and the particularities of a given historical moment. In India, new possibilities created by growth in print media and audio-visual broadcasting did not cause Hindu nationalism, but neither could nationalism be understood without considering the new technology (Rajagopal 2001). In Myanmar, it can be similarly said that political contests and conflicts will unfold in light of what newly arriving technologies make possible. This could be said of most new communication technologies in most places most of the time, but exploring existing communication practices helps to highlight why it may be significant in Myanmar: new technologies likely to reshape the everyday production of narratives are arriving at precisely a moment when narratives about the country, its past, and its future are being wrenched open and contested with new force and possibility. After more than sixty years of military rule, Myanmar is at the final stage of a seven-step ‘roadmap to Discipline Flourishing Democracy,’ which has featured a shift to law-making in parliament and the release of political prisoners, ceasefire negotiations with ethnic armed groups, reduction of pre-publication censorship, and the lifting of bans on public assembly, unions and political organising. These changes have been hailed as the country’s ‘perestroika’ and a ‘Burma spring’ (Selth 2011; Della-Giacoma 2011), and bring with them fraught contests for power between a military that is ostensibly retreating to its barracks yet backing a ruling party, and an opposition that is both fractured and led by a national icon and Nobel prize-winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. In an email missive circulating among political activists in early 2014, a friend characterized this as two bulls racing towards each other on a field; I share this vision, playing out on a field being experienced in daily life as a dissolution in the markers of certainty (Lefort 1988: 19). These changes have also enabled western countries to remove or weaken economic sanctions, a process that, along with domestic economic reforms, has touched off an intensified re-engagement with global flows of capital and culture. Telecommunications infrastructure is thus both a metaphor for the country’s reencounter with globalisation and part of the material process by which it is becoming possible. The state and society in Myanmar will be experiencing a media and technology upheaval at the same time they are, with an unusual lateness, encountering the fullness of contemporary globalisation with which societies throughout the rest of the world have been contending for decades. Coca-Cola for example, oft used marker for the spread of global capital and culture (Foster 2008; Lowe 2012), ended its 60-year absence from Myanmar in 2012, leaving North Korea and Cuba as the only remaining markets in which Coke is not officially sold (Jordan 2012). This encounter is bringing long-absent investment capital and development activity. But, in a place with an established cadre of crony capitalists and a state that rationalises use of force more than it regulates, it is also opening the way for extraction of natural resources and expropriation of land that is leaving most of the country far behind. Consideration of developing conflicts between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Myanmar must take these broader issues into account. It is not sufficient to locate inquiry exclusively in the history of relations between communities or the individual antagonisms within the hearts of people in Myanmar, just as it is not sufficient to seek out effects caused by new technologies and media. Arjun Appadurai, for example, has argued that encounter with globalisation generates a sense of social uncertainty that undergirds collectivised violence. Appadurai sought to understand the regularity of mass violence against civilians during the 1990s, identifying it as produced by the loss of national economic sovereignty inherent in the logic of globalisation, a loss that is simultaneously a challenge to the conviction that national identity will remain fixed and permanent so long as its geographic boundaries are defended. In 9