This dissertation examines the Free Burma movement as a case study of the potentially transformative movement politics of transnational legal action. Part I examines the development of Burma/Myanmar's pro-democracy movement since 1988, and challenges existing scholarship that depicts this process as a failed “people power” movement or as a movement hopelessly stalled by neo-liberal international foreign policy, repressive military governance, and divisive politics among a resource-poor, organizationally outflanked, domestic opposition. It describes how this movement forged a transnational network with NGOs and activists participating in a variety of other social and political movements. It traces the movement's transformation from nation-centered strategies of protest in Burma deploying civil rights discourse targeting the military's state-rule to transnational strategies of collective action after 1994 that deploy discourses on human rights and corporate governance targeting the relationship between the Myanmar Government and the transnational corporations with whom it has created partnerships since 1990. The author argues that, because transnational corporations are embedded in the politics, law, and morality of the states that have created them, and not only of the states within which they conduct business, relations like those between the Myanmar Government and its corporate partners have unintentionally provided their challengers with new opportunities. Part II presents three transnational “Free Burma” campaigns waged primarily within the United States after 1994: a selective purchasing law campaign against all corporations conducting business with the Myanmar Government (Chapter 4); the campaign to revoke Unocal Oil Company's corporate charter (Chapter 5); and the Doe v. Unocal lawsuit, representing the time that a transnational corporation has been successfully sued under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act. Each campaign highlights a different dimension—legislative, administrative, and judicial—of the processes through which the rules and institutional arrangements are produced to enable and constrain global market relations between transnational corporations and states. Using a variety of legal documents and interviews conducted within and outside Burma, the author develops an “ethnography of transnational legal space” to provide a mapping of the contested legal terrain over which the Free Burma movement has struggled, and the contingencies that this struggle has produced.
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