ABSTRACT
This chapter, based on over a decade of socio-legal research, details how legal inequality in Myanmar was built over decades, through both statutory weakening of personal status law and bureaucratic hurdles regarding everyday implementation and practice. The practice of personal status laws of minority communities is also impacted by restricted access to Myanmar citizenship following the introduction of the 1982 Citizenship Law. Since the 2021 coup, the military’s bureaucracy makes accessing personal status laws not only difficult for Myanmar’s religious minorities, but dangerous. With the Spring Revolution there is hope for a future more plural Myanmar, but the 2021 military coup complicated an already intricate and often unequal plural legal system in existence since its imposition via British colonial rule in the nineteenth century.
