In my upcoming book by the University of Hawai'i Press, I argue that Arakan, officially Rakhine State, has moved from the margins of Myanmar studies to its center. In little more than a decade, it has seen mass communal violence in 2012, the flight of more than 700,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh in 2017, and the rise of one of Southeast Asia’s most capable armed organizations. Between November 2023 and December 2024 the Myanmar military lost all but three of the state’s 17 townships. Few regions of the world have changed so fast, and few are so often written about by people who have never been able to work there.

This book is meant to give readers a single, reliable place to start. It brings together the history, geography, peoples, politics, economy and humanitarian situation of Arakan. For the period since 2022, it draws heavily on the monitoring data, issue briefs, special reports and in-depth papers of the Center for Arakan Studies (CAS), which are cited like any other source.

The book has five parts. Part I describes the land and its peoples. Part II covers history from the early kingdoms to 2016. Part III examines politics and conflict, including the Rohingya crisis and the war of 2023–2026. Part IV turns to governance, economy and society under the Arakan Army. Part V places Arakan in its regional and national setting and sets out the main debates for future research. Each chapter can be read on its own. Each opens with key points and cross-refers to other chapters where a topic continues.

The reference section contains a chronology, a glossary of terms and abbreviations, a who’s who, profiles of all 17 townships and Paletwa, a statistical annex and a bibliography.

The book is set up to October 2026. The chapters on Arakan before 1948 draw on a wide body of historical sources. Among them are East India Company reports, colonial gazetteers, the Journal of the Burma Research Society and the work of Jacques Leider, Michael Charney, Pamela Gutman and Stephan van Galen. Events in Arakan move quickly, and some figures, especially on displacement and casualties, are minimum counts that will be revised. Where sources disagree, the text says so.