Abstract
The February 2021 Myanmar military coup upended the country’s 10 year experiment in semi-democracy, during which longstanding military authorities shared power with a democratically elected civilian government. This article argues that despite extreme challenges and violence which ensued as a result of the coup and a bloody crackdown against dissidents, the people of Myanmar now have an unprecedented opportunity to wipe clean the country’s restrictive national identity which has revolved around the majority Bamar ethnic group and Buddhism, the predominant religion. While the country’s previous democratically elected government failed at forging a more inclusive national identity, a new government in exile has emerged in the form of the National Unity Government, which promises to be more tolerant of religious and ethnic minorities and has the potential to reshape a more inclusive Myanmar national identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Goldman (2021).
- 2.
Kirby (2021).
- 3.
Gunia (2021).
- 4.
Goldman (2021).
- 5.
@DoaAYae (2020).
- 6.
Aung (2021).
- 7.
Petty (2021).
- 8.
Fishbein & Lusan (2021).
- 9.
Tostevin (2021).
- 10.
United States Center for Disease Control (2021).
- 11.
Strangio (2021).
- 12.
Worldometers (2021).
- 13.
Human Rights Watch (2021a).
- 14.
Human Rights Watch (2021b).
- 15.
Ray & Giannini (2021).
- 16.
Goldman (2021).
- 17.
Aung (2017).
- 18.
Oppenheim (2017).
- 19.
Mozur (2018).
- 20.
Fuller (2013).
- 21.
Fisher (2015).
- 22.
Sherwell (2015).
- 23.
Simons & Beech (2019).
- 24.
Aung (2021).
- 25.
Ford (2021).
- 26.
Beech (2021a).
- 27.
Gladstone (2021).
- 28.
International Pressure Essential in War Against Junta: Myanmar’s U.N (2021).
- 29.
Beech (2021b).
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Acknowledgements
As noted in the text, this chapter is an expansion of an earlier article the author published with the Berkley Forum, a platform for public scholarship and commentary hosted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, in a series analyzing the roles of Buddhism, ethnicity and nationalism in the February 2021 Myanmar coup. This chapter is produced with the original publisher’s consent.
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Aung, K.M. (2023). Hope at the End of the Tunnel: Myanmar’s Civil Disobedience Movement and Moving Toward a More Inclusive Myanmar. In: Takeda, M., Yamahata, C. (eds) Myanmar’s Changing Political Landscape. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9357-2_10
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