The Business of Transition: Law Reform, Development and Economics in Myanmar.

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Date: 01 April 2019
• Author: Harding, Andrew

The Business of Transition: Law Reform, Development and Economics in Myanmar. Edited by Melissa Crouch. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover: 288pp.

Although Myanmar scholarship languished for many years due to lack of either interest or opportunity, since the opening of Myanmar in 2011 both have burgeoned as scholars from many disciplines have become keen to uncover the transformations taking place and assess the prospects for further change. In this edited volume, the contributors draw on their considerable experience of Myanmar, often stretching back to the period of absolutist military rule.

This collection is in fact the third in a series of books on Myanmar edited by Melissa Crouch, a Myanmar legal scholar at the University of New South Wales. (1) It brings together scholars from several disciplines: Southeast Asian area studies; politics and public policy; development studies; law; business studies; geography; economics; sociology; and international relations. A feature of the new Myanmar scholarship has indeed been its pleasing interdisciplinarity, highly appropriate in a situation where too narrow a disciplinary perspective may well miss much of what is worthy of study and explanatory of context. The word "business" in the title is presumably deliberately ambiguous, as the book deals both with the instrumentality of bringing about transition (aid, sanctions...