• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.161-196
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• 2018

The major object of this study is to analyze the political development of Myanmar's civilian government on the concept of defective democracy, and to investigate the main actors who delayed or stymied political development and their interrelation. In doing so, this study suggests the tasks required for political development overcoming the current political structure and behavior. The civilian government, which was launched in 2016, failed to achieve positive political development by following the behavior of military authoritarianism in terms of exercise of power and decision making structure. On the perspective of the government, delegative democracy and domain democracy have been strengthening since one person has taken over all political power and hesitate to take horizontal accountability for each power organizations. The military, which is responsible for national defence and security seeks illiberal democracy and exclusive democracy, keeping on an undemocratic constitution by the military and Burman ethnocentrism. The reasons why defective democracy has been occurred are that the lack of a group to run a democratic institutions and the limitation of power structure that fails to adhere to the principle of civilian control to the military due to long-term military rule. Therefore, there is a need for military's come back to barracks and transform the power structure to democratic of the civilian government which is tamed an authoritarian order for the political development in Myanmar. In order to achieve this, this study concludes that setting up a empowered democratic government is required.

• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.185-212
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• 2017

The National League for Democracy (NLD) has restored a civilian government since the military had taken political power in 1962 as a result of general elections on 7, November 2015. But Daw Aung San Suu Kyi could not take part in the presidential election due to some restraints in constitution, so new government created the state counsellor position and the ministry of sate counsellor's office against military's resistance. It never publicized whether the military has to back to barracks including abolish of military's occupying the parliament seats. The ruling party is still taking laissez-faire to the military's political and economic role. The National level Ceasefire Agreement called the 21st Panglong conference launched in the end of August for a week, but stakeholders only insisted their demands. Rohingya issue is not involved in the 21st Panglong conference which aims to achieve national unity. The U.S. fully lifted a comprehensive sanction toward Myanmar since 1993, Japan promised huge grant assistance succeeding the former quasi civilian government. China strived to restore alienated relations of two countries. Although Korea kept Official Development Assistance, the summit which was planed two times in 2016 did not hold. The civilian government announced twelve points of developmental agenda in July 2016, instead of destroying the national development policy of the Thein Sein government. This agenda only showed the direction of policy not road map which was the same trend of the former government. The main direction of economic development stressed agriculture but manufacture like light industry was ignored.