THE LADY AND THE GENERALS:
AUNG SAN SUU KYI AND THE STRUGGLE FOR
DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR (BURMA)

Andrew Kahn

DESCRIPTION: Since 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burmese independence leader General Aung San, has served as the General Secretary of the Burmese National League for Democracy. She spent years under house arrest, much of the time isolated from the outside world and her husband and children. Following a military coup against the democratic Burmese government in 1962, private enterprise, foreign trade and investment, the banking system and the currency became subject to the ideological whims of the military dictatorship. Over time, the nation, once the prosperous rice bowl of Asia, became bankrupt, the value of Burma’s currency plummeted, and inflation was rampant. Brutal acts of aggression were carried out against supposed - enemies of the regime which included minority groups, university students and reformers of all stripes. Buddhist monks were particularly targeted. In 2010, Suu Kyi’s 15 years of house arrest finally came to an end. A moderate reformer, General Thein Sein, had been elected president of the nation. Suu Kyi and other members of her party were elected to the lower house of parliament. She has been permitted to travel abroad without penalty, and has encouraged other countries to invest in Myanmar.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION: Andrew Kahn has studied political and social science on the undergraduate level at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and on the graduate level at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Maryland, and at New York’s New School University. He has taught at St. Cloud University in Minnesota and Western Connecticut University. He was a James Madison Fellow in Constitutional Law at the University of Indiana, and a Commonwealth Fellow in American and European History at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges in Pennsylvania. Mr. Kahn helped found AEGIS, the Association for Education in Global/International Studies, at Stanford University. Over the past several years, Mr. Kahn has taught a variety of global-issue courses and delivered individual lectures for the Lifelong Learning Society at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and Jupiter.