Higher Education in Times of Displacement
A decade ago, my academic engagement with Myanmar, aka my PhD, began with a consideration: universities occupied a central place in the country's struggles for democracy and social justice. For decades, Myanmar's students have stood at the forefront of political and social change. From anti-colonial mobilisations to the 1988 uprising and the contemporary Spring Revolution, university spaces have repeatedly become arenas where the present is contested and alternative futures are imagined. If the history of any country can be better understood from below, the modern history of Myanmar can be grasped by centring the analysis on the conflict between the state and student movements and, more broadly, activism. On one side, a brutal regime maintains a state of constant fear and war; on the other, generations of resistance have countered political incapacity. The 2021 military coup marked another turning point. As the resistance diversified, taking on new organisational forms and extending beyond Myanmar's borders, my own academic journey followed a similar trajectory. In many ways, my research has evolved alongside the story of Myanmar students and activists themselves, following their displacement while remaining grounded, as they did, in the enduring role of higher education as a site of political imagination and resistance.
Displacement was not present in my personal and academic journey before being confronted with the reality of Myanmar post-2021-coup. In Myanmar, students who were experiencing the benefits of a decade of educational reforms were left without the hope of meaningfully progressing with their academic studies and subsequent careers in the country. As a displaced student I met in North East India explained to me: “In Myanmar, I graduated from an LLB (Bachelor of Laws), in 2019. [...] After that, the coup happened, and then I feel very hopeless. As a youth, as a woman and as an ethnic in Myanmar, I don't want to work and I don't want to serve under the military as an advocate or as a judge.” Not only was I confronted with a generation of students who had seen what a decade of reform could do for their lives and for broader society, and who did not want to give that up, but I also confronted a kind of displacement that is seldom thought about—one that does not necessarily require mobility to happen: the exclusion from a country’s education system. In post-coup Myanmar, across the country, students and academics refused to return to military-controlled institutions. At the same time, they fought to remain students (even if it meant going abroad and dealing with survivor guilt), to create alternative spaces of learning (e.g. the Spring Universities), and to maintain aspirations that connect personal educational journeys to wider projects of social and political transformation. Reflecting on his journey, Zaw Sar Zu writes: “Along the way, I realised that revolution was not just about armed rebellion. It was also about boycotting the military and continuing education.” Authoritarian regimes seek not only to control territory and institutions but also to shape what can be known, taught and imagined. Resistance, therefore, is not only political; it is intellectual. Seen from this perspective, Myanmar's ongoing Spring Revolution is more than a political movement. It is also a knowledge revolution.
The Myanmar story that I have briefly traced here has had profound implications beyond its borders (e.g. significant effects on Thai higher education), and it calls for a reflection that transcends Myanmar itself. Across South and Southeast Asia, millions of people experience displacement caused by conflict, political violence, environmental crises and persecution. Displaced communities continue to learn, teach, organise and imagine futures. Universities can thus play an increasingly crucial role in these processes: they can become spaces of protection, belonging and opportunity—though this is neither automatic nor something to be taken for granted. They can serve as sites where displaced populations challenge exclusion and produce new forms of knowledge. Yet they can just as easily reproduce precarity, keeping displaced students suspended in conditions of trauma and liminality, particularly when institutional and policy responses centre on individual resilience while overlooking the structural conditions of coercion, violence and exclusion that produce displacement in the first place. Even if the story of Myanmar students is one of remarkable educational agency, it cannot be read simply as a success story of resilience or individual determination. Their educational trajectories are shaped not only by personal aspirations and resourcefulness but also by restrictive migration regimes, uneven access to legal protection, exclusionary higher education systems, and broader geopolitical dynamics. Acknowledging students' agency, therefore, must go hand in hand with recognising the institutional responsibilities of universities and states. The challenge is not merely to celebrate how displaced students navigate adversity, but to ask how higher education can contribute to transforming the conditions that produce educational exclusion and forced mobility.
These reflections provide the starting point for the areUsafe project. Moving beyond the Myanmar case, the project places the voices of displaced students at its centre to explore how they experience their higher education journeys and whether universities are perceived as spaces of safety, belonging and opportunity. Bringing together insights from Asian regional studies, critical higher education studies and displacement studies, areUsafe asks a broader question that emerged from the Myanmar experience: what role can universities play in the lives of displaced students? Are we safe spaces?
The following works informed this piece:
Ali, A. (2023). Conceptualizing Displacement: The Importance of Coercion. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 49 (5), 1083–1102.
Badri, S., & Saenko, V. (2026). Don't Call Me Resilient: Migrant Academics, Precarity, and Epistemic Injustice in Europe. European Alternatives Journal.
Khemanitthathai, S & Nyi Nyi Kyaw. (2026). Student Migration from Myanmar to Thailand after the 2021 Coup. Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung e.V. and The Nelson Mandela Centre for Conflict Resolution, Atrocity Prevention, and Human Security, Chulalongkorn University.
Kyi Min Khant. (2026). Liminal Lives: Burmese Student Migration After the Coup and the Search for Ontological Security. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 24.
Lall, M. (2020). Myanmar's Education Reforms: A Pathway to Social Justice? UCL Press.
Lall, M., Aung Mann Min, & Proserpio, L. (2025). Emerging from adversity: Spring Universities in post-coup Myanmar. Education and Conflict Review, 5, 89–96.
Lall, M., & Okamoto, I. (2026). Myanmar's Spring Revolution: Students, Higher Education and Political Change. UCL Press.
Mazzero, C. (2025). Higher education in displacement: empowering pathway or double-edged institution? Insights from Belarusian students' experiences. Journal of Refugee Studies, 38 (4), 857–873.
Proserpio, L. (2022). Myanmar Higher Education in Transition: The Interplay between State Authority, Student Politics and International Actors. PhD dissertation, University of Bologna.
Proserpio, L. (2025). Resistance through Higher Education: Myanmar Universities' Struggle against Authoritarianism. Bristol University Press.
Zaw Sar Zu (2026). Impact of Post-Military Coup on Lisu Youths: Forced Migration, Trauma, and Obstacles to Educational Access. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 24.