Book Review: Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar

Abstract

In February 2021, the Myanmar military ended a decade of democratic reforms with a coup and deposed the democratically elected government. The generals thus ended a transition process the military itself had initiated, and which comprised not only democratic reforms, but also an opening of the economy, and a peace process to end the world’s longest running internal armed conflict. Two years after the coup, Myanmar finds itself in a dire situation: The military’s violent response to an initially peaceful protest movement has led to a large popular armed uprising that now controls a significant proportion of the country. The military’s violence against protesters and scorched-earth campaigns against civilian populations, and later, continuous fighting pitting the military against ethnic resistance organisations (ERO) and so-called people’s defence forces has left thousands dead; and displaced over a million since 2021. The economy has taken a massive dive, and the practically unmitigated COVID-19 pandemic has probably killed thousands more. Despite the Myanmar military’s history of waging war against its population, the 2021 coup came as a surprise to most observers – had the generals not already secured a constant grip on politics and shielded themselves from being accountable to a civilian government? Or, in the words of Bertrand, Pelletier, and Thawnghmung, had the military not already been ‘winning by process’? While the book doesn’t directly solve this puzzle,Winning by Process draws a compelling picture of Myanmar’s politics on the eve of the coup by providing much-needed background and analysis to both Myanmar’s armed conflicts that have lasted over 70 years, and to the (recent) attempts to end them. This is a daunting task, and the co-authored book manages it very well by drawing on empirical material from extended fieldwork conducted over several years and the relevant literature on the complex histories of Myanmar. Conceptually, the book draws on (classic) studies of civil war and negotiation theory, and proposes to extend existing frameworks of how parties to a peace process can make gains not only by winning through war or through agreement, but also through tilting the peace process itself in their favour. As is already flagged in its title, the book’s main innovation lies in analysing the latter: Bertrand, Pelletier, and Thawnghmung identify