This seminar sheds light a variety of ways in which people in Myanmar have coped with multiple political and economic crises generated by the military coup in 2021. It addresses the following questions: To what extent do these crises transform the nature and degree of political violence and the existing state relationship between non-state armed groups? How have some villages/neighborhoods in conflict affected regions managed to avoid violence or an escalation of violence in this political context? My research looks at the types of armed actors who control the areas, the general level of resistance against the junta, local authorities’ relationships with local populations, and socio-economic backgrounds of neighborhood and households to explain variations in the nature and intensity of violence across the country. It focuses on how people and communities in Myanmar have attempted to minimize threats against their physical safety and to secure their individual or/and community’s wellbeing in the post-coup period.
This event will take place online via Zoom. Register to attend here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung is Professor of Political Science Department at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her areas of specialization are on Myanmar/Southeast Asian politics, ethnic politics, and political economy. She has written numerous books and articles on ethnic politics and political economy in Myanmar, including her most recent co-authored book with Jacques Bertrand and Alex Pelletier titled Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2022) and her single-authored book Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Ardeth served as Political Science Department Chair from 2013 to 2021 and interim Director for the Peace and Conflict Studies Program in the 2020-21 academic year. She has received fellowships and research grants from International Peace Research Association Foundation (2021-2022), Fulbright Public Policy Fellow (2020-2021), Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (2010-2011), Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, East West Center Washington DC, and the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute of Southeast Asian studies in Singapore.
Dr Hans Steinmüller is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE and a specialist in the anthropology of China. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Hubei Province (central China) and in the Wa hills of the China-Myanmar border. Publications include the monograph Communities of Complicity (Berghahn 2013), and more recently special issues on Governing Opacity (Ethnos 2023) and Crises of Care in China Today (China Quarterly 2023). He is editor of Social Analysis and convenor of the MSc programme 'China in Comparative Perspective'.