Excavating Memory and Archiving Emotion in The Palimpsest Constitution

Visakesa Chandrasekaram

Film Director & Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales

Carl Schmitt, in his infamous defence of Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power in Weimar Germany, claimed that the sovereign “awakes” when a normal political situation becomes an exception. In such moments, the sovereign decides whether to declare a state of exception to confront an extreme emergency and eliminate its causes. Critiquing this, Giorgio Agamben reconceptualises the state of exception as an anomic space—a domain where what persists is “a force of law without law”. How then, should we comprehend constitutionalism within such an anomic space? And how should we understand the functionality of constitutionalism in a country like Myanmar, where a near‑permanent state of exception has stretched from the colonial era through the post‑colonial period to the present? Answering these questions requires scholars to remodel constitutional discourse, rewire academic thinking through multidisciplinary inquiry, and redesign political‑anthropological methods. This is precisely what my colleague, our author, Melissa Crouch accomplishes in The Palimpsest Constitution. Offering rare insights into socio‑legal terrains that remain academically under‑explored, Crouch illustrates how Myanmar’s constitutional legacies have been shaped by the palimpsest effects of overlapping colonial and authoritarian instruments.

I cannot help but note the striking parallels between the constitutional histories of Myanmar and Sri Lanka, where my research and artistic interests are located. Sri Lanka narrowly avoided military rule despite enduring two armed youth insurgencies in the South and a thirty‑year civil war in the North. Myanmar’s prolonged military rule resonates with Sri Lanka’s decades‑long state of exception, legitimised through repeated renewals of emergency rule under the colonial Public Security Ordinance. Since independence, Sri Lanka has replaced its constitution twice, and its current republican Constitution carries twenty‑two palimpsestic alterations (no such state of emergency exists in Sri Lanka currently). 

A comparative analysis is, however, ultimately futile because the discursive tools designed for civilian constitutional frameworks cannot penetrate militarised constitutional concepts, structures, and precedents. Australian legal formalism offers even less explanatory power for Myanmar’s constitutional despotism. New tools are required to dissect this constitutional beast, and that is exactly what Crouch does.

At the heart of the book is the thesis that modern constitutions are palimpsests: they reuse principles, politics, and textual scripts from earlier constitutions because “nation states are never blank slates for constitutional reforms” (p. 10). These written and unwritten palimpsest layers create a “disharmonious mix of legacies” that take on “new life” when communities draw upon them to draft new constitutional orders (p. 12). To understand this complexity, Crouch argues, scholars must examine not only constitutional design but also the environment within which constitutions operate (p. 12). This is particularly salient in Myanmar, where the military—functioning effectively as a “fourth pillar” of government—has come to dominate nearly every aspect of political, social, and judicial life.

In a regime where constitutional knowledge is managed through propaganda, censorship, coercion, and persecution, constitutional memory becomes crucial. The author gains access to this unofficial public memory by seeking out the “living archives” of lawyers, scholars, and activists. Her evocative descriptions—of portly state buildings staffed by cynical officials, or dim stairways leading to the apartments of activist‑lawyers—enable us to imagine the precarious conditions in which these archives survive. This methodological choice, which she terms “constitutional ethnography,” is vital for understanding the optimism and tragedy embedded in Myanmar’s constitutional legacies.

Without abandoning the constitutional optimism of the Global North when looking toward the Global South, Crouch invites us to confront the tragedies that define Myanmar’s constitutional experience. She begins with the assassination of Ko Ni—an activist‑lawyer—before zooming out to encompass the waves of violence that preceded and followed his death. Her accounts are infused with sadness and trauma, but constitutional anthropology should not be stripped of emotion simply because colonial academic traditions demand detachment. 

In tracing Myanmar’s palimpsest constitutional layers, Melissa is excavating memory. To erase emotion from these memories would reduce them to abstract puzzles not solvable by blackletter footnotes. 

Echoing the renowned archivist Michelle Caswell’s protest against “archival oppression”, one might say that Melissa is archiving not only anger and grief but also resilience and hope. Through this lens, The Palimpsest Constitution offers a textured portrait of Myanmar’s constitutional life: the brutality of military dictatorship; the sacrifices of pro‑democracy actors; the betrayals of allies; the grief of those who suffered; and the survivor’s guilt of those who escaped suffering. 

Visakesa Chandrasekaram is a film director and Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law & Justice, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. He is the author of An interdisciplinary study on the use of confessionary evidence in Sri Lanka (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

Suggested citation: Visakesa Chandrasekaram, ‘Excavating Memory and Archiving Emotion in The Palimpsest Constitution’ IACL-AIDC Blog (20 October 2026) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2026-posts/2026/10/17/excavating-memory-and-archiving-emotion-in-the-palimpsest-constitution