6 Matthew J. Walton and Susan Hayward their movement, their ability to construct buildings, and on public worship.5 For the ruling military-led governments, religious difference, like ethnic difference, marked individuals and groups as outside the national community and as potential threats to the integrity of the country. Partly as a Under military regimes, result of this, Burmese nationalism became increasingly conflated with Buddhist relireligious freedom for gious identity, conveying a sense that to be Christians, Muslims, authentically a citizen of Myanmar was to be and other non-Buddhists Buddhist (and ethnically Burman) (Walton 2013c). This exacerbated the dynamic of was severely limited non-Burman, non-Buddhist “others” being considered a threat to the state, and tools of regional or global power interests. Outside support from Western or other foreign elements to insurgency efforts and anti-junta democratic movements fed this perception.6 Since the colonial period, Muslim populations have occasionally faced targeted repression (Christians have also been targeted). Riots in 1930 were directed at immigrant Indians (as a stand-in for the colonial power), but riots in 1938 targeted Muslims more explicitly. After the establishment of military rule in 1962, Muslims were explicitly excluded from the Burmese military. Anti-Muslim riots occurred again in Mandalay in 1997 and Taungoo in 2001. It can be difficult to separate violence and oppression visited on minority communities from more general political and military actions, simply because most of the non-Burman areas have been active conflict zones for the past 50 years. That is, the military carries out violence that appears to target non-Buddhist populations, but justifies these actions as a necessary response to ethnic insurgencies rather than religious discrimination or an attempt to assert Buddhist and/ or Burman hegemony (Walton 2013a). However, whatever the stated purpose, these actions do reinforce the general tenor of Burmese national identity as “Buddhist” and the idea that non-Buddhists are foreign elements. Decades of interethnic and interreligious fighting in an authoritarian state in which many ethnic and religious groups lived removed from one another, separated by violent conflict or government restrictions on movement, have taken a toll. Religious bias and misunderstand-