ABSTRACT
From gun-toting revolutionary soldiers in the mountainous Thai-Burma
border to domestic workers in middle-class homes in Chiang Mai, Thailand,
the Shan constitute one of mainland Southeast Asia’s largest (sub-)national
ethnic groups. Most of Southeast Asia’s Shan people can be found in the
Shan state located in the northeast of Burma (also known as Myanmar).
The political landscape of the Shan state tends to be characterized as a
complex patchworkof ethnic militias, political commandos and drug warlords,
scattered among villages of wet-rice farmers and slash-and-burn upland ethnic tribes. Although many Shan politicians had expected political
autonomy following the Second World War, for a number of reasons the
Burmese military authorities have continued to rule the area, and some
groups of Shan have been engaged in one of the longest-running civil wars
in modern history, with the first Shan armed separatist movement dating its
formation back to 1958.
