On 22 February 2021, a gifted Burmese artist named Tin Tin Sann fell victim to the COVID-19 epidemic then raging in the United Kingdom, where she lived. To celebrate her life and work, her family decided to publish a book showing her paintings, together with the memories of some of those who knew her. An invitation to write a short chapter for Tin Tin Sann's tribute book brought back memories of the art scene and artists I encountered in Myanmar during the 1970s.

As one gets older, memories of past times and old friends tend to fade, but they also become more important as milestones along life's busy highway (to resort to cliché). An inventory of my modest art collection recently brought this home to me, as it prompted recollections of my early days in Burma (as Myanmar was then known).

I was posted to the Australian embassy in Rangoon (now Yangon) as Third Secretary in January 1974. I lived there for two and a half years, leaving in August 1976. I did not fully appreciate it at the time, but I was there during a period of considerable movement in the local art scene, which I first stumbled across by accident, but later came to embrace.

The main reason for my developing interest in this subject was my friendship with Sun Myint and his two sisters, Tin Tin Sann and Khin Myint Myint. All three were very talented artists, who together had a major and lasting impact on the local art scene. I also became good friends with another noted Burmese artist (and author), Ma Thanegi.

Not long after my arrival in Rangoon, I was invited to dinner by the diplomat I was due to replace. He wanted to give me the opportunity to inspect the bungalow on Monkey Point Road (now Thanhlyet Soon Road) where I was to live during my posting. It had originally been built for the manager of the oxygen gas factory nearby, and consisted of two bedrooms and a kitchen/laundry surrounding a large open plan living/dining room.

This design was well-suited to the topical climate and to the lifestyle expected of a national representative. However, the large open area, characterised by high ceilings, broad archways and white walls, seemed to me rather stark and empty.

The launch of Operation 1027 by the Three Brotherhood Alliance in October 2023, and the insurgents’ unexpected string of military victories in northern Myanmar, followed by successful operations by other groups elsewhere, highlighted a key problem for the junta, namely its lack of sufficient military manpower. This severely restricted its options in responding to the multiple challenges it was facing, both on and off the battlefield.

Myanmar's generals have always known that the armed forces (or Tatmadaw) could never maintain a physical presence throughout the entire country. To exercise control, they counted on a divided opposition, superior intelligence and mobile strike forces. They also relied on a large element of bluff. Operation 1027, launched in northern Myanmar last October by the Three Brotherhood Alliance (TBA), and later joined by several other ethnic armed organisations (EAO) and militias, has effectively called that bluff.

Myanmar is the largest state in mainland Southeast Asia, covering 676,578 square kilometres. Much of it consists of rugged mountains, dense forests and major waterways. Vast tracts of land, mainly around the country's borders, are thinly inhabited, or visited only by small bands of hunters, smugglers and refugees. Even now, after a major road building program begun in 2004, there are barely 150,000 kilometres of roads, of which only 40 per cent are paved.

These harsh geographical realities have posed major challenges to central governments in Myanmar throughout history. Such difficulties have been compounded even further for the Tatmadaw which, ever since the 1962 military coup, has acted as an army of occupation, particularly in those peripheral areas dominated by the country's many ethnic minorities. No-one has ever determined the precise number of men and women in the Tatmadaw, but until the late 1980s it was less than 200,000 strong.

This meant that there were large parts of the country without a permanent military presence and many others that only saw an occasional patrol to show the flag. Even after a massive expansion of the Tatmadaw in the 1990s, perhaps to 400,000, there were still not enough troops to dominate the entire country.

Since the coup, there have been numerous news stories about the “defection” of men and women from the Tatmadaw and Myanmar Police Force, to the extent that some observers have forecast the eventual collapse of the state's coercive apparatus. Such stories need to be treated with caution. Even allowing for a degree of exaggeration, however, the rate of separations from the uniformed services has been unprecedented, raising questions not only about their continued viability, but possibly the survival of the military regime itself.

When Myanmar's generals seized power on 1 February 2021, sparking an immediate and massive public reaction, it soon became clear the coup would severely test the cohesion and loyalty of the country's security forces. This was a critical issue as, lacking any popular mandate, the junta depended entirely on coercion and intimidation to enforce its will over the civilian population. Nine months later, it is worth looking at this subject again, for three reasons.

One reason is the continued opposition to the military regime, including from a wide variety of armed groups. Another is the increasing trickle of defections from the armed forces (or Tatmadaw) and Myanmar Police Force (MPF) to the resistance movement. The third reason is a recent report that a senior army officer in a critical command position was arrested for planning to defect to one of the country's ethnic armed organisations (EAO).

As always, developments in Myanmar are difficult to determine with any confidence. However, some trends are apparent, raising questions about the future of the junta, which now calls itself a “caretaker government”.

It has been claimed that at least 3000 members of the security forces have defected to the so-called civil disobedience movement (CDM), either by joining the loosely-organised People's Defence Force (PDF) or simply by abandoning their posts. This number reportedly includes more than 1,000 members of the MPF and about two dozen members of the country's Fire Department (which is sometimes counted as part of the country's “Defence Services”).

The military coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 took almost everyone by surprise. There immediately followed a tsunami of news reports and popular punditry, in an attempt to make sense of what had happened and to consider its implications, both for Myanmar and the region. Many of these reports relied on incomplete or unverified information. Most were highly speculative. There was a need for sober assessments that weighed the available evidence and cautioned against unsupported conclusions.

On 1 February, Myanmar's armed forces (or Tatmadaw) declared a oneyear state of emergency, arrested State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and detained more than 50 politicians and activists. It had been just ten years since the former military regime permitted the transition to a “disciplined democracy”.

The official reason given for the coup was the need to respond to massive electoral fraud during last November's elections, which saw Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) win an even greater number of seats than in 2015, while the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) was reduced to a mere handful. Yet, few foreign observers believed that was the real reason, prompting a wave of speculation, personal views and rumours in the news media and online.

Hard facts being in such short supply, these comments are not easily judged. However, some are more plausible than others.

Many observers have suggested that the crushing defeat of the USDP last November humiliated the generals, who saw it as a rejection of the Tatmadaw and its political role. The result certainly highlighted the armed forces’ unpopularity, but the military leadership already knew that the vast majority of the population supported Aung San Suu Kyi and the idea of a genuinely democratic system of government. Also, given the USDP's marginal role, the generals are unlikely to have been too concerned about the loss of the party's “bargaining position” in the national parliament.

Myanmar in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 coup bore a number of similarities to the country in the early days of the abortive 1988 pro-democracy uprising. As the security forces became more violent and communal tensions escalated, the opposition movement chose similar ways to respond. The two cases, however, are also different in several respects. This time, the generals were dealing with a population that had tasted ten years of relative freedom and was determined not to lose it. Uncoordinated street protests turned into a nation-wide civil war with violent encounters in both urban and rural settings.

The American author Mark Twain once wrote that history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Sadly, this seems to be occurring in Myanmar, where developments following the 1 February 2021 coup bear a strong similarity to the events of 1988, when an earlier nation-wide pro-democracy uprising was crushed by the country's armed forces, or Tatmadaw.

Just to recap, in August 1988 a popular movement challenged the government of General Ne Win, which had been in power, in one form or another, since a military coup in 1962. All over Burma (as Myanmar was then known) people from all walks of life came out on the streets to protest against the regime's brutality and incompetence. As violence escalated on both sides, the opposition movement appealed to the international community for support.

By the end of a major crackdown in September, an estimated 3,000 people had been killed. Thousands more were detained and many were tortured. This resulted in a flood of refugees over Myanmar's borders. Some joined existing ethnic armed groups (EAG) or formed guerrilla bands of their own. In 1990, the ruling military council ignored the results of a general election, which was resoundingly won by the opposition National League for Democracy. A government-in-exile was formed, but it failed to win international recognition.

From relative obscurity before 1988, Myanmar became a frequent topic in the news media, and a global movement against military rule there gained wide support. A range of punitive measures were introduced by governments, international organisations and activist groups, aimed at removing the regime, or at least forcing greater observance of democratic principles and human rights. A special effort was made to secure the release of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent almost 15 years under house arrest.

For almost a decade, the international news media, members of the activist community and even some respected academics accused Myanmar's generals of negotiating a secret deal with North Korea to acquire sensitive nuclear technologies. The ultimate aim, it was claimed, was to construct a nuclear weapon. Yet, hard evidence remained elusive, encouraging an increasingly heated debate over where the truth lay. The nuclear believers made some remarkable statements, which were challenged by those who were more sceptical. This article attempted to describe the situation in mid-2010.

For the past ten years, Burma has been accused of trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. A number of developments during this period—notably Burma's growing relationship with North Korea—have raised international concerns. Yet, to date, no hard evidence of such a plan has been produced.

Claims of a secret nuclear weapons program date back to 2000, when Burma's military government announced that it was going to purchase a small research reactor from Russia. These accusations were repeated in 2003, when it was suggested by a respected news magazine that North Korea had taken over from Russia as the source of Burma's nuclear technology. In the years that followed, the issue surfaced periodically on activist websites, but in August 2009 it attracted global attention when a story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) citing ANU Professor Des Ball and the Thai-based journalist Phil Thornton.

The SMH claimed that there were in fact two nuclear projects running in Burma. The first was the Russian research centre, which was to be operated under international safeguards. (Contrary to the SMH story, construction of this reactor has not yet begun.) The second was said to be a secret project to build a reactor and associated nuclear fuel processing plants with North Korean help. According to the SMH, if all went according to plan Burma would have a nuclear weapon by 2014 and “a handful” of such devices by 2020. The main sources for these claims were two Burmese “defectors” and commercial imagery of suspect facilities in Burma.

After assuming power in 2016, it did not take long before Aung San Suu Kyi was attracting criticism for her personal style. However, given the circumstances that she found herself in, she may have seen a strong centralised government and firm leadership as the only way to marshal the forces at her command, keep her government together and achieve the reforms she wanted. The similarities in her approach to the way the armed forces leadership had operated, however, were not lost on her critics.

Over the past few years, there has been a significant shift in public perceptions of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. While still lauded by many as a champion of democracy, she is increasingly being accused of arrogance and inflexibility. Since the sweeping electoral victory of her National League for Democracy (NLD) last November, some observers have even suggested that she could replace one authoritarian regime with another.

Suu Kyi has always had her critics. She has been described as imperious, if not autocratic, and accused of refusing to listen to contrary advice. She has been uncomfortable with internal party debate. Disgruntled NLD members claim that she has denied others in the democracy movement opportunities to influence its membership and direction. They say she has resisted grooming a successor and blocked others with leadership ambitions.

Objective Reasons?

Since being released from house arrest in 2010, she has revealed other personality traits that do not accord with her public image. She seems to have lost sight of goals such as universal human rights, which she espoused as a prisoner of conscience, and stands accused of putting the pursuit of power above principles. For example, she has declined to speak out against the abuse of Myanmar's Rohingya community and, in the national elections, the NLD refused to field any Muslim candidates.

During the polls, Aung San Suu Kyi effectively reduced all other NLD candidates to proxies by restricting their roles and activities. She reserved the right to make major policy announcements herself. Although denied the presidency by the 2008 constitution (because her two sons are British citizens), she has stated that she intends to be “above the president”, who would “have no authority”. She planned to “run the government” herself and to “make all decisions”.

In July 2022, Myanmar's military junta executed four prominent prodemocracy activists, for a range of offences. All the country's past military regimes had killed pro-democracy campaigners, usually after detaining and torturing them, but this was the first time in many years that the generals had formally executed anyone, and in such a public manner. The questions thus arose, why the change in tactics? What did it hope to achieve? Pursuing such a line of enquiry could provide useful insights into the junta's thinking.

The world is still in shock over the execution of four pro-democracy activists in Myanmar over the 23–24 July weekend. More executions may follow in coming months. There has been almost universal condemnation of what were in effect state-sanctioned murders. There has also been a spate of articles and op-eds in the news media and online speculating about what these executions might mean in broader terms. Opinions have varied widely.

Most commentators have rightly noted the military regime's brutality and disregard for human rights. Some have seen the executions as a sign of the junta's increasing desperation, in the face of the unexpected and surprisingly resilient opposition to the 2021 coup. Others have described the regime's motives as simply survival, and an attempt to cow the Myanmar population into submission. A number have seen the executions as evidence of the regime's utter contempt for the international community and the principles it claims to uphold.

All these views are justified, to a greater or lesser extent. Certainly, the negative reaction to the executions, including from the usually reticent ASEAN, was not unexpected. However, there is another way of looking at recent developments, and that is by asking what the military regime hoped to achieve. Why go through the charade of show trials and judicial executions when the four activists could have been quietly disposed of in prison, which has been the tragic fate of so many other political prisoners detained over the years?

For almost twenty years, few news stories about Myanmar failed to mention opposition leader and later State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. After the 2021 coup, however, attention dramatically swung around to the nation-wide protest movement that saw demonstrations in the streets and young guerrillas training in the countryside. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was arrested on the day of the coup, seemed to be forgotten. Yet, in several ways, she remained an influential figure, affecting the thinking and policies of both the junta and the opposition movement.

In the flood of articles, op-eds and commentaries that has been published since the February coup in Myanmar, surprisingly few have looked closely at the plight of ousted State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet, in some ways her fate is just as critical to the final outcome of the crisis as the current confrontation between the armed forces, or Tatmadaw, and the diverse elements arrayed against them, both inside and outside the country.

As always when there are unexpected developments in Myanmar, there is a great deal that we do not know, a gap invariably filled by rumours, gossip and speculation. However, some facts are on the public record, permitting a few cautious conclusions.

On 1 February, when Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing declared that the Tatmadaw was taking back executive power, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under arrest. It is not clear where she has been held since then. Some news media reports have claimed that, after a period confined to her home in Naypyidaw, she was moved to “an undisclosed location”. Her rare court appearances since then have been via video link.

Aung San Suu Kyi faces several formal charges. The first relates to the illegal importation and improper use of six hand-held radios, found in her house the day she was arrested. She has also been accused of violating Myanmar's Natural Disaster Management Law, by failing to observe regulations relating to the COVID-19 pandemic on six separate occasions. Another charge is that of inciting public unrest, a crime punishable by three years in jail.

As Myanmar's opposition movement turned away from peaceful protests and began to employ more violent measures against the junta, there were echoes of the period after the 1988 uprising, when dissidents debated the best strategy to adopt against the new military regime. Arguments were heard for and against the use of terrorist tactics, as opposed to a rural-based guerrilla campaign. In the event, both strategies were adopted. Similar discussions took place in 2021, with the same result.

In early 1989, I was passing through Bangkok when a friend from a Western embassy invited me to what she called “a secret meeting”. She knew that I was a Myanmar watcher, but what interested her most was the fact that, in an earlier incarnation, I had published a couple of books on terrorism and urban guerrilla warfare. The meeting was with a senior member of the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF).

The ABSDF was founded in November 1988, after the Burmese armed forces (or Tatmadaw) crushed a nationwide pro-democracy uprising, killing over 3,000 people and driving many more across the Thai and Indian borders. Others fled north to remote areas near China. A few joined existing ethnic armed groups (EAG), but about 1,000 others created their own force, soon dubbed the “Student Army” by the news media.

The group was given some arms and rudimentary training by Kachin and Karen EAGs, which had been fighting the Tatmadaw for decades. However, the ABSDF were not trusted by their hosts, who feared infiltration by government agents. Also, most recruits were city dwellers who found it hard to adapt to the harsh life of a rural guerrilla. Many suffered from disease and malnutrition. Some died. The ABSDF was also riven by internal disputes, one of which resulted in the execution of 15 of its own members.

In terms of Myanmar's politics and security, the period 2007 to 2023, covered by this anthology, arguably encompasses the country's highest point since Independence in 1948, and its lowest point.

In 2008, a new constitution was introduced by the ruling State Peace and Development Council. This led to a national election in 2010 and the creation of a quasi-civilian government under former general Thein Sein. To the surprise of almost everyone, the new president introduced a range of reforms, including the relaxation of many laws and regulations that had made daily life in Myanmar terribly hard. This was followed in 2015 by the election of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, and five years of further reforms. It seemed to many people in Myanmar, and indeed to the world, that at long last the country had turned a corner, with a freer, fairer and more responsive government that offered real opportunities and hope to its citizens. Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD were not without their shortcomings, but in many ways the period 2016 to 2020 marked a high point in Myanmar's history, probably the highest seen in three quarters of a century.

As history has shown, however, there was also a darker side. In 2016–17 the armed forces, always a baleful presence, launched a series of harsh pogroms against the Muslim Rohingya population in Rakhine State. Myanmar was accused of ethnic cleansing, even genocide. After the NLD's landslide re-election victory in 2020, the armed forces leadership staged a coup, for reasons that are still not clear. To the generals’ surprise, the civilian population, which now included a generation of young Burmese who had experienced ten years of relative freedom, immediately fought back. A nationwide civil disobedience movement soon morphed into an armed insurrection. The country descended into a bitter civil war. The armed forces responded in the only way they knew, with brutality, systematic human rights violations and even greater repression. The situation was, and remains, a low point in the country's history, the situation at least as dire as the dark days of the 1950s when the country was riven by internal unrest, violence and lawlessness.

A side discussion at the 2017 Myanmar (Burma) Update Conference at the Australian National University prompted this cri de coeur, pleading for greater consideration to be given by libraries and other institutions to the disposal of private collections of Myanmar-related literature. The problem has only become worse since that discussion.

There is an old Myanmar saying that “wisdom is in the literature”. This was particularly the case before 1988, when the country was virtually closed to foreigners and field work of any kind was very difficult. The Internet was still in its infancy and Myanmar watchers of all kinds were heavily reliant on books, serials and other documentary sources, both to acquire information and to present their findings to a wider audience.

Access to Myanmar is now much easier and the past few decades have seen a flood of foreign officials, scholars and others intent on conducting primary research. As noted on New Mandala, this has contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of books, reports and articles written about the country. A new Griffith Asia Institute study lists over 1800 monographs published in English alone, and in hard copy, over the past 25 years.

At the same time, however, there is an increasing danger that the accumulated knowledge of earlier generations of Myanmar watchers will become dispersed, if not actually lost.

In the past, it was common practice for the personal libraries of major figures in Myanmar studies to be purchased by institutions. The British Library, the University of London, Cornell University and Princeton University, among others, acquired large collections of books, manuscripts and ephemera from former officials, academics and others with close connections to Myanmar. Even before the country became fashionable in the West, there was a wish to preserve its scholarly and literary heritage.

Albeit at a slower pace, this practice continued into the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1974, for example, the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg purchased the extensive Myanmar collection of Frank Trager, for many years a professor of international affairs at New York University, and a noted Southeast Asia specialist, who died in 1984. The German Research Council sponsored the acquisition of his collection on condition that it was catalogued and made available to the international scholarly community. It also prompted a major bibliographic project.

On 8 November 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy won a stunning victory at the national elections, which by most accounts was reasonably free and fair. For the first time in almost half a century, Myanmar faced the prospect of a genuinely representative civilian government, albeit in partnership with the armed forces. Analyses of the likely future of democracy in Myanmar ranged from the overly optimistic to the darkly pessimistic. In this debate, the harsh realities of power in Myanmar were sometimes overlooked.

Over the past few months, articles and op-eds by experts and others on Myanmar's general elections have covered almost every conceivable aspect of the subject. Also, it seems a shame to dampen down the wave of euphoria that has swept around the world since the National League for Democracy's (NLD) stunning victory on 8 November, which promises a new beginning for a country and people that have suffered for decades.

In considering where recent developments might lead, however, it is important to take a broad view and keep the election outcome in perspective. As Nicholas Farrelly wrote in the Myanmar Times on 9 November, this is just the beginning of a very long and difficult process. The harsh realities of power in Myanmar—at least as far as they have been seen until now— demand a fair degree of caution.

It might be helpful to list a few basic facts of life in Myanmar, just to set the scene:

First, the armed forces (Tatmadaw) have long been and arguably remain the most powerful political institution in Myanmar. As Robert Taylor has written, “Only the army can end its own role in Myanmar's politics, and that decision is dependent on its perception of the civilian political elite's ability to manage the future”. He might have added, “and protect the Tatmadaw as a national institution”.

Second, it is also important to bear in mind that the elections were relatively free and fair, and produced a reasonably accurate result, only because the leaders of the armed forces permitted them to occur and did not interfere. It may not have been easy, but they could have intervened at any stage of the process and ensured that the elections were cancelled, postponed, or manipulated to give a different outcome.

Almost from the outbreak of the latest civil war in Myanmar, members of the opposition movement and activists outside the country have called upon the United Nations and sympathetic foreign countries to impose a no-fly zone over Myanmar. As the junta increasingly resorted to air strikes against both civilian communities and armed groups, these calls became more insistent. Increasingly, a no-fly zone was seen as the answer to the opposition movement's military troubles. However, for a number of reasons, there was never any prospect of this happening.

Since the February 2021 coup, resistance to the junta in Myanmar has grown from protest rallies and civil disobedience campaigns to a nationwide civil war that encompasses terrorist-style attacks in urban centres and guerrilla campaigns in rural districts. The generals have responded to these challenges, in part, by exploiting their command of the air.

This has in turn led to louder and more frequent calls for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Myanmar, policed by foreign powers under the aegis of the United Nations (UN). These calls, however, are likely to be in vain. An effective and internationally-enforced air exclusion zone over Myanmar is one idea that, for several reasons, will not fly.

Anti-junta groups started calling for the imposition of a no-fly zone soon after the coup. Last April, for example, Myanmar's UN representative (who was appointed by the former government) called for a no-fly zone “to avoid further bloodshed caused by military air strikes on civilian areas”. At the time, the Myanmar Air Force (MAF) was hardly in evidence and his request attracted little attention.

As the civil war spread, however, and ethnic armed organisations (EAO) began supporting the resistance movement, the MAF was increasingly used by the junta to gather intelligence, move troops, provide logistical support and conduct ground strikes. Attacks were made by both rotary and fixed wing aircraft, mostly against guerrilla groups in rural settings but also against towns and other concentrations of non-combatants.

Over the past 30 years, another vehicle for the depiction of Myanmar in the West's popular culture has been graphic novels. These publications have most often been used to recount adventure stories of various kinds, often with a mystical twist. However, more recently they have had a distinctly political flavour. Some of the latter have been inspired by Aung San Suu Kyi's life story.

Before 1988, Myanmar (then known as Burma) did not feature prominently in comic strips, comic books and graphic novels. After the nationwide prodemocracy uprising that year, however, the situation suddenly changed. Assisted by the global campaign being waged against the military regime, Myanmar found a new place in popular culture.

These days, graphic novels in particular are influencing perceptions of the country and its government, by conveying images and views directly to an international audience.

Graphic novels date back to the 1930s, but they were only recognised as a distinct genre of publication in the mid-1960s. The term “graphic novel” was coined in 1964. These works are essentially collections of cartoon drawings that tell a continuous story. Initially reserved for works of fiction, the label now embraces fiction, non-fiction and anthologies. It is usually applied to original long form narratives, but the term has also been applied to bound collections of comic strips and comic books.

Over the past 30 years, Myanmar has featured in nearly two dozen graphic novels. Most have been produced in Europe, where there is a strong tradition of bandes dessinees (literally “drawn strips”). They have portrayed the country in different ways, but there have been a number of consistent themes. Most have been intended simply to entertain, but some have had a strong historical flavour, usually referencing World War II. More recent works have aimed to educate readers about contemporary developments in Myanmar, and have often conveyed strong political messages.

In 2015, the Griffith Asia Institute released a second edition of its select bibliography of Myanmar-related publications published in English and in hard copy. This prompted a brief foray into the wider world of Myanmarrelated bibliographic trends, both within the country and outside it.

There was a time when the small community of professional Burma watchers in the West could claim with some confidence that they were conversant with most, if not all, the academic and non-scholarly literature about the country. That situation has changed and it is now very difficult, if not impossible, to keep fully abreast of the outpouring of publications devoted to Burma (or Myanmar, as it is now called). There are a number of reasons for this.

After the Second World War, Burma was largely forgotten by the West. Except for events like Burma's independence from Britain in 1948 and Ne Win's military coup in 1962, it was rarely reported in the popular press. It featured in a few Hollywood movies, but they tended to hark back to the war. Even when the threat of communist “subversion” in Southeast Asia began to attract global attention, Burma's problems were not considered as important as those of states like Vietnam. It was not until the 1980s that the work of pioneering journalists like Bertil Lintner, writing in the old Far Eastern Economic Review, encouraged observers to look more closely at the country.

Burma was also sadly neglected by the academic community. After the war, there were major studies by recognised figures like Frank Trager, John Cady, Godfrey Harvey, D.G.E. Hall and Dorothy Woodman. Later, the field came to be dominated by scholars like David Steinberg and Josef Silverstein. However, the number of serious Burma watchers in the West remained very small. Not many postgraduates saw the study of Burma as offering a worthwhile career. One consolation was that, by following the efforts of the few Burma specialists around, and newcomers like Robert Taylor, it was relatively easy for Burma watchers to keep abreast of the relevant literature.