restored. Unable to effectively maintain control of the government under the guise of legal elections, just two years after U Nu returned to power, Ne Win carried out a palace coup in March 1962, and Burma quickly fell into the chokehold of socialism and martial law. One of the first measures of control taken by Ne Win and the Revolutionary Council was to jail all national and ethnic leaders. The official justification for this was that it was an attempt to preserve Burma’s national unity. In truth, this notion has its roots in the idea that the Tatmadaw is the only institution in Burma truly above politics and capable of holding the nation together and controlling all major aspects of social, economic, and political life (Seekins, 2011). Known as the “martial law regime,” Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council suspended the 1947 constitution and established a nationwide system of Security and Administration Committees (SACs), effectively beginning the hierarchical apparatus that remains to the present day (Taylor, 2015). As I will discuss in the following section, with the establishment of the SACs, every government has maintained a top-down power flow and similar administrative pattern in order to maximize control over the minutiae of Burmese life. In some instances, these regulatory entities extended as far as local wards and districts, effectively inserting military and/or government officials in a way that gave them access to the dayto-day workings of social life. By July 1962, Burma’s leadership decided it needed to establish more legitimacy in the eyes of the Burmese population and the international community, and thus the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) was born. By 1964 the Law to Protect National Solidarity was passed, effectively making the BSPP Burma’s only legal political party (Taylor, 2009). Composed of members of the Revolutionary Council, the BSPP’s 27