A New Formatting: Myanmar’s 2015 "race and religion laws"

This chapter analyses four laws to protect ‘race and religion’ passed in Myanmar in 2015 after strong pressure from Buddhist monastic groups. These laws follow a particular logic of the Burmese state’s ancien régime of codification of ethnic and religious identities as the basis for legal rights. However, the laws also represent a new formatting, which is informed by a global language of religious freedom. The result is a contradictory formatting process in which religious nationalist protection policies are combined with religious freedom concerns, serving as a reminder that religious freedom is not above, but rather part of, politics.