About the Paper
One of the biggest challenges facing Myanmar today is its lack of a cohesive national identity. Its colonial legacy and half a century of authoritarian rule has reified group divisions and hardened societal cleavages, leading to negative, and sometimes outright hostile, relations between different groups. Against this background, the authors discuss how the Myanmar youth perceive their social identity, in particular national identity, and how they conceptualize notions of citizenship within the Myanmar context, as well as the implications of the coup and the post-coup experience for the youth’s perceptions of social identity and interethnic relations in Myanmar.
About the Authors
Isabel Chew is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia. Prior to starting her PhD, Isabel was a policy consultant for governments in Southeast Asia and east Africa. She holds an MA in Southeast Asian studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Jangai Jap is an early career provost fellow in the Department of Government and a postdoctoral fellow in the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a PhD in political science from George Washington University.
This research was funded by USIP’s Asia Center, which is solely responsible for the accuracy and thoroughness of the content.