Preface to the Fourth Edition

Summary

Thirty-five years ago, Myanmar (or Burma, as it was called back then) was little known and even less understood. It rarely featured in the international news media and few governments and international organizations devoted significant resources to monitoring its myriad problems. The small number of foreign scholars who studied and wrote about the country could only rely on a select audience for an appreciation of their published product.All that changed in 1988, when a nationwide pro-democracy uprising in Myanmar demanded that the world pay it more attention. Almost overnight, there was a strong demand for articles and books that explained what was happening in the country, and why. A selection of such works was listed in the first edition of this bibliography, compiled in 2012, but since then the number of publications about Myanmar has grown exponentially. There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of foreign officials, scholars, journalists, students, tourists and others, both professionals and amateurs, writing about this fascinating but still deeply troubled Southeast Asian country.

As a result, there have been major changes to the publishing environment as it has related to Myanmar, both outside the country and inside it. Some of these developments were briefly noted in the prefaces written for the second and third editions of this bibliography, which were compiled in 2015 and 2018 respectively. Many of the trends identified in those works have evolved over the past few years as Myanmar has continued to undergo profound political, social and economic changes. The most recent development has been the military coup of 1 February 2021 and creation of a new State Administration Council (SAC) led by the Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services. For these and other reasons, not least several serious outbreaks of communal unrest and numerous examples of human rights abuses, Myanmar has remained the focus of international attention. Books, reports and other monographs about it (and of course articles of various kinds, although they are not included in this checklist) have continued to appear, mainly in the English-speaking world but elsewhere as well.

Among the many works published since the third edition of this bibliography was released, three genres in particular have dominated the academic and popular literature.