The winner of the Public Anthropologist Award 2025 is Elliott Prasse-Freeman for his book Rights Refused. Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar (Stanford University Press, 2023). Elliott Prasse-Freeman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Rights Refused is the result of long-term ethnographic engagement, which brought Prasse-Freeman to investigate a variety of forms and contexts of activism, from protest camps to prisons. The book explores the gap between elite human rights cosmopolitans and subaltern Burmese subjects who work in situations of violent governance. Well documented and well written, Rights Refused is a must read for all those interested in how rights frameworks operate and change.
Antonio: Can you tell us more about your personal and academic journey, which eventually brought you to publish this book?
Elliott: The path that led me to this book might be germane to many PUAN readers, given that I started not in the academic domain but in the NGO / UN / policy world – specifically the development sector. This interest built off some of my mother’s work with organizations in northern Thailand and also emerged from my aversion to do the things that my university – the apotheosis of finishing school for the bourgeois American subject – prepared one for (think banking and management consulting). At the same time, academia was not on my radar – I had no idea how the professors that I learned from became themselves; I assumed they descended from on high or emerged fully formed from a lake or something, complete with flowing robes and such.
I moved to Myanmar in 2004, back in the depths of military rule (to which the country may currently be returning). The military-state’s combination of parasitic extractivism and malign neglect combined to create a fascinating series of subterranean social formations and coping strategies that I was able to access due to the enormous number of opportunities that opened up to me there – from teaching kindergarten to working for the UN to teaching politics to dissidents through a clandestine program sponsored by one of the foreign embassies.
This latter experience allowed me to get to know some really special people, and sparked an interest in questions around contentious politics and social mobilization in authoritarian contexts. But I left Burma in 2005 after a year for Thialand and did not expect I would return, given how entrenched the military was and how much it and the US Congress (particularly its sanctimonious sanctions scheme) restricted what could be done there. However, over the next few years I became quite disillusioned with the development sector – from the implementation, which felt piecemeal and unsustainable; to the policy approaches, which felt willfully myopic. And while I finished a master’s program in public policy and development economics, I felt a bit like I was going mad, screaming questions that were largely illegible to, or simply seen as unserious by, most of my professors and peers. Many of my complaints were epistemologically oriented – why do we assume humans are rational actors optimizing subject to identifiable constraints? How do we really know whether that project works, given that the evaluation stopped after a year (what if it all collapses next year)? Why do we pretend that questions regarding politics, violence, human decision-making, and such should not be asked merely because they cannot be measured elegantly with large-scale surveys?
It was for this reason I turned to anthropology. And given that my interest in Myanmar had persisted over those years (I had continued to learn the language, had worked on projects with Burmese migrants when I lived in Thailand, etc), it made sense to continue thinking with Burmese people as part of PhD research. And while my original PhD project proposed Thai-border and diaspora fieldwork, Burma’s much-lauded but ultimately ill-fated “political transition” began around the time I was preparing for field research. I therefore moved to Yangon, where – through more luck – I was able to fall in with a group of political / social activists who didn’t mind having me around as they traversed sites all over lowland Myanmar – from rural land uprisings to industrial zone labor actions.
I spent 2014 and 2015 in country and returned several times afterwards, especially after moving to the National University of Singapore in 2018 (although Covid lockdowns meant my last trip to Burma was in late 2019). The coup came in February 2021 and put the final coffin in a “transition” that had increasingly seemed moribund, in that its embrace of neoliberal quasi-authoritarianism – endorsed and deployed by the erstwhile democratic opposition of Aung San Suu Kyi, to be clear – served an upwardly-mobile middle class but largely excluded the masses. I tried to grapple with the ambivalences that emerged from that (people devastated by a return to military rule despite their deep frustrations with “democracy”) as I remained in touch with my activist friends, cataloguing their experiences on the streets, then in hiding, and ultimately in the underground where they remain today.
Antonio: Can you share some of both the most rewarding and most challenging aspects of your ethnographic research in Myanmar?
Elliott: I tell anyone who will listen how lucky I was to meet the members of the activist group featured in the book. They were really good people – as I put it in the book’s acknowledgments, I often find myself contemplating one of my own (paltry) problems and then asking myself what I think they would do in the same situation. And as problem navigators, they did not allow the demand to consider everything (alternatives, unintended consequences, morality, etc) lead to paralysis, while they also staved off the temptation to be in perpetual reaction to ever-changing conditions on the ground. Central to this activism was a host of activity – which meant that I got access to many things I did not anticipate: not just court rooms, prisons, and protest camps, but I got to witness daily life of people living in peri-urban Yangon, how peasants in upper Burma tried to organize responses to land grabs, and how young factory workers imagined their futures. The book is of course not comprehensive in its account of lowland Burma during this era, but with the activists as matire d’s, I got to experience a movable feast of sorts.
In terms of the challenges, of course there’s always language. I simply never felt skilled enough to really get everything, especially when observing a heated conversation play out, for instance. As affect flooded the zone, I tended to focus on the interpersonal interactions (how were their bodies arranged – is he going to hit him right now?!) and my brain couldn’t keep up with the explicit content of the speech. Even if I could, I felt I was still missing much of the subtext (especially when conveyed through idioms or slang). I was lucky to have patient and interested friends who helped piece things together for me, which had the added dimension of allowing me to solicit their reflections.
Beyond language, another challenge was telling their stories without drifting into hagiography or romanticization. Ethnography is a weird method, in that you’re painting a picture with borrowed supplies – and so while you’re responsible for the ultimate product, you’re constrained by those materials, and need to respect them. At the same time, the thousands of other Burmese people I met and interacted with over the years were also stakeholders in this story; I wrote while imagining them all, to differing degrees, peeking over my shoulder, assessing the analysis and choices. I do not claim to have got this mix right, but one of the benefits of ethnography is that it can, when things go well, provide enough depth and detail to allow for others to interpret the same materials differently.
Antonio: Rights Refused focuses on subaltern Burmese struggles to conduct politics under violent governance, but Myanmar is not an exceptional case in this regard. As the case of Gaza also makes it evident, understanding how rights frameworks are used, abused and operate is of critical importance. What do you make of today’s international situation?
Elliott: The genocide in Gaza has been enabled by – couldn’t exist without – the USA’s so-called “progressive” political party. The same party that had been pushing “rule of law” reform and “human rights” trainings in Burma has been sending weapons to slaughter children by the thousands in Gaza, reminding us of Žižek’s famous line: “one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food parcels.” Can rights frameworks provide any protection in these situations of super-sovereignty? To riff on Yeats, rights seem quaint when, in what we might call the imperial core, those who do not “lack all conviction” instead revel in sociopathic desire for vengeance and domination. Moreover, one argument advanced in the book – that the referent for “rights” in Burma is not stable, and evolves through material deployments and corresponding interpretations of the sign – is also relevant here. To wit, when the USA evokes human rights frameworks and a “rule-based order” only to then enact this carnage, the sign “human rights” is incapable of remaining uncontaminated. It should be seen instead as part of the language of empire, even as it may retain emancipatory or oppositional valences for others at the same time.
Gaza has also created a (relatively much milder, of course) crisis for scholars on the left. While many of us endorse radical politics, our material commitments and actions are largely subsumed within a (crypto)normative model of liberal persuasion (here meant in the Enlightenment-Humanist / “speaking truth to power” sense). For no other reason than we are not organizers or activists but scholars – devoted in part to knowledge production – we need to acknowledge this reality. And such a role seems hard to sustain when courageous Palestinian witnesses bring images of atrocity to our screens in a never-ending stream: the temporal deferral immanent to leftist knowledge production projects in general – the dialectical sublation of current failure into potential future transformation – seems to collapse in the face of genocide (and, we should say, the fact of genocides after Auschwitz, the supposed “never again” watermark). Things are made worse still when much of what we could write about Gaza seems destined to be incorporated into a broader symbolic machine that produces liberal pieties of humanitarian despair or anti-political “both-sides” equivocations.
There is no answer to this (relatively much milder) crisis. It seems that the only way to do some semblance of justice to Gaza is to incorporate the horrors of the last year and a half directly into on-going analysis. For example, Myanmar activists certainly perceive how their struggles are not contained within their country – their forgotten war is simultaneously a global one: the military regime is supported by Russia while Israel has supplied it weapons even after the coup; natural resource rents are valorized on external markets; China has been an unexpected (if inconsistent) ally to the revolution while somehow also a staunch supporter of the regime; and the West has been only present by its absence (for better or for worse). It seems important to retheorize those global linkages in terms of imperial formations while identifying anti-imperial ones. In the past, many Myanmar people – the activists I work with included – have viewed “the international community” as a strange kind of ally: capricious and often indifferent, but oriented towards justice, if one can only grab its attention. Gaza seems to have forced a reckoning, threatening the viability of this fantasy. Rather than being a third party simply failing to act in time to prevent genocides (as with the case of the Rohingya in 2017), here the “international community” (with Germany, Austria, Poland, and France in particular joining the USA as exponents) is the cause of the carnage. The same role had certainly been played earlier in this neighborhood (Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s), but no time before has it been so glaring, so brazen, and so mediatized as with Gaza from October 7th until the ceasefire (one that came, apparently, via the deranged and self-interested Trump not Biden).
It remains to be seen, of course, whether Gaza will have a kind of lasting effect in which Myanmar, and related places in the Global South, forge a new kind of internationalism, a Non-Aligned Movement for the 21st century. I observed even before Gaza that Myanmar was already turning away from the international community, deciding that it would need to fight without reliance on that kind of fickle outside help. But outside help in general is necessary against a well-armed foe with its own external patrons. Ultimately, and this is obviously quite under-developed, but I discern a sort of elective affinity between the way that social movements operating within an imperial-capitalist milieu must mimic the expansionary nature of imperial capitalism (in which the capitalist imperial core necessarily looks outside of itself for extraction, new markets, new territories to control). If your enemy is constantly expanding, you must as well. And here the nascent signs of solidarity between Myanmar revolutionaries with Rojava and Gaza, respectively, are important to endorse and circulate.
Antonio: What are your future plans?
Elliott: As alluded to above, while I was conducting research for Rights Refused, Myanmar’s military launched a genocidal attack on the Rohingya people of western Burma (in August 2017). I incorporated this event and aspects of the Rohingya struggle for inclusion in Burma into the book (particularly chapter 6), but that discussion could obviously not do justice to the histories of the people, the dynamics of the conflict, and the questions of identity in the midst of mass violence. Even so, through that research I became aware of the significant gaps in knowledge about the Rohingya – basic understandings of social structure, marriage markets, migration routes, political economy, and so forth exist neither in journalistic nor academic accounts. I think this can be attributed in part to the imperative to tell the story in simple terms so as to mobilize humanitarian and political responses: to save the bodies under threat. But in so doing, Rohingya have been reduced to bodies, reproducing a now-classic irony of humanitarian logic, in which the dehumanization experienced at the hands of perpetrators is mimicked in reduced form when humanitarian discourse presents victims as mere life in need of saving. The corollary is that as these texts have circulated they have created a presumption that the oppressive violence long experienced by the Rohingya (particularly after the 1962 military coup and accelerating after the deployment of a new citizenship law in 1982) has been so great that all Rohingya experienced that violence equally and in such complete ways that their culture had been entirely erased – that there was nothing much worth studying.
Neither of these assumptions is quite true. First off, Rohingya experienced state oppression quite differently depending on where they resided in Arakan, and – more importantly – where they resided in a surprisingly class-differentiated social system. For example, when the military demanded that Rohingya conduct forced labor, wealthy Rohingya were able to pay bribes or purchase replacements from poor Rohingya families. The phenomenon of forced labor, heretofore a violation catalogued in human rights reports as describing an encompassing condition instead revealed the opposite – its partiality – and in doing so helped reveal a class schism. Clues such as these made me suspect that there was an entire universe for exploration beneath the one-dimensional descriptions, and that not all culture had been erased – that we could better understand the way Rohingya social systems functioned and continued to operate even as Myanmar’s military state encroached upon their previous lifeways and corrupted indigenous self-governance institutions.
In 2018, upon moving to NUS, I began to examine these and related questions more systematically – this has included several visits to the camps in Bangladesh. There I have been implementing an oral history project through a team of Rohingya researchers who previously worked with an international organization that has since been forced to scale back its work given humanitarian funding cuts and reallocations (to places such as Gaza). We are now in our fourth phase of the research, as we have adapted and expanded our questions as we learn more about the contours of Rohingya society. Further still, part of this has necessitated an inquiry into the foundations and material structures of Rakhine nationalism, which I am only beginning to scratch the surface of.
The project also includes an ethnographic component, which I conduct in Malaysia with Rohingya (and Myanmar Muslims) who have found a form of refuge there. Though these people are vaguely recognized as refugees (Malaysia permits the UNHCR to distribute identity cards), Malaysia has never signed the UN Convention on Refugees, meaning that Rohingya remain formally “illegal migrants” who receive no benefits and few opportunities. For example, the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Malaysia cannot work and their children cannot attend public school, leading to a situation in which marginalization and exclusion are reproduced across generations. My research there explores how Rohingya-ness is inflected by these forms of survival and how collective identity maintains or erodes in the wake of mass violence and expulsion. In response to that concern of erosion, some Rohingya actors with whom I work are attempting to address the crisis of potential cultural erasure by preserving key Rohingya artifacts on a virtual digital platform – one that could be accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and open to contributions from the Rohingya community itself. However, questions about what constitutes authentic Rohingya culture – not to mention how to narrativize it and represent it – persists as a challenge that this project continues to struggle with (especially given that so many Rohingya have been forced out of Myanmar for so long, and because so much violence has, from the perspective of Rohingya, prevented them from actively living their culture for decades as well).
Taken together, the book that will hopefully emerge from these various strands of research will illuminate the histories and potential futures of the Rohingya, ones that have been obscured thus far. It will also touch on issues of mass violence, racial capitalism, state formation, global regimes of biopolitical in/exclusion, and ethnogenesis that should make the Rohingya issue more relevant to comparative cases (such as Gaza, discussed above).