David Scott Mathieson’s piece on the remarkable paucity of research on civil conflict in Burma/Myanmar within the study of civil war is a must-read:
“There is lamentably little known about the history of the civil war or about the micro-dynamics of conflict. It begs the question: why is Burma almost totally absent from the academic and reportage canon of conflict literature? In academic research and related human rights documentation and journalism, there is generally only passing mention of Burma’s conflicts within historical and academic surveys of civil war.”
And to bolster his point – even if we accept that there are serious problems with quantitative data on Myanmar, in the current UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict dataset, almost 12% of the entire dataset’s dyad-year observation occur in the country.
Paul Staniland 