Watch: Sean Turnell’s Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of Reform in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar

In Conversation: Sean Turnell on Best Laid Plans — Myanmar's Reform Dream and Its Violent End

In February 2021, a military coup shattered one of the most ambitious economic and democratic reform agendas in modern Southeast Asian history. One of its key architects was there — and paid dearly for it.

In this Lowy Institute conversation, Dr Sean Turnell — senior economic adviser to Myanmar's democratic government under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and one of the few foreigners imprisoned in the wake of the coup — joined Director of Research Hervé Lemahieu to discuss Best Laid Plans, his extraordinary first-hand account of the reforms designed to rescue Myanmar's economy and build the foundations for lasting democracy.

The discussion explored what those reforms set out to achieve, what brought them undone, and what the coup means for Myanmar's people and its future. The conversation included questions from the audience.

Deeply personal, historically significant, and urgently relevant, this is essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand one of the most consequential — and most overlooked — tragedies in the contemporary Indo-Pacific.

About the speakers

Dr Sean Turnell is a Senior Fellow in the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute and Professor of Economics at Macquarie University. He has served as a Senior Economic Analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia and a policy adviser to the IMF and World Bank. From 2016 to 2021, he was senior economic adviser to Myanmar's democratic government under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and was imprisoned following the February 2021 military coup.

Hervé Lemahieu is Director of Research at the Lowy Institute and the original architect of the Asia Power Index.