Van Tran
vantran@nias.ku.dk
​Twitter: @vmtran

Gunfire
​one empty cafe in 2017 Yangon
one confident 25-year-old metropolitan
one shaky cigarette burnt after another
Silences
“I witnessed Saffron as a high school student”
his wound reopened

Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. My research has focused on contentious politics and digital cultures under authoritarianism in the contexts of Myanmar's military dictatorship (1962-2010) and post-coup period (after 2021).
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I completed my Ph.D. at the Department of Government, Cornell University with a dissertation examining the resilience of public activism under repression, based on new qualitative evidence from Myanmar’s urban pro-democracy movement during 1988-2010. Using process tracing, my analysis highlights the agency of non-contentious bystanders, whose protection as well as disruption toward protesters ultimately influence movement durability.

I have also worked with civil society organizations in Myanmar to coordinate mixed-method research projects on local governance, digital literacy, and online disinformation, integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze both online and offline data. My policy recommendations have been disseminated to hundreds of development partners at Myanmar Digital Rights Forum, Facebook, the United Nations, European Union, Oxfam, etc.

My academic research is published and forthcoming at the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and ​Asian Politics & Policy. Other public scholarship works on Burmese politics have appeared in an edited book by the Torino World Affairs Institute and more than 100 media outlets and research blogs, including The Washington Post, Brookings Institution, Al Jazeera, AP, New Mandala, etc.