In an April 2003 editorial on how to support the establishment of a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq, David Plotz asserts that “there's a tendency in democracy-building to mistake elections for a stable democratic government”. Plotz states that, prior to the holding of national elections, the hard work of building integrity and trust in the rule of law, establishing checks and balances through the diffusion of power to independent commissions, and the development of associations and civil society, needs to be undertaken. Indeed, transforming situations of repression and protracted conflict into situations where diversity and difference is productively managed, is the challenge to peace-builders everywhere. In our increasingly diverse and complex world, the need to be able to deal constructively with our differences is of paramount importance. In few places is this challenge greater and more complex than what is faced in present-day Myanmar.

After six decades of armed conflict — starting from the Japanese invasion of British colonial Burma in 1942 and continuing through insurgency and counter-insurgency up until the present time — and after four decades of relative isolation from and by the international community, Myanmar finds itself significantly lagging behind its neighbours on most socio-economic indices. Poverty, health, and education indicators show significant suffering by the population, with ethnic minority populations experiencing the most dire situations — particularly as a result of the decades of armed conflict in their regions.

During the Ne Win era, from the early 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s, civil society organizations were dismantled and any organizational activity outside the sphere of government was tightly constrained. From the early 1990s, in a departure from the policy of the Ne Win era, Myanmar's military government has gradually opened up space for international and domestic humanitarian development agencies to provide assistance to improve the plight of the people. Over the past dozen years, the number of international development agencies operating in Myanmar has grown to number around fifty, and the number of informal and registered domestic organizations has increased as well.