Nick Cheesman
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 575205 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Nick Cheesman |
| NOMBRES | Nick |
| APELLIDO | Cheesman |
| FIRMA | CHEESMAN N |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4224-7709 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 32 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 282 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Armenia, Gaza, and the Trouble of Political Trial
Interpretation and political science in Australia
What’s to know about politics? Positivism and tradition in Australian undergraduate programme and course descriptions
Introduction
Myanmar is in a protracted revolutionary situation. State military authority has been greatly weakened but has not collapsed in the face of an array of armed and unarmed forces, new and established, which have fought against the junta that seized power in 2021. What forms of solidarity have contributed to the making of a revolutionary situation in Myanmar? How have they been sustained? Where and why has solidarity been hindered or broken? These q…
On the banality of paperwork and the brutality of judicial bureaucracy in Myanmar
Bureaucratic paperwork seems to be self-evidently banal. But why \ndoes it matter that paperwork has this appearance? What work is \nbanality doing? This article addresses these general questions by \nattending to three specific material qualities of banality in files \nfrom Myanmar’s Supreme Court under military dictatorship, for the \nyears 1992–1998: namely, their uniform typeface, frequent \ntabulation, and strenuous concatenation. Each has a…
Law and Order
Law and order denotes a negative form of peace secured among the members of a given social or political order. Minimally, it is an appeal to restore public order to conditions classed as disorderly, or to defend it against potential or articulated threats. But what counts as public disorder, and why is it a problem for any given social or political order? Although social and political scientists tend to concur that it is determined by tradition a…
Torture in Thailand at the Limits of Law
How do courts mediate the relationship between the practice of torture and the content of law in places where torture is neither explicitly criminalized nor authorized? If torture is recounted in court, then what happens? Drawing on sixteen months of observation and documentary research in Thailand, this article outlines a jurisprudence of torture in which judges accommodate the practice by denying the facticity of narratives about torture, or ac…
Reading paperwork realistically
According to Steven Lubet, documentation freezes facts in time. For this reason, it is, he thinks, more reliable than other kinds of evidence. That makes it especially useful for fact checking. However, this is not a realistic way to read for evidence in documents. It ignores or downplays a crucial fact that inheres to all paperwork, which ethnographers have long heeded: documents do not report on facts; they render them. Ethnographically informe…
Cyborgs, Torturers, and the Making of Forensic Psychological Knowledge
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Introduction
Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
Introduction
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation ena…
Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar's contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, i…
Conflict in Myanmar
As Myanmar's military adjusts to life with its former opponents holding elected office, Conflict in Myanmar showcases innovative research by a rising generation of scholars, analysts and practitioners about the past five years of political transformation. Each of its seventeen chapters, from participants in the 2015 Myanmar Update conference held at the Australian National University, builds on theoretically informed, evidence-based research to g…
Opposing the Rule of Law
Introduction
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation ena…
How in Myanmar "National Races" Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar’s contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, i…
Anticipating the Struggle against Everyday Impunity in Myanmar through Accounts from Bangladesh and Thailand
Work done internationally to address impunity concentrates on removing blanket amnesties and establishing commissions of inquiry into past atrocities. Everyday impunity—the impossibility of bringing state officers to account for routinized violent crimes against other individuals—gets less attention, even though its effects on public life are insidious. Studying the 2014 killing of a journalist, we identify modes for the production of everyday im…
Rule-of-law Lineages in Colonial and Early Post-colonial Burma
These days the rule of law is often invoked in Burma. Although its contemporary salience is partly a consequence of recent global trends, the rule of law also has lineages in the country's colonial and early post-colonial periods. To examine these lineages, this article distinguishes between its procedural and substantive conceptions. Whereas the latter conception recognizes the subjects of law as freely associating equals, the former is compatib…
Opposing the Rule of Law
The rule of law is a political ideal today endorsed and promoted worldwide. Or is it? In a significant contribution to the field, Nick Cheesman argues that Myanmar is a country in which the rule of law is 'lexically present but semantically absent'. Charting ideas and practices from British colonial rule through military dictatorship to the present day, Cheesman calls upon political and legal theory to explain how and why institutions animated by…
Opposing the Rule of Law
Introduction 1. How law and order opposes the rule of law 2. Ordering law in the colony 3. Reordering law in the postcolony 4. Subsuming law to order 5. Embodying the law and order ideal 6. Performing order, making money 7. Through disorder, law and order 8. Speaking up for the rule of law 9. Against quietude Glossary Bibliography Index
Edward Schatz, Slow anti-Americanism
Additional informationNotes on contributorsNick CheesmanNick Cheesman (PhD, ANU) is Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. The author of Opposing the rule of law: How Myanmar’s courts make law and order (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015), he publishes on state violence—recently in Law and Social Inquiry; Politics, Groups, and Identities; and, Human Rights Quarterly. He also…
Sacred Men
Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam." The Journal of Pacific History, 56(1), pp. 85–86
The Constitution of Myanmar
Myanmar, formerly Burma, has had long spells without a written constitution. From a military coup in 1962 to the establishment of a socialist economy in 1974, and from another coup in 1988 to 2011
How in Myanmar "National Races" Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar’s contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, i…
Opposing the Rule of Law
Introduction 1. How law and order opposes the rule of law 2. Ordering law in the colony 3. Reordering law in the postcolony 4. Subsuming law to order 5. Embodying the law and order ideal 6. Performing order, making money 7. Through disorder, law and order 8. Speaking up for the rule of law 9. Against quietude Glossary Bibliography Index
Seeing 'Karen' in the Union of Myanmar
Karen identity is problematic, as peoples known as 'Karen' do not share a common language, culture, religion or material characteristics. Most of the research on Karens has been conducted in Thailand, but the dominant 'pan-Karen' identity is a product of social and historical forces in Myanmar, where this study is focused. In the main part of this paper, I reveal the subjective criteria that have come to signify pan-Karen identity. My primary sou…
Introduction
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation ena…
How an Authoritarian Regime in Burma Used Special Courts to Defeat Judicial Independence
Why do authoritarian rulers establish special courts? One view is that they do so to insulate the judiciary from politically oriented cases and allow it continued, albeit limited, independence. In this article I present a contrary case study of an authoritarian regime in Burma that used special courts not to insulate the judiciary but to defeat it. Through comparison to other Asian cases I suggest that the Burmese regime's composition and charact…
Introduction
Myanmar is in a protracted revolutionary situation. State military authority has been greatly weakened but has not collapsed in the face of an array of armed and unarmed forces, new and established, which have fought against the junta that seized power in 2021. What forms of solidarity have contributed to the making of a revolutionary situation in Myanmar? How have they been sustained? Where and why has solidarity been hindered or broken? These q…
School, State and Sangha in Burma
This article explores by means of an historical descriptive analysis of schooling in Burma the merits of historical descriptive analysis in comparative education. It demonstrates how control over schooling is likely to relate to state legitimacy. Prior to the nineteenth century, the supervision of teaching in Burma was undertaken not by the state but rather by the monasteries of the Theravada Buddhist order, the Sangha. The monastic schools were …
What Does the Rule of Law Have to do with Democratization (in Myanmar)
Talk of the rule of law is today ubiquitous in Myanmar. But what does the rule of law mean? And what does it have to do with the country's nascent democratization? One way to conceptualize the rule of law is in terms of substantive legal equality. Burmese farmers and activists mobilizing through the lexicon of law to defend agricultural land against intrusive state projects engage with the rule of law in this sense. Another way is as a language o…
Ruling Myanmar
November 2010 sees the first elections in Myanmar/Burma since 1990, to be held as the culmination of the military regime’s 'Road Map for Democracy' The conditions under which the elections are being held are far from favourable, although the laws and procedures under which they will be conducted have been in place for seven months and quite widely publicized. Political controls remain repressive, freedom of expression and assembly does not exist,…
That Signifier of Desire, the Rule of Law
Calls for the rule of law sometimes signify desire for substantive political and legal equality, and sometimes are used to justify technical interventions, especially to reform courts and police. While the rule of law can generate confusion by signifying different desires for different people, in Myanmar it is more problematic when used to justify technical interventions. Mistaking intention for weakness, the advocates of institutional fixes insu…
Thin Rule of Law or Un-Rule of Law in Myanmar
T he government of Myanmar has responded to worldwide dismay over the May 2009 criminal trial of democracy icon Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for allegedly violating the terms of her house arrest by characterizing it as a simple and unavoidable matter of law. State-run media outlets have rebutted arguments that the charges are baseless, erroneous and politically motivated. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to criticism from the United Nations Secu…
The Constitution of Myanmar
Myanmar, formerly Burma, has had long spells without a written constitution. From a military coup in 1962 to the establishment of a socialist economy in 1974, and from another coup in 1988 to 2011
Introduction
Rule-of-law Lineages in Colonial and Early Post-colonial Burma
These days the rule of law is often invoked in Burma. Although its contemporary salience is partly a consequence of recent global trends, the rule of law also has lineages in the country's colonial and early post-colonial periods. To examine these lineages, this article distinguishes between its procedural and substantive conceptions. Whereas the latter conception recognizes the subjects of law as freely associating equals, the former is compatib…
Law and Order
Law and order denotes a negative form of peace secured among the members of a given social or political order. Minimally, it is an appeal to restore public order to conditions classed as disorderly, or to defend it against potential or articulated threats. But what counts as public disorder, and why is it a problem for any given social or political order? Although social and political scientists tend to concur that it is determined by tradition a…
Cyborgs, Torturers, and the Making of Forensic Psychological Knowledge
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Anticipating the Struggle against Everyday Impunity in Myanmar through Accounts from Bangladesh and Thailand
Work done internationally to address impunity concentrates on removing blanket amnesties and establishing commissions of inquiry into past atrocities. Everyday impunity—the impossibility of bringing state officers to account for routinized violent crimes against other individuals—gets less attention, even though its effects on public life are insidious. Studying the 2014 killing of a journalist, we identify modes for the production of everyday im…
Seeing 'Karen' in the Union of Myanmar
Karen identity is problematic, as peoples known as 'Karen' do not share a common language, culture, religion or material characteristics. Most of the research on Karens has been conducted in Thailand, but the dominant 'pan-Karen' identity is a product of social and historical forces in Myanmar, where this study is focused. In the main part of this paper, I reveal the subjective criteria that have come to signify pan-Karen identity. My primary sou…
School, State and Sangha in Burma
This article explores by means of an historical descriptive analysis of schooling in Burma the merits of historical descriptive analysis in comparative education. It demonstrates how control over schooling is likely to relate to state legitimacy. Prior to the nineteenth century, the supervision of teaching in Burma was undertaken not by the state but rather by the monasteries of the Theravada Buddhist order, the Sangha. The monastic schools were …
Thin Rule of Law or Un-Rule of Law in Myanmar
T he government of Myanmar has responded to worldwide dismay over the May 2009 criminal trial of democracy icon Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for allegedly violating the terms of her house arrest by characterizing it as a simple and unavoidable matter of law. State-run media outlets have rebutted arguments that the charges are baseless, erroneous and politically motivated. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to criticism from the United Nations Secu…
How an Authoritarian Regime in Burma Used Special Courts to Defeat Judicial Independence
Why do authoritarian rulers establish special courts? One view is that they do so to insulate the judiciary from politically oriented cases and allow it continued, albeit limited, independence. In this article I present a contrary case study of an authoritarian regime in Burma that used special courts not to insulate the judiciary but to defeat it. Through comparison to other Asian cases I suggest that the Burmese regime's composition and charact…
Human Rights in Asia
Ruling Myanmar
November 2010 sees the first elections in Myanmar/Burma since 1990, to be held as the culmination of the military regime’s 'Road Map for Democracy' The conditions under which the elections are being held are far from favourable, although the laws and procedures under which they will be conducted have been in place for seven months and quite widely publicized. Political controls remain repressive, freedom of expression and assembly does not exist,…
What Does the Rule of Law Have to do with Democratization (in Myanmar)
Talk of the rule of law is today ubiquitous in Myanmar. But what does the rule of law mean? And what does it have to do with the country's nascent democratization? One way to conceptualize the rule of law is in terms of substantive legal equality. Burmese farmers and activists mobilizing through the lexicon of law to defend agricultural land against intrusive state projects engage with the rule of law in this sense. Another way is as a language o…
Opposing the Rule of Law
The rule of law is a political ideal today endorsed and promoted worldwide. Or is it? In a significant contribution to the field, Nick Cheesman argues that Myanmar is a country in which the rule of law is 'lexically present but semantically absent'. Charting ideas and practices from British colonial rule through military dictatorship to the present day, Cheesman calls upon political and legal theory to explain how and why institutions animated by…
Opposing the Rule of Law
Introduction 1. How law and order opposes the rule of law 2. Ordering law in the colony 3. Reordering law in the postcolony 4. Subsuming law to order 5. Embodying the law and order ideal 6. Performing order, making money 7. Through disorder, law and order 8. Speaking up for the rule of law 9. Against quietude Glossary Bibliography Index
That Signifier of Desire, the Rule of Law
Calls for the rule of law sometimes signify desire for substantive political and legal equality, and sometimes are used to justify technical interventions, especially to reform courts and police. While the rule of law can generate confusion by signifying different desires for different people, in Myanmar it is more problematic when used to justify technical interventions. Mistaking intention for weakness, the advocates of institutional fixes insu…
Anticipating the Struggle against Everyday Impunity in Myanmar through Accounts from Bangladesh and Thailand
Work done internationally to address impunity concentrates on removing blanket amnesties and establishing commissions of inquiry into past atrocities. Everyday impunity—the impossibility of bringing state officers to account for routinized violent crimes against other individuals—gets less attention, even though its effects on public life are insidious. Studying the 2014 killing of a journalist, we identify modes for the production of everyday im…
Rule-of-law Lineages in Colonial and Early Post-colonial Burma
These days the rule of law is often invoked in Burma. Although its contemporary salience is partly a consequence of recent global trends, the rule of law also has lineages in the country's colonial and early post-colonial periods. To examine these lineages, this article distinguishes between its procedural and substantive conceptions. Whereas the latter conception recognizes the subjects of law as freely associating equals, the former is compatib…
Conflict in Myanmar
As Myanmar's military adjusts to life with its former opponents holding elected office, Conflict in Myanmar showcases innovative research by a rising generation of scholars, analysts and practitioners about the past five years of political transformation. Each of its seventeen chapters, from participants in the 2015 Myanmar Update conference held at the Australian National University, builds on theoretically informed, evidence-based research to g…
Opposing the Rule of Law
Introduction
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation ena…
How in Myanmar "National Races" Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar’s contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, i…
Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
Introduction
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation ena…
Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya
The idea of “national races” or taingyintha has animated brutal conflict in Myanmar over who or what is “Rohingya.” But because the term is translated from Burmese inconsistently, and because its usage is contingent, its peculiar significance for political speech and action has been lost in work on Myanmar by scholars writing in English. Out of concern that Myanmar's contemporary politics cannot be understood without reckoning with taingyintha, i…
Introduction
Reading paperwork realistically
According to Steven Lubet, documentation freezes facts in time. For this reason, it is, he thinks, more reliable than other kinds of evidence. That makes it especially useful for fact checking. However, this is not a realistic way to read for evidence in documents. It ignores or downplays a crucial fact that inheres to all paperwork, which ethnographers have long heeded: documents do not report on facts; they render them. Ethnographically informe…
Cyborgs, Torturers, and the Making of Forensic Psychological Knowledge
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
On the banality of paperwork and the brutality of judicial bureaucracy in Myanmar
Bureaucratic paperwork seems to be self-evidently banal. But why \ndoes it matter that paperwork has this appearance? What work is \nbanality doing? This article addresses these general questions by \nattending to three specific material qualities of banality in files \nfrom Myanmar’s Supreme Court under military dictatorship, for the \nyears 1992–1998: namely, their uniform typeface, frequent \ntabulation, and strenuous concatenation. Each has a…
Law and Order
Law and order denotes a negative form of peace secured among the members of a given social or political order. Minimally, it is an appeal to restore public order to conditions classed as disorderly, or to defend it against potential or articulated threats. But what counts as public disorder, and why is it a problem for any given social or political order? Although social and political scientists tend to concur that it is determined by tradition a…
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