Legislators as Foreign Policy Actors during Democratisation. Insights from Myanmar (2011-2021)

The proposal will examine the case of Myanmar’s past decade of political opening (2011-2021) to question the prevailing narrative that parliaments, especially in post-authoritariansettings, wield limited influence over foreign policymaking. How donascent legislatures engage with foreign affairs? Does the role of parliaments in foreignpolicymaking affect the democratisation of societies emerging from authoritarian rule?The project will concentrate on the practice of international affairs developed byMyanmar’s Parliament of the Union (Pyidaungsu Hluttaw) across two five-yearlegislatures (2011-2016 and 2016-2021). It will be grounded on an in-depth investigationof publicly available, Burmese-language legislative proceedings and accompanyinginterviews with former parliamentarians and United Nations experts. It will develop anovel and counterintuitive hypothesis: that the involvement of Myanmar’s parliament inforeign affairs has contributed significantly, and perhaps decisively, to the collapse thedemocratic experiment in 2021. To understand the impact of parliament as an emerging institution getting involved ininternational issues, the study will first probe the proposition that Myanmar’s legislaturepositioned itself as a significant foreign policy actor until a coup shut it down inFebruary 2021. It will unpack such process, and the outcomes it led to, by examining themicro-foundations of the legislature’s international activity. It will characterize andexplain patterns in the foreign policy action and behaviour of individualparliamentarians across two legislatures controlled by competing ruling parties. Whichindividuals engaged in foreign policy activity? What potentially conflictual issues didthey address on the floor? How did other legislators, including army-appointed ones,responded? Then, focusing on the major diplomatic or national security issues andinternational human rights disputes identified, the project will build a multiple casestudy to test the hypothesis that parliamentary involvement in contentious foreignaffairs affected democratization, altered Myanmar’s civil-military equilibrium and,ultimately, fostered the military takeover of 2021. The contributions of this project are twofold. Informed by the literature on parliamentand international affairs, the study will assess the records of a post-authoritarian, non-Western legislatures in foreign policy and identify policy applications for complex,sometimes highly sensitive, foreign and national security contexts. In addition, sheddinglight unto unexamined Burmese-language materials teh project will aim to provide novelempirical insights on how Myanmar’s hybrid, semi-civilian regime operated and why itcollapsed within a decade. The findings will informed understandings of hybrid regimedynamics and foreign policy governance after political opening in fledgling democracies.