Pop Culture, Art and Ideas of Legitimacy in Struggles over Democratization and Peace (POPAGANDA)

The struggle for democracy against an authoritarian and oppressive military regime, is the source of deep conflicts in a number of countries. In what ways are political processes in such countries shaped by cultural-historical beliefs and cosmologies? How are political legitimacy and authority understood, and how do various opposition groups use popular culture and artistic practices to push for political change? In the POPAGANDA research project, we aim to unpack the role played by myths, cosmology, religion, spirituality, and magic in both generating and challenging political legitimacy. The research team investigates how opposition groups and their supporters among artists reinvent and interpret narratives rooted in cultural-historical or religious representations in their artistic expressions. We examine how popular culture and art are used to both generate legitimacy for political opposition groups and contest that of the state. We are interested in how these practices affects political processes and power structures. Myanmar and Thailand are both examples of countries caught in protracted conflicts where minority and opposition groups have built strong political visions and ideological systems incompatible with the political mindset of the dominant military elite. The research team is engaged in generating new insights into how popular culture and artistic expression influence political dynamics and the work for democratization and peace in Myanmar and Thailand. At the same time, we are committed to producing the necessary building blocks for theory development about how this knowledge can contribute to a better understanding of other contexts with unresolved violent and political conflicts. The project is led by the Institute for Peace Research (PRIO) in collaboration with researchers at the partner organizations Ubon Ratchathani University in Thailand and Naushawng Development Institute (NDI) in Myanmar. The start-up meeting for the project was held on 21 December 2021. The research group used the meeting to carve out a common conceptual understanding of the project as well as to present and discuss research ideas. Both the pandemic and the military coup in Myanmar presented major practical, methodological and professional challenges for the project in its start-up phase. An important milestone for the project was the employment of doctoral fellow Amara Thiha. Amara was employed at PRIO from 1 January 2022 with the project Rituals, Power, and the Search for Political Legitimacy in Myanmar. The doctoral thesis will be defended at Coimbra University in Portugal and is supervised by Teresa Almeida Cravo (Coimbra) and Marte Nilsen (PRIO). Amara defended his project description at Coimbra University on 27 October 2022 with Professor Nicholas Farrelly as an external opponent in a jury appointed by the university. From July to August 2022, he held a visiting researcher fellowship at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Singapore. In the first year of the project period, much of the data collection took place digitally. In March 2022, the project manager carried out a research trip to Ubon Ratchathani and Bangkok and Amara Thiha carried out fieldwork in Myanmar from December 2022 to January 2023. On 9-11 December 2022, the entire research group met for a project seminar in Bangkok. The project manager has since carried out fieldwork with data collection with Burmese exile artists and activists in Chiang Mai and Mae Sot, and the doctoral fellow carried out new fieldwork from December 2023 to January 2024. Other researchers in the project have carried out several rounds of data collection in Pattani, Ubon Ratchathani and Myitkyina. The research group met for a new project seminar in Bangkok in November 2023. Throughout 2023 and 2024, the group has mainly worked on article drafts for a planned scientific anthology on popular culture and art as a tool in the fight against military rule. Titipol Phakdeewanich was a visiting researcher at PRIO in May and June 2023 and in the summer of 2024 Tsin Mai participated in the University of Oslo's summer school. The research group has also worked closely with several different artists and activists and held joint seminars combined with exhibitions and performances.

POPAGANDA investigates how political opposition groups in Myanmar and Thailand use popular culture and art to generate legitimacy for their political causes and propagate their messages. The project team seeks to discover how these subaltern groups and their supporters among artists reinvent narratives rooted in ancient belief systems and cosmologies to produce political legitimacy in contemporary struggles over democratization and peace. The project team aims to reveal how these groups use popular culture and art to contest the legitimacy of the state and how this practice of contestation affects political processes. This research is essential for the understanding of how and why countries that are undergoing transitions from autocracy to a more democratic system fail to solve internal political and violent conflicts. An outcome of the project is to significantly improve knowledge about the cultural, religious and cosmological origins of political legitimacy in these countries. Studying narratives and the cultural transmission of such narratives, provides a unique way of researching group identities, political legitimacy, power relations, and perceptions of democracy and peace. Such insights are needed to understand the dynamics of conflicts, but they are also necessary building blocks for theories and strategies for solving violent and political struggles in transitioning states.