Dr. Mart Viirand

Mart Virand is a PhD candidate at the School of Social and Political Science at University of Edinburgh. He has previously worked on the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border in Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley, where he studied the social and economic pressures created by the militarization of historically unified, yet ethnically diverse rural areas. His current research centres on the development of competing institutions of formal education in Northern Myanmar in both historical and contemporary perspective. He is also involved in several locally managed educational programmes in minority areas of Myanmar that aim to modernize teaching methodologies, encourage local leadership and raise awareness of democratic governance in the context of on-going ethnic warfare and forced displacement.