I spent several months in Hpa-An in 2018, teaching social science at a post-secondary school. When I first met the school’s principal, I asked if he liked his job. ‘Like?’ he said, ‘weird question. It’s very difficult, but it is also my dream.’ I thought about this exchange often in subsequent months, as my doctoral research settled into understanding the aspirations of civil society actors in Karen State. His words spoke of his tenacity in the face of disenfranchisement, but also the tiny, tentative vent created for his dreams in recent years. At the confluence of the 2012 KNU ceasefire and the Myanmar government’s post-2010 reforms, civil society actors in state- and mixed-authority areas of Karen State dipped their toes into unchartered waters; exploring opportunities to form associations and enact change that had been denied to them for decades. ‘We didn’t have a chance for seventy years,’ one civil society actor told me, ‘now we do.’

My friend, Will, a writer and formerly a teacher at one of Yangon’s graduate institutes, put it this way in his elegy for Myanmar:

Gone was the sense that this was a country always a moment away from falling back under military rule. It was not that everything was now okay. It wasn’t. My Burmese friends were well aware of the magnitude of the problems they faced. But when they talked about the future, they talked about it as if it was something they genuinely had a stake in, as if it was something that could be fashioned, with enough creativity and commitment.

‘In 2019,’ he wrote, ‘it seemed as if the gravitational pull of the past had weakened, and with this weakening came a sense that a different future was possible.’

I felt this in Hpa-An too, among students and fellow teachers. There, my Karen students came from state- or mixed-authority villages in Karen State. There, they grew up under conditions of fear and discrimination. They were familiar with the presence of armed groups, but sometimes could not distinguish them. They also felt that the Myanmar government had done little for their families and villages. There may have been a new road or a new school nearby, but they bemoaned a lack of opportunities for social mobility.

This changed when they moved to Hpa-An. The cruel legacies of militarisation remained, but many students emphasised how they felt—in Will’s words—that the future was ‘something they genuinely had a stake in.’ There was always a striking intergenerational dimension to the interviews I did with them.^[2] My students emphasised that they were, as a generation, distinct from their parents and grandparents, who grew up under military rule. At 18 to 23 years old, they did not have living memories of the 1988 uprising and the subsequent crackdown. Some had spent more than half their lives out of junta rule, and a third of them under ceasefire conditions. My students embodied youth and hope, and they were cautious harbingers of a new future, determined to restore a sense of agency extinguished in decades past. Even so, their hopes were tempered by empathy towards their older family members. Few students were open to their parents about the nature of their involvement in civil society or their views on the KNU. A recent graduate, who had begun to work on ‘sensitive’ issues with a community-based organisation in Hpa-An, simply told her parents she was working in an ‘office’. She didn’t want them to worry. 

The anthropologist Jennifer Johnson-Hanks writes about ‘vital conjunctures,’ or moments in one’s life course ‘during which potential future are under debate and up for grabs.’ Such conjunctures, the geographer Jane Dyson suggests, can be precipitated by migration from a village to a city, which results in a reinterpretation of one’s original community. In 2018, I began to think about community schools in Hpa-An as spaces for a kind of vital conjuncture. Here, students were forming new, intra-generational bonds that solidified their hopes for a new future for Myanmar’s Karen communities. At school, they negotiated possible futures that were foreclosed before: to start a library or a school in their natal village; to pursue ‘critical thinking’ and uncover more about Karen history; to further their studies in Yangon or abroad.

In 2021, I feel heavy with their heartbreak. As the school’s principal put it, community education in Hpa-An is a ‘difficult’ endeavour. Indeed my research seeks to explain why and how civil society actors’ aspirations have been repeatedly frustrated. However, today I want to emphasise the tenaciousness of their hopes, and the extent to which they have been dashed. The coup presents a different kind of ‘vital conjuncture’, at which new futures must be—again—negotiated. I wonder if this upheaval is distinct because it has made a brutal dent on a generation’s aspirations, crafted according to their expectations for the persistence of civilian rule. Whereas previous upheavals occurred during a protracted period of military rule, from 1962 to 2011, the Tatmadaw has now seized power after ten years of reforms, which created hopes so widespread, they spanned the width of a generation. The 2021 coup represents the Tatmadaw’s veto power over the hopes and dreams of young people, in Karen State and beyond.