General Ne Win’s Legacy of Burmanization in Myanmar : The Challenge to Peace in the Twenty-First Century

The authors agree that Ne Win’s policies “didn’t work.” However, the book goes further by elaborating why Burmanization policies developed in the 1960s are important for understanding Burmese society today.

This book focuses on how Burmanization created and reinforced ethnic divides since the 1962 coup d’etat. when General Ne Win concentrated all authority in the Burmese speaking army. Background research for the book includes Burmese language materials from the Burmese Socialist Party (BSP) and others that describe with what the BSP believed in their own terms. This is unique from previous works on the topic which either simply pointed out that the policies “didn’t work” and therefore are uninteresting, or to claim that they were “necessary” given the chaos of the previous regime. The authors agree that Ne Win’s policies “didn’t work.” However, the book goes further by elaborating why Burmanization policies developed in the 1960s are important for understanding Burmese society today. Most importantly, Ne Win’s ideology reflects how patterns of interethnic relationships in Myanmar lead to the “intractability” of the battles in early twenty-first century Myanmar.