
Myanmar’s Spring Revolution has created an understandably polarised society, between the right and the just on one side, and the wrong and the unjust on the other. According to this logic, the former are the Myanmar people under military rule, and the latter are the military and its supporters.
This underlying logic is dichotomous and simplistic. If you are with them—you are against us. If you are not with us—you are, or could be, against us. If you are silent about us, you are cowardly, or at least complicit.
These arguments particularly affect politicians and professionals in popular media and the arts with a public face, including but not limited to movie stars, singers, musicians, celebrities, and beauty pageant contestants.
Myanmar’s pained search for a common national identity amid the ongoing Spring Revolution has deepened societal divisions more than ever. A recent example is the viral controversy over whether Myanmar netizens should get behind Thae Su Nyein, the country’s contestant in the ongoing Miss Grand International 2024 beauty pageant being held in Bangkok on October 25.
The Myanmar candidate’s profile is irrelevant. What matters is the question of who does represent, and ideally speaks up for the people of Myanmar?
Two moral and political questions have haunted the people of Myanmar regarding this particular pageant. First, should Myanmar have sent a contestant at all, given the massive, monstrous and ongoing repression against the Myanmar public by the State Administration Council (SAC)?
Second, shouldn’t the candidate be using her platform to speak out for the people of Myanmar, promoting their cause and calling on the international community to at least sympathize with them?
The work of building a unified national identity in Myanmar was largely suspended after the 2021 coup. But Myanmar’s people, with various political leanings or none at all, remain in constant search of a common identity that can hold them together.
The lack of democracy and the emergence of parallel bottom-up federalist political structures in Myanmar cast doubt on the existence of a common national identity, even before the coup. In this context, the work of building a national identity is extremely challenging and is often hijacked by controversial issues such as the beauty pageant in question.
Myanmar netizens—and most likely their offline counterparts as well—cannot help but participate in these emotional questions and viral debates, asking who is in which political camp, weighing up who is right and just, and who is not.
Some politically active netizens, who are focused on resisting the military dictatorship by any means necessary, argue that beauty pageants are frivolous and even more so now. Such events are abhorrent and unthinkable, they argue, given the levels of violence and chaos that Myanmar is currently experiencing.
On the other hand, thousands more “ordinary” netizens, regardless of their political leanings, are still giving digital applause to the contestant. She is Myanmar after all, they say, and Myanmar people should support her.
Yet another group, including so-called social media influencers and commentators, exert enormous peer pressure on their fellow netizens to at least ignore the pageant, if not strongly condemn it. These individuals tend to appeal to emotions and engage in naming, shaming, and blaming.
Some conspiracy theorists have also entered the fray, suggesting that the candidate’s seemingly huge support must be coming from the pro-military camp. There may be some truth in each of these arguments.
The field of debate and controversy surrounding this week’s pageant is not clear-cut. It is a complex and dynamic conversation, and contradictory views are professed, at different times, within various social media echo chambers. This traffic is mostly online, but it has spread offline as well.
It goes without saying that heated debates about this beauty pageant should not be at the centre of public discourse in Myanmar at the current political moment. For some people, focusing on it may even be an abomination.
However, dismissing the topic entirely risks overlooking thorny but important questions of identity, popular political discourse, and societal polarisation raised by the beauty pageant debate.
First, it is worth noting that the increasingly heated and viral controversy surrounding the contest reveals the degree of discursive leaderlessness in Myanmar politics in general. It also demonstrates a general lack of public intellectual voices in Myanmar society at this time. There are extremely few, if any, sane voices that are listened to by Myanmar citizens. The noise of the crowd, online or offline, can be deafening.
There is a limited understanding among researchers and commentators of Myanmar people’s political narratives, attitudes, and arguments in general, and those expressed on social media platforms in particular, after the coup.
Social, cultural and psychological factors may also be at play in people’s thinking about this particular controversy. Socially, there are and always will be free riders and the politically disinterested or even apathetic among Myanmar citizens, regardless of the level of suffering of millions of their fellow citizens. We simply cannot expect every single one of Myanmar’s 56 million or so to be on the side of the resistance.
Culturally, many people may still find such beauty pageants entertaining, even if many of them broadly identify with the resistance. The cultural consumption of these people may not always reflect their political ideals.
Psychologically, for many in Myanmar, who have had to consume depressing news and live under military dictatorship since the coup, the pageant and the contestant from Myanmar may be refreshing and even helpful in trying to forget the troubles of their lives, even if temporarily.
So, is a new hell breaking loose among Myanmar netizens and their offline counterparts? Maybe not. Or at least not yet. There have been and always will be extremes and polarisation, especially during a revolution against oppression and dictatorship.
The conversations about national identity ushered in by the Spring Revolution are still ongoing. Indeed, it is important to keep track of polarized political narratives, as divisions seem more apparent than ever, and to counter them when necessary. Who is in a position to do this, and what can help? These are questions that require further debate.
*Nyi Nyi Kyaw is an International Development Research Centre (Canada) research chair on forced displacement in Southeast Asia, currently based at the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.