Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropological Analysis of Political and Legal Reform in a Context of Democratization

当允许信息、思想、商品和服务在国家之间自由流动时，美国的国家利益和我们的经济竞争力是最好的。新民主国家政治和法律改革的成败取决于这些发展与当地对什么是权利和义务的理解相一致。这个项目培训一名研究生进行严格的、有经验的科学实地考察，问题是在一个新的民主化背景下，这些权利和义务是如何谈判的。研究结果将有助于政策和发展从业者分析民主化和政治稳定所必需的先决条件。埃利奥特·普拉斯-弗里曼在耶鲁大学埃里克·哈姆斯博士的指导下，探索了在民主化的背景下，权利是如何被援引的，统治的技术是如何参与的。这项研究发生在缅甸，在经历了半个世纪的军事统治后，缅甸似乎正在向民主制度过渡。研究人员对这个网站的独特访问让我们有机会探索权利话语和民主过渡是如何实时发生的。随着缅甸前军事领导人与反对派政界人士达成了一项紧张的协议，以推动改革，人权一直是争论的主题。改革者和国际合作伙伴赞同政治自由主义的权利观念，认为它反映了个人仅仅是一个政体成员所具有的绝对标准，或从根本上赋予人类的权利；另一方面，一些缅甸人似乎认为权利的概念(其中的权利被认为存在于特定背景之外)没有反映他们的现实。相反，他们将权利视为“机会”的同义词(这两个词在缅语中可以互换)。获得一项权利取决于社会地位、谈判技巧、资源，在某种程度上还取决于随机性。该项目假设，在缅甸，“权利”通常只有在参与者有机会实现这些权利的情况下才有意义。从这个角度来看，缅甸人可能要求对其社会中现有的权力和资源分配进行结构性改革，而不是通过改革的法律和政策来实现正式的权利。该项目将推动人类学中关于国家和政治的科学辩论，推动早期人类学家在缅甸和东南亚开展的关于政治组织和权力的讨论，以及权利和法律。该项目将关于非西方政治制度的历史人类学辩论与当代关于政府的讨论联系起来。研究将使用一些方法，包括：对社会运动和法律战略的记录和分析；(对律师和运动成员的)半结构化访谈；对社会运动策略的分析；以及最重要的是，对运动成员和律师的民族志参与者观察。

American national interests and our economic competitiveness are served best when the free flow of information, ideas, goods, and services are permitted between nations. The success or failure of political and legal reform in new democracies depends on how well such developments calibrate with the local understandings about what constitute rights and obligations. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how such rights and obligations are being negotiated in a newly democratizing context. The results will be useful to policy and development practitioners who analyze the preconditions that are necessary for democratization and political stability. Elliott Prasse-Freeman, under the supervision of Dr. Erik Harms of Yale University, explores how rights are invoked and technologies of rule are engaged in a context of democratization. The research takes place in Burma (Myanmar), which appears to be transitioning to a democratic system after a half-century of military rule. The researcher's unique access to this site gives us an opportunity to explore how rights discourse and democratic transition happens in real time. As former military leaders of Burma have formed a tense pact with opposition politicians to forge reforms, rights have been subject to debate. Reformers and international partners endorse the political liberal idea of rights as reflecting absolute standards that individuals have by the mere fact of being members of a polity or which are fundamentally afforded to humanity; some Burmese, on the other hand, appear to find a concept of rights (in which rights are thought to exist outside of a specific context) as not reflecting their realities. They instead look at rights as synonymous with 'opportunities' (the words are interchangeable in Burmese language). Attaining a right is subject to social position, negotiation skill, resources, and to some extent, randomness. The project hypothesizes that in Burma 'rights' often have meaning only to the extent that actors have the opportunities to realize them. In this perspective, rather than delivering formal rights through reformed laws and policies, Burmese may demand structural transformations of the existing distribution of power and resources in their society. The project would advances scientific debates in anthropology about the state and politics, discussions of political organizations and power that earlier anthropologists had situated in Burma and Southeast Asia, and rights and law. The project connects historic anthropological debates about nonwestern political systems with contemporary discussions of governmentality. The research will use a number of methods, including: documentation and analysis of social movements and legal strategies; semi-structured interviews (of lawyers and movement members); analysis of social movement tactics; and, most importantly, ethnographic participant observation with movement members and lawyers.