In the early hours of February 1st, 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup d’etat against its democratically elected government. Myanmar’s defacto civilian leader, Aung san suu kyi was arrested, alongside Myanmar’s president and dozens of other civilian officials. By the afternoon, the military had announced the imposition of a one-year state of emergency, in which supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power would be granted to a Senior General of the military, Min Aung Hlaing. In the weeks since, thousands of Burmese people have taken to the streets to protest the coup, and demand a return to civilian rule. How have the lives of those in Myanmar changed since the coup, what are the prospects for a return to civilian rule, and in what ways have geopolitics affected international response? To help us answer these questions, today on the podcast we are joined by Mr. Sebastian Strangio.
Sebastian Strangio is Southeast Asia Editor at The Diplomat. In 2008, he began his career as a reporter at The Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia, and has since traveled and reported extensively across the 10 nations of ASEAN. Sebastian’s writing has appeared in leading publications including Foreign Affairs, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times, The Diplomat, and Nikkei Asian Review, among many others. He is the author of “Hun Sen’s Cambodia” (Yale, 2014), a path-breaking examination of Cambodia since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and “In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century” (Yale, 2020).
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