Myanmar’s redemptive revolution: constituent power and the struggle for sovereignty in the Nwe Oo (Spring) Revolution

Abstract

Revolutions are thoroughly international phenomena that have shaped world-historical development, international orders and political modernity. Recent scholarship foregrounds the consequences of their constitutional politics for world affairs, emancipatory ethos and revolutionaries’ strategic agency, and has raised concerns about the prospects of subaltern self-emancipation in the wake of the Arab Spring. This article presents a study of Myanmar’s Nwe Oo (Spring) Revolution (2021-present), which follows two successive failed revolutions of the negotiated and passive kind, the limitations of which Myanmar’s revolutionaries have learnt from and overcome. Offering a counterpoint to the top-down nature of passive revolutions and predominantly peaceful transitions of negotiated revolutions, their extraordinary struggle for self-determination forces us to reconsider established models of revolution, conceptions of sovereignty and norms of non-violence in mainstream IR. The article argues that Myanmar’s Nwe Oo Revolution bears the promise of redeeming and completing previous revolutions, both inside and outside Myanmar, and even the norm of sovereignty itself: as ultimately grounded in the constituent power of a community to determine the political forms of its own existence, calling it a redemptive revolution to emphasise its distinctiveness and world-historical significance. Through it, the peoples of Myanmar remind the world of several important lessons: about the potential of mass collective action, that the power of dominant classes is not insurmountable and that the grounds of freedom rest on violence. Theirs is a particular moment of a more universal human struggle: for social freedom and political liberation, the predominant response must be solidarity, not non-interference.