Seminar Details:

• Title: When Indoctrination Fails: Education, Economic Growth, and Resistance Against Authoritarian Rule in Myanmar
• Speaker: Dr. Htet Thiha Zaw
• Date: February 20, 2025 (Thursday)
• Time: 1:00 – 2:30 pm (PST)
• Location: C.K. Choi Building, Room 351
  (Also on Zoom)

This hybrid webinar is part of the UBC Myanmar Discussion Series, generously supported by the IDRC’s Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar (K4DM) Initiative.

Abstract

Recent literature on the political economy of education emphasizes indoctrination as the primary motivation behind education expansion under non-democratic states. However, existing literature fails to explain a paradoxical consequence of state-led education: the emergence of educated youth as a force of resistance against non-democratic rule. Modeling the strategic interaction between educated youth and government under changing economic situations, I argue that education through indoctrination only works when loyalty to the state continues to generate economic advantage in a low-development context. Therefore, education’s potential for indoctrination weakens as education access expands and economic returns to education decline. I evaluate this theory in the context of Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. Using novel panel data on economic development and access to education at the township level, I show that, while education levels are negatively associated with the number of resistance events, the relationship is significantly weaker in townships that experienced strong economic growth after the emergence of civilian-military government in 2010. The findings yield new insights into the dynamics of state consolidation through education in developing economies.

About the Speaker

Dr. Htet Thiha Zaw is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. He studies how institutions created and maintained by indigenous societies have shaped historical state development in the Global South, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. His research demonstrates that indigenous political and social institutions—many of which predate colonial rule—are crucial to understanding how colonial elites constructed state institutions, from allocating infrastructure and exercising coercive power to replacing indigenous schools with state-controlled education systems. He supports his arguments with empirical evidence drawn from original data in pre-colonial and colonial records, integrating quantitative analyses of cross-section, panel, geospatial, and text-as-data with qualitative insights from archival research. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Education Review, and the International Journal of Educational Development, among other venues.

This week’s New Pubs features Chambers on religious institution building as a form of state territorialization in southeastern Myanmar; Lucassen on xenophobia in labor migration within colonial Burma; and Waters exposing how American officials’ memoirs leave the CIA out of U.S. policy in Burma.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

photo in Chambers

coming in May!

Hue, Emily. Performing Vulnerability Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora, University of Washington Press, 2025.

see here for more pubs of the future

This week’s New Pubs features Chu et al on business practices of a Chinese-owned SOE in Kyaukphyu; Nyi Nyi Kyaw on Myanmar’s Spring Revolution leadership deficit; and Eaindra T.T.T. and Middleton on enclosure of fisheries in the Gulf of Mottoma.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

This week’s New Pubs features Mon Mon Myat assessing Myanmar Egress; Smith on tourism in Myanmar as a form of extraction; and Passeri on Myanmar’s post-coup foreign policy.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

Deadline is coming soon: 10 Feb 2025

for more info see here

This week’s New Pubs features Wittekind on speculation as subsistence in peri-urban Myanmar; Selth on Myanmar’s authoritarian intelligence apparatus; and Wu on Burmese exiles on the Thai border during this revolutionary era.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

This week’s New Pubs features Thein-Lemelson on contestations over the memory of political imprisonment in Myanmar; Faxon et al trace a “feminist counter-topography” of Myanmar’s wars; and Sengupta on activism, law, and Rohingya life in Bangladesh camps.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.

“Writers and Myanmar conflict“

Date: January 22, 2025 (Wednesday)

Time: 06:00 – 07:00 PM (Melbourne Time)/01:30-02:30 PM (Myanmar/Yangon Time)

Zoom: here

Ma Thida is a human rights activist, surgeon and writer who was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for endangering public peace, distributing unlawful literature and having contact with illegal organisations. She was released in 1999 after facing 6 years of harsh conditions. She is currently chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee. She continues to speak out about the current difficult environment for freedom of expression and the cases of other writers in prison in Myanmar.

Michelle Aung Thin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication, teaching in the disciplines of Communication and Creative Writing. Her research spans in cultural history of colonial mixed-race groups such as the Anglo-Burmese, Anglo-Indians, Zerbadi and other Asian diaspora in cosmopolitan Rangoon to contemporary Myanmar literary production. She has taught writing in Mandalay and Yangon and more recently, collaborated with Myanmar artists, writers and translators on creative and academic works. Michelle has been a guest at southeast Asia and Australia’s most prestigious literary festivals and events. Michelle was born in Burma and her personal connection to the region enable her to offer insight into cross-cultural creative practices. 

Questions and Answers will follow the presentations. For more information about AMI, please visit aummi.edu.au/.

This week’s New Pubs features Campbell on how the coup enables labor exploitation in Thailand; Rellensmann w/ a book on the way the military regime has appropriated Buddhist sacred spaces; and Cerretani on transnational Rohingya social movements.

See our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks, and if anyone wants a PDF but is excluded by pay wall, please email us and we will help if we can.