The New UN Special Envoy on Myanmar: A Mission Impossible?

Date: May 27, 2024 (Monday)   

Time: 06:00 – 07:00 PM AEST Time (14:30-15:30 Myanmar/Yangon Time) 

Zoom Meeting here

The appointment of former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop as new UN Special Envoy to Myanmar has been met with a mix of quiet hope and vocal scepticism. Many see the job of the Envoy as essentially impossible, and some have even called for the position to be terminated. The webinar will reflect on the past 30 years of UN mediation in Myanmar and discuss how the mandate might be most useful today.   

Dr Morten B. Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of New South Wales Canberra (Australian Defence Force Academy) and a former senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Myanmar. He has been working on Myanmar politics and development affairs for more than twenty years and has served as a policy adviser to the Australian government, the United Nations, the European Commission, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, among others. His major publications include A Good Office: Twenty Years of UN Mediation in Myanmar (International Peace Institute, 2012), with Sofia Busch; Principled Engagement: Negotiating Human Rights in Pariah States (Ashgate, 2013), with David Kinley; and The Rohingya Crisis, Myanmar, and R2P ‘Black Holes’ (Global Responsibility to Protect, 2021).

Moe Thuzar is a Senior Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, where she coordinates its Myanmar Studies Programme. Moe joined ISEAS in 2008, as lead researcher in the ASEAN Studies Centre up to August 2019. Prior to joining ISEAS, Moe spent ten years at the ASEAN Secretariat, where she headed the Human Development Unit from 2004 to 2007. A former diplomat, she researched Burma’s foreign policy implementation (1948-88), for her PhD at the National University of Singapore. Moe was a Fox International Fellow (2019-2020) at Yale University’s MacMillan Center during her PhD candidacy. Her research interests include Myanmar’s foreign policy, ASEAN integration impacts and issues (socio-cultural areas) and ASEAN’s dialogue relations. Moe has co-authored, co-edited, and contributed to several compendia and edited volumes on ASEAN, and on Myanmar