RPL in the News: "Myanmar: Religion, Peace and Conflict Country Profile"

This primer was drafted for the United States Institute of Peace in June 2023 by Susan Hayward, RPL Associate Director for the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative, and Htay Wai Naing, recent HDS graduate, Certificate in Religion and Public Life student, and RPL graduate assistant.

"Appreciating the religious dimensions of society, state and politics in Myanmar is essential to understanding the country’s conflicts. This is not easy, as religions in Myanmar are deeply entangled with a complex array of ethnic identities and shaped by dynamic social and political forces both local and transnational, historic and current. Nonetheless — and indeed, precisely for these reasons — there are certain religious dimensions of life in Myanmar that anyone seeking to support the pursuit of a just peace must understand.

Part I: Religion in Myanmar

For much of its pre-modern history, the territory known as Myanmar, or Burma, was constituted by kingdoms in a dynamic state of alliances and disputes. This included the Pyu city states just before the Common Era, when Theravada Buddhism from India arrived; the Pagan Kingdom established by the Bamar ethnic group in the 9th century CE; and the kingdoms of Mrauk U (Rakhine), Ava, Hanthawaddy (Mon), the Shan States, and others in the 13th-16th centuries, before the Taungoo and Konbaung dynasties created relatively unified political units that lasted until the British colonial period. These monarchies generally operated via Theravada Buddhist governance. The righteous Buddhist king was considered one who ruled in accordance with the “dhamma” (Buddhist teachings or law), helped maintain order within the “Sangha” (monastic community), and protected and propagated the Buddhist “sasana”(the entirety of the Buddhist tradition). 

The British Empire conquered Burmese territory in a succession of wars throughout the 19th century. In establishing new forms of British governance, colonial rulers disrupted the traditional relationship between religious and political institutions. They refused to appoint a “sangharaja,” the political head who oversees the Sangha, and severed the patronage relationship between state and Sangha.

The result was a perceived decline in the sasana’s well-being. An influx of practitioners of other faiths — especially Christians and Muslims — exacerbated anxiety about Buddhism’s weakening influence on social and political life and sparked a Buddhist revival movement.

While the first constitution for the newly independent state in 1948 preserved this separation between religion and state, the country’s first prime minister, U Nu, himself a devout Buddhist, sought to establish Buddhism as the official religion of the state. This, among other issues, upset non-Bamar ethnic groups, particularly those for whom Buddhism was no longer the prevailing religion, and fueled the fire of ethnic insurgencies. In 1962, these ethnic rebellions led the military to its first coup.

The military ruled autocratically for the subsequent five decades, responding violently to persistent democratic activism in the heartland and multiple ethnic armed insurgencies in the periphery.

Democratic movements during this period, including the mass uprising in 1988 led by Aung San Suu Kyi and the 2007 Saffron Revolution, were associated primarily with Bamar Buddhists, with monks playing important leadership roles. In 2008, the military regime began to lay the foundation for establishing its path to a “discipline flourishing democracy” through a series of reforms.

During this quasi-democratic period from 2011-2021, the country engaged the international community robustly, the military pursued cease-fires with some ethnic armed groups, and the opposition National League of Democracy (NLD) operated freely under the leadership Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released from house arrest. But this period was still marred by violence, including the 2012 rise and spread of intercommunal violence targeting Muslim communities and the brutal 2016 and 2017 assaults on the Rohingya Muslim community that led to their mass displacement into Bangladesh, which was designated a genocide by the United States. In February 2021, the military staged another coup, re-arresting Aung San Suu Kyi and re-establishing authoritarian rule."

Read the full primer on the religious dimensions of Myanmar's conflicts on the United States Institute of Peace website.