The Group Before the Self: Collectivism, Rights Suppression, and the Limits of Human Rights Agency in Myanmar

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Dr. Sai Kyi Zin Soe holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia. He is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Disability Research and Policy (CDRP) at the University of Sydney, and serves as an Advisory Researcher on Myanmar for the Conflict and Resilience Research Institute Canada (CRRIC).

▪️Abstract

This essay examines the tension between Myanmar’s deeply embedded collectivist cultural framework and the individual-agency premise that underpins the international human rights regime. Drawing on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, Theravada Buddhist ethics, the sociology of religious social discipline in Christian ethnic minority communities, populist political behaviour, elite capture within the resistance movement, and the literature on vernacularisation of human rights, it argues that while significant cultural friction exists, this tension is neither unique to Myanmar nor inherently irresolvable. The analysis interrogates the structural, theological, and social mechanisms through which collectivism suppresses individual rights consciousness, while acknowledging the empirical evidence and its limits from Myanmar’s Spring Revolution.

1. Introduction

The question of whether human rights norms, conceived largely within an individualist liberal tradition, are meaningfully applicable in collectivist societies has animated international human rights scholarship for several decades (An-Na’im, 1992; Donnelly, 2007). Myanmar presents a particularly instructive case. Ranked among the world’s most collectivist societies, Myanmar’s social fabric prioritises group conformity, hierarchical deference, and collective harmony over the articulation of individual claims against state or community authority (Vignoles et al., 2025). Nevertheless, the country’s history of rights activism and its ongoing Spring Revolution complicate any reductive conclusion that cultural collectivism forecloses human rights consciousness. Indeed, the analysis presented below reveals a further irony: the very resistance movement that emerged to defend democracy and human rights has, in certain dimensions, reproduced the same collectivist disciplinary logic it ostensibly opposes¹.

The argument advanced in this essay is fourfold. First, collectivism in Myanmar is not a monolithic or solely Buddhist phenomenon; it is reproduced across religious and ethnic boundaries, including within Christian minority communities, through structurally comparable mechanisms of social discipline and shame. Second, collectivist social psychology creates structural conditions for populist majoritarian violence and uncritical deference to authority figures, both of which are antithetical to core human rights principles. Third, the anti-coup resistance movement and the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) have themselves exhibited forms of elite capture and enforced conformity that mirror the collectivist suppression of individual agency found in broader Myanmar society. Fourth, and notwithstanding these constraints, the vernacularisation literature and the evidence of mass individual mobilisation during the Spring Revolution demonstrate that individual rights agency in Myanmar is contextual rather than absent.

2. Cultural Dimensions and Myanmar’s Collectivist Structure

Hofstede’s value dimensions provide the most widely applied comparative lens for analysing Myanmar’s cultural orientation. An exploratory application of the Hofstede-Bond typology found that Myanmar is characterised by high uncertainty avoidance, high power distance, and a moderate-to-strong collectivist orientation, with individuals expected to subordinate personal needs to group interests and to maintain community loyalty as a primary virtue (Rarick, 2006). A more recent Hofstede-based analysis confirms that these dimensions are reinforced by strong interpersonal trust networks that function within, but rarely across, group boundaries. High power distance means that authority hierarchies are broadly accepted, and the social cost of individual dissent is structurally elevated: challenging a community norm, a family elder, a religious leader, or a political icon is not merely considered impolite but actively coded as a moral failure^{2 3}.

Critically, Vignoles et al.’s (2025) comprehensive cross-national study challenges the assumption that such collectivism is fixed or civilisationally determined. Their research confirms that collectivism is a variable correlated with socioeconomic development and existential security, suggesting that a more rights-enabling cultural environment in Myanmar is structurally achievable rather than permanently foreclosed. This is a significant methodological caveat: the cultural collectivism observed in Myanmar reflects conditions of poverty, conflict, and institutional insecurity as much as any inherent cultural disposition. Nevertheless, for the present analysis, what matters is the operational effect of collectivism on rights consciousness within the current context⁴.

3. Buddhist Ethics: Moral Shame, Karma, and the Individual Subject

Theravada Buddhism introduces a significant layer of complexity, shaping the moral subjectivity of the overwhelming majority of Myanmar’s Bamar population and several ethnic minority groups. The Theravada concepts of hiri (moral shame) and ottappa (moral dread or fear of wrongdoing) are central to the Buddhist ethical architecture (Meral Education Repository, 2020). Hiri refers to internal self-scrutiny, an inwardly directed sense of shame arising from one’s own conscience, while ottappa refers to concern for the social and karmic consequences of wrongdoing. Together, these concepts affirm a form of individual moral reflexivity embedded within a relational frame; they are not reducible to mere social conformism. Buddhism thus constitutes a site of latent individual moral agency^{5 6}.

However, the doctrine of kamma (karma) simultaneously legitimises the fatalistic acceptance of one’s social position. The belief that one’s current circumstances are the product of merit accumulated in previous lives can serve to discourage structural challenges to authority and to naturalise existing hierarchies as morally appropriate outcomes (Chambers, 2023). Chambers’s (2023) study of Buddhist ethics and everyday life in southeastern Myanmar demonstrates how moral frameworks derived from the dhamma permeate quotidian decisions about deference, social roles, and conformity in ways practically indistinguishable from collectivist social norms. This creates a theologically mediated ambivalence: Buddhism simultaneously provides resources for individual ethical agency and for passive accommodation of social conformity. The critical issue for human rights is which strand predominates in a given political or social conjuncture.⁷

4. Cross-Religious Collectivism: Christian Ethnic Minorities and Social Discipline

A vital analytical error in much of the existing literature is the conflation of collectivism in Myanmar with Buddhism specifically. The evidence makes clear that comparable mechanisms of social conformity and punitive group discipline are reproduced within Christian minority communities, particularly among the Baptist denominations that are dominant in the Chin, Kachin, Karen, and Karenni states. Research on ethnic minority Christian communities in Myanmar indicates that church membership and congregational identity serve as the primary vehicles for social belonging, moral legitimacy, and community solidarity, particularly in contexts where these communities face ongoing persecution by the state (OMF International, 2021)⁸.

Within this context, the social sanctions imposed by congregations function as powerful instruments of conformity. When a member of a predominantly Baptist congregation marries a non-Christian partner, even one of the same ethnicity, the congregation may formally denounce or exclude that individual from the church until both partners publicly confess and recommit to the Christian faith. This form of social excommunication is not merely informal: it carries material consequences in communities where church membership is coextensive with social acceptance, access to communal resources, and moral standing. Similar exclusions are imposed on LGBTQIA+ individuals who disclose their gender identity or sexual orientation, who face demands to conform to strictly binary gender and sexual norms under threat of ostracism and moral denunciation (Human Dignity Trust, 2024; ASEAN SOGIE Caucus, 2025). Individuals who leave the faith, whether to practise another religion or adopt non-belief, are frequently characterised as morally corrupt, as betrayers, or as individuals of bad character by their former congregations. The language of moral condemnation deployed in these cases is functionally identical to the language of collective discipline observed in majority Buddhist contexts: the theological vocabulary differs, but the suppressive effect on individual conscience is structurally equivalent^{9 10}.

This cross-religious dimension of collectivism has significant implications for human rights analysis. It suggests that the suppression of individual agency in Myanmar is not a feature of any particular theological tradition but rather a structural property of how community solidarity is organised in contexts of minority vulnerability, displacement, and conflict. The ethno-linguistic demarcation of Myanmar’s churches, many of which serve a single ethnic group, further consolidates the equation among religious, ethnic, and communal identities, departing from group norms tantamount to a cultural betrayal (OMF International, 2021). In rights terms, the practical constraint on the freedoms guaranteed by Articles 18 and 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and expression, emanates not only from state actors but from community-level enforcement mechanisms that are largely invisible in conventional human rights monitoring¹¹.

5. Populism, Majority Endorsement, and the Suspension of Moral Reasoning

Perhaps the most severe human rights implication of Myanmar’s collectivist social psychology is its susceptibility to majoritarian populism. This is most acutely visible in the widespread public endorsement, or at minimum passive acquiescence, of the systematic atrocities committed against the Rohingya Muslim minority. The Ma Ba Tha movement and its predecessor, the 969 movement, successfully framed their anti-Rohingya agenda as the expression of the “general will” of the Buddhist majority, positioning the protection of Buddhism and Bamar ethnic identity as a collective obligation that superseded any individual moral reservation (Democratic Erosion Consortium, 2022; U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2020). The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission (2018) documented how this narrative achieved broad social currency, including through the instrumentalisation of social media to disseminate dehumanising rhetoric (OHCHR, 2020)^{12 13 14}.

What is analytically significant from a human rights perspective is not only state complicity in the violence but the community-level acceptance of that violence. The Race and Religion Protection Laws of 2015, which received broad parliamentary support, imposed state regulation on religious conversion and inter-religious marriage, encoding the community’s collectivist claim over individual conscience into formal law (Amnesty International, 2015). This legislative convergence of popular sentiment and state discrimination illustrates precisely how collectivist social psychology, in which the group’s boundaries must be defended against individual or minority deviation, can be mobilised to catastrophic effect¹⁵.

The second dimension of populist deference is the uncritical following of authoritative political figures. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political career provides a striking case study. Multiple scholars have documented how her moral authority, derived from years of house arrest and personal sacrifice, generated a cult of personality that effectively insulated her from critical scrutiny both domestically and internationally (Steinberg, 2018; Kurlantzick, 2019). When she publicly defended Myanmar’s military operations against the Rohingya before the International Court of Justice in 2019, her domestic popular standing within the majority community remained broadly intact, because loyalty to an iconic leader was treated as a collective virtue that superseded individual moral assessment (Lowy Institute, 2026). Griffith Asia Insights (2023) observes that the “politics of personality” surrounding Suu Kyi was continuously reproduced domestically even as her international reputation collapsed, driven by the same collectivist deference to authorised leadership that characterises Myanmar’s social structure more broadly. This pattern is not unique to Suu Kyi; it extends to religious celebrities, military commanders, and community elders and reflects the general tendency, as indexed in Hofstede’s high power distance score for Myanmar, to validate authority through deference rather than critical engagement (Rarick, 2006)^{16 17 18 19 20}.

6. Family Obligation, Filial Piety, and the Contraction of Autonomy

A further, less frequently examined mechanism through which collectivism constrains individual agency in Myanmar is the institution of filial piety, understood as the moral and ethical duty of children to support, obey, and defer to their parents. Research published in the Journal of the Myanmar Academy of Arts and Science presents filial piety as one of the “most fundamental ethical principles” in Myanmar society, rooted in the Buddhist concept of gratitude (katañña) towards parents, who are regarded as the greatest benefactors (Myanmar Academy of Arts and Science, 2020). The five filial responsibilities prescribed in Buddhist-derived ethical discourse extend well beyond material support to encompass deference to parental judgment across a wide range of life decisions²¹.

In practice, this framework produces patterns of decision-making among adults, disproportionately affecting women, that are structurally incompatible with the exercise of individual autonomy. It is not uncommon for working adults in their thirties and forties to seek parental permission or approval for work-related travel, participation in social events, or significant life choices such as marriage partners, career changes, or relocation. Such deference is not experienced as constraint but is actively socially valorised; individuals who maintain these practices are regarded as virtuous, principled, and dutiful. Conversely, individuals who exercise autonomous decision-making in defiance of parental expectations risk social condemnation as ungrateful or morally corrupt (Facts and Details, 1996; Go Myanmar Tours, 2022)^{22 23}.

A longitudinal study of filial piety and adolescent autonomy conducted in Taiwan found that “authoritarian filial piety”, in which parental authority over personal decisions is treated as entirely legitimate, is positively correlated with broader deference to external authority (Lui, 2011). In the Myanmar context, this suggests a developmental pathway in which early socialisation into unconditional parental authority produces adults with a reduced capacity for the kind of autonomous moral reasoning presupposed by human rights discourse. The right to choose one’s partner, occupation, domicile, or religious belief, rights enshrined in both the UDHR and the CRPD, are, in the quotidian social reality of many Myanmar families, effectively conditional on parental assent²⁴.

7. Elite Capture and Enforced Conformity Within the Resistance Movement

The analysis of collectivist suppression of individual agency would be incomplete without confronting a deeply uncomfortable dimension of Myanmar’s post-2021 political landscape: the reproduction of these same suppressive dynamics within the anti-coup resistance movement itself. This represents a structurally significant irony: a movement mobilised ostensibly in defence of democracy and human rights has, in certain respects, internalised and reproduced the collectivist disciplinary logic it formally opposes.

The Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), which emerged immediately after the 1 February 2021 coup as a general strike by civil servants and healthcare workers, rapidly became not only a form of political resistance but a moral litmus test for political loyalty. Within the movement’s social and digital ecosystem, participation in the CDM was elevated from a political choice to a categorical moral duty: those who did not or could not join, owing to economic necessity, family obligation, personal risk calculation, or political ambivalence, were liable to be publicly denounced as traitors, collaborators, or enemies of democracy. The Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw warned formally that “serious action” would be taken against those not participating in the protest movement. This binary classification, CDM or non-CDM, mirrors precisely the social disciplinary structures described in earlier sections of this essay: the group’s moral consensus is enforced not through persuasion but through the threat of exclusion, denunciation, and social punishment^{25 26 27}.

The mechanisms of social punishment in this context were not merely informal. Documented practices included the doxxing of individuals perceived as insufficiently resistant, publishing their personal information, workplace details, and social media profiles, and organising coordinated campaigns against them online. Threats escalated in some cases to explicit calls for harm: “We will punish them to the point that they want to kill themselves,” read one widely shared social media post targeting a military officer’s family member. Journalists who attended SAC press conferences were threatened. Non-participating civil servants faced harassment. The social punishment campaign extended to people with family ties to the military who had no personal political role, reflecting the collectivist logic that individual identity is subsumed in the identity of the group to which one belongs, a logic structurally identical to the congregational discipline documented in Section 4 above²⁸.

More broadly, criticism of the National Unity Government (NUG), its political decisions, its internal accountability failures, or the tactics of People’s Defence Force (PDF) units became effectively taboo within pro-resistance social spaces. Critics risked being labelled as SAC sympathisers, traitors to the revolution, or morally deficient individuals. Fulcrum (2025) documents the NUG’s legitimacy crisis arising from the human rights violations committed by its affiliated forces, noting that criticism from within the resistance structure, including from armed groups nominally aligned with the NUG, was met with attempts at suppression rather than substantive accountability (Htet Hlaing Win, 2025). A January 2026 commentary from CNI Myanmar explicitly warned that “the NUG needs to be cautious that it does not take on the appearance of an organisation engaging in bullying and manipulation if it attempts to arbitrarily apply laws… and arrest or suppress other organisations or individuals who are not guilty” (CNI Myanmar, 2026). NUG’s crisis of accountability and the structural silencing of internal dissent represent a form of elite capture in which the revolutionary leadership benefits from the same collectivist deference mechanisms, loyalty, solidarity, and moral condemnation of deviance that have historically served authoritarian structures in Myanmar^{29 30}.

This dynamic has concrete implications for human rights. The right to freedom of expression and to hold and express political opinions, guaranteed under the ICCPR, to which Myanmar is not yet a State Party, requires the existence of spaces for dissent not only from state actors but from dominant civil society coalitions. When challenging the policies of the NUG or questioning the methods of the CDM becomes socially equivalent to supporting the SAC, the structural conditions for meaningful individual political agency have been foreclosed, this time not by the junta but by the resistance movement itself. The parallel with the populist endorsement of anti-Rohingya violence is instructive: in both cases, collective solidarity is deployed to suppress the exercise of individual moral and political judgment.

8. The Universalism-Relativism Debate and Myanmar

The broader debate between human rights universalism and cultural relativism is directly pertinent to the above analysis. The “Asian values” argument, advanced in the 1990s by governments including Singapore, Malaysia, and China, claimed that collective well-being and social harmony are prior values to individual rights, and that Western liberal rights discourse constitutes cultural imperialism (Donnelly, 2007). While this argument has been substantially critiqued as a post-hoc legitimation of authoritarian governance rather than a genuine expression of popular values (Steiner, 1995), it resonates with the structural features of Myanmar’s political culture documented above. Myanmar’s 2008 SAC-era Constitution nominally incorporates civil and political rights but systematically qualifies them with provisions that subordinate individual rights to national security, social order, and community interests (Human Rights Watch, 2013)^{31 32 33 34 35}.

However, the cultural relativist argument confronts a fundamental problem well illustrated by the Myanmar evidence: the “cultural” justification for limiting individual rights is rarely the authentic voice of those whose rights are being constrained. The Rohingya did not consent to their exclusion. LGBTQIA+ individuals expelled from their congregations did not author their own marginalisation. Women seeking professional autonomy typically do not endorse social norms that require them to seek parental approval. Moreover, CDM non-participants who faced doxxing and death threats did not consent to be judged by a revolutionary moral code they were unable or unwilling to meet. As Steiner (1995) observed, the critical question is not whether a culture values community, but whether those in positions of power are using the invocation of cultural values to foreclose the choices of those who are not (Steiner, 1995). The analysis presented in this essay demonstrates that this pattern operates consistently across the political spectrum in Myanmar, from the SAC junta and Buddhist nationalist organisations to Christian congregational leadership and the post-coup resistance coalition³⁶.

9. Vernacularisation as a Bridge

The most constructive scholarly response to the collectivism-human rights tension in Myanmar comes from the vernacularisation literature, which examines how human rights norms are translated and adapted into culturally resonant frameworks. Merry’s (2006) concept of vernacularisation describes the process by which local actors reframe international human rights standards in idioms drawn from indigenous cultural, religious, or moral vocabularies, enabling local uptake without cultural alienation. Research on Myanmar’s SOGI rights movement demonstrates that activists have achieved precisely this: reframing human rights grievances through community trust networks and culturally familiar vocabularies of dignity and care, mobilising individuals who would not otherwise engage with abstract rights discourse (Chua, 2015). The University of Melbourne research describes this process as one of “rejection, adoption, and adaptation,” showing that collective solidarity can serve as a vehicle for individual rights claims rather than an obstacle to them (University of Melbourne, 2020)^{37 38}.

A 2020 survey conducted by Colours Rainbow and PROUD found that 81% of Myanmar respondents agreed that “LGBT people deserve equality and equal treatment just like anyone else in Myanmar,” while 74% did not support criminalisation of LGBT identities (New Mandala, 2020). However, the same survey found that 50% of respondents would find it “completely unacceptable” if their own child identified as LGBT. This disjunction, affirming rights in the abstract while enforcing conformity in the relational, is a precise expression of the collectivist human rights paradox: rights are considered acceptable for others but not when they implicate the group’s own members or family. This finding underscores the importance of distinguishing between declarative and operative rights consciousness in collectivist settings³⁹.

10. The Spring Revolution: Emancipation and Its Limits

The Spring Revolution, which emerged in response to the SAC’s coup on 1 February 2021, offers the strongest empirical counterargument to a simple cultural-determinist reading. The CDM drew millions of individuals into deliberate acts of personal risk-taking, including public protest, strike action, and armed resistance, in defence of democratic and rights-based principles (Global Voices, 2024). Thame’s (2025) analysis argues that the Spring Revolution articulated a form of constituent power grounded simultaneously in popular sovereignty and in individual and collective rights claims, challenging both the SAC’s authoritarian nationalism and the ethnic majoritarian assumptions of traditional Bamar political culture (Thame, 2025). Coalition-building among the NUG, EAOs, and the PDF has also necessitated negotiating rights-based frameworks that transcend ethnic collectivism (Thinzar Shunlei Yi et al., 2024)^{40 41 42 43}.

The inclusive framing of the Spring Revolution, incorporating gender equality, disability rights, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion, reflects an emerging rights consciousness that integrates collective identity with individual dignity claims (Outright International, 2024). However, as argued in Section 7, this emancipatory dimension coexists with suppressive practices that reproduce precisely the collectivist disciplinary logic the revolution nominally opposes. The Spring Revolution is thus neither a straightforward expression of individual rights consciousness nor a simple reproduction of Myanmar’s collectivist traditions; it is a site of genuine tension between emancipatory aspiration and structural constraint. The critical challenge for the revolutionary movement’s human rights credibility is whether it can institutionalise internal accountability mechanisms that protect the right to dissent, criticism, and political difference within the resistance camp itself⁴⁴.

11. Conclusion

Myanmar’s collectivist cultural framework, expressed through Buddhist karmic ethics, Christian congregational discipline, filial piety norms, populist deference to authority, and, most recently, enforced conformity within the anti-coup resistance movement, creates genuine and well-documented structural friction with the liberal individualist premises of mainstream international human rights discourse. The mechanisms reviewed in this essay operate across religious, ethnic, and political boundaries, confirming that collectivism in Myanmar is not a feature of any one tradition but a structural property of social organisation under conditions of vulnerability, conflict, and institutional insecurity.

A cultural-determinist conclusion that the Myanmar people are constitutionally unable to appreciate or exercise individual rights is not, however, warranted by the evidence. The more analytically precise formulation is that individual agency in Myanmar is expressed through relational and communal frameworks that require context-sensitive translation for rights norms to achieve social traction. The Spring Revolution demonstrates that such agency exists and can be collectively mobilised. The vernacularisation literature demonstrates that rights norms can be adapted to local idioms without diluting their substantive content. The survey evidence on LGBT attitudes demonstrates that abstract equality norms have achieved broad popular resonance.

Nonetheless, the reproduction of collectivist suppression within the resistance movement itself, in the form of CDM binary moral categorisation, the silencing of NUG critics, and social punishment campaigns against those deemed insufficiently revolutionary, constitutes an important and under-examined dimension of the human rights challenge in Myanmar. It suggests that the obstacle to individual rights consciousness is not located solely in traditional cultural institutions or state ideology, but is reproduced structurally wherever collective solidarity is organised around mechanisms of exclusion, moral denunciation, and social punishment. Any credible human rights strategy for Myanmar must therefore address not only the SAC’s systematic repression but the suppression of dissent and difference within the very movements claiming to fight for democratic freedoms.

Footnotes

1. New Global Study debunks East vs West Cultural Stereotypes ↩︎
2. Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Analysis on Myanmar (Cultur&Society) ↩︎
3. Rarick, Charles A. and Nickerson, Inge, An Exploratory Study of Myanmar Culture Using Hofstede’s Value Dimensions (February 20, 2006). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1114625 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1114625 ↩︎
4. See 1 ↩︎
5. See 4 ↩︎
6. Buddhist concept of ‘Hiri–Ottappa–Dhamma’ ↩︎
7. Justine Chambers, Pursuing Morality. Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar, NUS Press, ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series, 2024, 209 p. ↩︎
8. The Case for Multi-Ethnic Churches in Multi-Cultural Myanmar ↩︎
9. The Silent Struggle: Myanmar’s LGBTQIA+ Community Under the Shadow of Conscription ↩︎
10. Myanmar criminalises same-sex sexual activity between men. The gender expression of trans people is also criminalised. Sentences include a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment. There is some evidence of the law being enforced in recent years, and LGBT people are regularly subjected to discrimination and violence. ↩︎
11. See 8 ↩︎
12. The Rise of Populism in Myanmar ↩︎
13. Sources of Hate Speech ↩︎
14. Situation of human rights of Rohingya Muslim minority and other minorities in Myanmar ↩︎
15. Myanmar: Scrap ‘race and religion laws’ that could fuel discrimination and violence ↩︎
16. See 3 ↩︎
17. In defence of Aung San Suu Kyi ↩︎
18. Aung San Suu Kyi and the Cult of Personality ↩︎
19. The fallen idol: Aung San Suu Kyi and the politics of personality ↩︎
20. Myanmar: Aung San Suu Kyi and the Cult of Personality ↩︎
21. The Practice of Filial Piety in Myanmar Society ↩︎
22. Typical Myanmar Family Life – Changes & Values ↩︎
23. Women, Men and Families in Myanmar ↩︎
24. Liu Y. L. (2013). Autonomy, filial piety, and parental authority: a two-year longitudinal investigation. The Journal of genetic psychology, 174(5-6), 557–581. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221325.2012.706660 ↩︎
25. The CDM: Anxiety, hardship and sacrifice but no regrets ↩︎
26. Myanmar’s Civil Disobedience Movement, From the Inside ↩︎
27. Myanmar ‘traitors’ hounded in online anti-coup campaign ↩︎
28. See 27 ↩︎
29. Rebel Violence in Myanmar and NUG’s Crisis of Legitimacy ↩︎
30. NUG should be cautious not to take on the characteristics of “bullying and manipulation” ↩︎
31. Transforming the culture of human rights in Myanmar ↩︎
32. The Asian conception of human rights is fundamentally different from the way they are regarded in the West ↩︎
33. Hoang, Van Nghia, The ‘Asian Values’ Perspective of Human Rights: A Challenge to Universal Human Rights (May 15, 2009). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1405436 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1405436 ↩︎
34. Universal human rights, cultural relativism and the Asian values debate ↩︎
35. Papers on Parliament No. 25 – June 1995 – Constitutions, Rights and Democracy, Past, Present and Future – Chapter 2 – Cultural Relativism and the Attitude of Certain Asian Countries Towards the Universality of Human Rights ↩︎
36. Professor Henry J Steiner “Cultural Relativism and the Attitude of Certain Asian Countries Towards the Universality of Human Rights” ↩︎
37. Chua LJ. The Vernacular Mobilization of Human Rights in Myanmar’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Movement. Law & Society Review. 2015;49(2):299-332. doi:10.1111/lasr.12135 ↩︎
38. Doffegnies, A., & Wells, T. (2022). The Vernacularisation of Human Rights Discourse in Myanmar: Rejection, Hybridisation and Strategic Avoidance. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 52(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2020.1865432 ↩︎
39. Understanding LGBT realities in Myanmar: new study indicates public support for equality ↩︎
40. Resisting the Return of Military Rule – Coalition Building, Armed Struggle and Governance by Myanmar’s Spring Revolution Movement ↩︎
41. Myanmar’s Spring Revolution ↩︎
42. Myanmar’s redemptive revolution: constituent power and the struggle for sovereignty in the Nwe Oo (Spring) Revolution ↩︎
43. Brenner, D. (2026). Rebel Politics after the Coup: Ethnic Armed Organisations and Myanmar’s Spring Revolution. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 56(2), 179–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2025.2494109 ↩︎
44. LGBTQ Anti-Coup Resistance in Myanmar ↩︎