Religious Resurgence from a Saffron Sepulchre: How can Religious Actors in Myanmar Transform an Uprising into a Revolution

The paper is divided in three major sections. The first part features the speculative analysis of the argument outlined in chapter four of Monica Toft, Daniel Philpott and Timothy Shah’s God’s Century and discusses the general methodological and operational assumptions implied by the authors’ paradigm in explaining the behavioral variation of religious actors in country’s democratization processes. In its second part, the paper examines the historical case study of Myanmar’s democratization process, focusing on the key events of the 1988 secular uprising, the 2007 Saffron Revolution and the November 9th 2015 victory landslide of the National League for Democracy party (NLD). The aim of the second section is to assess to what extent does God's century's paradigm predicts the role of Myanmar’s religious actors (the Sangha) to successfully push for democratization. In its third part, the paper attempts to assess the inherent features that made the Sangha play such a decisive leading role in democracy fostering despite its institutional position of conflictual integration within the Burmese government of the military (the Tatmadaw), a position considered by Toft, Philpott and Shah as not optimal to realize effective changes. To achieve this purpose, this paper attempts to triangulate the religious actors’ level of significance upon positive democratic reform by studying the transformations in the institutional relationship between the government and the Sangha.