This chapter provides a practitioner’s point of view on diplomatic images. The author is positioned to give a unique perspective as a freelance photographer who is currently based in Singapore, which has recently become a significant city-state for major global diplomatic events. Through his first-hand experiences of covering high-profile international diplomatic events, such as the 2018 Trump-Kim Summit held in Singapore, the author takes us backstage and demonstrates how famous diplomatic images are produced to represent the affective register of the moment. In so doing, the chapter illuminates the situational context of the photographer in taking diplomatic images, offering insight into the editorial process in which diplomatic images are produced by the media.

This chapter examines three novels: Wendy Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango, Lucy Cruickshanks’s The Road to Rangoon, and Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma, and two works of life writing: Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear. The fictional works unravel a world of insurgent figures that undergo a constant mitosis and metamorphosis, from lovers to rebels, from fathers to national fathers, and from husbands to dictators. The chapter discusses concepts of intimate violence, affective (in)justice, inherited violence, and intimate sovereignties. Unlike the soft or slow violence of poverty and precarity, intimate violence occurs in familiar sites and spaces, against a familiar enemy. The readings unveil how the intimate violence is bound by sovereign desires of armed secession. The second part pairs two readings, Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear and Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts, offering a contrasting perspective on the interplay of intimacy, affects, violence and sovereign desires. If Suu Kyi’s narrative of defending the nation through militaristic means can be read as an extension of national autobiography then Thwe’s defense of tribal autonomy through affective insurgency can be read as the formative aspect of what I call subalter-nation.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as a human right. There is first a brief general review of a few relevant philosophical debates about human dignity and human rights that are concerned with societal progress in the way karama as a human right, was sometimes interpreted by protesters. Then, the chapter moves on to a closer look at a postcolonial review of similar debates. After reviewing some relevant passages from interviews and other expressions of karama as a human right in Egypt, the chapter ends with an overall analysis of this specific theme in light of the material previously presented.

This chapter presents the field of rule of law assistance as it became established in Myanmar after 2011. It introduces common rule of law actors and their technologies and provides a brief background to the political and legal features of the case study. While doing this, the chapter hints at the frictions of foreign-funded rule of law assistance that emerge because international, national, and local understandings and approaches to rule of law development differ and are challenging to align. It shows how intermediaries emerged to mediate between counterparts regarding issues such as monetary compensation; applications for funding; the best approach to achieve rule of law development; donor involvement in local affairs; and institutional constraints.

Imprisoned under house arrest for fifteen years over a twenty-one-year period, from 1989 to 2010, the Burmese pro-democracy leader and human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi became one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners and the face of the Myanmar opposition movement. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Peace “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.”1 Over the course of her imprisonment, Aung San Suu Kyi was the subject of six WGAD opinions. The author was hired by her family to serve as her international counsel from mid-2006 until her release on November 13, 2010. He worked with Aung San Suu Kyi’s local counsel, U Nyan Win and U Kyi Win, along with countless others globally, to utilize the latter three opinions, in combination with political and public relations advocacy efforts, to advance efforts to secure her freedom and that of other political prisoners from the military junta. Under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi was denied access to virtually everyone from the outside world other than her doctor, domestic lawyer, occasional diplomat friendly to the military junta, and Liaison Minister for the then-junta U Aung Kyi.