Posting yesterday about the political role of Myanmar’s military in the present and future reminded me of a neat analysis of its role in the past. I’m thinking of an article Federico Ferrara published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2003. It’s called “Why Regimes Create Disorder: Hobbes’s Dilemma during a Rangoon Summer”. I checked Google Scholar and found 26 citations, which is a fair number. But few Myanmar specialists have cited this work, possibly because Ferrara himself has not been inducted into the ranks and is merely a comparative political scientist making excellent use of the tools of his trade.

Ferrara’s research question focuses on Burma’s pro-democracy uprising in 1988, notably the mass revolt of August 8 and the internal coup of September 18. Twice the government unleashed brutal fury on its people. The first time, in August, the opposition movement fought back. The second time, in September, it cowered into submission. Why was that? His answer is simple: “The regime presented its population with Hobbes’s dilemma.” What does he mean by this?

In Leviathan, published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes considered what life might be like in the absence of government or, as he put it, in a state of nature. His prognosis was famously bleak. There would be constant warfare (“such a warre, as is of every man, against every man”), and in general life would be highly unpleasant (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”). In such circumstances, Hobbes argued, individuals would mutually covenant to create Leviathan (“reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will”). In Mancur Olson’s terminology, they would choose by means of a social contract to submit to a relatively predictable “stationary bandit” rather than place themselves at the mercy of capricious “roving bandits”.

Ferrara’s argument is that when faced with the 8-8-88 uprising, Burma’s collapsing government opted to turn Hobbes’s imaginary state of nature into a late twentieth-century reality. For six weeks, it withdrew security forces from streets, released common criminals from jails, and encouraged widespread looting. In short, it compromised the public good of social order. It thereby offered the Burmese people a stark choice: anarchy or dictatorship? In this real-life scenario, however, individuals did not need to engage in mutual cooperation to escape from turmoil. All they had to do was defect from the opposition movement, and submit to what Ferrara calls “an inept, obtrusive, and hideously repressive Leviathan”. He contends that this was how the regime shattered the rebels’ support base and prolonged its autocracy.