About the Project
For decades, OECD states have used foreign aid as a tool for stabilising central governments in conflict-affected countries. However, the situation in Myanmar since the 2021 coup turns this on its head. Western governments are more ideologically aligned with armed groups fighting to restore democracy as part of the Spring Revolution. Hence, they are hesitantly using aid to support revolutionary groups’ abilities to act as democratic and “good” governance actors in the territories they control. In other words, aid actors are seeking to support rebel governance. At the same time, Western governments are facing a dramatically shifting geopolitical landscape.
Governing the Revolution aims to use Myanmar as a vantage point for capturing transformations in the global aid regime, especially as they pertain to states deemed “fragile” or “failed”, while seeking to understand aid dynamics within the Spring Revolution.
The core questions are: How is foreign aid being used in the Spring Revolution? How does aid shape social relations between foreign governments and Burmese revolutionaries? And how does aid shape the Spring Revolution itself? Using an ethnographic and relational approach, these questions will be answered through multi-sited qualitative research in two border areas of Myanmar, as well as in Bangkok, Geneva, and other centres of aid policy.
The project will contribute to human geography, development studies, and international relations through several journal articles and a monograph. It also hopes to contribute to actors across the aid landscape, including aid policymakers and local organisations in Myanmar’s borderlands seeking to oppose military rule while navigating a changing global context.
About the People
Dr. Shona Loong (https://www.shonaloong.com) is the principal investigator for the Ambizione Project Governing the Revolution, based at the Centre for Conflict, Peacebuilding, and Development. Her research focuses on conflict, peacebuilding, and the politics of development in Myanmar’s borderlands. Her work has been published in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Political Geography and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
Between 2021 and 2024, Shona was Senior Scientist with the Political Geography Group at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich (UZH). She completed her DPhil in human geography at the University of Oxford in 2021, and previously studied at the National University of Singapore. Shona has also worked in and consulted for organisations outside academia. She was Associate Fellow in Southeast Asian Politics and Foreign Policy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) between 2023 and 2024, where she worked on the Myanmar Conflict Map (http://myanmar.iiss.org) and co-published a book, New Answers to Old Questions: Myanmar Before and After the 2021 Coup d’etat (Connelly and Loong 2024).
Dr. Loong strives to do publicly engaged scholarship, based on both rigorous theoretical engagements and long-term relationships in the field, guided by an ethic of care.