Associate professor of political science Tun Myint shares his own experience as a student leader in the 1988 democracy movement in Myanmar.

Associate professor of political science Tun Myint wrote about his own experience as a student leader in the 1988 democracy movement in Myanmar for this op-ed in The New York Times, in which he urges President Biden to take action to pressure the Burmese military to restore democracy.

“The current crackdown on protesters echoes the military’s violence against the pro-democracy movement of 1988, which I experienced as a high school student living in Yangon. My father, a farmer who was jailed repeatedly for speaking out, had taught me the importance of resilience in the face of repression, so I joined the protest. The military responded with a massacre. I fled, along with close to 10,000 other student activists, to the forested areas along the border with Thailand. Eventually I made my way to the United States, where I now teach political science, social change in Southeast Asia and the challenge of establishing democracies.”