Burma’s conflict holds the distinction of being among the world’s longest civil wars – dating back to 1948. This multimedia public roundtable considers new perspectives for understanding the longevity of Myanmar’s civil wars by looking at the roles of militias, drugs, and human rights abuses against civilians through historical, feminist and cinematographic perspectives.

The seminar features footage from Adrian Cowell’s The Warlords – a documentary film shot in Shan State in the early 1970s to highlight the continuity of the roles played by militias and drugs across over fifty years of armed conflict from an on the ground perspective. The panelists will examine the Burmese military’s use of its militia system as part of larger strategy for managing conflict and discuss shortcomings of scholarly and practical interventions which focus too narrowly on armed actors and governance solutions, ignoring local contexts and longstanding grievances and potentially replicating harms.

Panelists include scholars and practitioners: 

• Dr John Buchanan is a Researcher at Tallinn University and focuses on politics in Southeast Asia
• Melissa Booth, independent researcher on security and justice reform and gender and conflict
• Dr Jenny Hedström, associate professor of war studies at the Swedish Defence University
• Dr Patrick Meehan, Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies, Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HRCI), University of Manchester; 

Moderator: Dr Elizabeth Rhoads, Human Rights Profile Area member and researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University