Governance is frequently defined by a delicate balance between citizens' desires to be provided services by a central government and their demands for autonomy, to be left alone by that same government. Functioning democracies depend on the effective management of this balance. This proves even more challenging in multiethnic nation-states, where cultural, ethnic, or religious difference can come to play central roles in the state's willingness or unwillingness to provide protection and assistance. Such difference can also become the basis for cultural minorities claiming the right to self-determination. In multiethnic democracies, there often results a tension between demands for recognition, the right to be counted, to vote, to be treated as an equal; and demands to exit the polity, to take on the risks and potential rewards that accompany independence. This project investigates whether strategies that invoke cultural rather than territorial claims are effective for obtaining state services and recognition in the context of democratic transition. Project findings will also be presented to organizations involved in development pathways for effective governance, conflict resolution standards, and sustainable transition to democracy.
Dr. Michael McGovern of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor will explore the strategic deployment of culture as a peaceful means of making claims on the central governing apparatus. The research takes place in a context undergoing democratic transition, among the Danu people in southern Shan State, Myanmar, which is selected as a site for investigating this question because it contrasts with claims-making practices of most other ethnic minority groups in Myanmar, defined by territorial claims and a history of armed resistance to the state. Research will take place in three adjacent townships in Shan State, located 1. in a semi-autonomous self-administered zone (SAZ) of the Danu, a hybrid Shan-Burmese population, 2. in an SAZ governed by the Pa-O National Organization, a former separatist group that fought the ethnic Burman-dominated central government (as well as the locally dominant Shan) until 1994, and 3. in an ethnic Shan township that is not part of an SAZ, but that sits between the two SAZs. Village-based participant observation, semi-structured interviews with local elites and representatives of the central state, and life histories with both villagers and local elites will allow the researcher to investigate the ways in which instrumental use of culture and alternation between armed resistance and cultural struggle do or do not lead to different forms of everyday governance, cultural practice, and political sentiment among ordinary civilian villagers and the local elites who speak on their behalf. The research will contribute to understanding the ways both states and minority groups utilize cultural claims, and to understanding the relations among culture-making, territorial claims and violence.
