This is a book on contemporary Burma, a vivid and interesting account based on material from Burmese sources and on the author's own rich experience. It is not a formal history; it just looks back and reminisces. In her more than two decades of freedom, Burma has come through much trial and tribulation, and General Ne Win, who once again leads the country, has been an important figure in her h…
The State in Myanmar attempts to draw the com- plex history of state making and state perpetuation in Myanmar into one volume. The social and economic forces, as well as international and domestic issues, which have made Myanmar one of the poorest and least understood Asian countries, are discussed in this volume.
A Plastic Nation examines the immense role of Thai nationhood in domestic and international politics. Although in fact ill-defined, Thainess, or khwampenthai, has been consistently used by Thai leaders to legitimize their power and to defend their economic interests. Not only has the assertion of Thainess been deeply rooted in the private interests of those in power, it has been deployed as par…
The government of Myanmar, considering the many "distortions" contained in foreign accounts, in recuperating its history set up the Myanmar historical commision in the 1950s to delve into the past by way of what is commonly know in Myanmar as "living history".
In line with recent reviews of policy by Aung San Suu Kyi and the U.S. Government, ASEAN's Myanmar Crisis: Challenges to the Pursuit of a Security Community provides a clear and innovative analysis of why it is necessary to reassess regional and international approaches to Myanmar. For the first time, this book also reveals the full extent to which Myanmar has challenged the solidarity and deve…
British journalist Francis Wade spent considerable time in Myanmar trying to understand its distant and recent history. In early 2017 he published Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim “Other,” about changing attitudes over the centuries about how the majority Buddhist population viewed Muslims. In his historical investigations, he does not spare British col…
Vince Boudreau compares strategies of repression and protest in post-war Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines because these alternative strategies shaped the social bases and opposition cultures available to dissidents and, in turn, influenced their effectiveness. He includes first-hand research as well as the the social movements' literature to consider the interactions between the regimes in …
In 1988 Burma exploded. In scenes now familiar from recent events in Eastern Europe the people of Burma rose against their government. They were brutally put down on a scale matched only by the Chinese repression at Tiananmen. This was a mass and nationwide expression of outrage at the régime's ruinous economic policies and repressive politics.
This book tells the story of Burma's financial system - of its banks, moneylenders and 'microfinanciers' - from colonial times to the present day. It argues that Burma's financial system matters, and that the careful study of this system can tell us something more general about Burma - not least about how the richest country in Southeast Asia at the dawn of the twentieth century, became the poo…
Peter Popham distills five years of research including covert trips to Burma, meetings with Suu Kyi and her friends and family, and extracts from the unpublished diaries of her co-campaigner and former confidante Ma Thanegi into this vivid portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi, illuminating her public successes and private sorrows, her intellect and enduring sense of humor, her commitment to peaceful re…