New Mandala

New Mandala readers will be interested in the following announcement for the 2nd Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network.  The first of these conferences was held in 2008 in Guwahati, northeast India.  It was a very worthwhile conference and I imagine that the Chiang Mai iteration will be similarly good.
The details are:
Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation [...]

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At The Sydney Morning Herald Mic Looby, who co-authored the 2001 Lonely Planet guide to Burma, has weighed into the ongoing debate about Burma sanctions.  It is well worth reading in full.  One of the key paragraphs launches a broad attack:
If a handful of Australian-based companies are guilty of indirectly supporting an oppressive military regime, [...]

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Further information about this event is available here.

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In terms of engagement, we intend to begin a direct dialogue with Burmese authorities to lay out a path towards better relations. The dialogue will include specific discussion of democracy and human rights inside Burma, cooperation on international security issues such as nonproliferation and compliance with 1874 and 1718, and areas that could be of [...]

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Those New Mandala readers who follow debates about economic sanctions against the Burmese government will be intrigued by this current flare-up in Australia. 
The president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Sharan Burrow, is lobbying for Jetstar to stop its flights to the country.  All of the usual arguments for beefing up sanctions against Burma are [...]

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A New Mandala reader sends the following note on the background of a senior Burmese government official who represents his government at the United Nations:
I just came across some information regarding the permanent representative of Myanmar to the United Nations, U Than Swe (sometimes written Than Shwe — not, of course, Generalissimo Than Shwe) who [...]

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Web censorship regimes in mainland Southeast Asia are a regular topic of discussion here at New Mandala. Of course, anybody who spends time in Burma gets used to the government’s relatively consistent effort to block potentially subversive online material.  And, jokes aside, since the coup of 2006 Thailand has also beefed up resources to clamp [...]

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A September 15 article on the New Era website reports that UNICEF-funded kindergartens in cyclone affected areas of Myanmar’s delta are empty. The Kale Pyaw Neya (literally, Happy Children Place) kindergartens have no kids in them, Aung Kyaw Moe writes, because parents can’t afford to pay for carers. He quotes an INGO staff person working [...]

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As China continues to have problems with its own internal ethnic tensions, some of those it faces in Burma are richly ironic, but the entire situation is becoming more complex and fraught by the day.
- Michael Sainsbury, “For China, Burma is thorny territory”, The Australian, 8 September 2009.  This old New Mandala picture provides some [...]

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Long-term readers may recall that I have something of a sideline interest in the unevenness of Western fast food proliferation across mainland Southeast Asia.  Indeed two of my very early New Mandala posts were on this topic (back in the first months: 30 June 2006 and 4 August 2006).  In May 2008 I even put out an endorsement for KFC’s decision [...]

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