Talking Along the Integral Margin

Myanmar Musings

Myanmar rulers and foreign experts often describe the country's economic reforms in the period following 2010 in glowing terms. In the book, Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement, author Stephen Campbell, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, takes readers into the lives of the labourers behind the much-lauded, yet terminally tragic, "transition", of the time leading to 2021. He discusses why Myanmar elites were beholden to modernisation theory, the nature of squatting, internal migration, debt and "informal" work at the edge of Yangon, based on fieldwork before the 2021 coup.