A Political Biography of Aung San Suu Kyi: A Hybrid Politician By Michał Lubina. 158 pp. London, Routledge, 2020.

Few political figures dominate international representations of their country like Aung San Suu Kyi, and few have been so central to their country’s domestic politics for so long. When she first entered the political fray in 1988, the US president was Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Augusto Pinochet was the president of Chile. Aung San Suu Kyi’s domestic and international standing was arguably at its peak during her periods of house arrest in the 1990s and 2000s when she was revered within Myanmar (officially Burma until 1989) for her moral opposition to military rule, and lauded internationally as an iconic symbol of democracy and human rights. From 2016, her time in government as Myanmar’s state counsellor—the de facto prime minister—brought responsibility for her administration’s decisions and, at times, loud criticisms from both home and abroad. Michał Lubina’s latest book about Myanmar politics A Political Biography of Aung San Suu Kyi: A Hybrid Politician (released in September 2020, weeks before the general election and just months before the most recent military coup) is about Aung San Suu Kyi’s political practice. Lubina will be well-known to scholars and engaged observers of Myanmar. He has authored six books about the country and regularly presents his work at international conferences. (We have, on occasion, presented on the same panels, and I was discussant for the launch of this book at the 2021 Myanmar Institut conference.) Lubina’s biography enters a crowded market. There are dozens of books about Aung San Suu Kyi and there has been no shortage of journal articles and scholarly chapters either, which have considered virtually every aspect of Aung San Suu Kyi’s engagement with politics, including her political thought and the role of Buddhism in her politics, her role as a leader, her influence on both domestic politics and on international foreign policy, and, of course, her long-term failure to speak up for Rohingya human rights. There has even been a Luc Besson-directed feature film starring Michelle Yeoh as The Lady, advertised as ‘one of the greatest love stories set against a background of political turmoil’. Understandably, Lubina’s focus is different, scholarly, and, significantly, the book is the first political biography of Aung San Suu Kyi to cover both her years in opposition and most of her years in power from 2016. Lubina’s book is very readable, and its accessibility to those outside the academy and, importantly, to those in Myanmar and other parts of the Global South is enhanced too by its open access availability funded by the author’s home institution, Poland’s Jagiellonian University.