Explaining Youth Activism in Transition: Insights From Myanmar

Despite its historical role in the vanguard of many democracy protests, youth activism has been widely neglected in the transition and social movement literature. Moreover, existing attempts to explain youth activism lack explanatory power in most ‘poor’ transitional contexts. How can youth activism be explained in such contexts? Previous studies suggest that there is, under certain circumstances, a wider spread of postmaterialist values among youth activists that might account for their activism. However, these studies are unable to deliver a persuasive explanation for postmaterialist values in transition contexts. A contemporary transition context is Myanmar, which has been perceived to be in a process of democratization since 2011. In this process, also opportunities to protest have newly emerged, in which youth can be identified as one of the most assiduous groups. It is hypothesized that youth activist’s postmaterialism in Myanmar results of a historic legacy of the 1988 pro-democracy struggle that established a collective identity shared with the 1988-youth generation activists. By analyzing time-series data from a self-created dataset, consisting of protest event data compiled through a protest event analysis from local news resources, it is empirically verified that in contrast to all other groups, youth activists in Myanmar protest solely for postmaterialist issues (ipso facto are more postmaterialist). In addition, the thesis of a shared collective identity is supported by the findings, suggesting that it might be the transmitter of postmaterialism among youth activists in Myanmar.