ABSTRACT
Since independence, successive Myanmar governments have sought to establish and consolidate state power by exercising control over land and the people that use it. In this chapter, we describe the shifting assemblage of laws, regulations and policies governing land from the military period to the 2021 coup. We interpret successive changes in land law through the twin lenses of ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’, where reform suggests a circular logic of repairing something that once worked, and revolution connotes rupture with the past and a drive to begin anew. Precisely because it seeks to rebuild and repair, the logic of reform limits possibilities for radical transformation. We outline the structural and ideological constraints on land law reform under the USDP and NLD governments and consider how the reversion to authoritarianism – with its accompanying resistance couched in explicitly revolutionary terms – might affect land claims and patterns of dispossession in the medium to long term. And we speculate on what new regimes of land control could emerge if the dictatorship were to collapse.
