Enforcing Social Control in Rural Myanmar: Identifying the Implementer in the Pa-O Self-Administered Zone

Abstract

The Pa-O National Organisation (pno) was the only pro-regime ethnic political party that managed to retain all its seats in the 2015 Myanmar election. Amid accusations of rampant land grabbing and faced strong competitions from political parties at the national, regional and local levels, how did the pno manage to secure the seats? Through quantitative analysis, the paper noted a statistically significant volatility in the turnover of village tract leaders (vtl s) in the township where resistance was strongest. This in turn suggested that the pno relied on the vtl s to enforce social control. There is a clear gap in existing literature on how social control is constructed at the local level. Applying the state-in-society theoretical framework by Migdal, this paper aims to identify the ‘implementer’ in the crucial process of social control in the Pa-O saz, thereby helping to shed light on how local politics work.