Last year I had the accidental experience of examining attitudes toward incidents of violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Myanmar.
It was accidental in the sense that I had not set out to explore this issue at all. I was doing my PhD research on how people – who are involved with work on fostering democracy – tell the story of Myanmar’s democratisation.
But as I spoke to Western aid workers, Myanmar activists and NGO workers about democracy I found that they often linked back to examples of Buddhist-Muslim tensions. As this continued to happen I realised that the way people reacted to news of communal violence was closely related to the wider story of democratisation that they told.
Some people – most commonly Western aid workers – told a wider story of democratic modernisation based on liberal values and institutions and how communal violence was an awful affront to the core value of human rights. And in some cases, anti-Muslim attitudes were portrayed as being associated with a ‘crazy nationalism’. Some aid workers even said that they simply couldn’t talk about the issue any more without getting too emotional.
Another common story – within some circles of activists and NGO workers in Myanmar – was that a central element of the country’s democratisation was about unity. (Courtesy of asiapacific.anu.edu.au)
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