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Identity, Culture, and the State

Edited by David S. Meyer,

Nancy Whittier, & Belinda Robnett

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

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T h r e e S o u t h e a s t Asian C o u n t r i e s

State Repression and Democracy Protest

in Three Southeast Asian Countries

VINCENT BOUDREAU

Between 1986 and 1998, three Southeast Asian dictators of long standing,
Ne Win in Burma, Suharto in Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, resigned in the face of broad popular protest. Democratization scholars, particularly those who describe recent transitions to democracy as part
of a single "third wave," have viewed Philippine and Indonesian transitions
as different examples of the same general political developmentand the
Burmese case as perhaps a near miss. 1 But were the Indonesian and Philippine transitions really similar? Did Burma miss the democratizing bandwagon
by a hair's breadth or a country mile? If we attend to the processes and patterns of the struggle, instead of to the mere fact that democracy movements
occurred in each place, the Indonesian, Burmese, and Philippine cases vary
tremendously. In this work, I investigate the contours and causes of variation in contentious processes among these three countries. Specifically, I
argue that important variations in movement identities, tactics, and influence
reflected ongoing interactions between the authoritarian regimes and their
societies. Those variations, and their structural roots, must be central to any
explanation of the protests.
Those w h o have examined democracy struggles as social movements
often ask what factors influence anti-regime mobilization, including poten^
tial movement allies, shifting policies, and changes in the likelihood or severity of repression (Hipsher 1998; Melucci and Lyyra 1998; Sandoval 1998).
Mobilization levels, however, tell us relatively little about how protest drives
processes of regime fragmentation and defection so closely associated with
transitions to democracy. Under what conditions does protest bring down a
regime accustomed to crushing dissent? One clue lies in an odd coupling of
28

2-9

tactics and goals common to many democracy movements: essentially (or

initially) peaceful demonstrations demanding regime change. In cases other
than democracy movement, we are more used to seeing two different couplings of tactics and objectives: state-replacing movements adopt violent
modes of struggles, whereas movements for reform embrace more peaceful
protest (Zald 1988; Boudreau 1996). In the former case, the movement accumulates enough power to displace the regime; in the latter, it adopts tactics that will appeal to the regime's sensibilities. Democracy movements more
generally work by encouraging loose or discouraged elements of the regime's
supporting coalition to defect.
To fully understand this process, however, we need a fix on the character
of potential alliances between state defectors and protesters; here, an ideational
story line comes into play alongside more material factors. Patterns of state
repression influence the institutions, social bases, and collective repertoires
available to dissidents (Schurman 1989). Some sorts of repression drive claim
makers far underground, or into radicalizing mass alliances. Other kinds of
repression may decimate activist institutions and render protest tentative and
cautious; still others may distinguish those who elect moderate dissent from
potential radicals. Movement identities emerge in relation to such processes
of contention and are not essential or fixed (Snow and Benford 1992). But
the same is true of state actor identities, for modes of resistance (rather than
essential hard- or soft-line orientations [O'Donnell 1989; White 1994]) surely
shape how potential reformers inside the state react to dissent. Strong and
vibrant anti-dictatorship movements may embolden state officials to take a
reforming stance, while the absence of such movements may compel state
actors to swallow their criticisms. Radicalized movements may encourage state
actors to close ranks, while more moderate dissidents may invite defection.
Hence, whether democracy movements and state actors are politically or
physically available to one another greatly influences what modes of contention may cause defection from the regime, as well as the likely political con^
sequences of such defections.

Political Context: State Repression, Movement Repertoires

Ne Win, Suharto, and Marcos all needed to repress dissent and resistance. I
argue elsewhere that the dictators each tuned repression to thwart their strongest
challengers and maximize their own strengths (Boudreau 1998). Repression,
in short, was a strategic matter for these men, developed in their respective
rises to power and subsequently adjusted to meet new challenges. From these
patterns of repression, the new regimes took shape. In Burma, General Ne
Win directed his military (the Tatmadaw) to clear the urban areas of open

States and Policies

Three Southeast Asian Countries

politics, including protest. The military hierarchy itself became the new
regime's core, and ensured that civilian politicians had no role outside the
Tatmadaw-dominated Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP). Suharto took
power during a furious but one-sided battle between the only two national
organizations in Indonesia, the military and the Communist Party (ABRI,
Angkatan Bersanjata Republik Indonesia, and the PKI, Partai Komunis Indonesia, respectively). Having physically exterminated the PKI, ABRI constructed a vast corporatist machinery and banned most forms of political
organization outside that structure. Under cover of Philippine martial law,
Marcos jailed many of his parliamentary opponents and chased communist
insurgents into the hillsbut eliminated neither. He then built his New Society regime by amassing central powers and resources and using those to limit
the exercise of civil liberties, representative institutions, and legal processes
that he still formally allowed.
The repressive styles at the core of these new regimes shaped political
contention by conditioning the possible choices available to dissidents. Repression taught activists lessons about the likely consequences of dissident
acts and helped claims makers think about how opposition might work or
fail. Ne Win, for instance, used great violence against lowland protests but
periodically allowed insurgent groups to operate under state license in distant "un-Burmese" frontiers, groups like those most under fire in Indonesia.
In each setting, patterns of repression eliminated some movement organizations but left others, proscribed some activities but allowed alternatives.
Repression also shaped oppositional identities by clarifying boundaries between the subversive and the innocuous and thereby shaping dissidents' programs of struggles, the social coalitions such programs would attract, and
the designation of movement participants as nationalists, moral critics, revolutionaries, or something else. These identities had roots in larger structures
of power but also influenced how dissidents perceived or engaged those structures. Over time, interactions between state repression and social movements
created sets of relational possibilities between social and state actors. Repression influenced whether social allies were physically, organizationally, or ideologically available to potential state defectors. Let us examine these established
relationships in each case before focusing on the democracy movements.
In Burma, Ne Win cemented his dictatorship by murdering student demonstrators at Rangoon University in June 1962 and building the BSPP as the
sole narrow avenue for political participation. From then on, the military
violently attacked each (admittedly rare) protest against the state (Silverstein
and Wohl 1964). Dissidents escaped prison or murder by joining frontier
insurgencies or forming secret underground cells. These latter institutions,
however, remained largely isolated from one another, for no legal associations existed to provide them cover, and state repression severed links to the

Burmese Communist Party (BCP) in the 1960s. Protest required powerful

exogenous stimuli, such as famine or currency crisis, that pushed large sections of society toward revoltfor few Burmese would risk murderous state
violence unless demonstrations could threaten enough disruption to displace
the state. Hence, waves of protest began as unruly and spontaneous affairs
(Steinberg 1981) that grew organized as underground activists entered the
fray. Burmese protest had a cataclysmic, all-or-nothing dynamic: activists
working the tail end of a protest upsurge often pursued increasingly radical
activities, fueled by the certainty that the state would retaliate if it survived.
By eliminating the PKI, constructing a corporatist machinery, and restricting the possibility of independent political organizations, the Indonesian state
under Suharto completely reworked the conditions of political contention.
Mobilizations no longer had the institutional support, guidance, or continuity that political organizations, particularly the defunct PKI, once provided.
Still, because the state lay secure behind its corporatist monopoly, Suharto
tolerated unorganized protest and generally did not murder or arrest demonstrators (with the important exception of separatists). The regime countered protest mainly via after-the-fact restrictions on organization forms that
had been too successful, supported by conflations of organization and communism in state propaganda that invoked the New Order's baptismal slaughter. Activists quickly picked up on the new rules and responded to regime
proscriptions against organization by adopting new (and often small-scale)
organization forms the regime still had not banned. Activists rarely experimented with illegal organization forms, and students especially began to
describe their movement as a "moral" (and explicitly not an organized "political") force. In consequence, protest remained small, rather than national;
thematically limited, rather than holistic; and short-lived, rather than sustained
(Aspinall 1993). Deprived of strong movement organizations, protesters eventually found careers in the country's dynamic economic mainstream, and
meanwhile developed cautious modes of criticizing the regime that preserved
the possibility of reengaging in the economy, and they frequently relied on
support from select state actors.
In the Philippines, Marcos never eliminated either protest (as in Burma)
or anti-regime organization (as in Indonesia) but sought to divide moderates
from communist insurgents by coopting the former (Anderson 1998) and
squashing the latter. However, Marcos's main early concern with state building (rather than decisive attacks on adversaries) provided opponents with
leeway crucial to challenge his program. Almost all parliamentary opponents
survived the first crackdown. They soon organized human rights associations
and, by 1978, political parties. The Left insurgency weathered strong repression in the early 1970s and then steadily built a comparatively elaborate
network of front organizations and underground units. Both centrist and Left

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32

Three Southeast Asian Countries

States and Policies

groups sheltered behind civic and religious institutions, and a combination

of these institutions and movement organizations supported individual activist careers for decades (far longer than in Indonesia; far more open than in
Burma). Building on organizational bases that survived martial law, these
opposition groups thwarted Marcos's scheme to co-opt the political center,
for while promised reform often excited moderate hopes (and even triggered
radical experiments with open struggle), the disappointment of those hopes
(inevitable under Marcos) drove angry liberal dissidents toward radical positions and alliances. Rather than isolating the Left, therefore, regime activity
underwrote stronger Center-Left coalitions. All regime opponents, moreover,
developed organizations that expanded and accumulated; most adopted revolutionary ways of describing their struggle, if not radical programs for a posttransition society.
The relationship between state repression and political contention in each
case varies considerably, but in each, state actors' decisions about repression
condition the choices available to claim makers thereafter. Indonesia and
Burma provide the sharpest contrasts. Whereas the Indonesian state eliminated forms of movement organization and then allowed protest a freer hand,
the Burmese regime violently repressed protest in ways that drove dissidents
into secret or distant movement organizations. The Philippine state adopted
a policy eliminating neither protest nor political organization, but harassing
both; the strategy was designed to preserve a liberal facade to mollify moderate opponents. Instead, it created an opposition that accumulated across
the dictatorship. Table 2.1 represents the relationship between strategies of
state repression and modes of political contention. We turn now to a more
focused discussion of the three democracy movements.

Burma
The Burmese democracy protests of 1988 began, like every post-1962 movement, with widespread economic crisis and unorganized demonstrations. To
meet massive external debt in 1987, the state cut farm-gate prices, angering
rural cultivators. By October, the government announced a crushing demonetization of 25, 35, and 75 Kyat notes. In both Rangoon and Mandalay, students protested and vandalized government facilities. Similar actions occurred
several weeks later in Arakan state and Pyinmana, several bombs exploded
in Rangoon, and antigovernment pamphlets surfaced both there and in
Mandalay. The regime closed urban universities to clear the cities of protest
and sent students home, ending the protests but also spreading word of them
upcountry, as the censored news media would not. Still, the 1987 protests
foreshadowed more serious contention from March to September 1988, when

33

TABLE 2 . 1 Summary of Regime Repression Strategies and Social Response

in Burma, Indonesia, a n d the Philippines
Burma

Indonesia

The Philippines

Dictator's initial
base of power.

Burmese military
(the Tatmadaw)

Indonesian
military (ABRI)

Philippine
presidency

Major regime
adversary

Urban political
parties

Indonesian
Communist Party
(PKI)

Rival elite politicians

Mode of domination

Smothering
military surveillance and the
repression of all
dissent

Strong corporatist
control prevents
dissent from
acquiring an
organized base

State attempts to
divide the centrist
and Left resistance
by limited
concessions to the
former and
violence against
the latter

Mode of repression

Prohibition of
open urban politics
and the murder of
demonstrators

Massive murder of
PKI members and
destruction of nonstate organizations

Arrests scatter or
detain both
underground and
legal dissidents,
but destroys neither

Institutions of
contention left by
repression

Frontier insurgent
armies and isolated
underground cells

Loose ad hoc
collectives, smallscale development
agencies, and
public intellectuals

Dense and
expanding protest
movement organizations, legal and
illegal parties, civic
groups, and an
armed underground

Patterns of
contention

Rare but cataclysmic uprisings that

grow more furious
and organized as
they progress; each
ends in state
violence

Limited, shortterm, and episodic

protests that often
look to influence
state policy or
support reputed
reformers inside
the state

Sustained,
organized, and
increasingly institutionalized protest
campaigns; an
expanding insurgency; and links of
support and recruitment between them

protests, riots, and repression shook Burma, beginning almost inadvertently

with police violence at a tea-shop fight. Before a September coup reimposed
military rule, thousands died, and Ne Win had resigned (Lintner 1990).
From March through September, the movement passed through three distinct phases, each shaped by the operation of different movement organization forms. Protest during the first stage was conditioned by the utter absence
of movement organizations or supporting social institutions. In mainly spontaneous Rangoon student demonstrations on March 12-14, protest leaders
emerged from crowds that were very nervous about government infiltration

34

States a n d Policies

and unequipped to screen imposters. Those who distinguished themselves by

public bravery or defiant speech acquired authority. Such acts provided the
best proof that their dissent was on the level, and a reckless defiance of authority became the guiding spirit for early demonstrations. After several days
of loosely organized campus protests, Burmese riot police moved into the
Rangoon Institute of Technology (RIT) to arrest students, but many protestors escaped. The next day, on March 16, students from the nearby
Rangoon University (RU) marched toward the RIT campus but clashed with
riot police crouched in ambush near a small white bridge at Inya Lake. That
day's casualties exceeded 200. At this stage, broad mass outrage and violence
(also unorganized) provided cover for students escaping murderous state
pursuit. Three days of broader skirmishes followed in which workers, slum
residents, and students fought the police and military (Sein Win 1988). On
March 18, protesters burned government facilities in downtown Rangoon.
Riot police attacked once more, exchanging gunfire with activists' rocks, firebombs, and other projectiles. Scores of protesters died, and the schools and
universities closed.
The movement's second phase began on Junei 5, marked by the first signs
of underground cell activity, manifest in a more explicitly political tone and
a closer political, rhetorical, and symbolic association with pre-1962 organizations and traditions of struggle. These underground cells were particular
creations of Ne Win's post-1962 repression: cautious, fragmented, and secret,
they lay inert for years at a time but were nevertheless important repositories
of movement experience. The idea of "going underground" survived from
Burma's vibrant pre-19 62 traditions, even as systematic state repression fragmented that underground and prevented any open dissent to which the underground could attach itself. After 1962, such cells were the fragile last ground
of dissent left by Ne Win's appetite to control and repress, containing veterans of pre-coup or later protests, younger people seeking an outlet for their
dissatisfaction, or, more rarely, actual BCP members. In the stifling atmosphere of Ne Win's Burma, such cells could not act except under extraordinary
conditions such as those the March protests provided. Thereafter, underground activists cultivated new student leaders (to replace those arrested) and
taught them to be more organization-minded.
On June 15 masked students (nobody in March wore masks) suddenly
broke from a crowd milling near the RU campus center, announced a demonstration, and made a more polished political speech than anything heard
in March. The next day, all of Rangoon's university campuses had protests,
but leaders now devoted great energy to building committees and linking
campuses. Some, like Maung Maung Kyaw, were known March leaders, but
most others were not. Often, demonstration speeches announced subsequent
activities. Small "lightning" rallies broke out in Rangoon's streets, where

T h r e e S o u t h e a s t Asian C o u n t r i e s

35

masked activists spoke for perhaps three minutes and then fled, leaving a flurry
of pamphlets spinning in their wake. 2 New protests also had a broader social
base than those in March. Workers, market vendors, and street gangs joined
marches that often dissolved into bloody battles simultaneously in different
parts of town. Activists outside Rangoon also began to weigh in, for many
students sent home in March remained there and drew provincial society into
the struggle. In Pegu and Moulmein, mid-June demonstrations coincided with
those in Rangoon, and the Pegu unrest lasted for days after Rangoon demonstrations subsided (Yitri 1989). The June protests finally tapered off in
another wave of massive arrests and shootings, and the movement lost another strata of leaders. This time, however, many surviving activists used the
break to travel upcountry and to begin building new movement centers for
the struggle's anticipated resumption.
On July 7, Ne Win shocked all of Burma by admitting state and personal
responsibility for the March and June shootings and resigning from the party
and state. His speech included broad criticism of socialist rule and introduced
the idea of a referendum to decide Burma's political future. But it also contained the dark warning: "When the T a t m a d a w shoots, it shoots to hit"
(Lintner 1990). Moreover, he named Low Htien commander Sein Lwin (the
man who commanded the troops during the March repression and during
repression in the 1970s and the 1962 attack) as his successor. The appointment triggered the most strongly national protests since independence. To
achieve the scope and coordination of these protests, activists depended
heavily on underground work under way since the June events, and others
shrewdly used interviews with BBC radio reporter Christopher Gunness to
announce national demonstrations on August 8 (Kyaw Yin Hlaing 1996).
By August 10, protest had occurred in virtually every Burmese town of any
size. Wherever populations protested, moreover, the Fighting Peacock Flag
of the All-Burma Student Union became their standard, associating the movement with the nationalist struggle against British colonialism decades earlier.
After several bloody days, Sein Lwin resigned on August 12, the state
apparatus pulled back from the struggle, and the movement's third period
began with utter, but uncertain euphoria. Strike committees quickly became
remarkably widespread, representing every conceivable constituency, from
transvestites to grave diggers. Demonstrations, more like victory parades,
occurred daily under strike committee auspices, and the committees also linked
movement elites to mass populations. Committees published newspapers, sent
organizers to smaller villages, collected food and money, secured rally venues, and established communication with other strike centers. In Mandalay,
monks and lawyers organized one citywide committee that managed to produce daily, peaceful protests from August 12 onward. In all of these remarkable moves toward organization and coordination, underground activists

States and Policies

Three Southeast Asian Countries

provided the coordination and experience that Burma's repressed society could
not. But they had difficulty keeping mass formations focused on the national
struggle. When government officials vacated government offices, many strike
committees moved in and soon bogged down in efforts to run villages. In
Rangoon, those who oversaw checkpoints to collect contributions and maintain security often came from local criminal gangs and acted in frighteningly
summary style. While underground activists tried to direct efforts toward
movement building and consolidation, the networks they controlled proved
too thin (and secret) to direct the movement. Students attempted to forge a
stronger public leadership by brokering a meeting between prominent figures Aung San Suu Kyi, General Tin Oo, Aung Gyi, and former Prime Minister U Nu, launching Ang San Suu Kyi to prominence but producing no unity
among the potential leaders.
In September, the democracy movement reached its apogee. Strike committees and underground cells pulled mass society into streets vacated by the
dictatorship, and elite pro-democracy activists were mass leaders. Burma's
brief carnival of democracy was nothing if not a movement of the whole
society against increasingly isolated state authorities. The state and army,
however, never split, despite rumors to the contrary. The state's withdrawal
in August eliminated opportunities for contact between potential state defectors and movement leaders, much as established patterns of normal state
repression had done before the protests. The pattern of Burmese repression
left an insular state divided from its society and pushed dissident elites toward mass allies, away from potential reformers inside the regime. Not only
did the regime not split but movement activists mistrusted any intermediate
reform program and narrowed their demands to immediate regime resignation. On September 18, the military retook the country with speed and brutality. In Rangoon alone, soldiers killed thousands. They smashed strike
committees, pursued students into the jungle, and enforced new and rigorous curfews and restrictions. Early estimates of those killed in September ran
as high as 10,000. Subsequent estimates were closer to 3,000, still a remarkably high figure.

the unclear status of presidential succession (Liddle 1995). To bolster their

position, some players in this struggle courted social support, particularly
among students, in the process reintroducing campus institutions, like student councils and newspapers, banned since the middle 1970s. When world
oil prices fell, the regime encountered its first fiscal difficulties in more than
a decade, a hardship that encouraged authorities to grant nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) greater leeway to service mass communities. Broader
social dissent blossomed under the influence of such changes, yet it still conformed to dynamics carved out by established state repression and bans on
movement organizations. Without organizations to provide protest continuity and supportand with the ghosts of 1966 haunting thoughts of defying
state proscriptionseven Indonesian3 activists with holistic programs for
political change needed to assess them in terms of their immediate, rather than
long-term, promise.
This situation produced two modes of activism. First, democracy discussions, accompanied by restrained published criticism (and more pointed unpublished letters), acquired status as democracy struggle, behind a mythology
suggesting that democracy occurred when democratic ideas spread. A sort of
dissident lecture circuit emerged in major cities, where public intellectuals
(tokoh dari rakyat) spoke in favor of democratic reform or against corruption, and even Suharto was compelled periodically to discuss reformasi (reform) and keterbukaan with hedged approval. Second, protest increased but
remained typically localized and episodic. Students demonstrated against issues from electrical rate increases to human rights violations but seldom in
broadly coordinated actions or over time. Though NGOs grew more assertive, most declined to build large networks or recruit multi-sectoral support
(Bunnel and Bunnel 1996). The first independent national labor union began
with symbolic hour-long national strikes; subsequent (1994) labor riots triggered enough state repression to drive workers back to local unions. Across
the board, the New Order's legal and ideological constraints warned activists against building movement organizations capable of sustained national
contention; the regime's history of repression ensured that most heeded that
warning. Hence, small-scale and loosely organized forms of struggle, among
students and in mass communities, remained more common than large-scale
or sustained protest movements.
The protests that ended Suharto's rule began with a massive economic crisis
that undid the work of this state repression by establishing conditions for
protest across Indonesia without any explicit coordination. As the Indonesian rupiah lost value (from 2,500 to around 10,000 against the U.S. dollar),
riots and protest spread geographically across Indonesia and socially among
both the wealthy and the impoverished. Student and intellectual protests that
regularly accompanied the special meeting of the People's Consultative As-

36

Indonesia
From 1988 onward, a period of keterbukaan or openness occurred in Indonesia. Closely conditioned by the state's decision to maintain control by
monopolizing organizational power, the dissent and questioning at keterbukaan's core began within the behemoth New Order apparatus, as a consequence of factional power struggles. From the early 1980s, regime members
criticized government corruption, the military's established political role, and

37

States and Policies

Three Southeast Asian Countries

sembly (called every five years to [re]elect the president) in 1998 coincided
with rural mass rioting. Elite dissidents and students never joined or enlisted
this mass unrestand indeed elites seemed to fear mass chaos so much that
they intensified demands that sympathetic state actors undertake preemptive
stabilizing reforms. Still, the coincidence of mass and elite unrest led military
officials to try to section off dissident segments from one another. In a move
that inadvertently gave student protesters their long-lost institutional base
for protracted and coordinated struggle, ABRI broke a two-decade prohibition on campus protest but banned street demonstrations. The announcement
carried an implicit guarantee that protesters on campuses would be safe, and
soon elite alumni returned to their alma maters to join the fray. As university
protests grew, the archipelago of campuses across Indonesia became apprehensible as a unified and coordinated movement. Significantly, however, the
campus arena deepened the existing division between elite activists and mass
demonstrators, a clear residue of the state's repressive program.
Spreading protests emboldened regime factions dissatisfied with either the
status quo or their position in it, and some edged closer to criticizing the regime directly. These critical state actors picked up and amplified calls for
reform issued from elite and intellectual democracy meetings and lectures.
Moreover, Indonesian marines, marginalized under the New Order, now
accompanied student protests, at first because their rapport with students
diminished the chances of protest violence but increasingly as a token of their
potential support for the reform campaign. Evidence also suggests that Suharto's
son-in-law, General Prabowo Subianto, provoked rural riots to provide cover
for his own power grab.4 The regime, finally, was under strong new pressure
from global financial institutions and foreign governments, both rendered far
more influential inside Indonesia by the fiscal crisis; such external forces
openly pushed Suharto to reform and brushed aside his efforts to evade these
demands.
In this context of potential collaboration between elite democracy activists and some regime members, the new round of democracy protests took
effect. At this time, the repeal of consumer price supports, undertaken to meet
International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands, brought students into the
streets. When soldiers killed several participants in those demonstrations, they
touched off three days of rioting that left Jakarta ruined. Afterward, students
left their campuses, carefully wearing colored university jackets that set them
apart from mass society, and massed at the national parliament. Through the
next days, activists appealed for security forces and other members of government to support political reform, for no movement organizations existed
to allow these elites to mobilize and control an autonomous, mass-based
movement. (In any case, mass society had just shown itself to be dangerously
volatile.) After several days, a group of officials that featured the head of ABRI,

the vice-president, and the Speaker of the National Assembly convinced

Suharto to resign. This de facto coordination between regime defectors and
protesters left most of the old regime firmly in chargeat least for the next
several months. With no organizational following, and significantly afraid
of mass politics, social reformers could initially do little but voice demands
for the new arrangement and set about the long-deferred work of constructing the institutions of more open political competition.

38

39

The Philippines
The Philippine democracy movement rose against a regime of repression (designed to isolate the revolutionary Left by coopting the center) already imperiled by the steady accumulation of strong movement organizations among
both radical and centrist dissidents. By the early 1980s, however, several
exogenous developments triggered a thaw in authoritarian practice that rendered the regime's strategy even less effective. First, Marcos yielded to international and domestic pressure and lifted martial law on January 17, 1981.
While carefully preserving the dictatorship's central powers (Bonner 1987),
the measures expanded opportunities for legal and semi-legal anti-regime
organization and protest. Shortly thereafter, a cataclysmic balance of payments crisis, brought on by the discovery of central bank fraud, halted import
credits, devalued the peso, and angered the business class, providing a new
and powerful group of dissidents. Inside the regime, Marcos's power base
was crumbling in ways that also provided political allies for activists. Unlike
Suharto, who regularly rotated senior military officers out of the ABRI hierarchy and away from power, Marcos cultivated a relatively stable inner circle
that included members of the professional military (often selected by personal
or ethnic connection to the president) and a cadre of civilian supporters, cronies, family members, and retainers. Rivalries between these two groups were
held in check while Marcos retained clear control, but when the president
fell ill in August 1982, a minor (and premature) succession crisis rippled
through the regime that eventually placed Imelda Marcos more clearly in line
to succeed her husband. Minister of National Defense Juan Ponce Enrile and
Philippine Constabulary Commander General Fidel Ramos, representing the
military's professional faction, wound up on the outs, creating the most serious potential for factionalism in the regime to that point.
Under these influences, protests, strikes, and demonstrations increased
through the early 1980s in ways conditioned by martial law's original failure to eliminate either open legal or underground anti-regime organizations.
In consequence, movements reacted to these new developments by expanding their existing networks of centralized organizations, capable of mixing

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States a n d Policies

open-legal and underground-insurgent programs in long-term struggle.

Political moderates reacted to the combination of economic crisis and liberalization by adopting stronger and more organized positions, and elites among
them brought vast material and organizational resources to the movement.
Encouraged by this trend toward elite dissent, the underground Left began
to establish semi-legal "front" organizations with stronger ties to centrist antiMarcos groups. Hence, moderate and radical regime opponents both found
themselves at the helm of ever-expanding mass organizations that often
worked in consort with one anotherand all anti-regime movements increasingly depicted their activity in state-replacing, revolutionary terms.
Marcos rejoined characteristically, by calling elections in 1981,1984, and
1986, undertaking further liberalizations (such as eased press restrictions) but
murdering prominent regime opponents and intensifying the war against rural
guerrillas. But ejections no longer posed demobilizing choices between accepting regime cheating or joining the revolution. While some activists joined
elections and others boycotted, the political center had become strong enough
to use election campaigns (which they also took seriously) as a staging ground
for large-scale protest and refused to shrug off regime cheating or concede
the superiority of the Left's boycott position. Such mobilizations threatened
the regime and triggered renewed repression. Repression, in turn, encouraged
further protest with broader (i.e., center-Left) political bases.
Events leading to the 1986 transition followed these patterns. Benigno
Aquino, exiled moderate leader, returned home to challenge Marcos in scheduled elections and was murdered at the airport on August 2.1, 1983. In response, moderate and radical movement organizations joined forces in the
broadest and most sustained protest to that point under Marcos. While
disagreements remained within the broad antidictatorship movement over strategy and tactics, its disparate strands had each grown so strong and institutionalized that Marcos faced virtually unremitting pressure. Activists controlled
strong church groups, N G O s , unions, and other movement organizations.
They published magazines that sold openly on newsstands, held conferences
at national universities, and marched in street rallies that only sometimes drew
gunfire. When events did not excite spontaneous protest (as Aquino's funeral
had) organization leaders could deploy their mass followings in command
protests that kept pressure on the state. This sustained and institutionalized
movement, particularly along its moderate flank, also presented increasingly
attractive alternatives to both foreign observers like the United States and
Filipinos in the establishment. Under duress and looking to shore up his regime in 1985, Marcos announced snap presidential elections to take place in
early 1986.
The opposition campaign in those elections was better funded and more
enthusiastically supported than any other under Marcos. Young military

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41

officers, announcing their commitment to free and fair elections and a professional military, formed the Reform Armed Forces Movement (RAM). The
National Movement for Free Elections, a civic poll-watching association first
organized in the 1950s, resumed operation with strong support from the
church and the middle class. After a violence-marred campaign, the ballot
collection and counting process produced dramatic irregularities, and poll
counters (often, the wives of RAM members) stopped the process and locked
themselves up with evidence of Marcos fraud. In this highly charged atmosphere, election protests mounted, and soon military officers, representing
those shouldered aside by Imelda Marcos in the 1982 succession crisis and
featuring the RAM, moved to unseat Marcos. The regime discovered the coup
in its infancy, and the exposed dissidents holed up in one of Manila's military camps and called for help. We now know that the coup plotters did not
challenge Marcos in order to install an Aquino presidency but to establish a
military junta. Still, when nearly a million people, responding to Cardinal
Sin's call, gathered to demand that Aquino take power, and to celebrate Enrile
and Ramos as prodemocracy revolutionaries, the would-be generalissimos
reconsidered their position. From then, the protests quickly undermined
Marcos, and when ordinance from a plane sent against demonstrators landed
near Malacanang palace, Marcos understood that his chapter of Philippine
history had closed.

Comparisons
These narratives suggest a causal chain that runs from established styles of
state repression through patterns of anti-state mobilization to differences in
prodemocracy movements. In each, patterned interactions between state repression and social mobilization over the authoritarian duration shaped
movement identities and the relationships possible between state defectors
and social activists. When things started to unravel for the regime, elements
of the ruling coalition considered defecting from the dictatorship. Whether
they did or not, and the political consequences of defections that did occur,
reflected the influence of established patterns of contention.
By proscribing counterhegemonic organization, Indonesian state repression separated critical social reformers from potential mass followers. Unable to pursue a movement "career" within an articulated opposition structure
(as existed in the Philippines), most Indonesian activists eventually moved to
the political, social, and: economic mainstream. The prospect of this move,
moreover, moderated activist strategies generally. With no organization to
mediate movement relations between social classes, critical elites could not
direct mass society and seemed rather to fear it. When the prospect of more

States and Policies

Three Southeast Asian Countries

massive unrest dawned in 1998, elite dissidents were inclined to demand action
from the state (rather than engineer a mass uprising) to avert riots in Jakarta's
streets. State propaganda exacerbated the divide between elite and mass claim
makers, for its mythology of Sukarno's fall spun a cautionary tale against
both communism and mass chaos. No wonder, therefore, that movement
identities reflected these structural influences and featured moderating ideas
that protest was moral rather than political, that public intellectuals (rather
than activists) were at its core, and that students needed to distinguish themselves from the rakyat (society).
Because Philippine activist organizations survived and expanded under
martial law, political and economic crises in the 1980s drew new dissidents
into existing organizations with controlling links to mass constituencies.
Demonstrations typically occurred when movement leaders decided they
should and depended less on exogenous provocation than did protest in Indonesia or, especially, in Burma. Moreover, the well-organized Philippine
antidictatorship movement (even on its moderate flank) could make complex
and protracted state-replacing and revolutionary plans. Strong links to mass
organizations made movement elites less ambivalent about the opportunities
in crisis than their Indonesian counterparts: bad news for Marcos was always
considered good news for the movement, and mass activity was assumed to
serve organization priorities. Nor did Filipinos make substantial concessions
to support state reformers qua state actors: activists worked within a powerful organizational field of gravity and expected defections from the regime
to the movement. Hence, when Philippine society polarized, the movement
enthusiastically pushed the crisis and commanded the mass resources to do
so. Standing at the helm of mass mobilizing alliances and movement organizations aimed at toppling the state, even politically moderate anti-regime
activists came to identify themselves as revolutionaries, and radical tropes
overlay even conservative political orientations.
Burmese state repression violently eliminated public expressions of dissent
but produced small, scattered, and generally paralyzed underground cells
unconnected to any larger movement organization. The clearest result of this
repression was a pattern of widely intermittent mobilizations that depended
on deep, widespread social dislocation to coordinate grievances and produce
unrest, which in turn roused underground cells to activity. This sweeping
repression also produced important and specific influences on dissident elites.
Burmese intellectuals had, since the middle 1960s, no scope for critical participation in political life. The state marginalized and impoverished all social
strata and more thoroughly concentrated power and prosperity among a small
leadership clique than what happened in either Indonesia or the Philippines.
It consequently became natural for educated activists to ally with mass societyeven when no organization cemented the alliancebased on the level-

ing effect of their shared marginality. While 1988 protests began on campuses,
participants soon moved to the streets, where workers enthusiastically joined
in. The great political distance between the entrenched state and the combination of elite and mass dissidents invoked the student-led nationalist movement against the occupying British colonial regime. Thus, long before the
movement demanded democratic elections or political reforms, it adopted
orientations from a struggle to reclaim the nation from interlopers. While
powerfully mobilizing, the nationalist identity left little room for compromise
with any state actor and so exacerbated the polarization between authorities
and society.
In each case, state repression shaped alliance potentials between regime
defectors, reform-minded elites, and mass society. The Indonesian state divided critical elites from mass society, particularly during periods of mass
anger and mobilization. Isolated from, and fearful of, mass society, dissidents
who described themselves as intellectuals and moral advocates did not scare
state actors into closing ranks: quite the contrary, defecting officials seemed
confident of their ability to control the transition. In the Philippines and
Burma, state repression produced greater solidarity between these classes
but the solidarity differed in important ways. In the Philippines, moderate
movement elites had access to a degree of civil space denied those in Burma.
Supported by church and civil institutions, alliance between established elites
in the movement and mass members regularized and even legitimized mass
activism. Hence, even as Filipino protesters called for revolution against
Marcos, they did so from an establishment position so manifest as to pull
many of that revolution's most fearsome teeth. In contrast, Burmese elites
found common cause with the masses at the political and social margins,
where they were driven by a regime policy of indiscriminate repression. The
nationalist identity that bound mass and elite Burmese dissidents focused such
acrimonious attention on defeating authorities in street battles and driving
them from office that no moderating alliances could form between any element of the regime and the movement.
Events immediately preceding these democracy protests interacted with
these more established patterns. In both the Philippines and Indonesia, larger
trends toward political opennessmartial law's abolition and Indonesian
keterbukaanset up the antistate uprisings. Each thaw moved certain activities and discourses into the realm of the permissible, broadening alliance
possibilities between some state actors and the opposition. In Indonesia,
keterbukaan introduced a rhetorical trope with currency both within the state
and in society: the need for political reform and clean government. In the
Philippines, expanding civil liberties, assembly rights, and formal representative institutions, helped re-center opposition activities away from the radicals, more toward political moderates, and fired moderate rage when Marcos

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States a n d Policies

T h r e e S o u t h e a s t Asian C o u n t r i e s

transgressed civil norms. In both cases, new, albeit still bounded, possibilities for more legitimate dissent helped some state actors take democracy advocates more seriously. In those circumstances, defections from the authoritarian
coalition became imaginable for actors somehow dissatisfied with their position in the state, whether for principled or selfish reasons.
Burma's democracy protests, however, did not occur during a liberal thaw.
Although Ne Win criticized the country's economic policies, he never instituted clear political reform, nor was he pressured to from within the state.
Under these conditions, dissent was neither safer nor more permissible then
it had previously been, and the possibility that members of the largely unified regime would support the movement was minuscule. Without such support, either state-led reforms on the Indonesian model or defections to the
movement on the Philippine, chances diminished of an intermediate regime
transition, short of the full state defeat that Burmese activists pursued. The
battle lines between state and society were clearly drawn, with tragic consequences for the activists and for democracy. In Burma, movement success
required force massive enough to overwhelm a state still unified and committed to retaining power.
In all the cases then, movement success or failure depended on both the
movement's capacity and the state's resilience. I have shown that both factors are significantly contingent on established patterns of contention, themselves influenced by patterns of state repression. This contingency helps
explains a superficial paradox arising from the cases: that in its mode of
struggle, the Burmese democracy movement seemed in August 1988 far closer
to seizing state power outright than either Philippine or Indonesian counterparts ever would be. Certainly the Burmese underground allowed far greater
movement coordination, both across territory and across classes, than ever
occurred in Indonesia, particularly when one considers how Jakarta students
segregated themselves from mass society. Philippine protests, while massive
and organized, never developed the ferocity of the Burmese struggle, nor did
the protests (as opposed to the insurgency) seize state assets and positions, as
in Burma. In both the Philippines and Indonesia, however, a liberal thaw
broadened the possibilities of alliance between members of the regime and
democracy advocates and produced some coalition between state defectors
and democracy protesters that, more than the movement's sheer power alone,
displaced the dictator.
But how does one explain liberal thaws in Indonesia and the Philippines
and their absence in Burma? I would start by relating these liberalizing trends
to established patterns of state repression. We have seen that Marcos's decision to conciliate the political center and attack the Left both required periodic, bounded liberalizations, but that these produced social organizations
capable of demanding further steps, such as the repeal of martial law. There-

fore, democracy and reform- became an available concept for regime members who had lost position to rivals, and the existence of established, moderate, and sociologically compatible (i.e., elite) democracy advocates allowed
men like Enrile and Ramos to support the movement. In Indonesia, the construction of a massive New Order apparatus, while long an effective measure to fragment social dissent, eventually produced divisions within the vast
state that paved the way for keterbukaan. The balance between state actors
and social dissidents was, of course, different in Indonesia (where the movement had no strong organizations and ABRI retained immense powers) than
in the Philippines. Yet precisely because Indonesian protesters remained weak
and fragmented, members of the Indonesian state were willing to support demands for reform by pressing for a regime change they fully expected to control. Both cases contrast with Burma, where the state's decision to crush all
forms of open dissent never forced Ne Win to reach any accommodation with
society, so, despite the passion and duration that democracy protests achieved,
they never appealed to any significant force within the state.
A host of dynamics associated with democracy protestswhen protest will
mobilize, whether mobilization will set a transition in motion, and who will
be in control of that transitionis contingent on histories that states and
movements write together, histories of state repression and movement response. Understanding how authoritarian regimes defeat, or are thrown aside
by, powerful social forces requires an understanding of the historical and
political context out of which those challenges and responses arise. This chapter has neither exhausted the possibilities of comparison between these important cases nor touched upon other, comparable cases. I hope, however,
to have demonstrated that a habit of thinking about historic interactions
between repressive states and society can illuminate the identities, organizations, and tactics that emerge in democracy protests, and, partly in consequence of those factors, the possibilities for alliance and cooperation between
potential state defectors and social dissidents on which the transition to democracy, or its defeat, so deeply depend.

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NOTES

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mary Callahan, David Meyer, Charles

Tilly, and Elisabeth Wood in the preparation and revision of this chapter. Others
in the Contentious Politics Workshop at Columbia University's Lazarsfeld Center
for Social Sciences also contributed criticism and suggestions that helped me
sharpen this material, and they have my thanks as well.
1. In Burma, as we will see, several months of protest led Ne Win to resign
and ushered in a brief period of popular rule. After little more than a month of
popular rule by local "strike committees," the military reasserted its control in a

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States a n d Policies

bloody attack on the movement, in which between 3,000 and 5,000 Burmese
protesters were killed.
2. Much of this information differs from published accounts of the 1988
protests and is based on a series of interviews I conducted in Burma and in the
United States from 1995 to 1997. I am preparing a fuller account of the movement
at this writing.
3. By specifying that the protests are Indonesian, I mean to emphasize that
claim makers were not challenging their inclusion in the Indonesian political
community. Separatist protests from East Timorese, West Papuans, and others
often were bolder and more directed at confrontation.
4. Since Suharto's fall, reports have linked his son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto,
to the rural riots in Java in early 1998, to the murder of four Trisakti University
students that touched off rioting on May 13-15, to that rioting itself, and to the
rape of some sixty-six Chinese women during that chaos.

Mobilization on the South African Gold Mines

T. DUNBAR M O O D I E

In August 1982, Cyril Ramaphosa announced the formation of the National

Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in South Africa. South African mining is an
industry composed largely of migrant workers, barracked in large concentrated compounds. Black miners typically live at mines located far from large
cities, insulated from workers in secondary industry, moving from bed to
heavy work to mass feeding to bed in a cycle that John Rex (1973) once called
the most effective form of labor control ever invented. Conventional wisdom
in South Africa was that such workers were "unorganizable." In 1987, however, only five years after the launching of the N U M , more than 300,000 black
South African mine workers embarked on a legal wage strike. It was the largest
black strike ever in South Africa. Black miners stayed out for three weeks
before being forced back by mass dismissals. Even the failure of the strike
could not conceal the colossal organizational achievement of the N U M , which
has become the largest of what Eddie Webster (1988) called "social movement unions" 1 in South Africa.
When I began to study the rise of the N U M , I turned eagerly to social
movement theory, hoping for a perspective to guide my understanding of
actors and events. Although certain monographs were helpful, social movement theory itself was a disappointment. I turned to other, more dialectical,
theoretical traditions. In this chapter, I shall use social movement theory to
analyze the making of the N U M while challenging and modifying basic assumptions that haunt (and, I believe, hamper) sociological efforts to understand social movements. Three general questions set the focus here. First, what
should social movement theory (or any other social theory for that matter)
do? Second, what does social movement theory actually do? Third, what is it
possible for social movement theory to do?

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