Myanmar: the country that ‘has it all’

Susan Banki (Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, Australia)

Journal of SouthEast Asian Human Rights
Vol 4 No 1 (2020): June 2020

For scholars of Southeast Asia interested in human rights, Myanmar is a country that ‘has it all.’ I use this tongue-in-cheek expression to suggest the myriad ways that the country remains mired in structural challenges that inform its current human rights problems. In this paper, I point out the country’s most glaring structural challenges and link these to its most pressing human rights problems. A brief section about Myanmar in the context of COVID-19 offers the same conclusion as the rest of the article: while there is variance in the actors targeted and the degree of suppression, the underlying patterns of oppression remain unchanged over time.