Non-State Education and Ethnic Conflict in Myanmar

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This network aims to bring together London-based scholars working on education, knowledge and ethnonational conflict with education researchers and practitioners in Myanmar. Its main aim is to analyse the role of non-state education in Myanmar's competing nation-building projects and ethnic conflict. In doing so to it aims to a) generate academic and policy-relevant knowledge on the extensive landscape of non-state ethnic minority-based education regimes in Myanmar's conflict zones, to b) aid capacity building of education practitioners and researchers in Myanmar's ethnic minority communities, and to c) to inform the country's education reform, including international donors engaged in the reform process. This is important as education has long served as a main vehicle for Myanmar's violent nation-building, including the forced assimilation of its ethnic minorities. At the same time, competing non-state education regimes have emerged as one of the means of resistance amongst the numerous revolutionary movements recruited from ethnic minorities. In order to analyse the politics of these non-state education regimes the network will use participatory research methods, including auto-ethnographic approaches that draw on the extensive experience of its local participants: education researchers who are themselves involved in non-state education provision. This will help to address the main paradoxes that ethnic-minority education providers are confronted with: 1) the tension between their aspiration to modernity and their need to create and preserve identities, ancestry and heritage and 2) the tension between resistance against an ethnocratic state oppression and the need to homogenise and solidify fluid and diverse ethnic minority identities into salient ethnic categories under the banner of an alternative nationalism.The network aims to address these challenges in three workshops (two in Myanmar and one in London). The workshops will provide the platform to connect the network, generate empirical and conceptual knowledge about non-state education in Myanmar, provide a platform for knowledge and experience sharing between participants, and inform Myanmar's education reform and international donors by incorporating seminars for a policy audience. The network will also disseminate its findings through academic, media and policy publications.