The Journal of the Burma Research Society was founded in 1910 and abolished in 1979 by Burma’s military regime. The move was part of the military’s war on independent public inquiry, research and debate.
However, when the military government officially dissolved itself in 2011, Yale University scholar James Scott seized on the opportunity to revive the tradition of rigorous social science, humanities and history research in the country. After five years of organising, that revival came to fruition.
Through its news site, Yale University congratulated Professor Scott earlier this month for his role in the launch of the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship.
Scott, a political scientist and anthropologist, began studying Myanmar in the 1950s and published “The Art of Not Being Governed” in 2009 about the strategies used by highland communities in the country to avoid domination by the central government.
The process of creating the journal began with a series of workshops involving scholars of Myanmar between 2011 and 2014 that would discuss content ideas for the first few issues of the journal.
The first issue came out in August this year under the theme of poverty. In his introduction to the issue, Scott wrote: “We hope, with this and the issues to come, to make a significant contribution to the many admirable efforts now underway in Myanmar to create a vibrant, daring, and critical public sphere of the highest standards. … It is our intention to let the light come in from any and all intellectual windows: the arts, fiction, verse, lyrics, social science, economics, anthropology, history, memoirs. Our premise is that no discipline or specialty has a monopoly on truth or insight, and that the more carefully crafted perspectives we can accommodate the more light we will shed.”
Like the first issue, each future issue of the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship will explore a particular theme through peer-reviewed papers and include distinctive art and graphics.
The journal will also be published in Burmese and in English.
Scott has said that he one day hopes the journal will be run by scholars based in Myanmar.
