The Joint Peace Fund, the group sponsoring the 2015 Ceasefire in Myanmar, sponsored a reception on International Peace Day at the Chatrium Hotel in September 2019. I was there because like much of Yangon’s NGO world, I know that the Joint Peace Fund administers a huge pot of foreign aid that funds the “peace process”. The keynote speaker at the International Peace Day reception was European Union’s Ambassador to Myanmar and Chair of the Joint Peace Commission, Ambassador Kristian Schmidt. …
Author: Tony Waters
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.
Insistence on Voluntary Rohingya Repatriation to Myanmar Lacks ‘Moral Imagination’
Published August 29, 2019 in The Irrawaddy of Yangon, Myanmar.
By TONY WATERS
The International Donors are meeting frequently to discuss the 1 million Rohingya refugees sitting in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazaar. The strange assertion that “the refugees will go home to Rakhine soon voluntarily because we have a plan” is again being recycled; apparently there is even a draft plan to send back 500,000 in the next two years. …
Searching for Classical Social Theory in Thailand
When I first taught in Thailand in 2011, I sought Thai sociologists to help me figure out what was different from my American-style sociology. In California, I taught many years of Classical Social Theory, focused on Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and wondered: what might Thai Classical Theory look like?
The Thai sociologists I asked about Thai Social Theory often gave me a blank look and noted that they too used at least Weber and Durkheim. …
How to Read a WEIRD Evidence-Based Yangon Consultancy Report
By TONY WATERS 24 June 2019
(Reposted from The Irrawaddy of Yangon, Myanmar)
Yangon’s INGOs are full of consultancy reports which offer “professional” opinions about conditions in Myanmar. NGOs, INGOS, and UN agencies investigate transitions regarding democracy, environment, federalism, ethnicity and, of course, gender. These are the subjects that donors are interested in—and thus willing to pay consultant companies tens of thousands of dollars to “research.” This is largely because evidence-based research provides a basis for what well-funded development projects promise their home governments, all on the assumption that the Myanmar people have a “will” to transition from what is bad, to what is good.…
College Internships and Fears of Hanging
I wrote a blog about the city of Yangon last month. I visited there in February, and quite liked the city. It is a vibrant city, busy, without being threatening. I met some teachers there too whose company I really enjoyed, as well as a number of other people. We talked about teaching, complained about students not studying enough—in other words the usual things.
Yangon is the commercial capital of Myanmar, and a five million person (or so) island of bustle and tranquility, albeit one where the ubiquitous Asian motorcycle is banned. …
George Orwell and the Modern Yangon INGO Worker
Recently I ran across a Western diplomat, this one from an embassy in Southeast Asia. I dream of having intellectual conversations with such people. After all they hold the levers of governmental power, particularly the big aid budgets in Myanmar, Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the conversations are usually one sided. Usually, I get an earful of talking points generated by a distant capital (think London, Washington, New York and Geneva) which shows that they are “up to date”—even ahead of The New York Times, which it seems is their main source of news and analysis.…
Lost Ethnographies, and other musings
Here is a link to a book with a real original thought! The Lost Ethnographies. Most projects of course never get anywhere. For example last month I wrote a brief blog about my trip to Yangon, and why I though it seemed like an interesting and engaging city. I promised a follow-up blog about its putative relationship with the rest of Myanmar, particularly the areas in revolt, and the populations in diaspora.
…Thinking about Yangon: Normalcy or Conflict?
Christina says I should write about my trip to Yangon (Myanmar/Burma) these last few days, as it is a city unfamiliar to the readers of Ethnography.com. Her impressions, and those of our readers are probably in the context of the international news about Myanmar which focused last year on the Rohingya refugee crisis in which some 800,000 fled to Bangladesh, and more recent fighting in the western province of Rakhine, which briefly made the news a week or two ago. …
The Fortunate Failure of ‘Voluntary Repatriation’ For Rohingya Refugees
Reposted from The Irrawaddy, February 11, 2019
By TONY WATERS
In 2017 and 2018, between 600,000 and 800,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar following attacks and clearance operations targeting their villages and coordinated by the Myanmar military. The result is the world’s largest refugee camp, Kutupalong, situated in a low-lying corner of Cox’s Bazar District in Bangladesh. The camp is there because the Bangladesh government saw it as a humanitarian way to deal with the refugee influx and preferable to a military operation.
Who Influneces American Foreign Policy in Burma More? James C. Scott or John Rambo?
James C. Scott is one of the major social science writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His first book Moral Economy of the Peasant published in 1976, studied Vietnamese peasants, and how they resisted social change while being rooted in a different “moral economy.” In subsequent decades he expanded his work to include other countries of Southeast Asia. And still later in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State he described how state-directed planning in Tanzania, Brazil, China, and the Soviet Union worked—and did not work. …
Discipline and Modern Society: Something about Max Weber and Well-Paid Development Bureaucrats!
Hey, I published a book last October, Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline. It is about Max Weber’s view of authority, and why so many of us obey. What follows is a lightly edited version of the introductory chapter where I have a bit of fun comparing subsistence peasants to well-paid UN bureaucrats.. To get to the more uplifting parts, you will need to read more—I suggest you order it from your library, or if you are feeling wealthy, get a copy from Amazon.com…
Mon Mon Myat’s Articles in the Irrawaddy Times of Myanmar/Burma
I spent last semester in Chico, California, where occasionally the issue of Burma/Myanmar would come up. A number of people in Chico are well-enough read that they have familiarity with the issues there primarily through writing in the western press, particularly The New York Times. The western press highlights the role of the Nobel Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She was a hero of the West for her opposition to the military government which ruled the country from 1962-2015, and continues to play a very very influential role.…