Responsibility to protest: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of motives for protest participation in Myanmar.

Abstract

Why do people protest in contexts known for violent suppression and imprisonment of protesters? There is a lack of psychological research on protest participation in repressive contexts. We address this gap by asking how individuals in Myanmar understand their motives for participating in a 2015 protest march against the enactment of the National Education Law (NEL), which was perceived to limit academic freedom and centralize control over education policy. The movement ended in a violent crackdown, involving the arrests of students, activists, and others. Applying interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to semistructured interview data from protesters, we identify four main themes in answer to the research question. First, the participants perceived the protest as important for making crucial change in an unjust law. Second, the participants had developed a student activist identity, rooted in a long tradition of student activism in Myanmar. Third, participants expressed a strong sense of responsibility to take part in the protest. And fourth, the participants described an expectation to achieve change, despite considerations of possible repressive and violent responses from authorities. These results add perspectives to existing psychological research and theory on protest participation. The present study also complements conventional deductive research designs, which use preexisting universal variables to quantitatively test hypotheses. Instead, we offer inductively gained insights into how individuals phenomenologically made sense of their motives for participating in protest within a particular sociopolitical context. We argue that the strongly felt responsibility to participate that individuals experience is a topic that requires further study. Public Significance StatementThis study presents a multifaceted and contextually situated picture of how individuals in Myanmar understand their motives to participate in protest in a context known for violent suppression of protests and imprisonment of demonstrators. We find that the protest participants' motives are more complex and interrelated than existing social psychological frameworks assume. In particular, we explore the strongly felt responsibility to participate that individuals experience.

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