Guest blog by Timo Kivimäki, Senior Research, NIAS, on his collaboration with Jasmin Lorch who visited NIAS on a SUPRA scholarship 6-19 November 2006.

Jasmin is a doctoral candidate at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and a member of the Conflict Transformation Group, and the research project on weak states, based in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In June 2005 she graduated in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin. For her MA thesis on civil society in Burma she conducted nearly three months of research in Burma., Thailand, Washington D.C. and on the Thai-Burma border. In addition to this, she has worked as a freelance researcher and consultant for aid agencies focusing on civil society developments inside Burma as well as on the debate on humanitarian aid for the country. Finally, in June 2006 she conducted another field study in Burma that focused on civil society developments in Burma in the sector of education specifically. Given these facts, the empirical data that Jasmin has acquired are unique in quality as well as quantity and therefore I highly welcomed the chance to work with her here at NIAS in Copenhagen. We are co-writing two articles about Burma: the first deals with the negotiation process between the Burmese regime on the one hand and the opposition on the other; the second focuses on the issue of sanctions in the Burmese context.

Using the NIAS library
Jasmin’s current research interests are civil society developments and democratization processes in comparative perspective. Her PhD focuses on the question of what kind of state constitutes what kind of civil society, using Vietnam and Bangladesh as case studies. And even though we have been very busy drafting the two articles she has also had time to do some work on her PhD. I know fore instance that she has sped a lot of time at the NIAS LINC (which is our library and information centre) conducting literature research and found material that she would not otherwise have access to.

As you probably can understand from the above it’s been a very productive stay for both of us. If fact, it is incredible what one can manage in two weeks at NIAS J

For more information about the NIAS SUPRA programme follow this link!

And for those of you interested in the Burma and civil society in Southeast Asia you might want to check out Jasmin’s publications:

Lorch, Jasmin (2006), Civil Society under Authoritarian Rule: The Case of Myanmar, in: SÜDOSTASIEN aktuell 2/2006, pp. 3-37 and
Lorch, Jasmin (2007), Civil Society – A Patch for Burma’s Education System. The Emergence of Civil Society in Areas of State Weakness, in: Mutz, Gerd/ N.N. (Ed.) (forthcoming 2007): Civil Society in Southeast Asia.

» You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.