First, let me welcome our two guest-editors of this special issue entirely devoted to the study of contemporary Myanmar. Their initiative is particularly well received considering the rather limited sources and the relative lack of well-informed references available on this country within the corpus of Southeast Asian studies. Therefore, I anticipate that their contributions and the six enclosed articles will be highly appreciated by both regular and new readers of our academic journal interested in various updates related to the political and socio-economic transition taking place in Myanmar in recent years. I also invite all readers to consult the collective bibliography inserted after the presentation of the six authored articles, which may be of great help for the reason just indicated. Let me add to this foreword a major change in the editorial management of our journal. I am particularly pleased to announce that from now on the European Journal of East Asian Studies can receive online submission sonly. All authors are invited to use Editorial Manager (EM), an online submission and peer-review tracking system, which is currently in operation worldwide for over 6,100 scientific journals. Editorial Manager allows authors to track the progress of their submissions online. When accessing www.editorialmanager.com/ejeas, authors are guided step by step through the submission process. The system automatically converts any submitted article into a single pdf document, which is then used as the document of reference throughout the peer-review process. All correspondence between editors, authors and reviewers proceeds via the internet linked to this EM platform. The publishing house of Brill in Leiden and I are confident that this new editorial management platform will greatly facilitate the process of submissions, peer-reviews and final publication editorial work. You are kindly invited to register online at www.editorialmanager.com/ejeas. If you face any difficulty with this new type of editorial instrument, please do not hesitate to contact me or the publisher.