​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)

​Work in Progress

"Platform advocacy and social media’s accountability to dissident voices in the Global South: Evidence from Southeast Asia"

Abstract: Global platforms, such as Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram, have faced widespread criticisms for failing to tackle authoritarian repression of dissident voices, especially in the Global South. In response, human rights defenders have increasingly launched advocacy efforts toward their governments as well as the foreign platforms to defend free speech. Despite the varying forms and effects of such transnational efforts, there lacks research that systematically examines their dynamic. Hence, this study aims to scrutinise the extent to which transnational advocacy might affect social media platforms’ practice to safeguard civic space in the Global South. The research adopts an exploratory mixed-method design, integrating insight from semi-structured interviews with Myanmar, Thai, and Cambodian human rights advocates and the corresponding viral political content from public Facebook pages and groups. Together, the evidence demonstrates achievements and challenges in Global South advocacy efforts for social media platforms’ human-rights based content moderation. Overall, the research elevates the global relevance of the platform governance scholarship by highlighting the oft-neglected experiences and advocacy agency of millions of internet users living under authoritarian regimes. It also deepens our understanding on transnational advocacy by demonstrating the unique dynamics of “big tech” politics in the Global South. Finally, this research offers recommendations to minimise research risks to vulnerable social media users.