Biography
Phwe Yu Mon is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS, The Hague), Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is part of 'The politics of agrarian transformations in Myanmar,' a research and training initiative based at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Eramus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Chiang Mai University in Thailand. She is also a member of the European Research Council Advanced Grant Project RRUSHES-5, led by Professor Jun Borras. Her current PhD research, supervised by Professor Jun Borras, explores the democratic struggles of Burmese people in Bamar-dominated central states across different regimes in Myanmar. How has the struggle in the Bamar-dominated Dry Zone region framed in term of class and identity politics around exploitation and oppression? The questions are relevant to ask especially in multi-ethnic Myanmar where daily struggle against Bamar-dominated state, state institutions and agencies have always been the domain of non-Burmese ethnic groups (Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Chin, Shan, etc. and in which the main axis of conflict is ethnic in character. The politics of land - not only as productive resources (such as farmland) but also a landscape and territory - is a fundamental starting point of her research.
Phwe locates her work primarily in grassroot communities and ethnic minority areas by taking different roles and positions in and through several civil society organizations for peacebuilding, governance and youth movement building in Myanmar and Southeast Asia since 2010. She has also worked on initiatives that aspire to prevent communal violence through organizing series of dialogues between different fundamentalist religious leaders during the period of escalating religious conflicts in 2014-2017. She earned a Master of International Relations from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2019.
