Dr Anna Plunkett is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies. Her research focuses on the role and development of local actors and local responses to conflict. She completed her ESRC-funded PhD titled ‘‘Opportunities and Obstructions: The Role of Local Elites in Creating Sub-National Variation within Nationally Led, Top-Down Regime Transitions’ within the Department in 2021.

Anna has a special interest in Myanmar’s political developments and has given multiple interviews to national and international new stations on political developments since 2020. She has published for online and print media, including publications based in the UK, Europe and Asia. Her present research focuses on the role of regional organisations within periods of norm contestation, where she is focusing on ASEAN’s response to the Myanmar 2021 Coup d'état.

She holds an MA in Post-War Recovery Studies and a BA in Politics and Economics from the University of York. Alongside her academic work, Anna has worked as a strategic consultant and human rights researcher within several post-conflict environments building capacity and sustainability within small organisations.

Research Interests

Her research focuses on the role of local elites as mediators and obstacles within nationally led regime transitions. She is interested in how the presence of such alternative authority structures impact communities’ experiences of national political processes. Her work has primarily focused on the ongoing regime transition processes and localised conflicts within Myanmar.

She is presently working to develop a comparative study of local elites within post-conflict regime transitions. She is also co-authoring a paper with Professor Oisín Tansey on the international response to the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar.

• Democratisation and Authoritarianism
• Post-Conflict Regime Transitions
• Statebuilding
• Local Elites
• Protracted Conflicts
• Myanmar and political movements in South East Asia

Publications

Journal Articles

• Plunkett and Tansey (2022) Contesting the Anti-Coup Norm: ASEAN Responds to the 2021 Myanmar Coup, Working Paper Series, UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
• Plunkett (2020) Democratisation as a Protective Layering for Crimes Against Humanity: The Case of Myanmar in Genocide Studies and Prevention 14 (3) pp. 69-89.

Book Reviews

• Plunkett (2021) The Hidden History of Burma: A Crisis of Race and Capitalism and Women, Peace and Security in Myanmar: Between Feminism and Ethnopolitics in International Affairs 97(4) pp.1276-78.
• Plunkett (2021) The Constitution of Myanmar: a contextual analysis in International Affairs 97(1) pp.253-254
• Plunkett (2020) Rebel politics: a political sociology of armed struggle in Myanmar’s borderlands in International Affairs, 96(2) pp. 555-556

Conference Papers

• Plunkett (2019) ‘Myanmar’s National Ceasefire Agreement: How failure to account for change is leading to all out failure’ paper presented at Studying Peace from Below, University of Tromso, Norway, 5-6 November 2019.
• Plunkett (2019) ‘Democratisation as Protective Layering Against Crimes Against Humanity’ paper presented at Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide First International Conference of the Centre for Holocaust Genocide and Human Rights Studies, UNCC, North Carolina, USA 12-14 April, 2019.
• Plunkett (2018) ‘Reconciling Burma’s Transitions: Democracy and Conflict within the state’ paper presented at the IPSA World Congress: Borders and Margins, Brisbane, 21-25 July 2018. • Plunkett (2018) ‘Conflict and Democracy in Myanmar's Ethnic Borderlands’ paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Sydney, 2-5 July 2018.

Media Engagement

Anna regularly contribute to the news through both print media and guest appearances some of her most recent articles include:

• Plunkett (2021) Aung San Suu Kyi trial: how Myanmar’s judicial system is staked against the deposed leader in The Conversation Aung San Suu Kyi trial: how Myanmar's judicial system is stacked against the deposed leader (theconversation.com)
• Plunkett (2021) Slim chance for Suu Kyi at Myanmar’s kangaroo courts in Asia Times. 
• Plunkett (2021) Anguish over Water: The Rohingya Crisis Continues published in "bedrohte Völker - pogrom" (Threatened Peoples – pogrom) published by the "Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker" (GfbV) (Society for Threatened Peoples)
• Plunkett (2021) Myanmar: The end of the democratic dream? Myanmar: The end of the democratic dream? (International Affairs Blog)
• Plunkett (2020) Just Words? The Failure of the ‘Never Again’ Convention (Strife Blog)