [they] ruined with the left hand”. What is required is genuine public participation – a channel for redistribution of power that enables the have-nots to be consciously included in making informed decisions.

​CSR is at a nascent stage in China. What Wanbao did at Letpadaung, by providing for communities and issuing transparent reports, is ahead of the curve for Chinese SOEs. Yet it is still a far cry from the participatory approach originating from the West. In rhetoric and in law, the Chinese government has long embraced notions of “sustainable development” and “public participation”. Public engagement has been stipulated in ESIAs since 2006, yet the law remains ambiguous and enforcement has been lax. Government agencies preserve the discretion of exceptions to protect “state secrecy”. Public participation, if any, is at most tokenistic and cannot substantively direct the state and companies’ decision making.

​In Myanmar, though, Chinese companies will not easily get away with it. Faced with a proposed Chinese-backed nickel mine in Mwe Taung, Chin State, civil society groups and political parties have already demanded full public disclosure of the scope and impact of the project. Relevant environmental laws are yet to be enacted but the people are engaging. In terms of their awareness of their rights to give or withhold free, prior, informed consent, they are indeed quite advanced.

Diane Tang Lee is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester.

Thinking about the MGI survey of global connectivity, there are a couple of dimensions to Myanmar’s reengagement with international society that fall outside a strict focus on the world economy – or are only tangentially related to it. Yet each is a key driver of the country’s reintegration process, and needs to be captured alongside, say, trade and financial flows.

One is the role now being played by INGOs inside the country. As with most developing nations, that role is substantial and is likely to rank alongside corporate activity as a determinant of contacts with the wider world. Across the global South, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs tracks this type of intervention, and generates a wealth of national and international data. An MGI-type study drawing on this database to show where Myanmar stands in relation to countries with a much deeper experience of the aid business would be a useful supplement to its study of connectivity in the world economy.

The other is the mapping of national to global values in the Myanmar case. This is a critical contextual issue for all forms of international engagement, and areas of dissonance are already plainly visible in places like Rakhine State. Across every continent, the World Values Survey seeks to capture data of this kind, though it has not yet extended its reach into Myanmar. Again, an MGI-type study built on a database that included Myanmar and was able to show the degree to which it subscribes to or departs from wider global norms would be a helpful complement to an analysis of economic connectivity.

Ultimately, of course, everything is related, and Myanmar’s re-entry into international society is being shaped by a wealth of factors straddling many spheres. However, at a time when INGOs are very present on the ground, and local and world value systems are sometimes dissonant, it would be helpful to have detailed studies of these aspects of the country’s global links.

Myanmar has come a long way from the extreme isolation of the Ne Win era. Then Burma left the Non-Aligned Movement, imposed stringent visa restrictions on all travelers, and among foreign companies allowed only German armaments manufacturer Fritz Werner to operate inside the country. Today, by contrast, Myanmar is back in the NAM, has reasonable visa rules, and strongly encourages inward investment.

Still, however, it is way behind the times. One measure of that comes in a McKinsey Global Institute report released last week: Global Flows in a Digital Age: How Trade, Finance, People, and Data Connect the World Economy. This examines five major global flows of goods, services, finance, people, and data/communication. It also captures inflows and outflows relative to country size to gauge the connectedness of individual states.

Some of the most fascinating findings come in the final category of data and communication. Between 2005 and 2012, cross-border internet traffic increased by a factor of 18. Since 2008, international Skype minutes have grown sixfold, and roughly 40 percent of all international calls are now made this way. At the end of 2013, more than two-thirds of the global population had a mobile phone. In 2012, 2.7 billion people were connected to the internet.

Country rankings in the MGI Connectedness Index are also interesting. Heading the list are Germany, Hong Kong, the USA, Singapore and the UK. The top emerging market is Russia, at ninth place overall. From East, South and Southeast Asia are Malaysia (18), South Korea (20), Japan (21), China (25), India (30), Thailand (36), Indonesia (56) and Pakistan (85). The East Asian trio of South Korea, Japan and China all score highly on everything except people flows. The world’s top six connected cities are Dubai, London, Hong Kong, New York, Singapore and Tokyo.

A central argument made by the report is that connectedness boosts economic development, that countries benefit from boosting their inflows and outflows of goods, services, finance, people and data/communication. This is from page 6: “The most central countries to the global network of flows in our database can expect to increase GDP growth from flows up to 40 percent more than the least connected countries. For example, Thailand, a high-centrality country, would disproportionately benefit compared with Laos, its low-centrality neighbor.”

Needless to say, Myanmar does not feature at all in this 180-page report. Despite all the catch-up now being promoted by political leaders, it remains minimally linked to the global economy. Nevertheless, the potential for rapid change is considerable. Mobile penetration is slated to reach 80 percent by 2016, and internet use is also spreading. Other flows should increase as global business develops. The regional neighbourhood is very much open to cross-border flows.

Connecting Myanmar is therefore the next major phase in a long national evolution away from the disastrous hermit state created in the 1960s and 1970s.

CSR debate focuses mainly on external determinants of responsible business practice: government regulation, activist campaigns, consumer pressure, that sort of thing. An emergent stream of research seeks not to deny the importance of these factors, but rather to note that there can be internal drivers too. I look here at research reported by Christian R Thauer in a Business & Society article published online about a year ago, but not yet available in hard copy. The title is “Goodness Comes from Within: Intra-organizational Dynamics of Corporate Social Responsibility”.

Thauer tests his hypotheses on a range of different inward investors in the South African automotive and textile industries. This is a solid choice because the country attracts considerable foreign direct investment. It also has national regulation meeting most international norms and standards, but lacks satisfactory enforcement and monitoring. It is therefore a case of “limited statehood” typical of emerging markets. Here, as in much of the global South, companies can get away with pretty lax compliance if they want to. It turns out, though, that some do not want to. Why is that?

Thauer argues first that firms will voluntarily boost their labour-related CSR if they face a human resource dilemma. Any firm that invests in training workers to acquire specific skills will be keen not to lose them either temporarily (to illness) or permanently (to another employer). As part of a strategy designed to ensure employee stability, a firm can pay higher salaries. However, there may still be uncertainty in its local environment, generated for instance by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the South African case. He found that companies in this situation responded by launching HIV/AIDS programmes ranging from condom distribution to information campaigns, disease management, medication and even antiretroviral therapy.

Thauer argues secondly that firms will enhance their production-related CSR if they confront a technological specialization dilemma. That’s not easy to grasp. The central idea is that any firm making a major investment that will not generate a return for many years to come also faces considerable uncertainty. It will therefore want to minimize the risks it faces. He found that companies in this situation responded by operating to heightened environmental standards so as not to provoke discontent and even opposition in the local community.

Business can therefore be good anyway. Making all the necessary controls for external factors, Thauer demonstrates that risk factors generated by specific skill sets or significant sunk costs with lengthy payback periods create strong internal incentives for firms to engage in CSR.

Talking with Vicky Bowman reminded me of a briefing paper circulated by the Burma Campaign UK last month. It seemed way off the mark at the time, and seems still more so now. Entitled “Trade, Development and the Smokescreen of CSR”, it was written by David Baulk and released on April 11. It can be downloaded from the BCUK website.

Baulk makes fair points about the restricted nature of the current transition, real problems generated by land grabs and ongoing human rights violations, and limited gains currently registered by ordinary people. On this basis, he castigates the international community for relinquishing “almost every lever of economic and political pressure”, and argues that it has made “an unequivocal commitment to prioritise trade and investment over human rights – under the name of ‘corporate social responsibility’”. But is that what is really happening?

Another way to view things is to start with an insight provided by Kofi Annan, as secretary-general in 2005, when reviewing the contribution of business to the UN Millennium Development Goals: “It is the absence of broad-based business activity, not its presence, which condemns much of humanity to suffering. Indeed, what is utopian is the notion that poverty can be overcome without the active engagement of business.” Myanmar is a perfect illustration of this. Its 50 years of economic catastrophe were triggered by a state socialist regime that was hostile to business, and a military junta that was incapable of creating conditions in which it might flourish.

Acknowledging this, the international community has decided to grasp the best chance of meaningful change offered in the past two generations and work with the grain of reform. As part of that, it now endorses corporate engagement with Myanmar. At the same time, though, it seeks to infuse business activity with CSR principles so as to boost welfare gains across the entire society. MCRB is taking concrete steps to deliver on that. So too are many international organizations, donor agencies from leading states, and INGOs. The Myanmar government is also moving in that direction.

Just about everyone involved in these initiatives accepts that progress is often slow, and much remains to be done. But there are also benefits in the emergence of responsible business practice, and its gradual spread to key parts of the economy. There is, then, no “smokescreen” of CSR in Myanmar, but rather a committed attempt to build a new corporate culture. The idea that the country would have a better shot at a decent transition if broad-based business activity were absent rather than present makes little sense.

Vicky Bowman served as British Ambassador to Myanmar from 2002 to 2006, and was a Yangon-based diplomat for seven years in total. From 2011 to 2013, she was employed in the private sector by Rio Tinto. Since October last year, she has been Director of the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business, formed jointly by the Institute for Human Rights and Business and the Danish Institute for Human Rights. A core aim is to promote awareness of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (unanimously endorsed by the Human Rights Council in June 2011). Externally, MCRB works particularly closely with the ILO and OECD. Internally, it partners both with government and civil society. On a daily basis, it links with companies of all kinds, and seeks broadly to support the UN Global Compact local network formed following Ban Ki-moon’s visit to Myanmar in April-May 2012.

We talked first about the different needs of different companies. Major western corporations tend to be up to speed with the responsible business agenda, and often seek advice on who talk to talk to, how to work with government, and how to partner with civil society. Asian companies, under little scrutiny at home, are less aware of or concerned by international standards. However, problems at Letpadaung copper mine have made them realize that Myanmar communities now have more freedom, and are mustering the courage to stand up and demand an end to bad practice. Leading local businesses are beginning to embrace greater transparency, and a forthcoming MCRB scorecard on what they publish regarding company structure, corruption, health and safety, human rights and land is focusing minds. To date, small companies remain broadly unaffected by the responsible business agenda, unless there is a chance they could become part of a top western corporation’s supply chain.

One issue that came through very clearly in our discussion is the long shadow cast by Letpadaung. On the positive side, Myanmar Wanbao is seeking to implement the terms of its revised agreement with the Myanmar government. One small indicator of this is its website, which hosts a range of important information, including a draft economic and social impact assessment running to 300 pages, plus 2500 pages of annexes. Increasingly, this kind of transparency will become standard practice once the government issues long-awaited ESIA rules requiring consultation and publication. On the negative side, there is a danger that Letpadaung will foster the emergence of a compensation culture in Myanmar, which has latterly become a dominant issue in debate. MCRB is bringing in comparative experience, for instance of companies adopting more genuine community engagement in Peru, to show that obtaining and retaining social licence to operate is rarely fixed just by spending money.

Connected to this are two ongoing MCRB sector-wide impact assessments of oil and gas and tourism (with agriculture and ICT to follow). These will recommend that to avoid negative impacts and poor relationships companies must go beyond government liaison and establish direct contact with communities. They will also advise the government, still often reluctant to lose control, to encourage this. In many respects, the problem Myanmar Wanbao faced in Letpadaung was that it failed to develop meaningful community ties enabling managers to understand and respond to local grievances. Now it is seeking to correct that, for instance by guaranteeing jobs to people who have lost land, though this too could be problematic because many affected families never owned land in the first place. A general commitment to source unskilled labour from the local community might be a better way forward.

We closed by discussing the general change registered in Myanmar’s business climate during the reform years. One highlight is ILO engagement not only in working to eliminate forced labour, but also in facilitating the implementation of new labour laws. Its Freedom of Association Programme, launched in June 2012, has already helped as many as 940 trade unions to form across the country. But there are also many ongoing challenges for business, particularly in the two critical areas of electricity and land, and in the overarching need to create more jobs for a population desperately seeking a significant boost in life chances.

Looking more deeply into the issue of inter-communal tension and discord in Rakhine State is a brief analysis by Dr Tatsushi Arai posted online in December 2013, and published by 7 Day News Journal in Myanmar in January 2014. It draws on fieldwork and workshops conducted with diverse sets of stakeholders in Sittwe, Yangon and other parts of Myanmar in August 2013. Here I simply present a brief summary.

Arai recognizes the short-term need to keep Buddhists and Muslims apart in some parts of Rakhine as fear of imminent attack is great. However, he argues for holding construction of physical barriers to a bare minimum, so that possibilities for contact remain open. Better still would be not to build barriers at all.

In the medium to long term, Arai focuses on creation of a broad-based international platform. Linking with the Myanmar government, and indeed responding to its request, it should be led by ASEAN or one or more of its members (such as Indonesia), and draw in a range of other actors including Bangladesh, China, Japan, Korea, the UN, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Arai describes its function in this way: “The platform’s primary purpose is to work side by side with Myanmar’s central government and the Rakhine State government within a well-defined mandate and timeframe to provide technical and economic support for addressing the root causes and far-reaching consequences of the ongoing crisis.” In particular, it would be allocated tasks relating on the one hand to citizenship, and on the other to inclusive development and reconciliation. Throughout its mission would be to collaborate closely with the Myanmar government.

On citizenship, the platform would be asked first to examine the causes and consequences of inter-communal violence witnessed since 2012. Second, it would be required to establish clear grounds, consistent with international standards, for currently ineligible persons (mainly Rohingya Muslims) to claim Myanmar citizenship. Third, its input could be sought on boosting security particularly along the border with Bangladesh to prevent further illegal immigration. Fourth, it could help to ensure that full political, economic and civil rights are extended to individuals gaining Myanmar citizenship by means of this process, and that realistic options are outlined for those denied it (such as lodging formal applications or resettling elsewhere).

On inclusive development and reconciliation, the platform could advise on urban and rural development strategies targeted notably at low-income groups. It could sponsor interfaith dialogue focused on common causes such as economic misery and social inequity. It could support resettlement of IDPs and refugees. It could seek to create safe and hospitable social spaces in which people from distinct communities can come together to reflect on their trauma, process their suppressed fear and anxiety, and share experiences of healing.

It’s now several months since this important and constructive agenda for a viable future for Rakhine State was devised. Arai argues that the ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, established at the Eighteenth ASEAN Summit in Jakarta in May 2011, could play an essential role in taking it forward. His proposal also merits analysis and debate in broader policy circles.

With my local aid worker friend I also discussed the interactions that are currently possible between polarized communities in Rakhine State. In Sittwe and in IDP camps nearby, options are clearly very limited. Rohingya Muslims live in Sittwe’s Aung Mingalar quarter and in camps. Rakhine Buddhists live everywhere else. Security barriers keep the groups apart. In remote Rohingya towns and villages there is also little inter-communal contact. Indeed, often the only non-Muslims in the vicinity are state employees: teachers, healthcare workers, local officials, security personnel.

In between, though, some townships still contain both Buddhists and Muslims. They tend to pursue separate lives, and from time to time incidents flare up between them. While both peoples are thus present, they are not integrated but rather distinct communities living side by side. They thereby illustrate perfectly the notion of the plural society famously devised by British colonial official J S Furnivall at the time of Burmese independence. In Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India, published in 1948, he described such a society in this way: “It is in the strictest sense a medley, for [the peoples] mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market-place, in buying and selling.”

There is, though, in Furnivall’s plural society that single point of contact: the marketplace. Similarly, in plural townships across Rakhine State today this is often the one location where Buddhists and Muslims still interact. Held daily in large towns, and rotating weekly through small ones, markets have for many people become the sole context in which talk and exchange are possible across a forbidding cultural divide.

Moreover, this experience mirrors others around the world. In the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, ethnic cleansing drove communities wide apart and made bringing them back together enormously difficult. Gradually, though, cracks began to develop in the walls that separated them. Going Nowhere Fast: Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an ICG report issued in May 1997, made this point about those cracks: “The first, and in many ways the most important, was the rebirth of commercial ties exemplified by the establishment of the so-called Arizona Market in the [Zone of Separation] near Brcko only a few days after the [Dayton Peace Agreement] was signed. Citizens of all three ethnic groups, and of the nearby states, began flocking to the Arizona Market to do business and make money.”

It’s not much to go on, and at a time of 969 Buddhist boycotts of Muslim traders it may not offer much hope. Nevertheless, it does seem that if these two communities could be helped to maintain the trading links that continue to function, and perhaps even to rebuild those that have collapsed, tensions between them might start to diminish.