Sadan quite properly closes by thinking through ways to address the issues Kachin people, and by extension other minority nationalities, confront as citizens of a centralizing Myanmar state. She begins by making the important point that Kachin identity is evolving, not static, and reaches beyond politics into a series of social worlds. Ethnicity is malleable and fluid, and the Kachin people themselves are participants in their own unfolding story, not mere observers.

Ruptures have been registered along the way, with globalization in the late eighteenth century and militant ethno-nationalism in the late twentieth being just as important as imperialism in the late nineteenth. The colonial experience was therefore not determining, though it did open up the contest to define Kachin modernity.

Any project to build a nation in Myanmar must be based on understanding, respect and sensitivity. As Sadan notes, however, these are qualities that no national political party has ever displayed. “It seems that the centre still does not know enough about its peripheries, while the peripheries feel they know more than enough about the centre” (468).

Thus, the state has to construct pathways for minority peoples to help build an inclusive nationalism. Indeed, in such a complex environment it has no choice but to do so. Yet there is still so much to be done. “To make the current conflicts the final manifestation of violence will require a mammoth effort of listening and engagement of the kind that the Burmese centre has yet to experience. It will require Burmese national politicians with the intellectual and ideological capacity and willingness to occupy a space in Burmese political life that no Burmese politician has yet occupied” (468-9).