The Space for academic freedom in Myanmar before and after the 2021 military coup
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Abstract
Academic freedom is particularly vulnerable during times of war. Since the start of the resistance war in Myanmar in 2021, the military has been repressing civil liberties and state surveillance has become entrenched in every aspect of people's lives. Although the military has often faced defeat on the battleground, there is a strong resilience in ideological control—especially within the university. This paper assesses factors limiting academic freedom in Myanmar by analyzing forms of coercion and consent prevailing in the education bureaucracy under the lens of Gramscian State Theory. Following its crackdown on the Civil Disobedience Movement of lecturers and university students, the State Administrative Council is bolstering its ideological influence by utilizing staff training and legal modifications as tools for the state's transmission of ideology. Universities must conform to the state's ideology and fulfill the legal, procedural, and institutional obligations of the ideological state apparatus. This paper employs document analysis, participant observation, and qualitative interviews to identify the constraint factors that hinder academics from exercising their rights in knowledge production while exposing them to legal and structural violations of their civil and political rights. It argues that the Civil Services Personnel Law and associated institutional culture deepen the deprivation of academic freedom. It also suggests that new educational institutions evolving out of resistance need not repeat the history of coercion, while there is a need to heal the damage done to the higher education system by successive military governments that suppressed political consciousness on campus.
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