a country with a long history of brutal military dictatorships, was for decades a hostile environment for mass contention. Nonetheless, large-scale protests, as part of the Burmese urban pro-democracy movement, still emerged through the years. So what accounts for the perseverance of a non-violent movement in a repressive regime? In this dissertation, I argue for the role of an important yet oftneglected factor: civilian bystanders and observers of opposition activism. I theorize that bystander

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... protection and disruption toward protesters, in particular, significantly impact the durability of a protest movement. To test my theory, I provide an original qualitative dataset with a large number of semi-structured interviews and written testimony of more than 100 ordinary citizens and former pro-democracy activists in Myanmar. The novelty of this dataset is the unprecedented number of voices from the ordinary, non-contentious general public, which are mostly missing in existing research. Hence, the findings from my research would serve to deepen our understanding of movement resilience under repressive authoritarianism. iv