Co-sponsored by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies and the Schell Center at Yale Law School
Wade joins a panel with James C Scott, Sterling Professor Political Science at Yale and Kyaw Hsan Hlaing, a Burmese peace activist working on Rohingya issues.
The Rohingya, a Muslim minority of Burma of approximately one million people, are enduring a protracted and ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign. In September alone the Myanmar military burned hundreds of villages and forced nearly half a million to flee to Bangladesh. Journalist Francis Wade, the author of Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ (2017), joins a panel of scholars and activists to explore the deep roots of these events, examining how violent prejudices were nurtured by the military and activated during the democratic transition, and what potential there is for peace and security in Burma not only for the Rohingya but for the country’s other minorities.
About the Speaker
Francis Wade is a journalist specializing in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. He began reporting on Myanmar in 2009 with the exiled Democratic Voice of Burma news organization, based in Northern Thailand, before going on to cover in-depth the transition from military rule and the violence that accompanied it. He has reported from across South and Southeast Asia for The Guardian, TIME, Washington Post, The Nation, Foreign Policy Magazine, and others. His writing and research has focused on ethnic and religious violence, political transitions and refugee movements. In August 2017 he published his first book, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ (Zed Books). He is now based in London.
James Scott is a political scientist and anthropologist. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism with a particular focus on Burma.
Kyaw Hsan Hlaing, an ethnic Rakhine, is a Burmese activist working in Arakan state. His organization, the Kintha Peace and Development Initiative https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=akyab%20institute%20of%20social%20studies, is one of the only local organizations working to foster dialogue between Rohingya and Rakhine people. Currently he is an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA) Fellow at Columbia University, working on a project documenting stories of the victims of the communal violence in the region.
Elliott Prasse-Freeman will moderate the discussion. He is a graduate candidate in Anthropology at Yale who has worked on Burma since 2002.