Free Burma: Transnational Legal Action and Corporate Accountability

Notes

217 Preface 1. Arturo Escobar, “Power and Visibility: Development and the Intervention of Management in the Third World,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 4 (1988): 428–43. 2. Michael Burawoy, ed., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Transnational World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 65. Introduction 1. The ruling military regime of Myanmar changed its name from the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) to the State Peace and Development Council in November 1997. Despite the change in name and a reshuffling of leadership within the government, there was no significant change in the military ’s governance. 2. Daniel Mato, “On Global and Local Agents and the Social Making of Transnational Identities and Related Agendas in Latin America,” Identities 4, no. 2 (1997): 171. 3. Sarah A. Radcliffe, “Development, the State, and Transnational Political Connections: State and Subject Formations in Latin America,” Global Networks 1, no. 1 (2001): 1936. 4. See Robert I. Rotberg, ed., Burma: Prospects for a Democratic Future (Washington , D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), especially the following chapters : John J. Brandon, “The State’s Role in Education in Burma: An Overview”; Notes 218 Notes to Introduction Mark Mason, “Foreign Direct Investment in Burma: Trends, Determinants, and Prospects”; Marvin C. Ott, “From Isolation to Relevance: Policy Considerations”; and Andrew Selth, “The Armed Forces and Military Rule in Burma.” 5. See Mya Than, “Economic Transformation in Southeast Asia: The Case of Myanmar,” in Burma/Myanmar toward the Twenty-first Century: Dynamic of Continuity and Change, ed. John J. Brandon (Bangkok, Thailand: T.K. Printing, 1997). 6. Bertril Lintner, “Arrested Development: Is the Opposition Doomed to Irrelevance?” Far Eastern Economic Review (March 2, 1995): 28–29. 7. Tin Maung Maung Than, “Myanmar Democratization: Punctuated Equilibrium or Retrograde Motion?” in Democratization in Southeast and East Asia, ed. Anek Laothamatas (Singapore: Silkworm Books, 1997). 8. See Mary P. Callahan, “On Time Warps and Warped Time: Lessons from Burma’s ‘Democratic Era’” and Joseph Silverstein, “The Evolution and Salience of Burma’s National Political Culture,” both in Burma, ed. Rotberg. 9. See, for example, Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Doug McAdam et al., “Introduction: Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Framing Processes—Toward a Synthetic, Comparative Perspective on Social Movements,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities , Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, ed. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a useful typology of state-centered analyses (state autonomy, state capacity , political opportunity, and state constructionist) and a lucid discussion of the strengths and limitations of each type of state-centered approach to revolutions (and collective action in any of its forms), see Jeff Goodwin, “State-centered Approaches to Social Revolutions: Strengths and Limitations of a Theoretical Tradition,” in Theorizing Revolutions, ed. John Foran (London: Routledge, 1997). 10. Sanjeev Khagram, Kathryn Sikkink, and James V. Riker, Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 8; and Tarrow, Power in Movement, 184. 11. For a fuller treatment of this case, see John Dale, “Transnational Conflict between Peasants and Corporations in Burma: Human Rights and Discursive Ambivalence under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act,” in The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, ed. Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 285–319. 12. U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1350. 13. Khagram, Sikkink, and Riker, Restructuring World Politics, 7. 14. An INGO is a private, voluntary, nonprofit association whose chief aim is to influence publicly some form of social change. It has legal status and tends to be professionally staffed and more formally organized than a social movement. In general, this is true of all nongovernmental organizations, domestic as well as international. Indeed, both may have aims that are cross-national or international in scope. Yet INGOs also have a decision-making structure with voting members from multiple countries. Examples include Oxfam International, Mercy Notes to Introduction 219 Corps, World Vision International, and Save the Children Alliance. An INGO may be founded through private philanthropy, such as the Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur , or Gates foundations, or as adjunct to existing international organizations , such as the Catholic Church’s INGO Catholic Relief Services. 15. Transnational advocacy networks are configurations of nonstate actors, based usually on informal contacts...