​Research

Peer Reviewed

2024. "Strange bedfellows or trusted comrades? Digital solidarity-building among Myanmar’s revolutionaries." Journal of Contemporary Asia. (with Megan Ryan & Swan Ye Htut)
Accepted version available here
 
The shock and anger felt by the Myanmar public as they witnessed their democratically elected government deposed in an illegal military coup in early 2021 has led to a revolutionary break in Burmese politics. The Bamar Buddhist political elites, formerly silent on the Rohingya Muslim crisis, apologised for failing to administer justice for the Rohingya victims; the coup breathed new life and possibilities into the formation of a federal democracy; and young students and strike leaders dared to challenge the dominance of the elites. However, little is known about whether this struggling together against military dictatorship might enable a broad-based development of solidarity among Myanmar’s traditionally divided ethnic communities. Since many revolutionary communities across Myanmar took to social media to mobilise resistance, studying these groups’ online interactions can provide critical insights to this question. By analysing conversations over the year following the coup on three of the most popular resistance Facebook groups from Bamar and non-Bamar communities, this article finds a two-step process of inter-ethnic solidarity building, driven by both instrumentalist interest and organic empathy. The findings deepen understanding on solidarity building among diverse anti-dictatorship forces, revolution dynamics in post-coup Myanmar, and the role of social media on forging inter-communal empathy.

2024. “Democratic backsliding disrupted: The role of digitalized resistance in Myanmar.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics. (with Megan Ryan)
Accepted version available here​

More than one year since its coup, the Myanmar military has neither established effective control of the territory nor crushed online dissent. What factors have enabled the resistance forces to deny the consolidation of military rule? We address this question by building a novel theoretical framework that incorporates the role of long-standing digitalized pro-democracy activism and conducting a mixed-method analysis that includes an original, largely representative sample of public Facebook posts in post-coup Myanmar. We find that the development of online and hybrid pro-democracy activism against digital abuse and other illiberal policies under previous quasi-civilian governments enabled anti-coup resistance forces to thwart the military’s attempt of authoritarian revival in 2021. Our research findings deepen understanding of Myanmar’s post-coup contestation dynamics as well as other cases of unpopular autocratization in the current-day digital era.

2023. "Provoking Civilian Disruption against Popular Protests: The Myanmar Military's Counter-Mobilisation Strategies." Journal of Contemporary Asia.
Accepted version available here

​While mass contentious movements face a wide range of state-led counter-mobilisation strategies, existing studies have mainly focused on repression by the security forces and violence contractors. Much less is understood about the impact of governments’ more deceptive strategies to provoke anti-protester hostility among the public, including labelling protesters as criminals and engineering widespread violent crimes. This article examines the effectiveness of these two types of strategy by juxtaposing two similar cases of popular protests under military-ruled Myanmar: the 1988 Four-eight Uprising and 2007 Saffron Revolution. The analysis leverages a novel qualitative dataset consisting of content from state media, authoritative secondary sources, as well as original interviews and written accounts by 109 civilians who witnessed or participated in the protest events. It is found that while anti-protester narratives were ineffective, orchestration of criminal activities targeting civilians on a large scale fuelled civilian distrust toward strangers, leading adult men to disrupt protest events by unfamiliar activists. This finding underscores both the crucial role of nurturing inter-group trust in order to grow a broad-based contentious front as well as the challenging conditions for doing so when a regime is steadfastly committed to crushing dissent.
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2023. “Organic Online Politics: Farmers, Facebook and Myanmar’s Military Coup.” Big Data & Society​. (with Dr. Hilary Faxon, Kendra Kintzi, Kay Zak Wine, and Swan Ye Htut)
​Published version available here

Despite perennial hope in the democratic possibilities of the internet, the rise of digital authoritarianism threatens online and offline freedom across much of the world. Yet while critical data studies has expanded its geographic focus, limited work to date has examined digital mobilization in the agrarian communities that comprise much of the Global South. This article advances the concept of “organic online politics,” to demonstrate how digital mobilization grows from specific rural conditions, material concerns, and repertoires of resistance, within the constraints of authoritarian violence and internet control. To do so, we examine social media interaction in the wake of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, an agrarian nation with recent, rapid digital connection that corresponded with a decade-long democratic turn. Analyzing an original archive of over 2,000 Facebook posts collected from popular farming pages and groups, we find a massive drop-off in online activity after the military coup and analyze the shifting temporalities of digital mobilization. Crucially, we highlight the embeddedness of online interaction within the material concerns of farming communities, examining how social media become a key forum for negotiating political crisis in Myanmar’s countryside. These findings call attention to rural digital subcultures as fertile sites of investigation and point towards the need for future scholarship on data practices that attends to rooted agrarian struggles.​

2023. “Enabling Activist Resilience: Bystander Protection during Protest Crackdowns in Myanmar.” Asian Politics & Policy 15(2): 205-225. 
Published version available here

What accounts for the survival and long-term participation of activists in contentious movements under repression? I argue for the role of an important yet oft-neglected factor: protective support by civilian bystanders. I propose that, mainly motivated by victim-oriented sympathy, bystanders engage in high-risk protection that helps activists to escape crackdowns and bolsters their dedication to the movement. To test my theoretical claims, I examine hard cases for activist survival at the height of state violence during military rule in Myanmar between 1988-2010, with an original qualitative dataset consisting of oral history interviews and written accounts by more than 100 protest observers and former pro-democracy activists. The dataset presents an unprecedented number of voices from the average, non-contentious general public, which are mostly missing in existing research on social movements. This approach generates a fresh perspective to better understand opportunities and constraints around movement entrepreneurs in hostile environments.

Book Review

2023. "Return of the junta: why Myanmar's military must go back to the barracks." International Affairs 99(6): 2544–2545.

How did Myanmar's intertwined conflicts culminate in the current political upheaval after the 2021 military coup? What role has the Tatmadaw, Myanmar's military, played in perpetuating the country's suffering? In Return of the junta, Oliver Slow skilfully weaves vivid personal accounts with accessible historical analysis to reveal the military's omnipresent responsibility for the injustices that Myanmar's residents have endured.

Public Scholarship 
Book chapter
2022. “Pro-democracy struggle in the age of social media: Evolution of military and resistance strategies in post-coup Myanmar.” In Myanmar after the Coup: Resistance, Resilience, and Re-invention. Edited by Giuseppe Gabusi and Raimondo Neironi. Turin: Torino World Affairs Institute. (with Megan Ryan)

Blog posts
2023. "Farmers, Facebook and Myanmar's Coup." New Mandala. (with Hilary Faxon, Kendra Kintzi, Kay Zak Wine, & Swan Ye Htut)
2022. "Digital Contention in Post-Coup Myanmar." New Mandala​. (with Megan Ryan) 
2021. “Myanmar’s Military Has a History of Using Deceptive Tactics against Protesters. Now It Has Social Media, Too.” The Washington Post. 
2021. “To Understand Post-Coup Myanmar, Look to Its History of Popular Resistance, Not Sanctions.” The Brookings Institution.
2013. “Understanding Malaysia’s Pivotal General Election.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (with Vikram Nehru)
2012. “Building Peace in Southeast Asia’s Conflict Areas.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (with Vikram Nehru)
2012. “More Hills to Climb for Aung San Suu Kyi.” East Asia Forum. (with Vikram Nehru)

Podcasts
2023. “Bystanders and the Resilience of Myanmar’s Pro-Democracy Movement.” Myanmar Musings. Mai Van Tran*.
2022. “The Politics of Protest in Myanmar, with Van Tran.” The Nordic Asia Podcast. Mai Van Tran*.
2021. “Activist Resilience under Repression.” Gatty Lecture Rewind Podcast. Mai Van Tran*.
 
Dataset
2024. Pro-democracy platform advocacy: A dataset of project-related content. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14471006. Mai Van Tran*, Tuwanont Phattharathanasut, Haymarn Soe Nyunt, Nalinthip Ekapong, Lewis Young, and Peosamnang Soth.

​Works in Progress

"Social media's algorithmic affordances for authoritarian repression: Evidence from Myanmar"
Mai Van Tran, Tom Willaert, Lewis Young, Haymarn Soe Nyunt
 
Abstract:  There are growing reports on autocrats’ cyber armies that run anti-dissident campaigns across multiple digital platforms on an industrial scale. Nonetheless, there lacks research that systematically examines the platform affordances that enable such coordinated repression. Hence, this study aims to scrutinise the extent to which the algorithmic curation, moderation, and design by social media platforms might facilitate cross-platform authoritarian repression. Our evidence comes from conflict-ridden Myanmar, where the military administration has orchestrated repression across three main platforms: Telegram, Facebook, and TikTok. Based on a list of prominent anti-dissident accounts and keywords, we captured more than 1 million public social media posts during February 2021- February 2024. With a supervised machine learning approach, we develop novel logistic regression and Large Language Model classifiers for four types of authoritarian content based on a random sample of 6,000 labelled posts. The research elevates the global relevance of the algorithmic governance scholarship by highlighting the oft-neglected user experiences with tech-enabled repression in the Global South. The findings will also deepen our understanding on autocrats’ industrial innovations in the age of algorithmic platforms.

"Pro-democracy platform advocacy: Resisting Big Tech-mediated authoritarianism in Southeast Asia". Pre-print at Open Research Europe. 
Mai Van Tran, Tuwanont Phattharathanasut, Nalinthip Ekapong, Haymarn Soe Nyunt, and Lewis Young
 
Abstract: Global platforms, such as Meta, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and Telegram, have faced widespread criticisms for facilitating authoritarian repression of dissident voices, especially in the Global South. In response, human rights defenders have increasingly launched advocacy efforts toward the foreign platforms to defend free speech. Despite the varying forms and effects of such transnational efforts, there lacks research that systematically examines their dynamics. This study advances a concept of pro-democracy platform advocacy and scrutinises the extent to which such advocacy might affect Big Tech’s practices and curb platform-mediated repression in the Global South. The comparative empirical evidence comes from Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia, as there exist similar combinations of digital repression while the human rights advocates adopt varying advocacy approaches during 2020–2024. We conduct an exploratory mixed methods analysis of an original dataset of 38 semi-structured expert interviews, 6000 Facebook posts, and relevant Meta’s Transparency Reports. We find that platform advocacy efforts are more likely to generate significant impact if the advocates focus on issues that resonate with Western democracies, promote campaign publicity via prominent international allies, and are able to engage marginalised dissidents. The research makes important contributions to both the platform governance and transnational advocacy scholarship by underscoring the unique dynamics of Big Tech governance under authoritarianism in the Global South. Methodologically, by strictly limiting the scope of social media processing to publicly available content with carefully selected accounts and keywords, this study showcases a promising big-data design that minimises privacy risks to vulnerable social media users.

"Responding to digital repression: Vulnerability and resilience of marginalized dissidents in Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia"
Mai Van Tran
 
Abstract: Autocrats increasingly turn to digital strategies to censor dissent, from internet blackouts during contentious periods to coordinated online disinformation campaigns. Civil society and policy reports have particularly highlighted how these strategies disproportionately target dissidents from marginalized groups (such as female, LGBTQ+, ethno-religious minority, and rural activists). Yet, many of them remain dedicated to sustaining activism and nurturing the growth of their young junior colleagues in the face of repression. By adopting an inductive approach, this book chapter examines how marginalized dissidents build resilience to overcome their vulnerability to digital authoritarianism. I conduct a qualitative analysis primarily of semi-structured interviews with 38 respondents, who are either digital rights advocates or activists representing marginalized groups from three different authoritarian contexts: Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. The findings demonstrate while being more vulnerable to digital repression, the dissidents are still able to promote youth voices by adapting self- and community-defense measures to the evolving digital environments. The novel insight nuances our understanding of the repression-dissent dynamics as well as youth activism under digital authoritarianism.