Myanmar's New Generation: A study of elite young people in Yangon, 2010 to 2016

Abstract

With Myanmar’s 2010 general election the world’s longest reigning military regime undertook a managed diminution of overt authoritarian rule. As the population adjusted to a series of cascading social transformations, elite young people stepped up to catalyse a period of generational change. This thesis considers elite young people in Myanmar from 2010 to 2016, and provides analysis based on extensive fieldwork in the city of Yangon, Myanmar. This thesis disaggregates five social groups of elite young people in contemporary Myanmar, and orders them according to their proximity to established arrangements of the former military regime: the Yakuza gangsters, the cronies, the beloved young women, the cool underground rappers, and the creatives.

Through a process of generational rejuvenation elite young people influenced Myanmar’s social and economic transformations, in what proved to be nuanced and contradictory ways. Theories of generations conceptualise generational change as an iterative process, involving the regeneration and rejuvenation of existing explanations and systems alongside the introduction of entirely new ones. In contrast, theories of elite formation explain how various elite qualities are inherited from one generation to the next, often bolstering the social status of the people with that quality. This thesis applies a combination of these approaches to the case study of Myanmar, contributing a vibrant understanding of the processes of generational change, highlighting the role of elite young people in the early days of a wide-ranging social transformation.