The UBC Myanmar Initiative is pleased to invite you to a research webinar featuring our postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Htet Thiha Zaw.
This hybrid webinar is part of the UBC Myanmar Discussion Series, generously supported by the IDRC’s Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar (K4DM) Initiative. If you plan to attend virtually, please register to receive the Zoom link.
About the Seminar
Recent literature on the political economy of education emphasizes indoctrination as the primary motivation behind education expansion under non-democratic states. However, existing literature fails to explain a paradoxical consequence of state-led education: the emergence of educated youth as a force of resistance against non-democratic rule. Modeling the strategic interaction between educated youth and government under changing economic situations, I argue that education through indoctrination only works when loyalty to the state continues to generate economic advantage in a low-development context. Therefore, education’s potential for indoctrination weakens as education access expands and economic returns to education decline. I evaluate this theory in the context of Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. Using novel panel data on economic development and access to education at the township level, I show that, while education levels are negatively associated with the number of resistance events, the relationship is significantly weaker in townships that experienced strong economic growth after the emergence of civilian-military government in 2010. The findings yield new insights into the dynamics of state consolidation through education in developing economies.
About the Speaker
Dr. Htet Thiha Zaw is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. He studies how institutions created and maintained by indigenous societies have shaped historical state development in the Global South, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. His research demonstrates that indigenous political and social institutions—many of which predate colonial rule—are crucial to understanding how colonial elites constructed state institutions, from allocating infrastructure and exercising coercive power to replacing indigenous schools with state-controlled education systems. He supports his arguments with empirical evidence drawn from original data in pre-colonial and colonial records, integrating quantitative analyses of cross-section, panel, geospatial, and text-as-data with qualitative insights from archival research. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Education Review, and the International Journal of Educational Development, among other venues.
