Vol. 50 No. 3 September 2019 ‘Accountability Amidst Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: Learning from Recent Cases’ President Thein Sein’s reform agenda, they have gradually withdrawn funding from social and political action, including humanitarian organisations, on the Thai border. Unsurprisingly, many border-based CSOs have since struggled, relocated to Myanmar, or ceased to exist (Décobert 2016). With the relocation of aid funding and political liberalisation, civil society in central Myanmar has flourished to unprecedented extents. Yet, space for social and political action has contracted severely since Aung San Suu Kyi took over power. Under her NLD government, persecutions of journalists and peaceful protesters have become commonplace again and inhumane treatment of political prisoners, including severe torture, remains to be a sad part of reality in Myanmar (Human Rights Watch 2019). The top-down nature of transition in a context of protracted conflict and authoritarianism poses severe challenges for civil society in Myanmar. The following section will focus on: (a) the growth of uncivil society that pursues exclusionary and violent agendas, and (b) the risk that peace-building and development initiatives are co-opted by securitised state-building and counterinsurgency. 4.1 Centre: civil and uncivil society While political and social action matured on the Thai border during the 1990s and 2000s, the situation for civil society groups in central Myanmar was dire after the 1988 uprising. Throughout the 1990s, SLORC expanded its intelligence apparatus, resulting in pervasive surveillance and mass imprisonment of pro-democracy activists. This resulted in increasing fragmentation of the NLD umbrella between NLD affiliates. In the mid-2000s, a new wave of civil disobedience campaigns challenged the military regime, organised by student leaders of the 1988 uprising that had been released after decade-long political prison sentences. The 88 Generation Students Group was founded in 2005/06 and has since become a civil society group with high moral authority. In August 2007, the 88 Generation organised peaceful marches against a steep rise in fuel prices. After authorities re-arrested many of the student movement leaders, Buddhist monks joined the protests, which became known as the ‘Saffron Revolution’, due to the saffron-coloured monks’ robes. The violent suppression of protests triggered a group of monks to establish the then-underground organisation All Burma Monk’s Alliance (ABMA). The ABMA called for the junta to restore fuel subsidies, release political prisoners, and engage in national reconciliation. After the junta remained unapologetic, the ABMA excommunicated SPDC leaders and called for continued protests (Selth 2008: 283).4 The political mobilisation of the pro-democracy monks in 2007 dealt a severe blow to the legitimacy of the military regime, but also helped to create an international narrative referred to by Freeman as the ‘good monk myth’, i.e. the notion that the Buddhist monkhood in Myanmar is predominantly a grass-roots, human rights movement (Freeman 2017). In contrast to this, the Tatmadaw has co-opted parts of the monkhood, 26 | Brenner and Schulman Myanmar’s Top-Down Transition: Challenges for Civil Society