ABSTRACT
During its military period, courts in Burma operated – for cases deemed “political” – as zones evacuated of legal content, given over to the administrative processes of prefigured dictates. Excessively long prison terms suffered by political activists under the military regime were meant less to discipline so much as to punish, communicating sovereign prerogative. Then in the corresponding early amnesties that the punished often enjoyed, decades before their full sentences had been served, the sovereign granted conditional pardons as gifts for which the recipients were meant to have been grateful. Although this jurisprudence was pedagogical, it was not dialogical: the state did not have to consider any response. Indeed, although recalcitrant subjects often voiced their opposition, in a sense, these incorrigible resisters shouted into an abyss, creating signs that did not signify. In contrast, while Burmese courts today remain a space for despotic decision making for political “crimes,” the fact of the decision and the processes that lead to it mean that social actions are represented to observing – and, ultimately, even participating – publics. Whereas during the military regime any overt political activity was quashed immediately and protesters summarily shunted off to prisons, now the law is becoming a dramaturgical space where conflicts over the meaning of citizenship and legal “rights” become visible. This is because these same courtrooms that host the imposition of unforgiving punishment also act as spaces for various actions that intensify the violation of aesthetic conceptions of normative political subjecthood, drawing judges, officials, and police officers into conflicts over proper expressions of citizenship. The state’s injunctions are recodified and thrown into relief as contestable, reintroducing politics into a domain – the law – long devoid of it in Burma.
