The Palimpsest Constitution: The Social Life of Constitutions in Myanmar. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2025).

February 2026 marks a dark anniversary that has passed with little notice from the global community: the fifth year of military rule in Myanmar.

Constitutions are not only important to democratic regimes—or even to authoritarian regimes like the one operated by Myanmar’s military—they are also crucial to pro-democratic groups who engage in creative and imaginative counter-constitutional initiatives. The Palimpsest Constitution charts the significance and long history of non-state constitution-making as a form of resistance to military rule.

The Palimpsest Constitution derives its title from George Orwell’s famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. First published at the end of World War II, Orwell describes history as a palimpsest to explain how a totalitarian regime simultaneously sought to erase memory and rewrite history. A palimpsest can be a text on which later writing is superimposed, or it can be the combination of two or more successive texts. The Palimpsest Constitution, argues that constitutions and their histories operate in the same way.

Like Orwellian palimpsests, constitutions build on each other’s legacies, each one superimposed on the next, recombining and repurposing earlier texts. Constitutional texts are repurposed, reused, and altered, even as they retain or evoke legacies of prior texts and forms. Modern constitutions draw on previous constitutional principles, scripts, and politics—comparative, transnational, and domestic. The palimpsest constitution embodies the reality that nation states are never blank slates for constitutional reform, and that constitutional histories are marked not only by optimism but simultaneously by tragedy and suffering.

Our assumptions and imagery of constitutions, however, often presumes a certain level of veneration and reverence of the text, and optimism in what it can achieve. Instead, the cover of The Palimpsest Constitution conveys people’s anger and disgust towards the military and its failure to follow its own Constitution by staging a coup. The image of the 2008 Constitution in flames is an example of how people burnt copies of the Constitution as a symbolic act of resistance. The dramatic political act of burning the constitution was a visceral example of people’s fierce resistance to military rule and to the Constitution.

These two elements of the book—the title and the front cover—frame the narrative and argument about the struggle for constitutionalism in the post-colony. The Palimpsest Constitution begins with the assassination of Burmese lawyer U Ko Ni who called for amendment of the 2008 Constitution to remove the privileges of the military. His advocacy for constitutional reform was so radical that his assassination is widely attributed to the military.

Ko Ni’s calls for constitutional reform, and efforts by non-state actors to draft alternative constitutions, are radical acts of resistance when viewed through the lens of constitutional history. The Palimpsest Constitution traces the legacies of colonial, democratic, socialist and military legality that reverberate loudly in contemporary Myanmar. We need to make sense of how different actors select and appropriate past texts and ideas to envision a new future because countries with multiple constitutional texts like Myanmar do not simply discard and forget about them. Instead, these texts become part of the social life of constitutions and people’s ongoing struggle for constitutional reform.

As part of these efforts, Ko Ni was rumoured to be subversively drafting an alternative constitution. Contrary to our focus on official state constitutions, such counter-constitutional texts are also central to constitutional legacies. Anti-military, pro-democratic and federal groups have a long and proud history of non-state constitution-making in Myanmar, from early texts by Burmese nationalists fighting against colonial rule, to the federal aspirations of minority groups in the 1960s, to constitutional texts that aspired to democracy and federalism in the 1990s and 2000s. These legacies inform people’s current hopes for a new constitutional future as expressed in the 2021 Federal Democracy Charter, a pro-democratic counter-constitution issued by people fighting against the military that echoes many of Ko Ni’s suggested reforms.

These constitutions tell us something about society: in Myanmar’s case, that something is its people’s fierce resistance to military rule. More broadly, The Palimpsest Constitution shows us that we live in an age not just of constitutions and constitution-making, but also of non-state constitution-making, where people understand and engage with constitutions not as fixed texts interpreted by courts, but as fluid ideas open to change and negotiation. That is why The Palimpsest Constitution concludes by suggesting that “the people can rewrite the palimpsest constitution, an idea that contains within it seeds of hope.”

Melissa Crouch is a Professor of Law & Justice in the School of Global & Public Law at the University of New South Wales. Her research interests include law and society; comparative constitutional law; and law and religion, with a focus on Indonesia and Myanmar. Her research approach is informed by legal ethnography, sociology of law, and historical anthropology. Melissa’s current research is on the role of the military as a constitutional actor in Asia, supported by an ARC Future Fellowship. This project builds on her earlier ARC Discovery Project on constitutions in authoritarian regimes, which focused on Myanmar (2018-23). That project led to the book, The Palimpsest Constitution: The Social Life of Constitutions in Myanmar (OUP, 2025).