Elliott Prasse-Freeman
Biographic Data
| ID | 905041 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elliott Prasse-Freeman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elliott |
| FAMILY NAME | Prasse-Freeman |
| SIGNATURE | PRASSE-FREEMAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3078-0530 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 153 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Big data visuality and interstitial spaces of autonomy: Drones and blockchains in and around Myanmar's civil war
Emergent technologies – from blockchains to drones – have sparked debate over their benefit to marginalized populations. When used in humanitarian contexts, proponents laud their ability to facilitate service delivery while critics hold that these technologies enact new regimes of control. Yet, both advocates and adversaries alike presume that the form of big data visuality generated by these technologies operates to intensify and perfect knowled…
Arms Politics: Becoming and Being a Weapon in the Borderlands of Myanmar
The Revolutionary’s Two Temporalities: Activism, Failure, and Uneventing
Radical activists assess actions both for their relatively immediate effects and for their potential longer-term consequences. Provisional failures can become resources for future victories, while erstwhile successes can dissolve after apparent achievement. Drawing from ethnography with Burmese revolutionaries, this article shows how activists appear to engage two divergent temporal strategies divided by respective orientations toward failure: in…
Kaminer, Matan: Capitalist Colonial: Thai migrant workers in Israeli agriculture
The polyvocal Rohingya story
On Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement by Stephen Campbell
Spaces of revolution: Ethnic oppression and liberation in Myanmar
Bullets and Boomerangs
Through digital ethnography of the mass uprising against Myanmar's early-2021 military coup, this article considers appeals to "the international community," in which activists maneuver the simultaneous potential and peril of global entreaties, deploying a double-move of contradictory thrusts. To continue stoking the possibility of international intervention, activists reiterate demands while intensifying their affective content; conversely, they…
Refusing Rohingya: Reformulating Ethnicity Amid Blunt Biopolitics
Members of the Rohingya ethnos must navigate the Myanmar state's "blunt biopolitics"-a mode of regulation that neither protects nor intensively knows, but rather uses violence to govern, the populations rather than individuals it takes as its object. As classic resistance is ineffective against the excessive sovereign force activated in blunt biopolitics, Rohingya communities across Asia enact strategies of refusal-what this article theorizes as …
Reassessing Reification: Ethnicity amidst 'Failed' Governmentality in Burma and India
In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were 'reified' and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing 'reification' through the concept of go…
Surplus precaritization: Supply chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of hope in Myanmar's borderlands
The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather t…
Revisiting the Wages of Burman-Ness: Contradictions of Privilege in Myanmar
Myanmar’s much lauded but short-lived transition to a liberal capitalist order was marked by an upsurge in Islamophobia, anti-Muslim riots and the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into Bangladesh. Amid this conflagration, debates over ethnic inclusion, privilege and nationalism were prominent. Yet within these debates, even seemingly antagonistic positions incorporated the class-blindness characteristic of US liberal white p…
Resistance/refusal: Politics of manoeuvre under diffuse regimes of governmentality
How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering 'refusal', which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of 'resistance'. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with …
Nothing to lose but their (block)chains: Biometrics, techno-imaginaries, and transformations in Rohingya lives
Can stateless persons become legal-economic subjects without state ratification? Can they appropriate technologies not designed for them to create both new subjectivities and new forms of community? A Malaysia-based nonprofit social enterprise, composed of stateless Rohingya, has been attempting to circumvent state rejection by inscribing aspects of Rohingya (in)dividuals-biometric data, genealogy information, and records of community participati…
Necroeconomics: Dispossession, extraction, and indispensable/expendable laborers in contemporary Myanmar
Through ethnography of de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar, the article shows how threshold subjects - poor laborers uncertain whether they are relatively or absolutely unnecessary to the social system of profits and distribution - become vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction constituted by combining extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; willing laborers driven by …
Revolutionary responses to the Myanmar coup
While Myanmar's recent military coup has devastated many people in the country, particularly those from the Bamar majority, who had been enjoying a decade of quasi‐democracy, it has also produced a massive uprising against the military's seizure of power that appears to constitute a revolution. This is because amidst protests, general strikes, and guerrilla warfare, this majority has also been grappling with the failures of the last 10 years: thr…
Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, by Lilly Irani
Aung San Suu Kyi at the ICJ
This guest editorial reflects on the complexities underlying Aung San Suu Kyi's appearance at the International Court of Justice
Class and inequality
Myanmar's growth model remains dependent on natural resource extraction, a phenomenon which in comparative cases has led to marked increases in inequality. This chapter discusses Myanmar's political economy and focuses on facets that prevented both grossly unequal conditions from developing and class-consciousness from forming. It describes the political economy, and elaborates the four challenges: highly resource-extractive growth model; agraria…
The Rohingya crisis
Myanmar's recent ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya people, in which more than 600,000 people have been forced into Bangladesh, has shocked the world. This guest editorial considers some potential root causes driving the violence, principally the combination of economic precarity felt by average Burmese people, affective and participatory deficits within Burma's current democratic experience, ethno-nationalist mobilizations, and Islamophobia. These…
Burma's historic elections
This guest editorial looks at Burma's national elections that have the promise of radically changing Burma's government after over half a century of military rule
Seeking and Avoiding the Law in Burma: A Comment on Judith Beyer [At 30(4)]
Scapegoating in Burma (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
This guest editorial considers the attacks on the Rohingyas and Muslims in the wake of liberalization in Burma
Power, Civil Society, and an Inchoate Politics of the Daily in Burma/Myanmar
Burma/Myanmar's postcolonial elites have established a military-state with hybrid-imperial structures, characterized by high despotic but low infrastructural modes of power, and fueled by rent-extraction. Given the resulting evisceration of opposition political groups, citizens understand explicit politics as dangerous. That said, cleavages between state and the polity afford vast space for "civil society" groups (CS) to form and operate. CS stab…
Resistance/refusal: Politics of manoeuvre under diffuse regimes of governmentality
How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering 'refusal', which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of 'resistance'. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with …
Necroeconomics: Dispossession, extraction, and indispensable/expendable laborers in contemporary Myanmar
Through ethnography of de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar, the article shows how threshold subjects - poor laborers uncertain whether they are relatively or absolutely unnecessary to the social system of profits and distribution - become vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction constituted by combining extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; willing laborers driven by …
Power, Civil Society, and an Inchoate Politics of the Daily in Burma/Myanmar
Burma/Myanmar's postcolonial elites have established a military-state with hybrid-imperial structures, characterized by high despotic but low infrastructural modes of power, and fueled by rent-extraction. Given the resulting evisceration of opposition political groups, citizens understand explicit politics as dangerous. That said, cleavages between state and the polity afford vast space for "civil society" groups (CS) to form and operate. CS stab…
Revisiting the Wages of Burman-Ness: Contradictions of Privilege in Myanmar
Myanmar’s much lauded but short-lived transition to a liberal capitalist order was marked by an upsurge in Islamophobia, anti-Muslim riots and the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into Bangladesh. Amid this conflagration, debates over ethnic inclusion, privilege and nationalism were prominent. Yet within these debates, even seemingly antagonistic positions incorporated the class-blindness characteristic of US liberal white p…
The Rohingya crisis
Myanmar's recent ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya people, in which more than 600,000 people have been forced into Bangladesh, has shocked the world. This guest editorial considers some potential root causes driving the violence, principally the combination of economic precarity felt by average Burmese people, affective and participatory deficits within Burma's current democratic experience, ethno-nationalist mobilizations, and Islamophobia. These…
Refusing Rohingya: Reformulating Ethnicity Amid Blunt Biopolitics
Members of the Rohingya ethnos must navigate the Myanmar state's "blunt biopolitics"-a mode of regulation that neither protects nor intensively knows, but rather uses violence to govern, the populations rather than individuals it takes as its object. As classic resistance is ineffective against the excessive sovereign force activated in blunt biopolitics, Rohingya communities across Asia enact strategies of refusal-what this article theorizes as …
Revolutionary responses to the Myanmar coup
While Myanmar's recent military coup has devastated many people in the country, particularly those from the Bamar majority, who had been enjoying a decade of quasi‐democracy, it has also produced a massive uprising against the military's seizure of power that appears to constitute a revolution. This is because amidst protests, general strikes, and guerrilla warfare, this majority has also been grappling with the failures of the last 10 years: thr…
Surplus precaritization: Supply chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of hope in Myanmar's borderlands
The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather t…
Nothing to lose but their (block)chains: Biometrics, techno-imaginaries, and transformations in Rohingya lives
Can stateless persons become legal-economic subjects without state ratification? Can they appropriate technologies not designed for them to create both new subjectivities and new forms of community? A Malaysia-based nonprofit social enterprise, composed of stateless Rohingya, has been attempting to circumvent state rejection by inscribing aspects of Rohingya (in)dividuals-biometric data, genealogy information, and records of community participati…
Reassessing Reification: Ethnicity amidst 'Failed' Governmentality in Burma and India
In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were 'reified' and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing 'reification' through the concept of go…
Scapegoating in Burma (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
This guest editorial considers the attacks on the Rohingyas and Muslims in the wake of liberalization in Burma
Aung San Suu Kyi at the ICJ
This guest editorial reflects on the complexities underlying Aung San Suu Kyi's appearance at the International Court of Justice
Power, Civil Society, and an Inchoate Politics of the Daily in Burma/Myanmar
Burma/Myanmar's postcolonial elites have established a military-state with hybrid-imperial structures, characterized by high despotic but low infrastructural modes of power, and fueled by rent-extraction. Given the resulting evisceration of opposition political groups, citizens understand explicit politics as dangerous. That said, cleavages between state and the polity afford vast space for "civil society" groups (CS) to form and operate. CS stab…
Scapegoating in Burma (Respond to this article at http: (Www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
This guest editorial considers the attacks on the Rohingyas and Muslims in the wake of liberalization in Burma
Seeking and Avoiding the Law in Burma: A Comment on Judith Beyer [At 30(4)]
Burma's historic elections
This guest editorial looks at Burma's national elections that have the promise of radically changing Burma's government after over half a century of military rule
The Rohingya crisis
Myanmar's recent ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya people, in which more than 600,000 people have been forced into Bangladesh, has shocked the world. This guest editorial considers some potential root causes driving the violence, principally the combination of economic precarity felt by average Burmese people, affective and participatory deficits within Burma's current democratic experience, ethno-nationalist mobilizations, and Islamophobia. These…
Class and inequality
Myanmar's growth model remains dependent on natural resource extraction, a phenomenon which in comparative cases has led to marked increases in inequality. This chapter discusses Myanmar's political economy and focuses on facets that prevented both grossly unequal conditions from developing and class-consciousness from forming. It describes the political economy, and elaborates the four challenges: highly resource-extractive growth model; agraria…
Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, by Lilly Irani
Aung San Suu Kyi at the ICJ
This guest editorial reflects on the complexities underlying Aung San Suu Kyi's appearance at the International Court of Justice
Revolutionary responses to the Myanmar coup
While Myanmar's recent military coup has devastated many people in the country, particularly those from the Bamar majority, who had been enjoying a decade of quasi‐democracy, it has also produced a massive uprising against the military's seizure of power that appears to constitute a revolution. This is because amidst protests, general strikes, and guerrilla warfare, this majority has also been grappling with the failures of the last 10 years: thr…
Surplus precaritization: Supply chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of hope in Myanmar's borderlands
The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather t…
Revisiting the Wages of Burman-Ness: Contradictions of Privilege in Myanmar
Myanmar’s much lauded but short-lived transition to a liberal capitalist order was marked by an upsurge in Islamophobia, anti-Muslim riots and the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into Bangladesh. Amid this conflagration, debates over ethnic inclusion, privilege and nationalism were prominent. Yet within these debates, even seemingly antagonistic positions incorporated the class-blindness characteristic of US liberal white p…
Resistance/refusal: Politics of manoeuvre under diffuse regimes of governmentality
How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering 'refusal', which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of 'resistance'. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with …
Nothing to lose but their (block)chains: Biometrics, techno-imaginaries, and transformations in Rohingya lives
Can stateless persons become legal-economic subjects without state ratification? Can they appropriate technologies not designed for them to create both new subjectivities and new forms of community? A Malaysia-based nonprofit social enterprise, composed of stateless Rohingya, has been attempting to circumvent state rejection by inscribing aspects of Rohingya (in)dividuals-biometric data, genealogy information, and records of community participati…
Necroeconomics: Dispossession, extraction, and indispensable/expendable laborers in contemporary Myanmar
Through ethnography of de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar, the article shows how threshold subjects - poor laborers uncertain whether they are relatively or absolutely unnecessary to the social system of profits and distribution - become vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction constituted by combining extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; willing laborers driven by …
Bullets and Boomerangs
Through digital ethnography of the mass uprising against Myanmar's early-2021 military coup, this article considers appeals to "the international community," in which activists maneuver the simultaneous potential and peril of global entreaties, deploying a double-move of contradictory thrusts. To continue stoking the possibility of international intervention, activists reiterate demands while intensifying their affective content; conversely, they…
Refusing Rohingya: Reformulating Ethnicity Amid Blunt Biopolitics
Members of the Rohingya ethnos must navigate the Myanmar state's "blunt biopolitics"-a mode of regulation that neither protects nor intensively knows, but rather uses violence to govern, the populations rather than individuals it takes as its object. As classic resistance is ineffective against the excessive sovereign force activated in blunt biopolitics, Rohingya communities across Asia enact strategies of refusal-what this article theorizes as …
Reassessing Reification: Ethnicity amidst 'Failed' Governmentality in Burma and India
In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were 'reified' and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing 'reification' through the concept of go…
The polyvocal Rohingya story
On Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement by Stephen Campbell
Spaces of revolution: Ethnic oppression and liberation in Myanmar
Big data visuality and interstitial spaces of autonomy: Drones and blockchains in and around Myanmar's civil war
Emergent technologies – from blockchains to drones – have sparked debate over their benefit to marginalized populations. When used in humanitarian contexts, proponents laud their ability to facilitate service delivery while critics hold that these technologies enact new regimes of control. Yet, both advocates and adversaries alike presume that the form of big data visuality generated by these technologies operates to intensify and perfect knowled…
Arms Politics: Becoming and Being a Weapon in the Borderlands of Myanmar
The Revolutionary’s Two Temporalities: Activism, Failure, and Uneventing
Radical activists assess actions both for their relatively immediate effects and for their potential longer-term consequences. Provisional failures can become resources for future victories, while erstwhile successes can dissolve after apparent achievement. Drawing from ethnography with Burmese revolutionaries, this article shows how activists appear to engage two divergent temporal strategies divided by respective orientations toward failure: in…
Kaminer, Matan: Capitalist Colonial: Thai migrant workers in Israeli agriculture
Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Cambodian History and Society (10 works) · Economics (7 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (7 works)