Ma Ma Lwin is a talented Myanmar entrepreneur. With her gentle manners and her ‘light version’ of Myanmar dishes, intercepting the Western tastes of a growing group of expats willing to experience the local food, she has transformed an abandoned rooftop in a Muslim district near downtown Yangon into a successful restaurant. In early 2020, it was time for her to scale up. With the money she had earned, she opened a new restaurant in the heart of the old city, paying advance rent for the whole year. But as Yangon enters its ninth month of lockdown, and expats have left the country en masse, Ma Ma Lwin is now nearly broke.
Behind well-established and fixed peacebuilding ‘models’ there always lies the danger of normativity and of a lack of flexibility. Rather than a model, it seems much more promising to foreground a frame within which to design more reflexive, adaptative and respectful peacebuilding strategies.
State-centric frameworks are problematic in building strong and just institutions in war-torn societies.
[IT] Le Zone Economiche Speciali (ZES) sono da tempo utilizzate dai governi dei Paesi del Sud-Est asiatico nelle strategie nazionali di sviluppo economico. L’istituzione di zone franche doganali, parchi tecnologici e distretti di innovazione permette di attirare gli investimenti diretti esteri, sviluppare cluster manifatturieri, creare nodi infrastrutturali regionali e potenziare l’integrazione delle piccole e medie imprese nelle catene globali del valore.
Giuseppe Gabusi (T.wai & University of Turin) is the author of the article “Under pressure: the end of free trade as we know it and the future of the liberal order”, published by Quaderni di Scienza politica (Il Mulino).
