SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Given the apparent turn in recent years away from increasing democratisation, but not towards outright authoritarianism, it seems timely and important to ask how human rights advocates operate in semi-authoritarian regimes (SARs) where there is latitude for political dissent, but a high risk remains of repressive state action. My work looks at the interplay of regime type, human rights and mobilisation strategies, contributing to recent efforts to expand the study of human rights mobilisation beyond authoritarian or democratic regimes, towards semi-authoritarian regimes and tapping into social movements theories to highlight the specific political opportunities they present to human rights advocates. This study takes one of the hardest cases—Myanmar—and asks if the leading human rights impact model, the spiral model, by Sikkink, Risse and Ropp, works to explain mobilisation in a country which embarked in 2008 on a road to democracy but where the military junta once again seized power following a coup d’état on 1st February 2021, effectively ending the semi-authoritarian interlude (2008-2021). Following a historical look into the regime transformation and the development of Myanmar’s civil society, I develop a framework for SARs as deliberate, permanent yet volatile regimes that present very specific political opportunities and constraints for dissent. I use this to frame the empirical analysis of human rights mobilisation in semi-authoritarian Myanmar in the 2008-2021 period. I demonstrate that 1) the specific political landscape created in semi-authoritarian contexts – where the opening of the space for dissent is realised through genuine political concessions yet limited by the superficial institutionalisation of progress – allows for the instrumentalization of the legal and political framework against human rights advocates, 2) human rights advocates deployed a wide spectrum of mobilisation strategies that reveals both the diversity within civil society and its common goal of carving out and expanding the space for dissent, and 3) the regime found itself policing the political space it had freshly opened as the political dissent it had itself invited threatened its survival. Human rights mobilisation strategies are uncovered via the analysis of qualitative data collected through dozens of interviews with pro-democracy and pro-human rights activists and civil society organisations’ publications, among other sources, to shed light on the diversity and impact of the strategies deployed by human rights advocates.