Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar

Cheesman, Nick (EDT)

ISBN 10: 0367891875 / ISBN 13: 9780367891879

Published by Routledge, 2019

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 38731358-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0367891875
• ISBN 13: 9780367891879
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Myanmar’s recovery from half a century of military rule has been fraught. As in other religiously, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous countries where a dictatorship has loosened a tight grip, people there have wanted for democratic institutions to express and manage conflict. Under these circumstances, mundane and seemingly apolitical events sometimes unfold into moments of intense violence.

Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar addresses one such violent chapter in Myanmar’s recent past: the communal violence that shook the country between 2012 and 2014. The violence, most of it involving Buddhists attacking Muslims, ranged from localised, fleeting, inter-group melees, to large scale, apparently well-organised, state-supported killing and destruction of property of a targeted community, running over a number of days.

The book’s seven chapters comprise a response to the violence by a group of Myanmar and Southeast Asia experts. Their contributions trace the histories and contemporary features of the violence, and the legal and political arrangements that made it possible. Their interpretations, while specific to Myanmar, also contribute to broader debate about the characteristics, causes and consequences of communal violence generally. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.

About the Author

Nick Cheesman is a Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, Australia, and author of Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (2015).