Chapter 6: Higher Education in Myanmar: Coup, Conflict, and Educational Crisis

The higher education (HE) sector in Myanmar is currently in a fragile, backward-looking state. Its fragility is due to the 2021 coup with its consequent civil disobedience movement, continued conflict between the military and people’s defence force, the junta’s spurious delivery of a post-Covid and post-coup education system, and the junta’s apparent abandoning of the previous civilian government’s progress with the National Education Strategic Plan. It is backward-looking because the current junta, like previous juntas in Myanmar, use education as a tool for military propaganda and to populate the education system with civil servants that are loyal, or at least supine, to the military. The task of this chapter is to provide an overview of HE in Myanmar and how its current condition aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 4.3. This task is contextualised by considering the role of universities in the history of socio-political uprisings in Myanmar. Universities as theatres of communicative action have been and continue to be spaces of public resistance. This resistance and its accompanying vertical tension continue to shape the physical constitution of universities and the delivery of HE in Myanmar.