Profile

Dr. Shona Loong 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 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.

THEMATIC EXPERTISE

• Conflict and Peacebuilding
• Politics of Development
• Global Aid
• Political Geography
• Rebel Governance
   

GEOGRAPHICAL EXPERTISE

• South East Asia
• Myanmar

RECENT PUBLICATIONS
 

Journal Articles

• Loong, S. (2026). Decolonising civil war: warscapes as relational conjunctures in post-coup Myanmar. Geopolitics. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2026.2659598.
• Loong, S. (2026). Foreign aid, civil society, and post-colonial statebuilding in the Thai-Myanmar borderworld. Development and Change, 57(2), 289-314.
• Loong, S. (2025). Volunteering while researching conflict and violence: reflections on listening, solidarity, and decoloniality in Myanmar's borderlands. Asia Pacific Viewpoint. DOI: 10.1111/apv.70030.
• Loong, S., Clare, L. C., and Sunita (Naw Moo) (2025). Tending to territories of life: Indigeneity, gender, and peacebuilding in the Salween Peace Park. Journal of Burma Studies, 29(2), 229-275.
• Loong, S. (2025). More-than-rebel territory: war, resistance, and relations in the Salween Peace Park. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 115(5), 1165-1184.
• Constantinou, C. M., McConnell, F., Dirik, D., Regassa, A., Loong, S., & Kuokkanen, R. (2025). Reimagining self-determination: relational, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives. Political Geography, 103112.
• Loong, S. (2023). ‘We have big ideas, but only small words’: The post-war geographies of civil society and community in Karen State. Geoforum, 147, 103891.
• Loong, S., Manby, A., and McConnell, F. (2023). Rethinking self-determination: colonial and relational geographies in Asia. Territory, Politics, Governance. DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2023.2232410.
• Loong, S. (2023). In Myanmar, Generation Z goes to war. Current History, 122(843), 137-142.
• Mostafanezhad, M., Farnan, R. A., & Loong, S. (2023). Sovereign anxiety in Myanmar: An emotional geopolitics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48(1), 132-148.

Books

• Connelly, A., and Loong, S. (2024). New Answers to Old Questions: Myanmar Before and After the 2021 Coup d'etat. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. [First chapter is free]

Book Chapters

• Loong, S. (2025). Thai-Myanmar borderland as a frontier space. In Gray, K. W. (ed.), Global Encyclopaedia of Territorial Rights, Cham: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-68846-6_854-1.
• Loong, S. (2025). "As a Karen, I have no leader": youth, conflict, and generational change in Hpa-An, Karen State. In Yamahata, C., and Takeda, M. (eds.), Youth, Community, and Democracy in India, Myanmar, and Thailand, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 79-96.
• Loong, S. (2024). War and geography. In Warf, B. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Cham: Springer, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-25900-5_316-1
• Connelly, A., and Loong, S. (2023). Conflict in Myanmar and the international response. In Huxley, T., and Kuok, L. (eds.), Asia Pacific Regional Security Assessment 2023, London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, pp. 138-159.
• Loong, S., Hsar Doe Doh Moo, and Palmano, C. (in press). With what we have saved, not what has been taken from us: how indigenous Karen communities conceptualise peace through the Salween Peace Park. In Chambers, J., Gravers, M., and Walton, M. (eds.), Ceasefire Aspirations and Anxieties Among the Karen in Myanmar, Copenhagen: NIAS Press.

Reports

• Loong, S. (2024, ​July). How conflict dynamics in Myanmar are challenging state-centric humanitarianism. International Institute for Strategic Studies.
• Loong, S. (2022, June). Post-coup Myanmar in six warscapes. International Institute for Strategic Studies.
  • Part of the warscapes series, for which I have written about the Dry Zone, Rakhine, Northeast, Southeast, and Northwest
• Loong, S. (2022, April). The Karen National Union in post-coup Myanmar. Stimson Center.
• Loong, S. (2021, March). Centre-periphery relations in Myanmar: leverage and solidarity after the 1 February coup. Trends in Southeast Asia, 9/2021, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

Commentaries

• Loong, S., Moeller, A. K., Antalikova, R., Dan Seng Lawn, and Suante, P. (2025). Producing knowledge in/of/for Myanmar's borderlands. Tea Circle: A Forum for New Perspectives on Burma/Myanmar. 21 July 2025.
• Loong, S. (2025). After the Myanmar earthquake, crisis fatigue reaches new depths. The Diplomat, 11 April 2025.
• Loong, S. (2021) Hope and heartbreak: Karen communities in the wake of the coup. Tea Circle: A Forum for New Perspectives on Burma/Myanmar, 4 February 2021.

If readers would like a longer list, please visit https://www.shonaloong.com/publications. 

GRANTS

• 12/2025 – 12/2029 - Funding by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs for the project “Governing the Revolution" with the aim 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.

TEACHING

University of Zurich, Department of Geography, 2022 - present

Bachelor's courses

• GEO112: Human Geography I (tutorial coordinator)
• GEO119: Small Group Teaching
• GEO389: BSc Thesis (supervisor for 4 students)
• GEO728: International Organisations, Geneva (field-trip)

Master's courses

• GEO421: Critical Development Studies (guest lecturer, "War, peace, development")
• GEO423: Political Geography
• GEO​521: MSc thesis (supervisor/co-supervisor for 6 students)

I also contributed the lecture War and Warscapes: Rethinking the Failed State Through Political Geography for the 2025 UZH Interdisciplinary Lecture Series on War and Peace.

University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, 2017 - 2021

​Bachelor's courses

• Space, Place, Society (tutor)
• Geopolitics in the Margins (tutor)
• Research Methods (teaching assistant, "Ethnography and participant observation") 

Master's courses​

• ASEAN Environments (guest lecturer, "Illegality, war, environmental governance")
• Governance, Politics, and Policy (guest lecturer, "Environmental and identity politics: postcolonial perspectives")

National University of Singapore, Department of Geography, 2015 - 2017

• Changing Landscapes of Singapore (tutor, awarded the Graduate Students' Teaching Award 3x, the maximum)

Dr. Loong has given guest lectures at various external institutions, including Chiang Mai University, National University of Singapore, School of the Arts Singapore, and Spring University Myanmar (video with Burmese subtitles).