Sean Turnell on Myanmar, Civil War, and Economic Reform

Beyond the Mekong

How the "best laid plans" of Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian government went awry.
Australian economist Sean Turnell has released his latest book "Best Laid Plans," detailing his efforts to lift Myanmar out of deep poverty as a policy advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi before she was ousted by a military coup in early 2021, when both of them were jailed.He spent 650 days behind bars as Myanmar was tipped into civil war by a military that ended an all-too-brief experiment with democracy and has since proven itself as ill-prepared on the battlefield as it is on the economic front with the nation’s finances in tatters.Turnell spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about his new book and the technocrats who lined up and prepared the country for trade and investment with the outside world, including China – a difficult country requiring a step-by-step approach – under Aung San Suu Kyi’s leadership.Like many others, he says the military led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing cannot win the civil war and when the conflict is over he expects those technocrats to return to their homeland and an era of post-war reconstruction."Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of Reform in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar" is published by Penguin Books and offers a script for what needs to be done to rebuild the country.But as Turnell notes, that will also depend on the post-war political make-up to be thrashed out among the many ethnic groups who are fighting to rid Myanmar of the military dictatorship and for their own independence.Turnell is a former director of the Myanmar Development Institute. He is currently an honorary professor of economics at Macquarie University and a Senior Fellow in the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute.