In 1960, the LSE-trained anthropologist Edmund Leach published an oft-cited article titled “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’” in which he raised fundamental questions about the country then known as Burma and today known as Myanmar. More than sixty years later, this seminar is intended to do the same in the context of the country’s inclusion in the activities of both the South Asia Centre and the Southeast Asia Centre at the LSE. The seminar begins by spotlighting both the striking commonalities and the striking divergences in the modern historical trajectories of Burma/Myanmar, on the one hand, and the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia, on the other. The seminar then zooms out to situate Burma/Myanmar within the broader historical context of the Indian Ocean. The point is to show how both Southeast Asian and South Asian perspectives help to illuminate the country’s political past, its current political predicament, and the prospects for political change in the future.
Register to attend online via Zoom. Register to attend in person (PAN 2.01).
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).
Dr Avinash Paliwal is Reader in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. Previous to this he was the deputy director of the SOAS South Asia Institute, taught Defence Studies at King’s College London, and was the Defence Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, also at King’s. He specialises in the International Relations of South Asia. His first book, My Enemy’s Enemy – India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal was published by Hurst and Oxford University Press (2017). His forthcoming book, India’s Near East – A New History (Hurst, 2024) unpacks India’s faltering attempts to exert control over its eastern hinterland and the neighbouring states of Bangladesh and Myanmar. Avinash holds an MA and PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, and a BA (Hons) in Economic from the University of Delhi. Formerly a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), New Delhi, he briefly worked as a foreign affairs journalist before entering academia.
Professor Michael Charney (PhD, University of Michigan, 1999) is a military historian of Asia, who has spent his career at the Centre for Advanced Studies, National University of Singapore, the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, and, since 2001, at SOAS University of London. He has recently joined the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy after eighteen years in the Department of History (now the HRP) at SOAS, with which he continues to hold a joint appointment. His main research interests are on the history of military logistics, armies and warfare in modern and contemporary Asia, the historical culture of war in Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, and West Africa, and the emergence of religious and national cultures in Myanmar (Burma) and the greater Bay of Bengal.
Dr Anja Karlsson Franck is Associate Professor in Peace & Development Studies at the University of Gothenburg with research interest in borders & international migration in Southeast Asia and co-author, most recently, of 'Hacking Migration Control: Repurposing and Reprogramming Deportability'
Dr Nilanjan Sarkar is Deputy Director and Development Manager of the South Asia Centre, LSE. Nilanjan was awarded his PhD in 2005 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His specialism is in the medieval Islamic history of the Indian subcontinent, with a particular focus on the pre-Mughal period (AD 1000-1400) in which he holds a Masters and an MPhil from the University of Delhi. He has published Streaming the Past: Peninsular India in History(co-edited, 2019), and is currently working on a book manuscript on the role of India’s early Islamic political history and governance. He has taught in several colleges in Delhi, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His research interests and publications are in scribal cultures and making of historical archives in early medieval India, techniques of history-writing in Indo-Persian traditions, the creation of historical knowledge in Islamic pre-Mughal India, and investigating categories of identity – of individuals, groups and institutions. A wider spread of these interests includes concerns with the use of history in contemporary India’s construction of identity, selfhood and nationhood.