Keep Your Device Clean, and Stay Safe! Cybersecurity Interventions, Digital Safety Practices, and the Making of Risk in Post-Coup Myanmar

After the military coup in 2021, Myanmar has seen the formation of a strong popular resistance movement opposing authoritarian rule. Relying on non-violent demonstrations and strikes first, many protesters have resorted to armed insurgency after brutal military crackdowns. The repertoires of the popular resistance in these struggles have been increasingly digital; and the military has responded with increased digital surveillance, blocking social media, internet blackouts, or frisking smartphones at checkpoints. Emerged from this has an ecology of physical and digital insecurity, where not only activists are fearing to be caught in one of the many nets of digital everyday surveillance. A range of digital safety trainings, guidelines, and cybersecurity 'how-to' documents has emerged that advise citizens, activists, and journalist on how to stay ‘safe’ – in the decidedly unsafe environment of post-coup Myanmar, characterised by armed conflict, surveillance, and forced conscription. Drawing on approaches from international political sociology and science and technology studies, we are taking these guidelines as an empirical entry point to critically examine how security and risk are imagined, made, and enacted by different actors in and around post-coup Myanmar – and what this tells us about current geopolitics. This means to unfold the complex interplay of digital technologies (platforms, messengers, encryption); their political economies and global infrastructures; and international interventions in armed conflict in a postcolonial context. Our findings from this analysis point out that rather than taking local realities of in/security into account, digital safety trainings often essentialise technological fixes (encryption, safety features) and individual safety practices to constitute ‘safe behaviours’ and ‘manage risk’. The political effect of this is twofold: firstly, current digital technology developed by mostly Western technology companies is recast as a solution to Myanmar citizen’s security concerns. Secondly, the responsibility for ‘staying safe’ is individualised through interventions aiming at behavioural change of targeted citizens, rather than structural change that would have to target both the authoritarian military and its surveillance technologies manufactured abroad. This not only absolves external technology actors and big tech companies from their entanglements in Myanmar’s digital conflicts. It also conserves and reifies a status quo where digital authoritarianism is painted as inevitable; where one can only manage and mitigate risks – rather than imagine non-authoritarian, safe, and democratic futures. In this sense, Myanmar has epitomised the collapse of the global liberal order long before Ukraine, Gaza, and Venezuela, and illustrates an emerging order where digital empires and their technologies are unaccountable and unobjectionable; and authoritarianism and surveillance are taken for granted.