Resilience of Contentious Movements Under Repression: the Role of Bystander Protection and Disruption
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RESILIENCE OF CONTENTIOUS MOVEMENTS UNDER REPRESSION: THE ROLE OF BYSTANDER PROTECTION AND DISRUPTION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Van Mai Tran December 2020 © 2020 Van Mai Tran RESILIENCE OF CONTENTIOUS MOVEMENTS UNDER REPRESSION: THE ROLE OF BYSTANDER SUPPORT AND DISRUPTION Van Mai Tran, Ph. D. Cornell University 2020 Burma/Myanmar, a country with a long history of brutal military dictatorships, was for decades a hostile environment for mass contention. Nonetheless, large-scale protests, as part of the Burmese urban pro-democracy movement, still emerged through the years. So what accounts for the perseverance of a non-violent movement in a repressive regime? In this dissertation, I argue for the role of an important yet oft- neglected factor: civilian bystanders and observers of opposition activism. I theorize that bystander protection and disruption toward protesters, in particular, significantly impact the durability of a protest movement. To test my theory, I provide an original qualitative dataset with a large number of semi-structured interviews and written testimony of more than 100 ordinary citizens and former pro-democracy activists in Myanmar. The novelty of this dataset is the unprecedented number of voices from the ordinary, non-contentious general public, which are mostly missing in existing research. Hence, the findings from my research would serve to deepen our understanding of movement resilience under repressive authoritarianism. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Van Mai Tran was born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam. Before coming to Cornell University, Van earned her B.A. degree at Wesleyan College and worked in Washington, D.C. and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Since September 2019, she has been working at Phandeeyar, a Myanmar tech hub, to manage research projects on information disorder on social media. She lives in Yangon, Myanmar. iv Dedicated to my parents v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Yangon School for Political Science and many other individuals, as well as independent libraries, museums, bookstores, and institutions in Yangon, Myanmar for their generous support and guidance during my data collection process. I also benefited tremendously from insightful comments and feedback from my colleagues, my Special Committee members, and especially my advisor, Tom Pepinksy. This project has been made possible by research grants from Cornell’s Einaudi Center, Southeast Asia Program, Graduate School, and Government Department. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 1 The social movement literature 4 The Burmese pro-democracy movement 10 What is Myanmar during 1988-2010 a case of? 16 Bystander perception and reactions toward contentious movement 18 My theory 22 Data collection and analysis method 24 My contributions 26 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 29 The impact of government and activists’ framing and mobilization on bystander responses 34 Impact of bystander response on activist survival and movement resilience 46 Conclusion 54 3. LEADER FRAMING AND BYSTANDER RESPONSE TOWARD PROTESTERS DURING THE PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT IN MYANMAR 56 Existing explanations 59 Qualitative sampling and causal identification 66 State’s and movement’s framing of protesters: hsu pu thu vs. pyi thu lu du 73 Effects of state’s and movement’s framing strategies on bystander protection and disruption 84 Broader implications 92 4. NEIGHBORHOOD MOBILIZATION FOR COLLECTIVE RESPONSE 98 Collective response during the Four-eight Uprising and the Saffron Revolution 102 vii Existing explanations 107 Neighborhood mobilization as main driver for collective response 113 Conclusion 127 5. BYSTANDER RESPONSE AND ACTIVIST SURVIVAL 131 Activist operations during protest periods 136 Activist operations during non-protest periods 155 Conclusion 168 6. ACTIVIST SURVIVAL AND MOVEMENT RESILIENCE 169 Myanmar military rule during 1988-2010: A hostile environment for pro-democracy movement 172 Existing explanations 176 Case studies of mass pro-democracy protests during 1988-2010 178 Other key contributions by movement veterans 191 Conclusion 200 7. CONCLUSION 202 Empirical contribution 202 Substantive contribution 203 Implications for contemporary authoritarian politics: Counter-mobilization over the digital public sphere 206 REFERENCES 212 viii LIST OF GRAPHS Graph 1. Theory on bystander protection and disruption toward protesters under repressive dictatorships 33 Graph 2. Effects of protester images on bystanders’ emotional and behavioral responses 38 Graph 3. Moral identity mediating the relationship between bystanders’ emotions and responses toward protesters 44 Graph 4. Effects of state’s framing strategies on bystander responses 85 Graph 5. Effects of movement’s framing strategies on bystander responses 89 Graph 6. Complementarity between Chapter 3 (leader framing) and Chapter 4 (neighborhood mobilization) 99 Graph 7. Manifestation of neighborhood mobilization in the case of Myanmar 100 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Maps of interviewees’ points of witnessing the 1988 and 2007 protests in Yangon (point precision at township level) 71 Figure 2. Maps of interviewees’ points of accessing mass media on the 1988 and 2007 protests in Yangon (point precision at township level) 72 Figure 3. Map of interviewees’ points of witnessing/accessing media on the 1988 and 2007 protests throughout Myanmar (point precision at city/town level) 73 Figure 4. Temporal order of state’s framing strategies during a protest period 75 Figure 5. Temporal order of movement’s framing strategies during a protest period 79 Figure 6. State repression strategies against an opposition movement, during both protest and non-protest periods 133 Figure 7. Timeline of hard cases for activist casualties (height of Four-eight and Saffron) vs. survival (final days of Four-eight and Saffron) 137 Figure 8. Temporal order of bystander protection toward protesters during government crackdown 150 Figure 9. Number of political prisoners in Myanmar during 1988-2010 174 Figure 10. Number of pro-democracy protests organized by activists in Myanmar during 1988-2010 181 x LIST OF TABLES Table 1. State’s and movement’s competing strategies to shape public perception of protesters 83 xi LIST OF ABBREVIATION All Burma Federation of Student Unions ABFSU All Burma Monks’ Alliance ABMA Burmese Socialist Programme Party BSPP Democratic Association of Youth and Student DAYS Democratic Voice of Burma DVB Free Funeral Service Society FFSS National League for Democracy NLD Rangoon General Hospital RGH State Law and Order Restoration Council SLORC State Peace and Development Council SPDC Supervisory Committee for Student Movement SCS xii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Authoritarian regimes with zero-tolerance policies toward the opposition are hostile environments for mass contention to emerge or endure. Indeed, in the case of modern Burma/Myanmar, hereafter referred to as Myanmar, the five decades of military dictatorship were a period of brutal repression against pro-democracy activism. Ever since General Ne Win took over the state in 1962 until General Than Shwe ceded power to a quasi-civilian government in 2011, anti-regime urban protests sprang up continuously yet were cracked down upon heavily. In every decade during the 50 years of military strongman rule, in the city of Yangon alone, there are numerous records of strikes and demonstrations by students, workers, monks, and the general public that the sitting junta crushed (Htun Aung Gyaw 1997, Fink 2001, Boudreau 2004, Kyaw Yin Hlaing 2009). Student protests at Yangon University in 1962 halted with the Ne Win government’s arrests, killings, and bombing of the university’s recreation center. The U Thant Affair in 1974, where students in Yangon stole late UN Secretary U Thant’s coffin to bury him at Yangon University, also met a similar fate. Worker strikes that broke out several times between 1974 and 1976 were put to a violent end with the same methods. This is not to mention thousands of imprisonments, disappearances, and censorships of leading dissident figures and their supporters. State brutality against contentious mobilization repeated itself into the later decades. Support from foreign governments and international communities also hardly made their way to activists inside the country. 1 Under such a hostile environment, one mass protest incident rarely induces change. Instead, challengers need to maintain a durable capacity for mobilization that can resurface time and again despite heavy crackdowns, and might eventually engender political change under the right circumstances. That is what happened in Myanmar. In the face of constant suppression, large-scale urban pro-democracy protests still re-emerged with the same spirit and fervor through the years. A variation of mobilization resources lived on, in the form of either key personnel, knowledge, experiences, or revolutionary spirit that rekindled fresh rounds of anti-government demonstrations throughout the decades. Activists who escaped repression worked with new generations of activists, adapted their strategies, and launched further contentious cycles with the hope that their new attempts would be more effective in generating pressure at home and abroad for regime change. The long-term resilience of the Burmese urban pro-democracy movement is one of the most impressive and puzzling among all cases of collective activism under authoritarianism. So what accounts for the perseverance