The Myanmar Education landscape, after the coup

(Research project of Nicolas SALEM-GERVAIS, affiliated researcher at IRASEC)

This research project, conducted with an international team of experts, aims at analyzing the consequences of the 2021 military coup on the education sector in Burma/Myanmar.

The realm of education has indeed continuously been at the heart of the great political, ideological and identity issues and battles underpinning the country’s history, throughout its successive eras : monarchic (pre-colonial) period, colonization and struggle for Independence (1825-1948), parliamentary period (1948-62), successive military dictatorship (1962-2011), reforms towards democratization and decentralization (2011-21)… and return to dictatorship, as well as a civil war, whose momentum seems to be increasing, following the February 1st 2021 coup.

The education sector itself has become sort of battlefield, in which the junta, the government in exile partly composed of lawmakers elected in 2020, and a multitude of other actors (armed or not and often linked to an ethnic identity) are directly involved. This project thus aims at a better understanding of the interactions between politics and the realm of education, by inserting recent developments in a historical and geographical perspective, and with a particular attention to minority languages and identities in the realm of education.