Of citizens and strangers: the privilege of being Burman

ABSTRACT

Drawing on interviews with 20 young Myanmar citizens from Yangon and Mawlamyine, this paper contrasts the educational experiences and perceptions of Burman and ethnic minority youth to illustrate Myanmar’s citizenship crisis, which fuels the grievances of ethnic minorities through their restricted citizenship vis-à-vis the Burman majority’s appropriation of citizenship. It offers a unique comparative analysis of Burman and ethnic minority youth citizens’ accounts to illustrate the ‘Burman privilege’ hypothesis and contributes to the limited evidence on Myanmar youth. I suggest that Burman-ness operated as a privileged identity in the education system to generate normative and institutional benefits for Burmans while constituting ethnic minority citizens as strangers estranged from their citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Social cohesion
• citizenship
• Myanmar
• peacebuilding
• whiteness
• privilege

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their constructive feedback and Ma Mya Aye for her referencing and formatting support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The Myanmar government has yet to release the ethnic data from the 2014 census so the exact ethnic distribution in Myanmar is unclear.

2. I use Burman to refer to the dominant ethnic group, though in quotations, Bamar is sometimes used.

3. The minimum voting age in Myanmar is 18 years old.

4. Thein Sein’s government re-introduced ethnic languages in formal education in 2012, but challenges in implementation meant that lessons on ethnic minority languages were primarily conducted outside of school hours, often with insufficient teaching resources (Salem-Gervais and Raynaud 2020). Ethnic minority languages are allowed to be used as classroom languages to help clarify concepts, but this is less than the mother tongue-based multi-lingual education (MTB-MLE) ethnic nationalists hoped for. For a summary of the debates on the teaching of ethnic languages in public schools, see Lall (2020) and Salem-Gervais and Raynaud (2020).

5. Since 2012, there have been a series of education reforms, including a Comprehensive Education Sector Review (CESR), which evaluated the public education system and outlined plans for reform. The CESR contributed to a review of Myanmar’s language policies, as well as a joint MOE-JICA project to develop new Grade 1–5 textbooks for all subjects that began in 2014. The participants in this study, however, missed out on these reforms. For a brief overview of Myanmar’s education reforms since 2012, see Lall (2021).

6. Whether the government carried out a systematic effort at Burmanisation is a matter of debate among scholars. Kyaw Yin Hlaing (2007) argues that rather than a systematic effort at Burmanisation, the military government was more interested in justifying its regime and its lack of support for minority cultures and languages was due more to irresponsibility than an explicit government policy.