Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar - (Emerald Studies in Activist Criminology) (Hardcover)

About the Book

Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar analyses prison life in Myanmar during a short-lived period of democratic transition. The accounts of former prisoners reveal the realities of everyday life illuminating survival strategies, landscapes of emotion, and power dynamics.

Book Synopsis

Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar analyses prison life in Myanmar during a short-lived period of democratic transition. The accounts of former prisoners reveal the realities of everyday life illuminating survival strategies, landscapes of emotion, and power dynamics.

Making a significantly different kind of contribution, this is the first in depth, empirically based, systematic study of imprisonment practices in Myanmar between 2015-2020, a period believed by many to herald a new democratic dawn for Myanmar before the subsequent military coup. Based on rich data gathered across four sites and examined collaboratively by a team comprised of experienced prison scholars and a local research team, the authors do not simply document the dynamics of prison governance; they analyse and contextualise them, utilising a bottom-up perspective informed by the most recent scholarly trends on prison governance in the Global South.

Filling an important gap in the scholarship about prisons in South East Asia and expanding the scope of the field of prison studies 'beyond the west', the authors provide important counterpoints to dominant understandings of imprisonment based on Western sources.

Review Quotes

This is a timely and urgent book that is co-produced by a long-standing and world leading expert on Global Prisons, and a research team firmly anchored in Myanmar, who are integral to every aspect of the research process. Myanmar, like so many nations in this part of the Global Southeast, remains woefully hidden and misunderstood by world Criminologists and policy makers concerned with reducing the damage and destruction of criminal justice and penality. Empirically grounded, yet theoretically sophisticated, this book builds on, upends, and extends how penalscapes emerge as hyper regulatory, authoritarian, and militarized. The work creates a necessary discomfort that is disruptive not only to how we come to produce bodies of Criminological knowledge from the Global North and metropoles dotted around the world. Moreover, it re-centers an age-old inconvenient truth, that Criminology, broadly defined, sits at a moment of great reckoning: it cannot, it must not, marginalize the voices and audiences that sit in the spaces of activism and resistance.

Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar is the first major study to go beyond the celebrated world of the country's political prisoners and deep into the relations, emotions and travails of its ordinary detainees. Through close descriptions and affecting narratives, it carries the reader along with the rhythms of petty bureaucracy, mundane brutality and the exchange economies of imprisonment in this erstwhile British colony. Painstakingly documented, thoughtfully presented and persuasively argued, this is a model of collaborative ethnographic research and writing on one of the most consequential yet misunderstood institutions in our time.

An exceptionally sensitive portrayal of prison life in Myanmar, the book stands out for its bold focus on prison dynamics beyond the western prison, and a profound ethnographic sensibility marked by an emphasis on the ordinary prisoner and the entanglements of prison worlds. Presenting a uniquely collaborative endeavour that brings forth a polyphony of prison voices it is a must-read for anyone interested in the politics of incarceration in the contemporary world.

About the Author

Andrew M. Jefferson is a senior researcher at DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture, Denmark.

Co-authors are Myanmar-based researchers protected by pseudonyms. They were core members of the research team, and they continue to engage in work that promotes justice in Myanmar.