Penal duress in (post)colonial Myanmar

Abstract

This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’ bodies) to show how these two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress – animate penal practice in powerful, productive and problematic ways. Resisting the urge to view imperial forms through a peripheralising northern lens, or solely in terms of continuity and discontinuity, we pursue an understanding of penal duress as a ubiquitous, yet distinctly situated and relational phenomenon that has taken form through local colonial experiences and their afterlives. In sum, we attend to ‘processes of partial inscriptions, modified displacements and amplified recuperations’ to discuss how relations of penal duress are endured and enduring in Myanmar today.