Thanks to @emeraldpublishing.bsky.social @stevetombs.bsky.social @vcanning.bsky.social Greg Martin, Valeria Vegh Weiss, Biko Agozino #statecrime #repression #Myanmar

10/10 The challenge for reformers thus becomes how to EXPECT LESS while DEMANDING MORE. P138

9/10 One obvious lesson to draw from the foregoing analysis would be to expect less from times of apparent transition, to de-romanticise the ‘rise of democracy’, and ‘waves of reform’ and to debunk linear understandings of change. P138

8/10 We have shown how prisons in Myanmar between 2015 and 2019 brutally and systematically restricted the space for volition, compelling subjects to conform even as they occasionally resisted, protested, or complained. P141

7/10 Via the narratives of a range of different prisoners – both men and women, younger and older – we have come up close to the everyday travails of the incarcerated in Myanmar. We have glimpsed the hardship and the harm and tasted… the torment. P138-9

6/10 Our analysis took point of departure in the everyday lives and experiences of people imprisoned during a period of imagined transition. P138

5/10 [The occupants of] Myanmar’s prisons were subject to a regime organised and regulated according to a violent logic of subjection based on hierarchies of perceived worth and sustained by relations of exchange and diffusely distributed authority. P137

4/10 (T)he prisons were harsh, brutal, unfair, unequal, and unforgiving… P137

3/10 (T)hey were organised & regulated according to hierarchical, martial norms, where authority is distributed, corporeal, & fear-inducing, & subjection is brutal, endemic, and deliberate. P127

2/10 Myanmar prisons (2015-19) were geared more to human degradation than human flourishing, more to social death than political life. P127