What the West Gets Wrong About Myanmar’s Politics of Fear

Aung San Suu Kyi: The Realities of Power in Burma’s Authoritarian Legacy

by Mon Mon Myat

Penguin Books, 2026. 200pp. US$13 (Kindle)

Dr. Mon Mon Myat’s book Aung San Suu Kyi: The Realities of Power in Burma’s Authoritarian Legacy is an intellectual biography of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and a meditation on the nature of power, and how it is understood. The emphasis is on Burma (Myanmar), and it is not a pretty picture—the people of Burma have long suffered under authoritarians who ruled with secret police, guns, gallows and prisons. The result is a population that longs for freedoms, especially freedom from fear, but is instead cowed into a sullen defiance. Today, this manifests itself in oppression by the Burmese military and insurgency by resistance groups across the country.

Dr. Myat’s book is a reminder that before Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was State Counselor, she was a prisoner who consumed the classics of Buddhist and Western political thought. She wrote “Freedom From Fear” and other essays about what a just and democratic society might look like in Burma while confined. In doing this she developed ideas based on the Buddhist concept of metta (loving-kindness), as well as her notion of the Revolution of the Spirit, and the need to be psychologically free of fear, all derived from Buddhist concepts typically missing from modern theories of good governance, where the emphasis is on utilitarianism, democratic governance and philosophical pragmatism. Dr. Myat’s book is thus a prolonged meditation on the limitations of Western concepts like “universal human rights” in Burma, which in recent decades has known only a culture of fear, and has little positive experience with the rule of law.

Dr. Myat’s description of peace and peacebuilding for Burma is refreshingly new; the book reframes Burmese politics away from the human rights narrative taught in the West toward emotions like fear, just leadership and the personal qualities needed by both leaders and citizens to create a righteous society. Her point is that the Western concept of human rights is not as “universal” as Westerners claim, and that Buddhist conceptions about the nature of fear, justice, dignity and rulership are important to peacebuilding efforts, too.

Such Buddhist traditions are steeped in understandings of humanistic morality, psychology and inner self-improvement. Thus where the Westerner tends to think in terms of financial incentives (you can get rich!) and punishments (you will get rich my way, or I will bomb you!), Buddhist tradition highlights inner peace, control of emotions, and maintaining personal trust. The emotion most dangerous for democratic politics is the corrupting power of fear, so ultimately fear must be controlled.

Dr. Myat does not dodge Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s role as State Counselor during the Rohingya ethnic cleansing, for which the military is mostly held responsible. Rather, Dr. Myat places the crimes against the Rohingya in the context of the authoritarian order that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi inherited from a military over which she never achieved authority. But having said that, Dr. Myat’s book is a primarily philosophical reflection about how and why Burma’s peoples are victimized in both international and national politics.

Freedom from fear

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi writes that for a truly democratic society to emerge, there needs to be trust between the ruler and ruled.  Trust of the ruler comes from the righteous administration of justice and the land, and is actually spelled out in the Buddhist “The Ten Duties of the Ruler,” which focuses on virtues like generosity, altruism, self-control, non-violence and uprightness.  The righteous ruler also respects the will of the people and seeks harmony.

What happens when the rulers becomes corrupt and the will of the people is ignored? Tyranny emerges, which is greedy, cruel, self-serving and violent. Kings become feared and legitimate government power becomes precarious. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi writes that in tyrannical situations, fear emerges among both the rulers and the ruled. The ruled become fearful of arbitrary power and the violence coming from the center, which in Burma has included feudal kings, British colonizers, Japanese invaders and, most recently, military generals. Fear is a natural response to midnight disappearances by secret police, violent confrontations, torture, imprisonment and execution. Such tyranny seeks to instill fear and obedience, so the rulers can extract short-term advantages. The point becomes to silence the people. Fear of tyrants creates a suspicion of those who are “disloyal,” however the leader defines the term. Spies are believed to be everywhere, and everyone becomes suspicious of everyone else. Such fear makes the people sullen, compliant, fearful and unfree. Righteousness and justice become impossible for both the rulers and the ruled.

But not only the people are afraid. The tyrants and their minions also fear the people, which means that the military leadership withdraws into barracks, hiding from everyday contact. Aware of the wrongs they have committed, soldiers are afraid of being treated as they treated their victims. The Burmese military today also lives in a culture of fear—especially a fear of losing power, and of just punishment.

Fear, of course, is an emotion that makes the rational behavior assumed by Western pragmatists difficult, and the trust and legitimacy underpinning democratic polities impossible. This, of course, is why Daw Aung San Suu Kyi insisted the “Ten Virtues of a Ruler” point a way out of the cycle of despotism and fear. Suppressing the emotion of fear within oneself, while refusing to comply with the demands of the oppressor, even when they become violent, is the “Revolution of the Spirit,” her name for the spirited, unafraid defiance of the oppressed, which was also taught by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also why Daw Aung San Suu Kyi faced confinement without fear for decades, and why, during the incident at Danubuyu in 1989, she fearlessly walked toward soldiers who had orders to kill her.

Roots in the Burmese royal court, Aung San’s rebellion, and ancient Greece

Dr. Myat writes that an early advocate for democracy in Burma was a minister in King Mindon’s court, U Hpo Hlaing. King Mindon sent members of the court to understand government, economy and other subjects in Europe during the 1870s. U Hpo Hlaing used this opportunity to develop ideas about a Burmese constitutional monarchy, or what he called “Burmese Native Democracy,” which focused on consensus between the rulers and the people. Central to his writings were principles of mutual respect and dignity, and particularly the quality Daw Aung San Suu Kyi picked up on later, “loving kindness”—metta in the sacred languages of Sanskrit and Pali, and a word used in Burmese. These were described in a treatise U Hpo Hlaing published in 1878, shortly after King Mindon died, titled Rājadhammasaṅgaha (A Collection of Norms for Kingship, or Civil Society Under Monarchy). In this work, among other things, he highlighted that the king’s position comes from birthright, and not divine right, so a righteous king must rule in a spirit of self-sacrifice and justice. This is done, he wrote, via a “social contract,” in which people’s interests were expressed via a parliament, which was not to simply implement the will of the king (as the King’s Council in the Konbaung Dynasty was traditionally used for), but to generate a consensus and express the will of the people.

Dr. Myat sees U Hpo Hlaing’s Burmese democracy as an expression of a broader Burmese moral culture regarding governance, in the same way that John Locke expressed British values of governance, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the French. All three acknowledged that power comes from the people—who are sovereign—and not from God, and refer to the “social contract.” But at that point the approaches of the Europeans and Burmese with respect to governance diverge a bit. For example, Locke highlights individual rights and the protection of property, and Rousseau emphasized liberty and equality. U Hpo Hlaing’s assumption about just governance has a similar democratic spirit, but emphasizes dignity, consensus, self-sacrifice and metta in governance.

The Buddhist way of looking at governance suffuses Burmese society; this was ignored when the British after 1885 pushed Burmese kings and Buddhist teachings into the background, and replaced such values with their own fascination with property rights, free markets and Christianity. Still, the British perspective never completely displaced the deeper Buddhist principles which re-emerged when Burma rebelled and moved toward independence in 1947, led by General Aung San and his successor Prime Minister U Nu. The two men, Dr. Myat writes, shared an instinctively Buddhist approach to good governance.

The reformed Burmese Buddhist conceptions of kingship were then corrupted by General Ne Win, who seized power in 1962, and General Min Aung Hlaing, both of whom used fear to rule, and isolated the army in their barracks. Such tyranny ironically reflected how British colonial masters corrupted their own basic principles of property rights when they expropriated the rice fields of Mandalay and the teak forests of Shan State. British tyranny was also found in their policies of burning villages, mass imprisonment in Insein, and mass executions of their enemies; and in a strange way General Ne Win resumed such tyrannical policies with the continuing appropriation of land for military projects, and particularly the brutal “Four Cuts” policies of the 1960s, which underlie Burmese military doctrine today.

Different rationalities—from U Hpo Hlaing to the ancient Greeks

So maybe U Hpo Hlaing is just another Enlightenment thinker; but as Dr. Myat emphasizes, if you go deeper, you find that there are fundamentally different rationalities. She points out that just as Locke’s description of the responsibility of kings to protect property makes sense in the context of governments emerging from British feudalism, U Hpo Hlaing’s descriptions of consensus and metta make sense in the Burmese context. Each rationality is a logical whole; but this also means that no single form of human and political rights is truly “universal” as implied in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and international law.

Fear in colonial and post-colonial Burma

One of the best essays written about fear in a colonial context is George Orwell’s semi-autobiographical “Shooting an Elephant,” in which a British police officer confesses, “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” The villagers use the legalism of the British system against the police officer, who shoots an innocent elephant so they can strip the meat from the carcass. He admits to shooting the poor elephant only because he is afraid of looking like a fool before those who hate him. Thus, despite the “favor” performed for the staring villagers, Orwell’s character remains a humiliated tyrant. He is still fearful, and still unconvinced by the racist reassurances found in the segregated European Club, in the same way today’s military officers who commit crimes against the Burmese people hide in their barracks and Naypyitaw mansions, avoiding the people who fear and hate them.

The point is that tyranny happens when rulers dominate the psyche through manipulation of fear. Where tyranny emerges, the political culture is brutalized, and peoples perceived as enemies of the state are victimized. Those who do the brutalizing are themselves fearful, and therefore seek safety in the army barracks, or European Club. There they seek reassurance that their cause is in fact just.

Power and corruption in ancient Greece

U Hpo Hlaing was not of course the only philosopher to notice that power corrupts; indeed it is a bit of an occupational hazard for politicians! This is why Dr. Myat brings up the ancient Greek term thymos, which was used by Homer in the Odyssey and reflects the deeply emotional drive for personal fulfillment, honor and status. Thymos, Dr. Myat observes, emerges from the emotional depths of the soul, where fear of humiliation drives the passions and corrupts the human heart. When this happens, anger, indignation and violence can result. Unfortunately, this focus on soulfulness and passion slipped out of European descriptions of politics in recent decades and now goes missing from the Requests for Proposals (RFPs) from Western NGOs funding peacebuilding exercises. Thymos is, however, Dr. Myat writes, implicitly part of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s “Revolution of the Spirit.”

As Dr. Myat emphasizes, thymos is implicitly part of the writings of U Hpo Hlaing’s description of Burmese politics. And this is an important point for pragmatic Western aid organizations that assume, as Max Weber does, that good governance is about efficiently operating a soulless judging machine of the economy and state. In fact, the need for thymos (and metta) is always hiding in the background. This is why Dr. Myat’s new book is a contribution not just to Burma studies, but also to the wider fields of political philosophy, social theory and cultural studies.

What Western peacebuilders misunderstand

A strength of Dr. Myat’s book is that it is clearly written and accessible, while also dealing with difficult philosophical issues. Dr. Myat puts Burmese scholars in the context of what Alisdair MacIntyre, Max Weber, Gandhi, Aristotle and Martin Luther King, Jr. have written.

Dr. Myat adds Burmese Buddhist writings to political philosophy, and points to how and why fear, metta and other concepts shape politics. The traditions of leadership described by the Theravada Buddhism of Myanmar and Thailand have long hidden in plain sight—but it takes an open mind to see their significance not only for abstract philosophizing, but in the political practices of Burma and elsewhere. The irony is that policies developed for Myanmar by Westerners between 2011 and 2021 assumed the universalism taught in the economics, political science and development studies programs of the West’s great universities. But the roots of such rationality were shallow, arriving in Burma only after 1885, brought by the technocracies of British colonialism, the CIA, and the Joint Peace Fund. This was done without paying attention to the soul of Myanmar, as reflected in the writings of U Hpo Hlaing, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Dr. Myat and others.

Western planners and others need to read Mon Mon Myat’s new book. It deserves to be found in the bookshelves or Kindles of every Western expat sent to Myanmar. (I hope that a Chinese version will be published soon, because they need to read it too.)

What is more, Dr. Myat’s book needs to be read in graduate seminars around the world along with Aristotle and Orwell. This is because the problems that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Myanmar have wrestled with are indeed universal—if only because the one thing “universal” in the modern world is a postcolonial hangover.

Tony Waters is a Professor of Sociology currently at Leuphana University, Germany. His most recent book is The Socio-Political Systems of Highland Burma and the Art of Governance (Palgrave MacMillan 2026). His email address is Anthony.waters@leuphana.de