Deciphering Myanmar's Ethnic Landscape:A Brief Historical and Ethnic Description of Myanmar’s Administrative Units

Myanmar is home to immense ethnic diversity, which has been at the core of questions relating to national identity, governance arrangements and constitutional design. The recent countrywide resistance against the 2021 military coup has provided new opportunities to rethink and redefine some of the established categories and assumptions about ethnicity and ethnic politics in Myanmar.

The report proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 highlights the paucity of ethnicity data from Myanmar and discusses background information on the GAD Township Reports and limitations of the ethnicity data generated from these reports. Chapter 2 provides an overview of ethnic diversity in Myanmar and presents ethnic distribution estimates based on the 1931, 1973 and 1983 censuses along with the 2019 GAD Township Reports. Chapter 2 also introduces the ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) index, an index commonly utilized in social science, as a way to conceptualize and compare ethnic diversity at various levels of subnational administrative units in Myanmar. Then, Chapter 3 explains the origins of Myanmar’s subnational administrative boundaries and provides an overview of how each state was created. It also examines the ethnic diversity of each state and where the titular ethnic groups are concentrated.