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.