While the previous chapter focused on room to manoeuvre for civil society under authoritarian rule, the following chapters describe how Myanmar civil society actors framed their advocacy messages towards an international audience in their search for political, moral and financial support. In contrast to the volatile ‘under the radar’ activities described earlier, the transnational advocacy activities of the democracy movement called for a clear and simple message concerning the social and political problems in Myanmar and the question of who was responsible and how such problems could be addressed. Social movement theory holds that human rights advocacy messages are only partly determined by factual situations and feasible solutions. Other factors, such as the susceptibility of the target audience to certain messages, also play a role.

In contrast to many actors working under the radar during Myanmar’s early years of transition, as well as the more open engagement attempts of the Third Force towards the military, representatives of the democracy movement continued to openly oppose the government. The distinction between proponents and opponents of engaging the government, moreover, became more pronounced as the political transition unfolded. The occurrence of cyclone Nargis in 2008 not only led to a gradual emancipation of civil society actors based inside the country, but also resulted in the emergence of contrasting ‘frames’ about the benefits of distributing local aid. These frames became even more noticeable after elections had been announced for 2010, which further polarized both the political and the civil society landscape. Parallel to developments in the political sphere, those affiliated with the Third Force chose to call for participation in the elections, while those affiliated with the democracy movement boycotted the elections. This dichotomy was accentuated as both proponents and opponents of the elections attempted to reach out to the international community to influence foreign positions towards the Myanmar government. The contestations around the 2010 elections will be discussed in Chapter 6.

Although the elections formed the focal point of the disagreement over the government’s ‘Roadmap to Democracy’, some of the varying frames had already become visible in earlier debates. These include the question of economic sanctions, the evaluation of the 2008 constitution and the distribution of aid in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. Apart from exile media, which largely served as a platform for the democracy movement at the time, Burma Partnership emerged as the primary public advocate of the election boycott campaign outside the country. Meanwhile, Generation Wave took the lead in organizing an election boycott campaign inside Myanmar, as well as contributing to advocacy abroad. The public statements and events organized by these two organizations form the basis of Chapter 6. In contrast, Myanmar Egress came to be seen by respondents as the most public proponent of engagement in the elections, although they were not the only actors who viewed the elections as an opportunity for change. The following two chapters are based on interviews with representatives and alumni of these organizations, as well as media analysis and observations at civil society trainings and public events. I bring in theory on transnational advocacy networks in order to analyse the strategies of the democracy movement and other civil society actors involved in transnational campaigns.

Framing and marketing in transnational advocacy campaigns

Transnational advocacy networks are defined as ‘an international cooperation of activists which can influence the re-distribution of resources, provide alternative sources of information and create a common discourse’ (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: ix). The Burmese democracy movement can be considered such a network, as it seeks to facilitate access to international supporters (including foreign governments, activists and intergovernmental organizations) and ‘make international resources available to new actors in domestic political and social struggles’ (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 1). Democracy activists make use of the ‘boomerang pattern’, an attempt to indirectly influence their own government’s domestic policies through international involvement when direct influence has proven impossible or ineffective (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 12). The presence of significant numbers of Myanmar political activists in exile after 1988, combined with increased opportunities for international networking, travel and communication, led to the democracy movement’s transformation into an influential transnational advocacy network, particularly since the late 1990s and early 2000s (Zaw Oo, 2006). This loose network of organizations uses and produces information on Myanmar strategically in order to pressure international organizations and governments and influence their policies.

Members of transnational advocacy networks lobby international actors in order to put across their viewpoints and motivate their audiences to take the desired action. Research has shown that domestic social movements often adapt their activities once they take on a transnational advocacy component. In this process of adjustment towards an international audience, three steps can be distinguished. First, a campaign becomes transnational as activists look beyond their own borders for assistance and support (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Second, the activists’ message and call for action must be ‘marketed’ to an international platform, where it competes with other causes that require international attention (Bob, 2005). Third, the activists’ portrayal of the problem and the proposed solutions must be formulated in such a way that international supporters become susceptible to it and feel compelled to take action, a process which is referred to as ‘framing’ (Snow and Benford, 1988).

In his book The marketing of rebellion, Clifford Bob (2005: 4) describes how activists frame situations and formulate messages in ways that are likely to lead to international attention and support: ‘In this global morality market, challengers must publicize their plights, portray their conflicts as righteous struggles, and craft their messages to resonate abroad.’ Only a small number of potentially worthy causes will ever be picked up by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), governments and donors, and so Myanmar activists lobbying abroad have to make sure they strike the right tone. Bob (2005: 5) argues that success in gaining international influence is determined more by a movement’s ‘promotional strategies’ than by the content of its message or the legitimacy of its claims. This means that the movement’s message must be constructed in a way that resonates with existing international frameworks and priorities. In order to tap into international interests, for example, land disputes might be rephrased as environmental issues, while poverty and ethnic minority concerns might be phrased in the language of human rights (Bob, 2005: 31). For activists campaigning against Myanmar’s military dictatorship for several decades, moreover, it was a challenge to continue phrasing their messages in ways that ensured prolonged international attention for their problems and proposed solutions. As the current and next chapters show, the occurrence of cyclone Nargis in 2008 and the announcement of elections in 2010 provided a welcome new angle to existing democracy campaigns.

Strategic framing efforts

According to theory on ‘collective action frames’, the way social movements mobilize around certain issues is determined not only by the content itself – the grievance, injustice or cause identified as requiring social change – but also by the characteristics and preferences of the individual actors that form the movement (Snow and Benford, 1988). Transnational activists engage in ‘collective processes of interpretation, attribution, and social construction that mediate between opportunity, organization and action’ (McAdam et al, 1996: 2), thereby constructing a certain depiction of reality (Benford and Snow, 2000: 614). While Myanmar activists found the structure of military rule difficult to change from within, they had more agency in determining how the situation in Myanmar was portrayed towards international audiences and in deciding how to frame their demands and proposed solutions.

Collective action frames often call for a simplification of reality, in order to bring forward a uniform advocacy message (Benford and Snow, 2000). Similarly, the Burmese democracy movement chose to highlight particular human rights abuses inside the country, allocate blame exclusively to the military government and its associates (‘diagnostic’ or ‘adversarial framing’), and call for international condemnation and pressure to bring about a change in government (‘prognostic framing’). In this process, exile organizations worked together with activists inside the country who sought to discredit the Myanmar government domestically. However, their depiction of the situation ran counter to the efforts of other domestic civil society organizations (CSOs) that sought to bring about gradual change by engaging with the government. In their efforts to identify culprits, moreover, democracy activists sometimes turned against other non-governmental actors whose interpretation of the root causes and preferred solutions in Myanmar differed from their own. These included local and international businessmen accused of supporting the military government financially, as well as foreign academics and local civil society actors who were accused of misrepresenting the situation in Myanmar under military rule (see Metro, 2011). Using vocabulary such as ‘cronies’ or ‘apologists’, these actors were accused of promoting their own self-interest, whereas democracy activists were portrayed as acting out of ideology or altruism. Research shows that in reality, situations such as conflict, poverty or repression often result in a combination of altruism and self-interest, ideology and calculated moves (Bob, 2005: 27).

Social movements tend to make use of generic ‘master frames’ that can be applied to multiple circumstances and thus can mobilize larger groups of people, such as the ‘injustice frame’ or the ‘return to democracy frame’ (Snow and Benford, 1992; Benford and Snow, 2000: 618). A human rights frame, for example, ‘takes a particular story and makes it general, targeting the state as the responsible agent and source of redress’, so that transnational alliances and coalitions can be built (Merry, 2006: 216). Since Myanmar’s conflict and repressive government had little cross-border consequences in terms of regional instability or foreign (at least Western) economic interests, activists continuously had to compete for attention with other causes in the ‘global morality market’, resulting in strategic ‘branding’ of their cause (Bob, 2005). Internal divisions within civil society, consequently, did not contribute to the single message required to successfully compete with other human rights causes in international platforms. Some civil society actors who could not connect to the traditional democracy movement, such as ethnic nationalities, therefore chose to link up with other ‘master frames’, such as the indigenous rights movement or the women’s rights movement.

Where social movements disagree on the interpretation or proposed solution of a human rights issue, ‘framing contests’ or ‘frame disputes’ may occur (Benford and Snow, 2000: 626). This was the case in post-Nargis Myanmar, where newly emerging civil society actors inside the country who called for strategic engagement with the government provided a counterframe to the democracy movement’s calls for disengagement. In response, democracy activists felt compelled to oppose the engagement narrative by emphasizing the distinction between actors inside and outside the country as a proxy for the pro- or anti-engagement position. This ‘framing contest’ further intensified after the announcement of the 2010 elections, which provided a concrete action perspective for those inside and outside the country to accept or reject participation in the military government’s ‘Roadmap to Democracy’.

In reaction to the foundational work of various social movement scholars, others have stressed the need to focus not purely on mechanisms and motivations for collective action frames, but to bring back into the discussion the matter of content, particularly ideology (Oliver and Johnston, 2000; Walder, 2009). A framing analysis does not deny that historical patterns and country-specific characteristics, such as the level of diversity and the long history of repression, inspired the activities undertaken by Myanmar advocacy networks to a large extent. A framing analysis, however, focuses on portrayal towards external actors rather than an assessment of individual motivations. Although most actors described in this book would have liked to see the military removed from power, they often chose smaller, more attainable objectives in order to increase the likelihood of campaign success. All of them saw themselves (or were seen by others) as representing civil society, but they attributed blame differently, turned to disparate actors for solutions and proposed contrasting alternative visions for change. These observations counter the idea that the field of CSOs trying to bring about change in Myanmar consists only of single-minded actors with a clear, altruistic goal in mind. To ignore the influence of strategic decision making would falsely objectify the way campaigns on Myanmar have emerged and evolved in the transnational context. As Bob (2005: xi) argues, ‘[i]t is not enough to extol [transnational movements and NGOs] as “moral” forces while refusing to scrutinize their interactions with each other and the public’. From this perspective, transnational activists operate in an inherently competitive market in which they must first gain a voice before they can actually influence international debates.

Encounters between civil society from exile and from inside the country

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, much of Myanmar activism against the military took place from abroad. These activities from exile influenced the conflicts taking place inside Myanmar in various ways (Brees, 2009). Activists residing outside the country were in a better position to challenge the government and expose human rights violations, due to their relatively safe environment, the opportunity for education and training, and the availability of their transnational communication channels. On the other hand, some argued that the privileged position of activists in exile detached them from realities inside the country, as discussed in Chapter 3. Moreover, the Myanmar diaspora in some cases may have prolonged conflict by providing financial and political support to ethnic armed groups and by ‘holding on to strident, uncompromising rhetoric’, for example by refusing to support ceasefire talks (Brees, 2009: 40).

For international human rights organizations, Myanmar activists in exile provided a channel through which information from inside the country was conveyed. People living inside the country, however, argued that activists in exile sometimes distorted information to suit their advocacy priorities, emphasizing the damaging role of the military government while downplaying the role of actors such as non-state armed groups (South, 2008b). Some authors argue that it is ‘artificial and arbitrary’ to separate external from internal activism, as these are fluent categories that mutually influence each other (Dudley, 2003). The power relations between actors inside and outside the country, however, tend to be unequal. With reference to Anderson’s concept of ‘long-distance nationalism’, Dudley (2003: 22) argues that ‘the “long-distance nationalist” … in exile from Burma has both little impact on what happens inside the nation and little price to pay for the possible effects of his or her actions’. Similarly, South (2008b: 110) explains how a focus on exile agendas ‘serves to reinforce the position of often unaccountable groups and individuals who – although they may be experts in fund-raising and rhetoric – are often quite marginal to the actual situation on the ground, inside Burma’.

An early example of diverging views and strategies that played out in the 1990s concerned the debate about economic sanctions and a tourism boycott on Myanmar (Pedersen, 2007; Mullen, 2016). These campaigns provided a clear action perspective to Westerners in relation to Myanmar and therefore received significant international attention over the years (Dale, 2011; Simpson, 2014). After Aung San Suu Kyi called for sanctions from inside the country, this issue was taken up by Myanmar advocacy groups in exile, who actively lobbied Western companies and governments to disengage with Myanmar. While lobbyists outside the country claimed to represent Myanmar people who could not speak out from within the country, critics argued that sanctions and boycotts were advocacy tools for foreign-based activists (both Myanmar and Western), which were of little use, or even damaging, to people living inside the country (Pedersen, 2007). While Western academics and prominent local activists debated the desirability of sanctions and the supposed effects on the Myanmar population, those expected to be directly affected by the sanctions lacked access to the international community and were therefore hardly heard. Internationally, these sanctions became of great symbolic value in signalling disapproval of the military government, and some observers commented that they could not be lifted with any credibility unless significant improvements were made on a number of publicly set benchmarks. In other words, it should be the Myanmar government’s actions that would cause a shift in Western sanctions policies, rather than a change of mind on behalf of those imposing the sanctions. Nevertheless, some prominent activists who had earlier campaigned for sanctions publicly changed their minds and began opposing the sanctions campaign, leading to a split in the Free Burma Coalition and the start of the US Campaign for Burma (see Zarni, 2006 for a personal account of this decision).

A similar shift from foreign-based activism to supporting local organizations occurred among European Burma organizations, including Burma Center Netherlands (BCN) and the Brussels-based Euro-Burma Office (EBO), both of which had initially been supporting the campaigns of the democracy movement. During the time that I volunteered with BCN (2004–6), the organization had already changed position on the tourism boycott that it initially called for. This meant that the posters of Aung San Suu Kyi which were frequently used in public events had to be folded one by one, so that the phrase ‘please don’t come to Burma’ was no longer visible. While previously BCN had focused largely on international advocacy directed against the Myanmar government and supporting democracy activists in exile, after Nargis it started engaging more with locally based activists, as mentioned on its website:

From 2008 onwards, BCN moved towards more actively engaging political actors and citizens in the political process, in response to requests from key organizations in its civil society program. In 2010, BCN chose to support the democratic political actors and parties that decided to participate in the elections, through trainings and capacity strengthening, and from 2011 continued its program to support democratic forces in the changing political landscape of Burma/Myanmar.1

According to a former staff member, most other Burma solidarity organizations in Europe continued the more activist stance, and BCN was asked to leave the Euro-Burma Platform.2 EBO too was informed by the European Burma Network in 2010 that its observer status had been revoked, because its actions were ‘no longer consistent with the “mandate of Burma’s elected leaders and ethnic leadership”’.3 In response, EBO’s executive director (Harn Yawnghwe, himself a prominent activist in exile) wrote a letter in which he argued that

[o]ver the years, the Burmese democracy movement has expanded to include many more voices from Burma … there now exists in Burma a wide and diverse civil society, ethnic leaders from the ceasefire groups, and new political parties who are also working for democracy … [whose] views and opinions need to be taken into account. To not acknowledge them is to ignore the majority of the people in Burma who are taking enormous risks to bring democracy.4

This exchange was exemplary of a growing disparity between organizations that emphasized change in Myanmar and those that focused on existing problems, which meant that some Burma support groups could no longer work together. A similar division between proponents and opponents of engagement with the government played out among foreign (mostly Western) academics. In 2005, democracy activists had severely criticized the European Commission for the composition of its ‘Burma Day’ held on 5 April. Burma Campaign UK, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma and EBO (before its aforementioned change in position) released statements in which they accused the Commission of being undemocratic by banning pro-democracy groups and ‘the Burmese community’ from participating, in contrast to the Burma Day of 2003, in which they had apparently participated. ALTSEAN-Burma also criticized the ‘independent report’ that had been written for the occasion by two Western scholars, whom they perceived to be anti-sanctions and pro-engagement. Burma Campaign UK (2005) accused the European Commission of ‘pursuing an anti-sanctions agenda in direct contradiction to EU member states’ policy’.

The scholars who had written the report were depicted not only as anti-sanctions, but also as ‘regular visitors to Rangoon’, which was apparently seen as a disqualification for speaking at a Burma meeting. At later events, including academic conferences I attended between 2010 and 2014, there were public and private complaints by democracy activists that pro-engagement scholars were given too much of a platform. These scholars in turn contended that the democracy movement was actually having a considerable influence on foreign policy towards Myanmar, whereas actors inside the country had less opportunity to speak out publicly about their experiences (Pedersen, 2012: 272). Metro (2011) refers to this debate in the context of the elections as ‘the divided field of Burma studies’, where ‘Burmaphiles’ (supporters of the democracy movement, often based in exile and highly idealistic or radical) and ‘Myanmarites’ (those who lived inside the country or visited frequently and whose views and actions were less radical and more conservative) competed for the legitimacy to voice the needs of Myanmar people, whereas fence-sitters refused to take sides (see Décobert, 2014).

Throughout the early 2000s, foreign, outside, academic and Burman voices were generally privileged over native, inside, activist and ethnic nationality voices (Metro, 2011). The relationship between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ slowly started changing in the late 2000s, particularly after cyclone Nargis, which in some ways opened the country up to the outside world. Up to the start of the political transition, activists inside and outside the country had limited opportunity to interact. As the country started opening up to outside influences, and some of the European Burma support groups changed position, activists from inside the country were increasingly in contact with the democracy movement in exile. One respondent from Yangon was invited to Brussels by EBO in 2010, where he publicly addressed the European Parliament about his experiences inside the country. His encounter with activists from exile during this visit proved somewhat surprising to him, as he conveyed the year after:

In Brussels, during lunchtime, I met with one exile group … they are looking with a very strange eye, you know. Because they think we are a partner of the government … We are inside here so we did a lot. So, according to their perception, if we get many things in Burma, we have a good relationship, good connection with the military generals. I don’t know why they come with that idea.5

This activist felt that he was being perceived as a government collaborator, simply because he was able to conduct his activities inside the country without encountering severe difficulties. The conversation took an even stranger turn when he tried to make conversation on what turned out to be a shared place of origin in Yangon:

And I ask them, oh, brother, where are you coming from in Burma, where is your place? They told me: “I am coming from, you know, rebel area.” So I said, what rebel area? [he replied] “You don’t know the rebel area!?” Haha! So [I asked] which place, in Rangoon? “Yeah, in Rangoon, Bahan [township].” Oh, Bahan, they call it a rebel area. So I told him, I am coming as a rebel in your rebel area. Ha!

Bahan township in Yangon may have been known to some as a ‘rebel area’ due to the presence of the National League for Democracy’s offices and a restaurant known for hosting politically sensitive events. However, this respondent saw the reference ‘rebel area’ for a location where he had been working openly for years as slightly exaggerated and decided to make a joke about it. Finally, when he politely offered to stay in touch, the exile-based activist had responded: “Do you want to go to jail? If you contact me, you will spend seven years in prison.”6 Asked whether this could be true, the respondent answered: “Maybe sometimes it is true. But he thinks of himself as a very big guy, you know, and inside we didn’t do anything. That is their perception.” Such views were in line with existing advocacy positions among democracy activists at the time, who viewed local civil society as ‘minimally effective at promoting the kind of reform they demand’ (Callahan, 2010: 73). Comparable tensions were reported after exiled labour organizations returned to Myanmar in 2012 (Arnold and Campbell, 2017). During a community development training in Thailand in 2010, several respondents similarly indicated that they understood and valued the work of democracy activists and media in exile but objected to depictions of people inside the country as mere puppets of the military government who could not think or speak for themselves. In some cases, activists from inside the country who were taken to joint activist meetings in Thailand were indeed concerned about their security, fearing public attention through reports in exile media. Organizers of these early public events around 2010 had to carefully select participants from inside and outside the country, as exile activists were generally more experienced in advocacy events and often spoke better English, which could easily lead to a power imbalance. In other cases, older activists in exile relied on younger activists inside the country to update them on the changing situation in Myanmar after they had left the country. Eventually, these interactions resulted in more contact between activists inside and outside the country, which proved useful when exiled activists increasingly started returning in the course of the political transition.

Post-Nargis counter-voices to the democracy movement

A concrete example of diverging portrayals of the situation and desired responses occurred in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. In 2009, an American university and a Thai-based democracy organization that claimed to be active inside Myanmar issued a report on the lack of aid effectiveness after cyclone Nargis, called ‘After the storm’ (EAT/JHU CPHHR, 2009a). This report prompted a rare statement by 21 INGOs working inside the country, criticizing the way the research had been conducted. The American university and the Thai-based Burma organization had accused the government of obstructing development assistance, imprisoning locals involved in the provision of aid and making use of forced labour in its post-disaster reconstruction efforts. In response, the 21 INGOs involved in humanitarian assistance wrote an open letter, accusing the report’s authors of ignoring the INGOs’ activities on the ground and of neglecting the opinions and experiences of the ‘courageous and resilient survivors of Cyclone Nargis’ (Action Aid et al, 2009).

The open letter claimed that the 33 relief workers and 57 cyclone survivors surveyed by the researchers of the American university and the Thai-based Burma organization did not adequately represent the experiences of ‘over two million cyclone survivors’ (Action Aid et al, 2009: 2). It was argued that local organizations had conducted more transparent research on a much wider scale, which contradicted the findings of the ‘After the storm’ report. The accusations of ‘theft and confiscation of relief supplies by authorities’ as well as the use of forced labourers by the government mentioned in the report were dismissed as anecdotal and out of context: ‘International and local relief groups did not hand over relief supplies to the Government. We were able to deliver relief supplies directly to cyclone survivors in virtually all circumstances.’ The 21 INGOs also accused the authors of the report of undermining the continuation of aid distribution in Myanmar by calling for restrictions in aid delivery until the human rights conditions improve: ‘[T]he consistent “voice” of all the people in the Delta, in direct contradiction to the report, is “Please, don’t abandon us.”’

The authors of the ‘After the storm’ report reacted to these accusations as follows (EAT/JHU CPHHR, 2009b):

We recognize that international organizations working under Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with … the ruling military junta in Burma, both operate in a constrained environment and are motivated by real concern for the welfare of the peoples of the country. We understand why it would be difficult for these agencies and their thousands of local staff to report in an uncensored manner on cyclone relief aid problems, as well as issues of forced labor and other human rights violations. We suspect that many of these agencies would join us in calling for the immediate and unconditional release of humanitarian relief workers and those reporting on the situation now imprisoned by the SPDC [State Peace and Development Council] … but understand why they cannot. We also recognize their inability to investigate and report incidences of human rights violations such as forced labor.

The report’s authors thus refused to take the response of the 21 INGOs seriously, instead challenging the ability of the INGOs to openly express their views due to their position inside the country. They contrasted the INGOs’ position with their own research, for which ‘truly independent community members’ had conducted interviews ‘in settings of anonymity and maximum protection from the SPDC, USDA [Union Solidarity and Development Association], and other junta-related entities’, allowing witnesses to freely speak their mind. They further brought up safety concerns for both researchers and humanitarian aid workers as a reason to refrain from openly contacting more locally based organizations for their research, although they did report conducting ‘under the radar’ interviews with some humanitarian aid workers.

This claim that organizations working inside the country were less independent and unable to create a safe environment for research, however, raises the question of why these 21 INGOs would voluntarily choose to issue a public statement in the first place. It seems more likely that they spoke on behalf of their local partners, who might indeed have been reluctant to publicly share their views on either the post-Nargis situation or the ‘After the storm’ report. In any case, the authors of the report asserted that the criticism of their report was ‘based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the premise’, since it was intended as a human rights investigation rather than a critique of humanitarian assistance. Clearly, the ‘human rights master frame’ of the democracy movement was so powerful that the report’s authors instantly dismissed other, more nuanced framings of the post-Nargis humanitarian situation.

This example shows how different advocacy goals can lead to various, sometimes opposing ways to frame the situation in Myanmar. As described in previous chapters, for organizations working inside the country the aftermath of cyclone Nargis provided an important opportunity to expand their room to manoeuvre within the government’s restrictive framework. A report that directly challenged this ‘space after Nargis’ discourse therefore ran counter to their attempts to gradually expand this space by building up durable relationships with the authorities. International organizations, moreover, were increasingly prepared to publish positive assessments. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch (2010) and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (2009) had taken the opportunity after cyclone Nargis to draw attention to the agency and resilience of local communities and organizations. Human Rights Watch, a well-known human rights advocacy group, was especially praised by people working inside the country for pointing out opportunities, not just restrictions under military rule.

Many respondents from the democracy movement did not deny that the occurrence of cyclone Nargis had had certain long-term positive societal effects in Myanmar but were more inclined to see these effects as part of a larger process of raising criticism against the authorities, which had been re-invigorated during the 2007 demonstrations. Moreover, they were hesitant to connect these developments to their own activities inside the country, as they feared that public connections between them and local organizations could result in further repression. The result, however, was a somewhat one-sided portrayal of civil society in Myanmar, which made the debate about the post-Nargis situation appear more polarized than it might have been on the ground.

Cyclone Nargis certainly marked a turning point for the balance between information coming from inside and outside the country. Organizations such as the Cambodian-based Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies published a series of reports under the title ‘Voices from inside’, arguing that the voices of ‘ordinary citizens’ in Myanmar should be heard. While the democracy movement aimed to speak with a unified voice, the organizations promoting voices from inside the country were more diverse in composition and goals, and less focused on international advocacy. As a result, many of them emphasized diversity rather than consistency of opinions inside the country, which could be seen as a deliberate counter-strategy against the democracy movement’s inclination to create the impression of a unanimous voice of the people. As international attention began to shift from a focus on exile activism to developments inside the country, locally based activists gained prominence in determining the narrative on Myanmar, eventually prompting adaptations and a diversification in transnational advocacy priorities.