This article explores everyday urban governance and politics in Mandalay, Myanmar. We examine this through a focus on state-society interactions within Mandalay’s ward offices, which are the lowest tier of the administrative backbone of the Myanmar state known as the General Administration Department. This reveals the existence of three intertwined forms of urban ‘politics’ in Mandalay: elite politics, which echo the practices of civil society in the sense of Partha Chatterjee; popular politics, which echo the practices of political society; and self-governance, which is an approach to politics culturally and historically situated in Theravada Buddhism and Myanmar’s authoritarian legacies. The situatedness of the case prompts us to argue in favor of expanding the southern urban critique beyond its conventional focus on liberal democratic metropolises of the global South, in order to enrich our understanding of what constitutes postcolonial urban politics. We suggest this could be achieved, as we attempt here, by adopting collaborative research methodologies and by extensively building on southern area scholarship in ways that mediate epistemic expropriation.

本文探讨了缅甸曼德勒的日常城市治理和政治。我们通过重点关注曼德勒各区政府内部的国家与社会互动来研究这一问题，这是缅甸政府行政骨干中最低的一层，即总务部。这揭示了曼德勒存在着三种相互交织的城市“政治”形式：精英政治，呼应Partha Chatterjee的公民社会惯例；大众政治，呼应政治社会的做法；自治，这是在上座部佛教和缅甸专制遗产中具有文化和历史意义的政治方法。案件的地点性促使我们进行辩论，主张将南部城市批评扩大到传统上不再关注全球南方的自由民主大都市，以丰富我们对后殖民城市政治构成的理解。我们建议，可以像我们在这里尝试的那样，通过采用协作研究方法并以调解认知剥夺的方式广泛建立南部地区的奖学金来实现这一目标。