The Palimpsest Constitution: Reading the Social Life of Law from Myanmar’s Borderlands

Malini Sur

Associate Professor of Anthropology, Western Sydney University

In The Palimpsest Constitution, Melissa Crouch explores Myanmar’s constitutional history, tracing its longue durée from Burma’s incorporation into British India through to the 2021 military coup and its aftermath. Challenging the liberal assumption that constitutionalism withers under authoritarian rule, Crouch shows how constitutional debate persists and inspires political struggle amid state repression and humanitarian crisis.

The book opens with the life and assassination of U Ko Ni, an eminent constitutional lawyer whose pursuit of democratic reform brought him into confrontation with Myanmar’s military regime. The circumstances of his life and assassination illuminate Crouch’s central argument: constitutionalism in Myanmar is inseparable from the intertwined histories of violence, resistance, and political imagination that have shaped the country’s political order. U Ko Ni’s presence haunts the book, embodying an alternative vision of constitutionalism shaped by the uneven relationship between legal activism, sovereignty, and political authority.

Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s notion of “politics past, politics present,” Crouch shows how constitutional politics in Myanmar is shaped by the persistence of older political and legal orders which political actors subsequently reinterpret and contest. Her evocative conception of the “palimpsest constitution” captures the interplay between past and present. Crouch moves beyond conventional accounts of legal precedent and case law to show the complex social life of law in Myanmar. The palimpsest offers a way of understanding constitutional change as a process of re-inscription, in which history pulsates within new configurations of power and authority. She also foregrounds tragedy and failure as part of constitutional life, showing how moments of rupture are fundamental to constitutional inheritance. The constitution emerges as an evolving historical project, continually reworked through the conflicts and reinterpretations of successive political moments.

I read The Palimpsest Constitution in several registers: as a meditation on time and endurance; from a frontier perspective with Burma’s uneasy proximity to India, particularly Northeast India; and through a legal anthropology of violence. These themes resonate with my decade-long work on the Northeast India–Bangladesh borderlands. Crouch’s analysis moves across scales, from constitutional centers to frontier zones, generating insights that extend well beyond Southeast Asia. She engages the postcolonial condition while also asking where it begins and how it is reproduced through law, violence, and institutional memory. Crouch effortlessly brings constitutional law into conversation with political theory and anthropology, weaving together archival research, visual materials, and interviews.

British interventions in Burma, first under the East India Company and later under the British state, were, as Crouch reminds us, deeply shaped by Benthamite utilitarianism, which emphasised codification and centralised executive authority. Across the British Empire, including Burma and the frontier regions of Northeast India, legal rationality was intertwined with emergency rule, enabling the deployment of martial law and militarised policing. Alongside this, Lockean ideals, premised on a distinction between the state of nature and civil society and mediated through the social contract, reshaped notions of the customary and the common, while imposing codified regimes of property. In Northeast India’s frontiers, the political destinies of upland populations came to be legally and socially classified as “tribes”, distinguishing them from settled agriculturalists. As Crouch notes, at the frontiers, law was instrumentalised to govern exceptionally and legitimise British control under the guise of legality.

Crouch situates the foundation and consolidation of colonial constitutionalism across British Burma. In its early form, constitutionalism was diffuse, operating through a patchwork of administrative practices, institutions, and legal norms. Before 1937, Burma formed part of British India and was governed within the constitutional framework of the Government of India Acts. Burma’s separation from India in 1937 marked a significant reorganisation of these arrangements, as Burma became a distinct Crown Colony. Crouch situates this transition within a broader history of colonial state-building, in which constitutional forms were repeatedly reworked to accommodate the particularities of frontier governance.

Territorial reordering also extended across Burma’s frontiers into Northeast India. In the early 1940s, Sir Robert Reid, Governor of Assam, proposed a Crown Colony encompassing the hill areas of northeastern India and adjoining territories of Burma, envisaging a political unit that would remain outside both an independent India and an independent Burma. His proposal formed part of secret British plans for the political future of the hill regions, reflecting the colonial imperative to treat frontier societies as administratively distinct from those settled in the valleys and plains. Although the Crown Colony scheme was never implemented, the proposal brought into view alternative territorial and constitutional futures at the end of empire.

Crouch’s discussion of the 1947 Constitution returns to the unresolved questions of territory and autonomy. As she notes, the Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry consulted representatives of the frontier peoples and recommended arrangements for their participation in the Constituent Assembly, including safeguards concerning constitutional provisions affecting the upland regions. The 1947 Constitution subsequently provided distinctive institutional arrangements for frontier societies including the Karen Affairs Council and the Special Division of the Chins. It also recognised a conditional right of secession for states, subject to a ten-year waiting period, a two-thirds vote of the relevant State Council, and a subsequent plebiscite. Crouch foregrounds constitutionalism as a process shaped by contestation among the state, frontier authorities, and communities seeking to define their political futures. Yet, as she shows, the constitutional settlement remained deliberately ambiguous about the meaning of federalism: the 1947 Constitution established a Union with constituent states and significant asymmetries of autonomy without formally naming the state a “Federal Union.”

One of the book’s central theoretical insights is the idea of constitutional endurance—the persistence and reworking of constitutional ideas across authoritarian regimes and political ruptures. By foregrounding ambivalence, Crouch shows how constitutional legacies can become resources for both domination and resistance, unsettling liberal assumptions about constitutions and democracies. In the final pages of the book, she turns to Chin leaders who have drawn on colonial-era laws to resist military rule. The 2021 Chin People’s Declaration, issued in response to the military coup, invoked earlier legal frameworks to assert local political authority, including claims concerning the control of firearms. As she shows, constitutional endurance is also a political practice through which minority communities draw on inherited legal frameworks to revive older claims to authority in confronting Myanmar’s military regime.

Today, the Federal Democracy Charter seeks to rewrite the constitutional palimpsest along democratic and federal lines, breaking with the military-dominated processes of constitution-making that have shaped Myanmar in recent decades. The charter draws on principles of democracy and federalism that echo earlier constitutional alternatives, while articulating a different vision of political authority and the relationship between the centre and Myanmar’s diverse communities. Although informed in part by contemporary debates in comparative constitutional design, the Charter remains deeply rooted in Myanmar’s constitutional history. As Crouch compellingly shows, constitutions endure as they continue to provide a language through which political actors contest authority and imagine alternative futures.

Malini Sur is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India–Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

Suggested citation: Malini Sur, ‘The Palimpsest Constitution: Reading the Social Life of Law from Myanmar’s Borderlands’ IACL-AIDC Blog, 27 October 2026, https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2026-posts/2026/10/26/the-palimpsest-constitution-reading-the-social-life-of-law-from-myanmars-borderlands