I am a political geographer studying conflict, peacebuilding, and the politics of international development in Myanmar and its borderlands. My work takes a grounded, qualitative approach to three themes:

• The postcolonial state and its peripheries
  
  Like many political geographers, my work challenges the idea that borders of nation-states map onto the boundaries of our social and political lives. I am interested not only in how individuals live across borders, but also how people relate to one another because of them. I began to see borders in this way when I wrote about migrant lives along the Myanmar-Thailand border, during Myanmar's "transition" (2011-2021). Later, my work on community organisations showed how "non-state" spaces along the Myanmar-Thailand border allowed various actors to challenge postcolonial statebuilding to an extent unavailable to those in the centre. 
  
  
• The politics of international development
  
  Billions of dollars are spent each year on international development. For the last thirty years, a significant proportion of this money has been channelled towards "good governance". Yet the question of what makes governance "good" is fraught in postcolonial states, where non-state actors act like a state, or fill gaps in areas where the state's authority is especially tenuous. Building on ethnographic, grounded, and actor-centred approaches to critical development studies, I study how the good governance agenda can reinforce or contest postcolonial statebuilding. For example, people in Karen State have used civil society as a vehicle for their hopes and dreams, which are related to own, localised experiences of war. 
  
  
• War and warscapes
  

  In Myanmar, war has persisted for generations, but experiences of war vary immensely, as they depend on local histories, economies, and power relations. I bridge macro- and micro-political approaches to war, showing how both perspectives are important for understanding how colonisation and postcolonial statebuilding shape current experiences of armed violence. This was the impetus for the interactive Myanmar Conflict Map, which I developed with a small team from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and a series of essays which explain the geography of war and related humanitarian issues. In my publications, I have shown that people do not experience and think about war only according to pre-defined categories (e.g. ethnicity), but do so out of localised experiences of violence and militarisation. This shapes their views on self-determination, infrastructure, and civil society in war-affected areas.

Please email me for any work you would like to read, but cannot access. More publications are available on my personal webpage.

Journal articles 

• Constantinou, C. M., McConnell, F., Dirik, D., Regassa, A., Loong, S., & Kuokkanen, R. (2024). Reimagining self-determination: relational, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives. Political Geography, 103112. [link]

• Loong, S. (2023). ‘We have big ideas, but only small words’: The post-war geographies of civil society and community in Karen State. Geoforum, 147, 103891.[link]

• Loong, S., Manby, A., & McConnell, F. (2023). Rethinking self-determination: colonial and
  relational geographies in Asia. Territory, Politics, Governance. DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2023.2232410. [link]

• Loong, S. (2023). In Myanmar, Generation Z goes to war. Current History, 122(843), 137-142. [link]

• Mostafanezhad, M., Farnan, R. A., & Loong, S. (2023). Sovereign anxiety in Myanmar: An emotional geopolitics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48(1), 132-148. [link]

• Loong, S. (2019) The neoliberal borderscape: neoliberalism's effects on the social worlds of migrants along the Thai-Myanmar border. Political Geography, 74. 102035. [link]

• Loong, S. (2018) ‘This country, law very strong’: Securitization beyond the border in the everyday lives of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. Geoforum, 90: 11-19. [link]

Books

• Connelly, A., and Loong, S. (2024). New Answers to Old Questions: Myanmar Before and After the 2021 Coup d'etat. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. [First chapter is free]

Book chapters

• Loong, S. (2024). War and geography. In Warf, B. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Cham: Springer, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-25900-5_316-1. [link]

• Connelly, A., and Loong, S. (2023). Conflict in Myanmar and the international response. In Huxley, T., and Kuok, L. (eds.), Asia Pacific Regional Security Assessment 2023, London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, pp. 138-159. [link]

Reports (selected)

• Loong, S. (2024). How conflict dynamics in Myanmar are challenging state-centric humanitarianism. Myanmar Conflict Map. [link - includes interactive maps]
• Loong, S. (2022). Post-coup Myanmar in six warscapes. Myanmar Conflict Map. [link - includes interactive maps]
• Loong, S. (2022). The Karen National Union in post-coup Myanmar. Stimson Center. [link]
• Loong, S. (2021) Centre-Periphery Relations in Myanmar: Leverage and Solidarity After the 1 February Coup. Trends in Southeast Asia, 9/2021, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. [link]

Online publications (selected)

• Loong, S. (2021) Hope and heartbreak: Karen communities in the wake of the coup. Tea Circle: A Forum for New Perspectives on Burma/Myanmar, 4 February 2021. [link]
• Loong, S. (2020) Decolonial worldmaking, Burmese independence, and the Karen struggle. Tea Circle: A Forum for New Perspectives on Burma/Myanmar, 13 August 2020. [link]
• Loong, S. (2019) Notes from the Salween Peace Park. New Mandala, 27 May 2019. [link]