Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in Burma, Elliott Prasse-Freeman reflects on the temporal strategies employed by Burmese revolutionaries in navigating cycles of political openings, when mass mobilizations produce seemingly meaningful gains and defeats, when the state seems to regain an even stronger foothold on the political terrain, and the possibility of even modest reform seems foreclosed. 

Joshua Segun-Lean (JSL): I wonder if we might begin our discussion on the revolutionary temporalities you discuss in this essay by returning to your analysis, outlined in a previous essay, of the distinctions between “resistance” and “refusal.” You write, “Where resistance describes opposition to direct domination (sovereign modes of power, following Foucault’s schema), refusal describes the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse and mediated forms of power (governmentality).” To what extent would you argue that both dispositions possess implicit temporal dimensions? And in what ways might the MDCF radicals’ relation to time reflect their relations to the resistance/refusal problematic?

Elliott Prasse-Freeman (EPF): Thank you for this question—both for reading my other work, to then make such an insightful and provocative connection amongst various ideas in it.

To recap my earlier argument (2022) that you reference from Anthropological Theory (where I’m now an editor, and am co-running the short-form theory space ATC, which everyone reading this should consider submitting to!), I came to write that essay because I was taken by (on one hand) the enervation of resistance studies, and (on the other hand) the explosion of interest across many fields (Black studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology) in what has generally been called “refusal.” 

Consequently, in engaging the refusal literature, I identified a substrate in which much of it seemed to eschew direct confrontations with sovereign domination to instead focus on how people negotiate highly-mediated forms of power (described as “governmentality” by Foucault, “security” by Agamben, “control” in Deleuze). If one reads just the first few pages of Audra Simpson’s essential Mohawk Interruptus (2014), one observes how Iroquois people must consider how they are enumerated as populations, how they are taxed, how they can move through space, whom they can marry (and still retain identity documents), what language they speak and are spoken to, and so forth. These are fundamentally biopolitical questions (redounding on them as regulated populations) that then have significant consequences for ensuing collective action. To put a fine point on it: Classic social movement studies imagines contentious action as involving protests in the streets and clashes with police—but what happens when, instead, the cops form a cordon and chaperone the group of people chanting “whose streets, our streets!”? (Are the streets really ours, then?) What happens when the protest occurs, but George W. Bush co-opts and re-channels that affect away from contestation and toward his own project: “Yes, this is why we are invading Iraq, so that people can rally like this”? What happens when the sovereign (the cops, the state) doesn’t show up at all—and yet/so the structural violence, the systemic racism, the suffocating infrastructural power continue to foreclose both dignified life and political horizons? Such realities call for new tools, which I see refusal as providing—especially given that they can supply resources, tactics, and even consciousness that enable better formulations of moments of contestation (resistance). Hence, the same way that, in Judith Butler’s (2006) conceptualization, governmentality reanimates sovereignty, we can also see that responses to governmentality reanimate responses to sovereignty. I describe this movement as dialectical: Social movement action must move from war of maneuver to war of position and back, which is to say do both at the same time. 

Turning now to your question, in the article for Cultural Anthropology I identify how activists (and perhaps everyone) face an existential uncertainty about the ability of any of their efforts (resistance; refusal; trying to get that promotion at work) to realize particular objectives. Indeed, when revolutionaries do what they do (attempt to topple a dictator or organize a community, let’s say) they inevitably face obstacles that they must interpret: Is this challenge a momentary setback or a fundamental failure? Those assessments entail corresponding actions: If only a setback, then more of the same efforts are warranted, because at a certain threshold point things will change (the regime will topple with enough pressure; people may take some time to come to consciousness but will then reassess extant conditions and alter their behaviors; etc.). If the actions’ inability to materialize success constitutes a fundamental failure, however, then activists are compelled to rethink their praxis entirely—or at least acknowledge that rethinking is necessary—lest they be dismissed by those they are trying to mobilize as quixotic or crazy. Yet, it is impossible for revolutionaries to assess with any certainty which path (setback or failure) they are on. 

Therefore, they are almost constantly caught between two orientations toward temporality—they must think about the future (the steps necessary to achieve certain futures; the responsibility they may feel toward taking those steps) in two different ways. Following Alfred Gell’s (1992) definition of A-series time, they are somewhat free to manipulate their conceptions of temporality, emplacing themselves in past lineages, permanent presents, and prefigured futures that are temporally anti-linear: so committed to means that they can eschew concern over the ends of their actions. Yet, simultaneously, they also must remain aware of intersubjective acknowledgment of B-series time, in which, as I put it in the Cultural Anthropology article, “the perceived reality of ... the perpetually becoming-later of time that encroaches on human life ... provides the ontological ground on which human communities manipulate their temporal experiences” (2025, 701). Gell’s point, one that I find very convincing, is that it is only because of this ground of B-Series that the manipulations of A-series—the “particular process[es] which go ... on in time” (1992, 231)—can have any meaning as such. Taking both temporalities together, we can say then that revolutionaries must simultaneously act as if any action they take could rupture the world... while also knowing that it most likely will not, which in turn means they will have to consider what such a lack of rupture means (to them, and about the world). 

Now, does this delineation of temporality map analogously to resistance and refusal? Both certainly have temporalities to them—resistance, with its emphasis on sovereign contestation (and hence relatively observable outcomes), finds itself most at home in the theory of the event, in which actions produce ruptures and hence cleave open radically new trajectories; refusal, by contrast, not only “often begins well before said utterance or act” but also “extends far beyond the moment of behavioral or verbal proclamation,” as Eliza Sobo has put it (2016: 342–3). But I am not sure if such a one-to-one mapping (resistance to A-series; refusal to B-series) is so clear. This is because resistance often fails, and hence those who are crushed by sovereign prerogative must—if they survive—assess what that failure means and then decide on ensuing courses of action.

JSL: There is another sense in which questions of time inform the MDCF’s political strategies, and this is in relation to rights. Rather than holding to the idea that rights are inalienable even when they are not manifest, MDCF members find it more useful to think of rights as alienable, “emerg[ing] only through the perpetual production and reproduction” (Prasse-Freeman 2025, 709) of particular situations. Is there in this acceptance of contingency a rejection of a fixed and determined vision of revolution, or of the society that it will bring forth?

EPF: My monograph Rights Refused (2023), particularly chapter 5, examines this issue of alienability closely. This is because I found during fieldwork that Burmese people discussed “rights” in a way that was so strange—to my ears, anyway—and which ultimately fundamentally estranged me from my earlier understanding of rights (as a more general political-philosophical concept). Specifically, both in terms of grammar/syntax and as an object of discourse, the most common way to talk about a right (akwint-ayay) in Burma is as an alienable rather than inalienable possession. Following Kockelman (2009), rights do not fall into the category of possession, to which belong things like limbs or kin—those whose relation to their bearer is perpetual and unbreakable, even by literal severing. In other words, if I lose my arm in a car accident on the way to this interview with you, or if my lovely mother perishes tomorrow, let’s say (she’s in great health, not to worry), I still describe their relations to me with the same kinds of possessive pronouns: “My arm was lost.” “My mom died.” Now, what is strange (and especially to a Burmese ear, perhaps) is how we include something as abstract and often immaterial as rights in this category. And if you start paying attention to this—how people immersed in what we might call the Anglo-American liberal tradition talk about having rights that they actually do not materially have—it can start to drive you a bit mad. But this inalienability has become so naturalized in speech and discourse that we mostly don’t notice; we often don’t find it odd that we are constantly working to restore statuses that have been denied, such that we even have to fight for our right to party (as those great philosophers of the suburbs, the Beastie Boys, remind us). And yet, when statuses and entitlements go from rights to suddenly not rights (take, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court decision to strip women of the right to abortion), or when rights exist to defend the indefensible and extinguish further political exploration (such as Israel’s so-called “right to exist” as a genocidal apartheid ethnostate), they emerge as an object of objection and even mild hysteria (as interviews with people as divergent in their opinions as Francesca Albanese and Tucker Carlson have recently revealed). 

The Burmese version of rights, by contrast, is closer to opportunities, in which the affordances of akwint-ayay (rights/opportunities) are subject to the particular constellations of power and contingency that do not simply inhere in a given situation, but which can be actively produced in that situation. This can, admittedly, be demobilizing—in the sense that when people lack the bulwark that rights seem to provide, political action can appear riskier, something to avoid. But it can also, conversely, enable more creative political action: Rather than being constrained by (ostensibly) transcendent structures, situations are perceived as immanent—open and subject to change, if only the right kinds of actions can be taken and sustained. Maybe. 

This kind of contingency—the openness that is produced by concrete and material social forces that clearly simultaneously constrain that openness—reminds me of Stuart Hall’s idea of Marxism without guarantees, wherein “determinacy without guaranteed closures” (1986, 43) produces a “necessary ‘openness’ of historical development to practice and struggle” (42). And so, if rights approaches by contrast are a form of false guarantee (and if asserting rights in conditions of their manifest absence is a deeply undialectical way of approaching the world), revolutionary praxis entails embracing the demands that necessarily attend the contingency of a political world that is absent any guarantees: How open is that horizon? What kind of values will emerge within it? What kind of responsibility do revolutionaries have—to themselves and those they organize—to acknowledge that the other side of openness is catastrophic failure? My article in CA delves into some of this, grappling with the confusion, contradiction, and even a sort of emptiness that this produces in revolutionaries. The ones some might expect to be most dogmatic and committed to a narrow revolutionary line are actually incredibly circumspect. This might be because they have been humbled by failure, which we might put another way: humbled by history.