Fasting as Commemorative Strategy: Hunger Strikes and Collective Memory in Myanmar's Contentious Politics

Abstract

This article adds to the literature considering hunger strikes as performances of resistance. It presents the action of fasting not merely as a form of protest, but also as a strategy for commemorating past struggles and producing movement memory during periods of abeyance. To do so, it leverages a case study on Myanmar under both colonial and military rule. The study draws on archival records and interviews with Burmese activists who staged hunger strikes while in jail or during protest events. The ethnographic data collected suggests that despite occupying a prominent place in Myanmar's protest repertoire, prolonged hunger strikes remain a contested tactic. Rejecting ‘fast-to-death’ forms of hunger strikes, Burmese dissidents have instead performed short-term, non-life-threatening fasts to remember past cycles of protest, pay homage to deceased comrades and martyrs, and use their bodies as living memorials to strengthen collective bonds, and invoke a genealogy of past collective action.

Introduction

Hunger strikes are a prominent mode of action in the repertoire of dissent. They involve the deliberate refusal of food as a means to make a claim or exert pressure on a more powerful opponent until an injustice is corrected or a concession obtained. The act of refusing food intake becomes a resistance tactic deployed to protest, defy, or advance a cause. Self-starvation and suffering are mobilised as “bodily weapons” for drawing attention, generating public support, and creating a strategic leverage over a target (Bargu, 2014; Dingley & Mollica, 2007; Machin, 2023).

However, hunger strikes are not merely a tactic for protesting. Activists can also repurpose the act of fasting to forge networks of solidarity, build collective identities, and create a genealogy of past cycles of protest. In this article, I take the case of Myanmar to show how Burmese activists and political prisoners have used the act of fasting as an instrument for commemorating and remembering past contentious events and key moments of the history of Myanmar's contentious politics. I aim to investigate an understudied characteristic of the principled and politically motivated act of fasting to show how such performance can also foster collective identification within a protest movement, invoke a genealogy of past contentious actions, and thus reinforce movement memory.

The existing social science literature on hunger strikes and political fasting – two slightly different contentious performances – has highlighted a large diversity of practices, actors, and contexts. Political fasting is an act that is often time-bound and symbolic, and resonates with traditions of religious or spiritual fasting. When deployed to make a political claim or raise awareness, a public fast does not necessarily seek an immediate concession, nor a direct response from the targeted actor. Hunger strikes, in contrast, are generally understood as a tool for direct action (Shah, 2022; Siméant & Traïni, 2016). They especially invoke a sacrificial suffering that can generate highly emotional responses such as shame, outrage, shock, or sympathy (Aitchinson, 2022). Hunger strikers must be willing to die by slow starvation, and thus, excruciating pain. In doing so, they signal their sacrificial commitment to a cause (Chenoweth, 2021: 58–59). By offering their life and performing an act of martyrdom, they demonstrate heroism. They can thereafter be remembered as symbols of resistance by their community, or even the broader citizenry (Koçan and Öncü, 2006). Some studies have assimilated hunger strikes as peaceful acts of civil disobedience and a method of non-violent persuasion (Scanlan et al., 2008; Sharp, 1973). Nevertheless, a larger body of work has underlined the coercive nature of hunger strikes. To threaten to starve oneself to pressure or constrain an opponent is indeed coercive (Delmas, 2024: 850). Self-starvation interiorises the opponent's violence within the diminishing body of the striker, and the painful impact of not ingesting food inverts towards the protester who is suffering, instead of the powerful opponent (Machin, 2016). For that reason, Mahatma Gandhi himself rejected the idea of hunger strikes and preferred performing what he called satyagrahic fast, a non-coercive form of individual fasting (Pratt and Vernon, 2005).

Scholars have construed hunger strikes and politicised fasts not merely as personal acts of defiance and protest, but also as actionable tools for broader mobilisation against a government or a condition (oppression in prison). Such contentious actions can be designed to motivate fellow protesters, inspire solidarity and emulation, and attract attention. They function as a communicative act in which activists signal not merely discontent, but also their belonging to a broader movement. A solid empirical scholarship is accounting for the widespread use of fasting for political purposes under different cultural settings since the late nineteenth century (Grant, 2019; Shah, 2022). Russian anarchists and the British suffragettes at the turn of the twentieth century (Grant, 2011; Lennon, 2007), Irish republicans (Hopkins, 2016; Pine, 2011; Sweeney, 1993), Gandhi and Indian nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s (Pratt and Vernon, 2005; Sherman, 2008; Srivastava, 2003), and in more contemporary contexts detainees across South Africa (Machin, 2016), Palestine (Norman, 2020), Britain (McGregor, 2011), Germany (Passmore, 2009), Guantanamo (Purnell, 2014), or Turkey (Anderson, 2004; Koçan and Öncü, 2006) have deployed hunger strikes as tools for protesting. In each setting, the act of starving for a political purpose or securing concessions in jail was adapted to a particular set of social and cultural conditions.

I develop here a case study of the history of hunger strikes in a Buddhist-dominated Southeast Asian society, Myanmar. Departing from classic views on hunger strikes, I conceptualise contentious and politicised acts of fasting as commemorative strategies and tools for building a collective memory of past struggles. The study first draws on two types of archival sources: British colonial archives from the India and Burma Office Records and English-language media reports from newspapers published during Myanmar's early postcolonial years, such as The Nation, The Burman, New Times of Burma, The Guardian, and Burma Star. Then, I have supplemented this archival material with oral and personal stories. Between April 2023 and March 2025, I gathered semi-structured interviews with 29 Burmese activists and former political prisoners, including seven who performed or witnessed hunger strikes either in jail or during protest actions. Building on the network of political and social actors I have leveraged over two decades of research on Myanmar, I used snowball sampling to contact new informants. Interviewees were drawn from both genders, a diversity of ethnic and religious backgrounds, and belonged to activist groups involved in one or more of Myanmar's successive cycles of protests since 1974. Meetings were held face-to-face in the United States, Thailand, and the United Kingdom; I carried out follow-up calls using Signal – a messaging app ensuring end-to-end encryption. The study, partially funded by the project ANR-24-CE53-7244-01, complied with the ethical guidelines and data management procedures set up by the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Given the sensitivity of the objectives and context of the study, informed consent was recorded orally. For interviewees I met for the first time, I gradually introduced elements of my research and gave them repeated opportunities to pause, or opt in or out of the interview, as trust was built. Recalling past episodes of suffering can be traumatic, and I allowed interviewees to talk at their own pace. Interview audio records have been securely stored in an encrypted drive.

Colonial records and news reports demonstrate how social actors long deployed hunger strikes in Myanmar for protesting against colonialism, injustice, and direct army rule, but also mobilising for statehood recognition and the defense of religion and religious practices. The contemporary interpretation of colonial archives, however, comes with caveats. British colonial records tend to reflect the hegemonic and biased views of the colonisers while not accurately representing the perspectives of the colonised. Likewise, editorials and news reports from the early postcolonial years are likely to reflect the perceptions of Myanmar's urban elites of the time. The ethnographic data I collected, on its side, suggests that despite occupying a prominent place in Myanmar's repertoire of contention, hunger strikes remain a contested tactic, especially in a society where Buddhism is so prevalent. Rejecting ‘fast-to-death’ forms of hunger strikes, some Burmese dissidents have instead performed short-term, repeated, yet non-life-threatening forms of politically motivated fasting. Such a strategy has enabled them to commemorate past cycles of protest and repression, pay tribute to deceased activists and martyrs, and use their famished bodies as living memorials to invoke a genealogy of struggles and contentious events. In doing so, they have further strengthened their movement's collective bonds and solidarity networks. Before I provide evidence to support this argument and explore the dynamics of fasting as a means for producing collective and movement memory, I start with a clarification of the Burmese terminology on hunger strikes and then sketch out when, how, and why activists and contentious actors in Myanmar deployed such tactics under successive colonial and military regimes.

Fasts, Hunger Strikes, and Contention in Myanmar

Many societies are acquainted with the idea of fasting. People – not merely activists – can be socialised early into fasting when the frequent refusal of food is performed for a religious or health purpose (Waismel-Manor, 2005). Intermittent fasting is an act deeply rooted in the religious traditions of Myanmar, where Theravada Buddhism plays a dominant role in society. Buddhist monks and nuns, as well as laypersons, typically perform a fast to discipline their desires and cleanse their bodies (Kawanami, 2013). Such fasting activity (asa shaun chin in the Burmese language) is understood as the regular, time-bound avoidance (shaun) of food (asa). Not eating after midday is a key aspect of a Buddhist monk's daily observances – an observance that, along with not killing, celibacy, or wearing monastic robes, does confer monastic status.

However, anti-colonial activists, dissidents defying Myanmar's successive regimes, and prisoners incarcerated under deplorable conditions, have also re-engineered such acts of self-starvation into a political instrument: the hunger strike (asa ngat khan hsanda pya pwe). Here, the Myanmar language attaches to the denial of food the idea that such an act is not only ritualised, but also made public. It is construed as a manifestation (hsan da pya pwe) of a belief or a feeling – or a ‘performance’ (pwe), to borrow from Charles Tilly's classic construction of contentious repertoires as sets of public performances that protesters can use to make a claim (Tilly, 1995, 2008). ¹ By refusing food, Burmese hunger strikers thus seek not merely to cleanse their bodies and minds, nor follow a mere ritualistic fast as Buddhist monks would, but also make a specific claim and express a sentiment, whether disapproval or discontent, inclination, or desire.

Buddhist Monks and the Emergence of the Politicized Fast

One of the earliest colonial records of a prominent Burmese figure performing a principled fast (not as a spiritual endeavour, but a political act within a broader collective action) is a one-day protest staged by the Buddhist monk U Ottama in May 1921. U Ottama stands among the most influential figures of Myanmar's early nationalist and anti-colonial activism. Convicted of sedition, he had been sent to Rangoon Central Jail. ² When denied by the prison staff a visit to a duly consecrated thein (a space construed as a Buddhist sanctuary) to observe the bimonthly uposatha (or ubo saung), a Buddhist ritual ceremony of observance, U Ottama refused to take food. By doing so, he signalled that his status as a monk was being denied by secular (i.e. British) authorities, and flagged such disruption by refusing food. He, however, gave up his fast the following day. As colonial records show, British administrators construed such a brief fast as a contentious act, using the English term ‘hunger strike’ (instead of fast) to qualify it. ³ As anti-colonial militancy and nationalist agitation rose throughout the Burmese colonial province during the 1920s and early 1930s, several other Buddhist monks also started to fast while under arrest. U Kwapeinda, U Arthapa, ⁴ and U Ottama's younger brother (Shin Ariya) ⁵ all performed frequent and prolonged fasts – often concomitantly – to protest their conditions and the impossibility for them to maintain their monastic status while under arrest and in a prison cell. ⁶

British colonial records are also peppered with reports on how jail authorities across the Burmese province applied forced nasal feeding to keep fasting prisoners alive. Eventually, a martyr would emerge among the monastic community. The monk U Wisara (also spelt Wizaya in British records) fasted to death at Rangoon Central Jail in 1929. ⁷ After 166 days of self-starvation and forcible feeding, he passed away in his cell on 19 September. ⁸ A hunger strike ending with the passing of the protester demonstrates a ‘spectacular performance of death’ (Machin, 2023). It shocks and generates highly emotional reactions. With U Wisara's death, Myanmar's anti-British struggle gained a well-identifiable martyr – one that would be celebrated through statues, street names, minutes of silence frequently observed, ⁹ and with a prominent place in Myanmar's history textbooks (Taylor, 1987: 183).

Nationalists, Labour Activists, and Pro-Democracy Dissidents

In the 1930s and until the Japanese invasion of 1942, other protest movements across colonial Myanmar deployed, albeit marginally, political fasts as protest tools. Labour activists – and oil workers from the Chauk and Yenangyaung area in particular – mobilised hunger strikes as public performances. In March 1939, oil strikers under the leadership of Po Hla Gyi gathered to fast at Botathaung pagoda and Kodatgyi monastery in Rangoon (now Yangon). They dropped their hunger strike after six days when the government agreed to start an enquiry into labour conditions (Maung, 1976: 447–449). In October 1940, a labour strike at the government timber depot in Rangoon morphed into a collective fast staged by some of its union leaders. ¹⁰ Students also launched frequent school or university strikes in the 1920s and 1930s. They used public fasts to attract attention. In February 1939, hundreds of pupils at Rangoon’s Myoma National School started a hunger strike to ask for the withdrawal of the constitutional framework imposed by the British through the Government of Burma Act, 1935 (Maung, 1976: 423–424). Hunger strikes were not, however, a weapon favoured by the Thakins, Myanmar's core group of nationalists and anti-colonial activists in the 1930s. Only handful were recorded by British prison officials and intelligence agencies. In October 1933, Thakin Maung Ngwe Zin was sentenced to two years for a seditious speech and started a hunger strike to oppose his conviction. He dropped it on his second day to lodge an appeal instead. ¹¹ In December 1933, Thakin Ba Thaung and two of his followers were likewise convicted for their seditious speeches. The three dissidents started a hunger strike to protest their classification as political prisoner, but dropped unconditionally after few days. ¹² In June 1934, two other Thakins were arrested, along with U Ottama's brother Shin Ariya. One of them started fasting but stopped after two days. The other, Thakin Lay Maung, only contemplated but did not proceed, noticed British authorities. ¹³ By August 1934, 33 hunger strikers had been recorded in Burmese jails. ¹⁴ These form only anecdotal evidence, however. Hunger strikes and Gandhian-inspired fasts were more commonly deployed against British interests in India between the 1920s and 1940s (Shah, 2022). They remain a marginal tool for action in the repertoire of contention of Burmese nationalists (Maung, 1976: 394). Even prominent figures such as Aung San, who would lead the country to its independence from the British, denounced fasting for petty individual causes. ¹⁵

Nonetheless, several social actors and political movements continued to deploy hunger strikes as instruments for collective action after Myanmar gained its independence in 1948. Archival records show how such a tactical repertoire was construed as a means for not merely defying authorities, but also for mobilising for statehood recognition and the defense of religion. Buddhist monks advocating for Arakan (Rakhine) statehood and against the influence of Muslim communities in the Mayu Frontier district bordering East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) frequently staged collective fasts. They often used pagoda grounds to perform their strikes – particularly Sule Paya in Downtown Yangon. ¹⁶ Monks also threatened to fast to death to show their disapproval of U Nu's government's decision in 1953 not to prohibit cattle slaughter during the Muslim Eid festival. ¹⁷ Furthermore, monks also fasted in public to express solidarity with others. In May 1957, when one leading abbot and president of the Pali University Students’ Union (PUSU), U Kissayana, was jailed by the government for opposing a proposed reform of Pali examinations, dozens of monks from the PUSU gathered at the gate of Rangoon Central Jail to start a collective fast. It would last six days. ¹⁸ In September 1963, monks from monasteries in North Okkalapa sat in front of the Consulate-General of South Vietnam, in Yangon's Dagon township, and fasted for three days. ¹⁹ They sought to show solidarity with Vietnamese Buddhist communities that were victims of a harshening repression by the Diem regime.

Hunger strikes were again deployed as protest techniques in public spaces during the student uprising of 1988. Several mass fasts (construed as visible, public performances) were organised. In August, hundreds of ordinary citizens gathered before Rangoon City Hall and started fasting in the open air. They demanded an interim government (Lintner, 1990: 133). On 11 September, nearly a thousand students responded to a call from the All Burma Federation of Students’ Union (ABFSU). They fasted for two entire days in front of Rangoon's General Hospital. ²⁰ They condemned the shooting and massacres carried out in its compound earlier in August. Students in other cities across the country staged similar hunger strikes. ²¹ Such initiatives, however, stopped when the armed forces launched another takeover on 18 September. Troops started to clear the streets, imposed martial law, and a night curfew. Due to the transportation shutdown, diminished hunger strikers, remembered one of them, had to hide with residents in Rangoon's downtown area. ²²

Hunger Striking as a Prison Protest

The advent of military rule in the late 1950s transformed Myanmar. In October 1958, a first experiment with a caretaker government led by the armed forces and its commander-in-chief, General Ne Win, started. The new administration began to shout down dissenting voices and restricted most public displays of discontent. In January 1959, the caretaker government set up a new penal colony in the remote archipelago of the Coco Islands, north of India's Andaman Islands. ²³ A first batch of 150 political opponents, mostly communist, was sent into exile there. Aung Than, brother of Aung San, was shipped to the camp in May 1959. ²⁴ After almost a year of detention, several detainees, including renowned independence fighter Thakin Pe Htay, started a hunger strike to demand unconditional release (Cheesman, 2022: 75). The strike was the first in a series of what would be known in the collective memory of many Burmese activists as the ‘Great Coco Islands hunger strikes’, a former detainee in Insein jail during the 1970s recalled. ²⁵ The struggle of this first batch of hunger strikers in the penal colony of the Coco Islands morphed into a contest to secure a return to the continent. Ne Win's government conceded, startlingly, to avoid any public backlash on the eve of the elections planned for April 1960. The core demands of the strikers were met, and they returned to Rangoon in three batches, in December 1959, April 1960, and January 1961. ²⁶

In March 1962, the country once more plunged into military rule. The penal colony in the Coco Islands was reopened and dissidents were again exiled there. In 1969, detainees launched another round of collective hunger strikes, asking for better food. Two other waves of hunger strikes would follow quickly in March and September 1970 (Lintner, 1999: 273–274). A last round erupted in May 1971. ²⁷ This time, it would prove a fast-to-death endeavour, and would be remembered as such. After fifty-three days of fasting and eight strikers left dead, the island detention camp was eventually shut down in December 1971 (Cheesman, 2022: 77). The Coco Islands strikes proved very popular events, well entrenched in the collective memory of the Burmese intellectuals and activists (Kyaw Zwa Moe, 2011). Several autobiographies by former detainees were published in Burmese in the early 1960s and again when a quasi-civilian government lifted censorship in the 2010s (Martin et al., 2024: 851). Some activists even learned about the strikes upon their first incarceration in different prisons nationwide. One former Insein detainee learned about it from a guard who had been a direct witness, having been posted to the Coco Islands camp twenty years before. ²⁸ As my interviews revealed, activists who spent time in prison have tended to mythologise the Coco Islands hunger strikes as much as U Wisara's fast-to-death in 1929. ²⁹

Aung San Suu Kyi herself engaged (once) in a hunger strike while under house arrest. For twelve days in late July 1989, she publicly declared refusing food to support her colleagues from the National League for Democracy (NLD) who had also been arrested in the aftermath of the 1988 coup d’état. They had to cope with far more challenging conditions – including torture – than she, who was the daughter of Myanmar's independence hero (Andrieux et al., 2005: 31). In the book Freedom from Fear, her husband recalls why she requested to be transferred from house arrest to a regular jail, but abandoned her fast after twelve days (Aris, 1991: xxii–xxiii).

In the 1990s and 2000s, several waves of hunger strikes staged by political prisoners unfolded. Strikers typically demanded the release of fellow detainees and Aung San Suu Kyi, and improved jail conditions (Andrieux et al., 2005: 31–32). In September 1990, a mass hunger strike by students and members of the NLD developed at Insein prison. The strikers requested the swift transfer of power from the junta to the parliamentarians elected in the polls held earlier in May (Amnesty International, 2000: 7). Several other collective fasts cases were recorded in other prisons or police stations. Many were recounted in personal memoirs published during a decade of opening in the 2010s (Martin et al., 2024: 851). One of the most infamous series happened at Tharrawaddy jail between May and June 1998. ³⁰ One of the detainees there, thirty-eight-year-old Aung Kyaw Moe, died in his cell as a result of torture and lack of food (AAPP, 2006: 47–48; Amnesty International, 2000: 3; Kyaw Zwa Moe, 2011). Other hunger strikes were carried out in prisons in Pathein (September 2003) and Insein (May 2005). Daw May Hnin Kyi, a candidate elected in 1990 for the NLD, performed a three-day fast after her arrest following the 2003 Depayin attack against Aung San Suu Kyi (Andrieux et al., 2005: 32). U Gambira, a leader of the Saffron Revolution of 2007, also performed a hunger strike to condemn his arrest in 2009, before moving into exile (HRW, 2009: 83). So did frequently during the 2010s a prominent activist and leader of a community-based movement in Yangon, Ko Htin Kyaw. ³¹

Lastly, the return to military rule in February 2021 and the massive opposition movement it has sparked across Myanmar (Egreteau, 2023) have rekindled prison protests, and thus the deployment of hunger strikes behind bars. Within a year of a renewed cycle of arrests, punishment, and torture of anti-regime dissidents, more than twenty episodes of such protests were recorded across the country (Martin et al., 2024). Detainees deployed hunger strikes in the jails of Insein, Obo, Myingyan, and Monywa (Kyaw Lwin Oo, 2023; The Irrawaddy, 2023). Rohingya and Chin activists arrested in neighbouring India also engaged in hunger strikes to protest against conditions in jails, especially in the north-eastern state of Manipur (Assam Tribune, 2024). In public spaces too, younger activists sought to organise collective hunger strikes, echoing acts already performed in urban areas during the 1988 uprising – but not necessarily remembered as such. A young student activist from Gen Z recalls a day from February 2021:

“Another day, using government offices in Yangon (…) we occupied every area to hunger strike. So, we started with the Accounting and Finance Office Building – it's in Pansodan, it's really in downtown – we occupied it, and called for a CDM Movement; and every student sat down in front of the office building [to fast]. (…) After that security forces came, and they negotiated with us [to terminate the strike]”. ³²

There is thus an undeniably rich history of hunger striking in Myanmar. Deeply embedded into the protest repertoire of Burmese activists, past and present, public performances of fasting have long been deployed to signal dissent and seek concessions. What is less understood in the context of Myanmar is the use of time-bound acts of fasting that seek not to protest merely, but to forge solidarity networks, strengthen bonds within each protest movement, and shape a collective memory of struggles – particularly during periods of abeyance or when activists are locked out of sight behind prison bars.

Fasting to Remember Past Struggles

Collective memory about past cycles of protest is a significant cultural resource for social movements. Movements build on a social memory of previous contentious actions and historical events to provide legitimacy, maintain continuity between cycles of protest, and shape their own collective identity (Berger et al., 2021; Kubal and Becerra, 2014). Furthermore, remembering protests, repression, and other high-impact events in the life of a movement is critical for the latter's survival, especially during extended periods of abeyance (Taylor, 1989). There is a long-standing public memory culture of protest and detention in Myanmar. Released political prisoners, especially from the NLD, have commemorated their past sufferings and shared experiences of violence in jail through rituals and ceremonies performed during public events (Thein-Lemelson, 2025). Ordinary citizens and the Myanmar state have often competed for commemorating and remembering past strikes, rebellions, renowned martyrs, and other significant political moments in the life of the country (Aung-Thwin, 2011).

As interviewees revealed, short-term fasting can also be deployed as performative rituals for remembering past protest events or key moments in Myanmar's contentious history of anti-colonialism, democratisation, and other struggles against power and authority. Such acts of individual suffering (even if brief) can be transformed into a key strategy for the collective remembrance of significant anniversaries. It is especially manifest in the case of jailed activists. Typically, detainees would hold a protest for a first anniversary, when there is a fresh memory of a major strike or crackdown, or a paramount moment in the history of the country, one that must be embedded in a wider collective memory, if not a genealogy of contention. For a generation of Burmese activists and leftist intellectuals socialised into contentious politics under Ne Win's military rule, it was the wave of protests that occurred in the 1970s that they first sought to remember or emulate. ³³ In detention, strikers would spend a whole day in silence in their cells, refusing food intake to specifically commemorate the anniversary of either a strike (like the workers’ sit-down strikes of June 1975) or a major demonstration like the protests following the funerals in Yangon of the former U.N. Secretary General U Thant in December 1974, noted Christina Fink in her book Living Silence (Fink, 2009: 177–178).

Besides, popular beliefs in the efficacy of numerology are rife in Myanmar. This fascination with numbers often translates to the public commemorating past events through numerical references such as ‘8.8.88’ for the general strike held on 8 August 1988 or the “Six-Two” protests organised on 22 February 2022. To mark the first anniversary of the coup d’état of 1 February 2021 (‘1.2.21’), some 149 prisoners from Insein jail collectively announced they refused to take food. They did not formulate any specific demands, nor made any claims that the prison staff or the government could have addressed. Instead, they denied food on that specific day to show defiance and at the same time commemorate a year of suffering under a new junta (Radio Free Asia, 2022). Fasting has morphed into an actionable means of memorialising a landmark moment in the history of Myanmar's fight against persistent military authoritarianism. It is a mnemonic practice similar to observing a minute of silence. It is also key to meticulous documentation and recordings of dramatic events.

Such practices illustrate important aspects of the memorialisation efforts developed by protest actors, as studies on activism in Hong Kong or the Irish nationalist struggle showed (Lee et al., 2025; Pine, 2011: 103). Remembrance is a process similar to storytelling and story-sharing. Burmese activists performed hunger strikes and principled fasts to tell their story and help further craft a collective memory for their protest movement. Such collective memory can then be turned into action if it fosters emulation. An activist detained in Insein jail during the 1970s remembered:

“I get these stories, you know… In 1971, there were many political prisoners, especially left-wing, sent to Coco Gyun [island]… They went on strike to be returned to Yangon. Eight, or fourteen, died. And the prison was shut down. I was in Insein. I heard these stories, and we imitated them, we copied them [laughs]”. ³⁴

Collective memory thus helps produce new episodes of public fasts, whether time-bound or fast-to-death strikes, thereby creating a genealogy of meaningful contentious actions developed by successive generations of Burmese dissidents.

Honouring Martyrs and Deceased Comrades

Prisoners in their cells have also refused food to honour the death of a prominent political or activist figure. An act of self-abnegation and personal sacrifice, such as abstaining from food, can also serve as a reminder of past sufferings by other activists. Detainees in colonial jails have often paid homage, if not exalted, the 166-day fast-to-death of the monk U Wisara – an event that has left a deep imprint in Myanmar's collective psyche. Each year after his death on 19 September 1929, hunger strikes were staged on that day to pay tribute to his martyrdom. ³⁵ Student activists from the All Burma Students Union (ABSU) have done so frequently in the 1930s (Maung, 1976: 101–102). Here, too, short-term fasting functions like a commemorative minute of silence. When announced as a time-bound commemoration of deceased comrades, fasting becomes a public act of remembrance that contributes to a sense of collective identity. Such identity for a movement is shaped around the suffering of activists, those who are fasting, and those who died for the cause.

On 26 June 1976, General Ne Win's regime executed in the compound of Insein jail a student activist named Salai Tin Maung Oo. Other detainees in nearby cells decided to fast and protest for a day to honour his memory. One of them, who had been arrested earlier in March following a demonstration staged to mark the hundredth birthday of renowned Marxist poet Thakin Kodaw Hmaing, remembered that they paid homage to their murdered inmate in a meditation mode typical of Buddhist, Vipassana-styled practices: with no food and in silence.

“Tin Maung Oo was hanged… I think he was arrested in March, and he was hanged in June or July. Just within three-four months he was hanged. At the time, we went on a silent strike. (…) All day we stay, the whole block [was] silent. This happened many times, on memorial days”. ³⁶

Similarly, in June and then August 2022, prisoners in Insein jail refused to take food to denounce the death sentences handed down to four fellow anti-regime dissidents, including former singer and NLD legislator Phyo Zeyar Thaw and 88 Generation activist Ko Jimmy (The Irrawaddy, 2022a). As Min Aung Hlaing's junta hanged the four convicts on 23 July 2022, several rounds of collective fasts were again performed to pay homage to them (The Irrawaddy, 2022b). I have gathered further evidence of prisoners fasting to pay tribute to the (often idealised) deadly hunger strikes performed in the Coco Islands penal colony between 1969 and 1971, when eight detainees starved to death. With pride sparkling in his eyes, a former detainee of Myingyan prison during the late 1990s, harked back to why prisoners would engage in fasting: ‘Because the one most popular among our prisoners is the islands strike… the Coco Islands’ strike!.’ ³⁷

Activists often seek to memorialise the victims of a regime or an oppressive system. They try first to record, and then commemorate the names of prominent activists who suffered, starved to death, or were slain by their opponents. ³⁸ Their stories, passed on from generation to generation, help shape a collective memory of heroes and martyrs. By commemorating deceased activists, hunger strikers can build a line of tradition of politically motivated fasts. Such practice echoes similar cultural and historical practices in Myanmar, where religious commemoration and prophecy can interact with genealogical time to link ancestors (including kings) with their descendants so that rulers know, and can act according to, ancestral traditions and past events (Candier, 2011).

Starving Bodies as Living Memorials

When activists engage in short-term fasting for commemoration, they seek to combine a ritualistic practice that is quite ordinary for many societies with a memorialisation process. A one-day or three-day fast can be both a memorialising activity and a healthy and not life-threatening act of dissent. ³⁹ If food suppression is prolonged, or performed on a more frequent basis, the bodies of protesters will soon be harmed. When a hunger striker's famished body is linked to a collective memory of past struggles, such a body becomes a site of protest in itself. In How Societies Remember (1989), Paul Connerton noted how physical bodies could prove central to memorialisation processes. He stressed that bodies ‘convey and sustain memory’ (Connerton, 1989: 104). Commemorative rituals and bodily practices, such as a minute of silence where social groups stand still without a word pronounced, help structure, and organise collective memory in a society.

When performed to commemorate, the physical act of fasting thus develops protesting bodies into a living memorial to past contentious acts, terrible events, and martyrs. Such sacrificial effort can create what French Historian Pierre Nora called lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory (Nora, 1989). For Nora, societies and social movements can re-enact the memory of past events through a vast array of rituals, where past and present co-exist in an atemporal space. Such rituals can be ceremonies held around a monument, a symbolic gesture, or ritualised actions such as, again, minutes of silence purported to transmit knowledge and reinforce collective memory (Nora, 1989: 19). As my study reveals, a body diminished by such a ritualised performance that is a principled fast can also form a specific lieu de mémoire.

Plaques, statues, and other monumental memorials can be forgotten, destroyed, or given new meanings by societies as years go by. However, here the story of past contention is maintained alive and kept in the public consciousness through the weakening bodies of suffering activists who ritually fast in the same way, and for the same remembrance of struggles past. By harming their bodies through such a ritualised commemorative performance, hunger strikers seek to embody the collective memory of their movement and further maintain it. The pain generated by past terrible events and suffering is not forgotten, but kept alive through a new round of collective suffering. Fasting activists frame the suffering caused by their self-starvation as a continuation of past cycles of suffering and contentious actions. In doing so, they reinforce the commemorative dimension, as past contentious events are repeatedly revealed, and their story is transmitted to the next activist or generation through their protesting bodies.

Ambivalence Towards Hunger Strikes and Time-Bound Fasting

Nevertheless, the mobilisation of fasting as a tool for protesting, remembering, or building solidarity networks remains contested. Despite its prestige in Myanmar society, many Burmese activists have refused to deploy the repertoire of hunger strikes to advance their cause. Some have argued it is not an effective tactic of collective action if done (as often it is) in a solitary mode and for a limited period. ‘Hunger strike is hunger strike, you do not do it for one day’, quipped a former prisoner who spent five years in jail after the 1990 election. ⁴⁰ Furthermore, if a hunger striker fails to achieve a stated goal, then it is difficult to avoid shame and ridicule by prison staff, making life more challenging for the remaining time one has to spend in that jail. Such shame can affect one's dignity and personal power – or hpoun, a key concept illuminating gender relations and male dominance in Myanmar's Buddhist-dominated society. ⁴¹

Older generations of Burmese former prisoners have often advised recently arrested activists against engaging in political fasts. For instance, an exiled informant I met once participated in a collective fast performed in front of Rangoon City Hall in September 1988. He was arrested a few months later and would spend five years at Insein. ⁴² Yet he never performed any further fasting while in jail. He now frequently tells families of political prisoners that they must convince their jailed relatives not to waste their lives with such an endeavour. Self-starvation is an extraordinary commitment because for it to be effective, one must be ready to die, and thus in a sense commit suicide. In Myanmar, where Buddhism is prevalent, suicidal behaviours are often viewed unfavourably. Suicide can be construed as an unwholesome act, equated to the taking of life, and thus contrary to core Buddhist values (Keown, 1998). It can lead to a bad death (malemort). Starving to death is also a waste of talent if done on a large scale during a collective action. While in jail – and especially under brutal regimes – inmates must instead seek to survive, and yearn to get out of prison as healthy as possible.

Political fasting thus remains a double-edged tool. Its efficiency depends on the morality of the oppressor and the target of the hunger strike. As Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1924, ‘you cannot fast against a tyrant’ (In Dalton, 1993: 164). Many of my conversations with activists have indicated that it is often considered a futile means for defiance and protest in Myanmar. As a former student activist from the 88 Generation, who was sentenced to five years in 1990, underscored during one of our conversations in English:

“When you make a hunger strike, you just rely on drinking water. If they [the prison authorities] cut water down, it is cruel. They are not like colonial [British] people, they don’t have any morale – the Ne Win guys”. ⁴³

Because the cruelty and barbarity of Myanmar's past and present military rulers – from Ne Win to the post-2021 junta – have no limits, hunger strikers cannot expect the authorities to be receptive, if at all sensitive to their claims. It was less the case with the British society of the 1920s and 1930s, despite its imperialist and colonialist hue. Then, the press, parliamentarians, and public intellectuals could (and did) easily document, disclose, and denounce barbaric treatments applied to prisoners engaged in protest actions (Shah, 2022). Likewise, in contemporary India, where hunger strikes are more firmly rooted in the local repertoire of protest, fasting for a political purpose has been taken more seriously by state and prison authorities than in Myanmar under persistent military rule. ⁴⁴ A Burmese student activist, who was 19 years old when the 2021 coup occurred, confirmed:

“I think it depends on the morality of the authorities. They do care about the people, they do care about human rights… or they do not. In a Manipur prison in 2023, 99 Burmese people did a hunger strike. And Manipur officials and police, and also the central government of India… they got interested in this case, and had discussions and [started] negotiations [to end the strike]”. ⁴⁵

Since the 1960s, the response from Myanmar's military authorities to hunger striking strategies developed by detainees has proved brutal, especially in the case of secular activists. The British colonialists had to cope chiefly with Buddhist monks fasting in jail. The monastic community, however, has far less frequently borrowed – if at all – the repertoire of hunger strikes against military rule since the coup d’état of 1962. Monks seem to have deployed other strategies for contention, such as the overturning of an alms bowl, social boycott, or street demonstrations. This may explain why fasting as a contentious act has gradually faded from Myanmar's contentious politics.

Conclusion

This article sought to reconceptualize political fasts as a commemorative performance and tactic for memorialising past contentious events, paying homage to martyrs, and sustaining the collective identity of a movement. Across different cultural contexts, hunger strikes and political fasts are given specific moral meanings and integrated into a genealogy of protest tactics that can resonate with local histories of resistance and past political struggles. Such is the case in Myanmar, from anti-colonialism in the late British era to the post-coup resistance of the 2020s. Burmese activists have used hunger strikes to exert moral influence on colonial and military authorities alike to be granted specific demands. However, in this study, I was more concerned with the way fasting had been politicised and mobilised to forge solidarity, strengthen a collective memory of past contentious actions, or remember the death of a fellow activist. Such a strategy is primarily built upon repeated, if short, acts of remembrance taking the shape of non-life-threatening one-day to three-day-long commemorative fasts. The broader attention given to such action can amplify the commemorative impact further.

By framing their fasts as time-bound commemorative moments (and not merely a show of defiance), Burmese activists situate their action into a broader genealogy of other protest events and tactics linked to one another, and specific to their movement. A collective history of hunger strikes is an important means for producing a movement's social memory. Past episodes of politically motivated fasts and hunger strikes narrated as effective contentious acts can prove a powerful tool for a movement's propaganda. They can consolidate the collective identity of that movement by crafting a lineage of impactful events and cycles of protest worth remembering. Maintaining such collective memory is crucial, especially during a period of abeyance or intense repression. When Burmese activists fasted not merely to emulate, but also remember well-known episodes of past hunger strikes (such as U Wisara's starve-to-death in 1929 or the strikes performed in the penal colony of the Coco Islands between 1969 and 1971), all past and present hunger strikes conflated to form a genealogy of struggles against Myanmar's past and present authoritarian rulers – be they colonialists or military despots. Even more, in societies where memorial landscapes are contested, the suffering bodies of fasting activists also function as lieux de mémoire, in the words of Pierre Nora (1989). Bodies are becoming sites of resistance, especially in highly coercive and authoritarian contexts. They are used as a means to maintain a living memorial under conditions of intense repression, and keep a cause alive in the public consciousness.

This study of politicised fasts in a Buddhist-dominated setting thus illustrate how protesting bodies can be turned into a locus of defiance and memorialisation that is more actionable than a monument, a plaque, or a book. It also feeds ongoing discussions in social movement research on why protest actors do what they do and when. Burmese detainees, in the face of a brutal repression and tough jail conditions, sought to innovate and adapt to circumstances. Starve-to-death tactics were for many reluctant prisoners and younger Burmese activists in the twenty-first century less a workable repertoire than time-bound fasting. Refusing food for a short period of time still offers a resource for those seeking to continue their mobilisation and engagement, yet without intentionally causing their own death and contradicting their own beliefs and values – most Buddhist traditions indeed consider suicide as a negative act. Besides, the construction of politicised fasts as commemorative performances enhances our understanding of the complex relationship between collective action tactics and the many ways collective identity is built by movements (Smithey, 2009). These findings thus put forth a novel research agenda bridging memory studies and the scholarship on the selection, adaptation, and translation of contentious repertoires for collective action, in Myanmar and beyond.