"From 2012 to 2014, Myanmar suffered violence between different communities, most of it involving Buddhists attacking Muslims. It ranged from localised, fleeting, inter-group violence, to large scale, apparently well-organised, state-supported killing and destruction of property of a targeted group, running over a number of days. The most serious and protracted violence, which left hundreds, perhaps thousands of people dead and over a hundred thousand displaced, was in Rakhine State, on Myanmar?s western seaboard, bordering Bangladesh. There, its objects were people variously identified as Rohingya, or Bengali Muslims. Large-scale anti-Muslim violence followed in Mandalay Region and Shan State; smaller incidents, some isolated, others sequential, occurred elsewhere. Collective violence is a feature of uncertain times. In Myanmar too—and before it, Burma—it has tended to occur amid rapid political and economic change. As in other religiously, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous countries where a politically oppressive state loosens a highly coercive grip, people there have found themselves wanting for genuinely democratic institutions to express and manage conflict. Mundane and seemingly apolitical events instead have been converted into moments of short-lived but intense violence in which people living in proximity have divided sharply into groups, with one attacking the other..."