Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
The introduction sets the scene for readers’ understanding of Myanmar’s old and new struggles against authoritarianism in its key political phases. In a country that has experienced three coups d’état in its modern history, what are universities able to do? And what can universities tell us about the country’s long-lasting struggle with and against authoritarianism? To frame these questions, the introduction lays out the key elements of the scholarly debate on the politics of higher education (HE). Indeed, understanding the role played by universities in the complex history of Myanmar means recognizing clashes among discourses, functions, and actors in the (ambiguous) space of HE. Finally, presenting the research methodology used in this case, the introduction offers insights into how research can be conducted in times of polycrisis.
This chapter sheds light on the history of higher education in Burma/Myanmar, from the foundation of the Rangoon University in colonial times to the struggles of teaching and learning under military rule (considering both the General Ne Win and post-1988 juntas). Originally founded by the British as secluded and elitist communities, universities became laboratories for an anticolonial nationalism that went on to shape the political trajectory of the country. As spaces of resistance, universities were an unsolvable problem for the juntas: instead of using them to further their own ideological agenda, therefore, they actively emptied them out, gated them up, and deprived them of resources. Meanwhile, a military education was portrayed and valorized as the best possible path to secure social and economic status for ‘first-class’ citizens. For the rest of the student population, a highly accessible but low-quality system of distance education was built as the second-best option. In this context, university student movements have represented Burma/Myanmar’s ‘vanguard in the vacuum’, a nationwide underground political opposition to authoritarianism. The chapter analyses occasions in which student organizations clashed with the junta, including the 1988 uprising.
In February 2021, Myanmar experienced the third coup d’état in its modern history. Unprecedented strength was displayed by Myanmar civil society as it fought back against these new authoritarian drives. Where did this strength come from?
Fearing the loss of the benefits gained in the previous decade of reforms (2011–2021), students, teachers, professors, and activists fuelled the Spring Revolution. To understand what is happening in Myanmar, this book outlines the historical efforts by Myanmar universities to advocate for a more just society and offers unique insight into the long-lasting struggle of education against authoritarianism.
By exploring Myanmar’s social and political struggles through the lens of higher education resistance, the book offers a compelling narrative about the life of the country following the latest coup d’état, an event that continues to puzzle the international community.
The chapters have shown the utility of the theoretical framework because it helped uncover how Solomon Islanders and Bougainvilleans make sense of the violent past. The conclusion reflects on the significance of the findings for education and transitional justice in other parts of the world and posits some questions for educators in Bougainville and Solomon Islands. The empirical chapters have shown that there are limits on what transitional justice scholars and practitioners can know about the violent past because in some contexts there are specific protocols and practices for discussing it. Citizens can impose these on each other as well as foreign researchers. By attending to moments when research participants refuse to discuss the past scholars can interrogate the culturally appropriate methods for dealing with the past and the power imbalances embedded in them. Finally, I ask educators in Bougainville and Solomon Islands if the processes through which young people and their teachers became enemy friends can be resources for Tarcisius Kabutaulaka’s concept of ‘Melanesianism.’
This chapter provides readers unfamiliar with Solomon Islands and Bougainville with information essential for understanding the enemy-friend relationship. The chapter grounds readers in the salient geographical, historical and cultural bases for enemy friends before describing the causes of the respective civil conflicts and the structures of the two education systems. Schools in Bougainville and Solomon Islands have long been multicultural places, and this was reflected in the teacher and student populations of each boarding school at which I conducted research, making them clear examples of fully integrated schooling. The chapter will also show that Bougainville and Solomon Islands have experienced radically different transitional justice processes. Post-conflict Bougainville received little intervention from the international community while Solomon Islands was subjected to a substantial state-building intervention. Ultimately, however, the contribution of schooling to transitional justice in Bougainville and Solomon Islands has far less to do with the formal transitional justice processes than it does social and cultural factors that shape everyday life at school.
This chapter analyses how teachers and students responded to events in which they could have used either the ‘enemy’ or ‘friend’ concepts to govern their actions. The chapter analyses how an incident was ultimately resolved and reconciled before it could escalate beyond the school into the wider community. The successful resolution hinged on teachers and students rejecting the view that the incident resembled the identity politics of the civil conflict. Instead, they adopted a perspective that emphasised their cultural similarities, the roles of professionals and school leaders, and their national identities. The nation making that teachers and students undertook made the nation a background condition for the formation of enemy friends. Teachers and students were ambivalent about their nation, however, which brought to the fore divisions between the urban middle class and the rural uneducated that had parallels with the drivers of the civil conflict. In this way, the chapter shows that nation building interventions trying to change the civic identities of young people take place within on-going, long-term and contested social processes of nation making.
Chapter 5 looks at what young people learn from the parts of the school programme in which they are encouraged to draw attention to their cultural differences. One method schools used to organise their students was through ‘cultural groups’, which were the basic unit around which schools organised nights of performances that gave all cultural groups present at the school the chance to showcase cultural practices specific to their rural homes. Students noticed a variety of similarities between their cultural practices at these events. Despite this, the students also developed a discourse about ‘real culture’ around these performances. The ‘real culture’ discourse went some way towards reinstating a respect for chiefly authority that had waned during the civil conflicts, but it also made students susceptible to an ‘ideology of landownership’ (Filer, 2007). This is an ideology, long in the making in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, that encourages Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders to emphasise their differences at the expense of their connections to each other and has been a driver of social conflict and instability throughout the southwestern Pacific.
The everyday practices of teachers and students and parts of the school routine re-enforced conservative ideas about a woman’s place in society as well as the legitimacy of male violence. As these ideas were shared across Solomon Islands and Bougainville they began to shape what professionalism meant for women and what leadership meant for female students. Not all teachers and students accepted these inequalities. Gender relations thus became a field in which the enemy friend dynamic was formed: when professionalism became entangled with shared cultural practices those practices became both the cause of disagreement and the means to resolve disputes. On the one hand, teachers said that when formal staff meetings resembled the reconciliation processes female teachers could speak on equal terms with their male colleagues. On the other hand, outside official meetings interactions between male and female teachers helped them to construct a common understanding about shame and appropriate responses to it.
This chapter introduces the pressing empirical problem for transitional justice scholarship on education, which is how people, after periods of civil strife or violence, deal with the past and learn to live together again at school. It also introduces the theoretical premises of mainstream transitional justice, particularly its preference for truth telling about the violent past and debates about how to achieve truth telling in schools. The discussion shows that the debates are far from settled and that the premises on which they are based are insufficient to explain how Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders come to terms with the past. The chapter then introduces the tools from critical transitional justice and critical education scholarship that will be used in the coming chapters: place-based justice, the everyday and cultural production. Solomon Islanders and Bougainvilleans ultimately led me to these tools, and eventually to the notion of enemy friends. Enemy friends, as I conceptualise it, contributes to studies of education in transitional justice by bringing a grounded, ethnographic sensibility to what education can achieve as a mechanism of transitional justice.
This chapter explains how students built their connections to each other in spite of the structural and system wide pressures on them to focus their energy on personal achievement and formal sector employment. It juxtaposes the technologies schools used to transform students’ subjectivities with the ideal ‘educated person’ that teachers and students strove to produce at school. In practice it was impossible for schools to impose a subjectivity based around formal sector employment and personal achievement. Daily life was so fluid and unpredictable that students and teachers had to draw on their relationships to succeed. In daily life teachers and students both redefined what it meant to be a ‘student’, ‘teacher’ and ‘professional’ person and discovered a multitude of family resemblances among their diverse cultures. This laid the foundation for the ‘friend’ half of enemy friends. In making these points I show the importance for transitional justice of understanding schooling dynamics outside the traditional focus on curriculum content reform and classroom teaching and learning.
