Thread by @DavBrenner

As there is increasing talk about the need to rethink Western donor engagement with #Myanmar, get up to speed with the following open-access article by @schulmanic & me, in which we urged exactly this two years ago:

Some takeaways - 1/6

#MyanmarCoup

bulletin.ids.ac.uk/index.php/idsb…

The article historicises Myanmar's transition of 2011, which demonstrates that Western donors' understanding of the country's transition primarily through the lens of "democratisation" was not only analytically wrong but also politically problematic. 2/6

Operating on this assumption of democratisation, Western donors shifted funds from grassroots networks to militarised state bureaucracies that co-opted peacebuilding and development projects for the purposes of ethnocratic and authoritarian state-building & counterinsurgency. 3/6

We detail some of those cases in the article, including projects funded by the World Bank and the multi-donor Myanmar Peace Support Initiative (forerunner of today's Joint Peace Fund). 4/6

Unsurprisingly then, international aid has not always contributed to, but also undermined, progressive change in Myanmar. The context indeed makes for a rather cautionary tale of an aid industry crash-landing in a country without much knowledge of its intricate politics. 5/6

NB The writing of this article was quite telling itself: we were initially asked to write how Myanmar's transition had been driven by civil society and how Western donors had supported this. Couldn't quite get ourselves to tell that story 😉 6/6