Department of Political and Social Change Seminar Series
All governments in Myanmar since the 1960s, from past military juntas to the National League for Democracy-led government and the current regime, have granted mass pardons, sometimes of tens of thousands of prisoners. In this seminar, I will outline a research project on the symbolic and material qualities and effects of pardons. My goal is to explain why they have become an enduring form of political and carceral practice in Myanmar. In a context of state punitiveness and repression for more than six decades, what political work is mass pardon doing? What is this ostensible act of collective leniency contributing to political and social life?
I propose to address these questions via an interpretivist methodology that concentrates on locally resonant meanings and experiences of mass pardons in Myanmar. I will explicate the ways in which the state enacts and represents the practice (including through the use of photographs), and how it is experienced by people in prison. Through a focus on mass pardons, I will explore attendant questions about political order, sovereign power and imprisonment that have broader relevance for critical prison studies and interpretive political science.
About the speaker
Dave Hopkins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Change at ANU, and a Research Officer with the ANU’s Myanmar Research Centre. He has worked in journalism, social justice and social policy roles, and written for a range of media in Australia and Southeast Asia.