Accommodation of communal identities in the institutions of governance in Myanmar

The current literature on power-sharing and decentralization of power advices against direct recognition of group identities in governance arrangements of states. Direct recognition is understood to perpetuate political salience of identities, which may hinder overcoming societal cleavages and undermine development towards societal stability in deeply divided societies. This insight guides this study, which scrutinizes whether and how group identities are accommodated into governance institutions in the key constitutional documents in Myanmar. The study draws from the idea of ideational path-dependency associated with constructivist institutionalism, which suggests that the ideas embedded in current and previous institutions also affect the institutions to come. In this study a two-fold approach is used to analyze the aspects of institutional accommodation of identities: theory-driven institutional analysis and discourse analysis. The study finds that identities are strongly embedded into the constitutional documents under scrutiny and are understood as exclusive categories. The documents envision institutional accommodation particularly through communally defined power-sharing in the upper house of a federal parliament and through decentralization of power in a form of communally defined federalism. The study argues that the emphasis on particular identities poses challenges to representation of minorities on the state and on the federal level and may also institutionally perpetuate political salience of identities. Additionally, the prevalence of identities in the research data suggests that identities are likely to play a part in institutional arrangements in the future. Based on the research findings the study concludes that naming the prospective federal states in a non-communal manner could increase the sensitivity of the governance institutions to the constructed nature of identities, which could support further development towards societal stability in Myanmar