Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
From 2012 to 2014, Myanmar experienced recurrent, sporadic, collective acts of lethal violence, realized through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. In this talk, I draw on scholarship from Indonesia and India to make a case for classing and analyzing the violence as “communal.” I conclude with some tentative remarks on the relationship between communal violence, anti-Muslim sentiment, and the most recent military operations in Myanmar’s west.
Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and in 2016-17 a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where he is working on a political theoretical study about torture. He is the author of Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Cambridge UP, 2015).
Co-sponsored by the New York Southeast Asia Network and NYU Wagner's Office of International Programs