General briefing: Burma

Burma (Myanmar) spent half a century under the rule of an oppressive military junta from 1962 to 2011. In 2011 the then-president General Thein Sein introduced a series of political reforms, including the release of hundreds of political prisoners and increased space for media, civil society and political actors. Preliminary ceasefires with most of the ethnic armed resistance groups were agreed. In 2015 the National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s first democratic elections in 25 years.

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