Insight Myanmar

Episode #493: The entry point was children. During the reform period, as the Myanmar military and other armed groups feared making concessions that would affect the battlefield, international mine action specialists sought common ground by emphasizing civilian protection."The civilians were the victims, and everybody could see that it was not a good thing to have young children being killed or wounded by the mines," says Pascal Simon, a veteran humanitarian mine action and national capacity development officer. “Everybody wants to save lives and protect civilians, in theory.”In this episode, Simon reflects on his work in Myanmar from 2016 to 2020 and the delicate process of expanding mine action education in contested space. He describes how it was importantto "try to remain open and neutral" in an attempt to focus on prevention rather than blame. Simon says this neutrality allowed mine risk education to be gradually integrated into education and social welfare networks, including in EAO-controlled areas and refugee communities in Thailand.Progress culminated at the 2019 National Mine Action Conference, which brought together civilian ministries, military representatives, international organizations, and ethnic actors, putting "the government in the leading seat" to discuss landmines as a national humanitarian issue. The workshop concluded with the need to establish a National Mine Action Authority.The proposed authority never materialized. When the 2021 military coup abruptly ended the transition period, it dismantled both the coordination infrastructure and the trust that had been built.Throughout the interview, Simon returns to the importance of trust, consistency, and neutrality, engaging with all actors. Engagement with the military, which risks legitimization, remains a critical tension for international organizations. "We have to talk to everybody, at least to try to and, of course, we have to make sure that they're not using us," Simon says.

Episode #492: Wong Chen, a Malaysian Member of Parliament active in international relations as Malaysia held the ASEAN chair, argues that the Myanmar crisis will not be resolved through moral appeals, symbolic diplomacy, or repeated Western advocacy alone. He maintains that the Myanmar military is far more resilient than many outsiders assume and largely unmoved by external condemnation. In his view, meaningful progress will come only when the junta faces real leverage generated by coordinated internal resistance, supported by pragmatic regional engagement. Without such pressure, he suggests, dialogue risks becoming performative and ultimately serving the military's interests. Wong Chen situates this argument in Malaysia's 2025 experience leading ASEAN, a consensus-based organization with a rotating annual chair. When Malaysia assumed the role, he initially felt optimistic, given Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's human rights reputation and ASEAN's existing Five-Point Consensus on Myanmar. That optimism faded as Malaysia adopted what Wong Chen describes as “pragmatic engagement” with both the junta and resistance groups. While he accepts that communication with all parties is unavoidable, he stresses its asymmetric effects because the junta is not a good-faith actor. For example, junta-controlled media reframes such meetings as “recognition,” even when this is far from the case. He also argues that ASEAN's institutional design undermines long-term crisis management. Unlike short, bilateral disputes ASEAN has mediated successfully, Myanmar requires sustained, multi-year engagement. Rotating chairs shift operational control to new national bureaucracies, reset personnel and priorities, and prevent the accumulation of institutional memory. The junta exploits these recurring reset points by re-litigating settled issues and using the sheer quantity of engagements to claim legitimacy. Wong Chen therefore calls for a permanent, well-resourced ASEAN mechanism dedicated to Myanmar, one that is not affected despite the changes inherent in the rotating chair. Beyond ASEAN, Wong Chen identifies China as the pivotal external actor, motivated less by ideology than by stability and trade. As long as Myanmar's opposition remains fragmented, Wong Chen points out that China will usually default to dealing with the junta. He criticizes the National Unity Government for strategic stagnation, internal rigidity, and overreliance on Western moral appeals, urging greater unity, clearer goals, and stronger use of diaspora resources. While cautiously optimistic that geopolitical shifts—potentially involving U.S.–China rivalry and even unconventional actors like Donald Trump—could create openings, Wong Chen ultimately places responsibility on Myanmar's resistance and opposition to unify around a shared vision and leadership in order to create the leverage needed to force a resolution. External actors can assist, he says, but “you have to do it yourself.”

Episode #491: The third episode in our five-part series features conversations recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners gathered around the theme Dealing with Legacies in Burma. Held amid ongoing political turmoil and humanitarian crisis, the conference created a rare space for open dialogue and shared reflection. Insight Myanmar was invited into this environment to record conversations with a wide range of attendees, produced in collaboration with NIU's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. We hope these episodes bring listeners into the atmosphere of the gathering and into conversation with the people who continue to shape the field today. Naw Moo Moo Paw, a PhD candidate at UMass Lowell, grounds her research on disability caused by political violence during her own upbringing. Raised in the conflict-ridden Bago region amid landmines, forced labor, and death, she witnessed numerous civilian injuries, including of her own father. She completed a master's in Japan, where the quiet environment triggered long-suppressed PTSD stemming from her childhood experiences. Her current research examines post-injury political participation, social inclusion, and cultural interpretations of disability. She emphasizes that disabled people in Myanmar seek acceptance and community support more than financial aid and warns that unaddressed trauma may lead to future societal instability. Aye Minn discusses his work with an online university in Myanmar, which was formed after the 2021 coup to provide a learning space for teachers and students who left the state system. He characterizes his work as combining parahita, the Buddhist principle of acting for the good of others with atahita, or acting for one's own benefit… which Burmese culture often views negatively. He argues that self-improvement is inseparable from service, especially in a country where opportunity is rare. The university now operates largely on unpaid volunteer labor, reflecting Burmese society's long tradition of service and its scarcity of financial resources. He champions equity, urging Western scholars to recognize their privilege and consider more culturally adaptive academic standards. As he puts it, “We should bring more scholars who are underprivileged onto the table.” Grace, a master's student researching rare earth mining in Kachin State, explains that these minerals are essential for global technologies and green energy, but their extraction causes severe environmental and health damage. In northern Myanmar, communities face rising cases of skin disease, respiratory problems, and digestive disorders, intensified by post-coup instability. After restricting domestic mining, China shifted to Myanmar, where a complex mix of militias, the military regime, and the Kachin Independence Organization control territory. China pressures these groups to maintain mineral supply chains while Chinese investors conduct mining with little oversight, leaving toxic waste behind. Local resistance exists through petitions and faith-based organizing, but militarization and poverty limit effectiveness. Many villagers depend on mining for basic survival, reflecting longstanding resource-curse dynamics. She references recent reports of U.S. interest in sourcing rare earths from here, which could be of interest to Kachin leaders as it offers them a lifeline away from China.

Episode #490: Matt Walton, a political theorist and scholar of Buddhism and politics in Myanmar, and author the acclaimed Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar, argues that Burmese political life cannot be understood through secular or Western democratic frameworks alone. He contends that struggles over democracy, authority, nationalism, and pluralism in the country unfold within a shared Theravāda Buddhist moral universe whose internal logics remain consistent even as they produce sharply divergent political outcomes. Ethical life, political legitimacy, and social order are deeply embedded in Buddhist moral reasoning, shaping how political ideas are articulated and contested. In his undergraduate years, he developed an interest in meditation, which took shape during his first visit to Myanmar. Initially going as a backpacker, he joined a demanding 21-day vipassanāretreat in the Mahāsi lineage in the Sagaing Hills. That retreat proved pivotal for him both as practitioner and professionally, sparking his interest how embodied Burmese Buddhism plays out in social, cultural and political spheres. Subsequent travels through Myanmar helped crystalize his awareness that democratic aspirations and rights discourse in the region operate within Buddhist concepts of causality, responsibility, and ethical conduct rather than liberal political theory. He devoted himself to the study of Burmese language, Buddhist philosophy, and political thought. Central to Walton's analysis is the relationship between lokī, the mundane sphere, and lokuttara, the supramundane orientation toward insight and liberation. These are not opposing realms but relational categories that structure political reasoning. Burmese discourse recognizes that ethical practice depends on material conditions, while also warning that excessive supramundane focus can undermine worldly governance. Political legitimacy emerges from negotiating this tension. Walton shows how Buddhist texts can generate competing political interpretations, supporting both hierarchical authority and participatory responsibility. Across history—from U Nu and Aung San to Ledi Sayadaw, Buddhist nationalism, and contemporary pluralist debates—Walton emphasizes that the same moral universe underlies empowerment and violence alike. Understanding this coherence, he insists, does not imply moral endorsement but is essential for grappling with Myanmar's political crisis and imagining more inclusive futures. Walton cautions against assuming secularism would offer a neutral alternative, noting that secular governance elsewhere remains shaped by Christian histories, and instead calls for explicit, critical engagement with Buddhist moral reasoning to identify resources for genuinely inclusive coexistence.

Episode #489: Neo grew up in Yangon, living a simple life—running a small convenience store, taking remote jobs, and spending his nights with friends, music, and beer. “I work and I play and I drink. Life was good, but things change,” he says. On the night of January 31, 2021, as he finished a hip hop track mocking junta supporters, the internet went dark. “They cut off every connection,” he recalls. “Telephone lines, internet, everything; yet my Wi-Fi didn't get cut. Maybe they forgot that service.” Through that one fragile signal, Neo confirmed the truth: “They really did a coup.” His father gave him a choice—leave the country or fight. “I immediately answered, ‘I'm going to fight back.'” Soon after, Neo left Yangon for Myawaddy and joined the resistance. At the jungle camp, life was stripped bare: “We were not well prepared, except our mental. We only had our spirit.” Between training drills, he wrote lyrics. “Some days I got four or eight bars; somedays I got the whole verse.” His songs—Pinkies vs. Guns and Nonprofit Soldier—became battle anthems of defiance. Frontline life hardened him. “If we had something to eat in the kitchen, we didn't have to go hunt,” he says. “That's the killing part.” Yet amidst the brutality, he found unity. “If you'reBuddhist, Christian, Muslim—that doesn't matter. Everyone's the same.” Neo insists their fight isn't about revenge. “It's not about how many you kill, it's about how many you save.” War changed him. “I can't say I'm a good man, but I can say I am trying not to be bad.” His name—taken from the protagonist of The Matrix—became both a shield and a vow: no going back. “I think I've already chosen the pill,” he says quietly. “So there's no going back.”

Episode #488: Veteran journalist and human rights advocate Chris Gunness describes Myanmar as “an extraordinarily fascinating country,” one that shaped both his early reporting career and his later work on international justice. Following events from London in the mid-1980s, he saw a nation marked by colonial legacies, ethnic fragmentation and civil war, yet so closed that major crises went unnoticed abroad. By 1986, Myanmar had become the center of his reporting as he tracked growing instability. In spite of his inexperience, he was sent undercover by the BBC to report from the country in the buildup to the 1988 uprising. Ordered to report openly, he filed news dispatches from a dilapidated Rangoon hotel. A day later, a hidden message from student leaders—coordinated by a prominent human rights lawyer—summoned him to a secret meeting. Blindfolded and taken to a safe house, he recorded interviews with organizers, a banker and a soldier. These tapes, smuggled out through diplomatic channels, were broadcast by the BBC on 6 August 1988. One interview inadvertently announced the precise moment protests would begin. At 8:08 a.m. on 8 August, millions marched across the country. The entire Burmese populace was informed ahead of time as a direct result of this reporting. Deported to Dhaka as a result, Gunness continued reporting, producing dispatches that became Myanmar's primary source of national information during the uprising. Though he rejects credit for sparking the movement—calling the Burmese people “the real heroes”—the experience taught him how shared information empowers political action. Gunness later founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP), using universal jurisdiction to pursue legal cases against junta leaders in Turkey, the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor-Leste. He also challenges junta attempts to gain legitimacy abroad, including a current case in the UK. Despite deep skepticism toward international justice and the UN's failures in Myanmar, Gunness believes accountability efforts can preserve evidence, empower victims and reinforce the illegitimacy of military rule. Ultimately, however, he argues that Myanmar's hope rests with its people, whose resilience he describes as “the indomitability of the Burmese spirit.”

Episode #487: Noor Azizah, a Rohingya genocide survivor and the founder and leader of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, argues that violence against the Rohingya is still an ongoing reality shaped by military force, armed groups, legal exclusion, and regional inaction. She insists that Rohingya rights must be central to any future political settlement involving Myanmar, rather than treated as a secondary or humanitarian issue. Azizah places Rohingya persecution within a long historical trajectory beginning in 1942, when Japanese forces exacerbated tensions between Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhine; before that, Rohingya and Rakhine communities had lived peacefully side by side. Following Myanmar's 1962 military coup, anti-Rohingya violence intensified, causing a large and growing displacement, mostly towards Bangladesh, which now hosts more than one million Rohingya refugees. The 1982 citizenship law was another defining moment, rendering the Rohingya stateless and imposing severe restrictions on movement, education, and healthcare. Finally, the 2017 military “clearance operations” represented the most extreme escalation, forcing more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee as villages were burned, civilians killed, and mass rape used as a weapon of terror. Azizah emphasizes that propaganda and hate speech have played a central role in this violence. Coordinated campaigns have portrayed Rohingya as illegal migrants and existential threats, amplified through Facebook and extremist Buddhist networks. She adds that economic interests, including infrastructure projects in Rakhine State, continued alongside mass violence. She discusses the International Court of Justice case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar as a landmark effort to enforce the Genocide Convention and stresses the failure of regional bodies such as ASEAN to protect Rohingya. Azizah concludes by describing the work of RMCN, a women-led organization providing humanitarian aid and advocacy, and reiterates that Rohingya rights are non-negotiable, and essential to Myanmar's future.

Episode #486: Daniel M. Stuart, a Buddhist studies scholar and vipassana practitioner, rejoins the podcast to describe his growing interest in Dr. Leon Edward Wright, a Black Christian theologian whose brief but potent connection with Burmese meditation master U Ba Khin has been nearly erased from histories of modern Buddhism and mindfulness. Stuart uses Wright's story to illuminate a world where meditation, anti-colonial politics, ritual therapeutics, and visionary experience intertwined—far from the later scientific and universalist framing of the Goenka lineage. He situates Wright within Asia's anti-colonial landscape, where independence movements fostered solidarity across communities. These movements influenced Black intellectuals in the United States, and Wright, already thinking about race, empire, and religion, saw global traditions as resources for liberation. Part of his time to Burma thus appears as part of a broader search for tools to support oppressed communities. Stuart highlights how Wright's experiences fit within Burmese cosmology shaped by Ledi Sayadaw, in which modern medicine coexisted with protective chanting and ritual healing. U Ba Khin adapted this framework, diagnosing afflictions through elemental imbalances and energetic blockages. Wright's visionary experiences—light, fire, a hand offering a yellow rose—made sense to him through Christian symbolism, and Stuart notes that “it's not at all surprising if he had some of those experiences, that he would interpret them through the lens of his own tradition.” In contrast, Goenka leans publicly on a secular presentation, but his lineage emerged from a lineage whose earlier layers were steeped in an esoteric cosmology. Ledi framed meditation, healing, and protection within a universe populated by unseen beings, karmically charged diseases, elemental obstructions, and the ritual power of chanting—what he called methods for “warding off” afflictions. U Ba Khin adapted that worldview into a system that treated ailments through energetic diagnoses in addition to teaching meditation. Goenka, however, reframed phenomena once explained through cosmological forces as natural law, and teacher-mediated energetic work was eliminated in favor of promoting the concept of a “non-sectarian” technique. Yet the tradition's underlying course structure—chanting, the teacher's position, the atmosphere of protection—still reflects its origins. For Stuart, Wright exemplifies cross-racial and cross-religious solidarity: a Black diplomat and cultural attaché in newly independent Burma bringing meditation back to Black communities in the U.S. He concludes that “I do think he's an important figure that deserves more attention,” not only for his own story but for what it reveals about the complex origins of modern mindfulness.

Episode #485: “I am not talking as a representative of Anya. I am just a normal person from Anya,” says Saw Bosco, a Myanmar peace process practitioner, grassroots educator on federalism, and political economy researcher. Drawing on his life as a Catholic from Myanmar's central dry zone, he connects faith, identity, violence, and economics to argue that peace cannot exist without dignity, inclusion, and material survival for ordinary people. Bosco was raised in a small Bayingyi community, descendants of Portuguese settlers long absorbed into Burmese culture. Although culturally local, their Catholic faith marked them as different within a state that rigidly links race, religion, and citizenship. Growing up as a “double minority,” Bosco learned that marginalized groups often try to blend in to survive, even when doing so offers no real protection under the law or in society. He explains that Christian identity is lived differently across Myanmar. In Christian-majority ethnic states such as Chin or Kachin, religious life is practiced publicly, even if under state constraints. In Buddhist-majority regions, however, Bamar or mixed-heritage Christians do not fit the state's standardized race–religion templates, leaving them subject to heightened bureaucratic scrutiny over identity documents, education, employment, and mobility. After the 2021 coup, this vulnerability intensified into targeted violence in places like Sagaing, where Christian villages were destroyed not only for resisting military rule but because religious difference made brutality easier to justify. Bosco situates these experiences within a broader critique of identity politics, federalism, and peacebuilding. He warns that opposition politics remain organized around ethnic categories that fail to represent newer regional and post-ethnic identities driving resistance today. His skepticism is shaped by his earlier involvement in the National Ceasefire Agreement, which he describes as an elite-driven process disconnected from civilian lives. At the center of his analysis is political economy. Across the Sagaing region, farmers face debt, land insecurity, and military attacks that have turned agriculture into a battlefield. Bosco rejects narratives that celebrate this suffering as “resilience,” insisting instead that peace without economic justice merely reproduces inequality and leaves survival mistaken for stability. “We need to listen to what is happening in the central area as well, like why we are struggling at the political level.” he says in closing. “Of course, everything is very important, for every single political movement and for everyone. But the life of the people from central area is also a unique experience, like the other ethnic people out there.”

Episode #484: In Myanmar, landmine contamination has often been attributed to relics of World War 2 or past conflicts. “But in Myanmar today, landmines are not a historical problem,” Nyein Nyein Thant Aung says. “[Landmines] are like a living system of control that continues to shape how people move, walk, and survive. They don't appear in dramatic footage, they don't require constant supervision, yet they often have a longer and deeper impact on a civilian life than more visible forms of violence.”Another misconception is that landmines are primarily defensive. Yet the strategic use by the Myanmar military is offensive, not only against military targets but civilians, she says, emptying villages, closing roads, blocking access to water and food, and making land unusable.The dynamic nature of the conflict, and pattern of opposing sides learning from the other's tactics, is also apparent in the evolution of the drone war. Nyein Nyein Thant Aung divides the military's drone use into different phases, beginning with their deployment in Kachin and Rakhine in 2016-2018 focusing on surveillance and reconnaissance. After Operation 1027 inflicted losses on its positions in 2023, the military began using dual-use drones as weapons platforms, copying tactical innovation demonstrated by resistance armed groups.These patterns of innovation and adoption are typical of present-day conflicts generally, Nyein Nyein Thant Aung says, with emerging tactics and technologies crossing borders. Foreign collaboration with the military in space and cyber affects both military domains and control of information spaces. Satellite technology provides imaging and coordinates in the military theater, giving a strategic advantage and guiding airstrikes, as well as control over communications channels.There are lessons from landmines that reflect on the wider, multidimensional conflict. “This is not an argument that landmines are culturally inevitable or accepted. Fear and resentment toward mines are widespread,” Nyein Nyein Thant Aung says. “The presence of landmines does not imply a strategic sophistication. So often it reflects insecurity rather than control… Being precise about these limits is important.”

Episode #483: “I particularly look from Marxist feminist perspectives,” says Ma Cheria, a Myanmar-born researcher now living in exile in Chiang Mai. Her work examines how capitalism and patriarchy combine to exploit Burmese migrant women in Thailand's informal economy. Before the 2021 military coup, she was a social worker involved in peace and gender programs and helped lead anti-coup strikes. After comrades were arrested, she fled to Thailand, continuing the struggle through research and activism. Cheria's studies reveal that over five million Myanmar migrants now live in Thailand, nearly two million without documents. Many work in “3D jobs”—dirty, dangerous, and demeaning—that Thai citizens refuse to do. Though formal factories must pay the minimum wage, most women end up in unregistered home-based factories where they can bring children and work flexible hours, but earn half the legal rate and lack safety or legal protection. “Workers know it is very unfair, but they cannot complain because they are undocumented,” she explains. Cheria traces these abuses to a malfunctioning migration system that forces workers to depend on brokers who extort money or seize passports. She links today's exile economy to Myanmar's crushed labor movement: once progressive and female-led, it was outlawed after the coup. In Thailand, migrants are legally allowed to join Thai-run unions but not to form their own—an empty right in border towns with no Thai workers. Her Marxist-feminist analysis highlights women's “double exploitation”: wage labor in factories and unpaid domestic labor at home. “In the revolution, we have to abolish both systems together,” she says of capitalism and patriarchy. From exile she teaches feminist and labor theory to ethnic women's groups online, believing that change grows through shared reflection. Despite repression and growing anti-migrant hostility, she documents quiet resilience in Burmese-run schools and clinics. Her message is clear: solidarity across borders is essential because “only a small group benefits, while the majority—the working class—remains unseen.

Episode #482: “My main mission, so to speak, is to clarify the differences between the many rumors about Myanmar... the myths going on both inside and outside the country, which are all very much related.” Hans-Bernd Zöllner, a Protestant minister turned scholar, has spent decades exploring how Buddhism, politics, and myth intertwine in Myanmar's history. From his first trip in the 1980s, he resisted Western portrayals that reduced Burma to a struggle between good and evil. “The media have their own image of Myanmar, which is still… like a confrontational view between good and evil.” He insists that such binaries ignore the cultural and religious frameworks that shape Burmese politics. At the heart of his analysis lies democracy. “The Burmese concept of democracy is a concept of qualitative democracy, the quality of the rulers comes first. And the Western concept is a concept of quantitative democracy, the number of votes comes first.” For a brief period, he notes, Suu Kyi's vision of righteous, elected rule coexisted with the military's karmic claim to legitimacy. That uneasy balance collapsed, culminating in the 2021 coup— another turn in Burma's recurring cycle of unity and rupture. Buddhism, Zöllner argues, is central to understanding this cycle. Where kings once ruled with monastic support, the generals after 1988 claimed legitimacy through karma and ritual. Monks like Sitagu Sayadaw reinforced this by endorsing military campaigns as protection of the faith. Suu Kyi, by contrast, drew from another Buddhist tradition— the ruler chosen for justice and order. These clashing concepts explain why she was venerated at home but misunderstood abroad, and in his mind, also explain why the 2021 coup was inevitable. Zöllner closes on a personal note: “Institutionalized religion is always a problem, and we have to try to find our own way to live by a personal religion that can guide daily life and encourage good deeds.”

Episode #481: Toby Mendel, a lawyer with the Centre for Law and Democracy, has spent over a decade working on freedom of expression and democratic reform in Myanmar. He recalls the Thein Sein years (2012–2015) as an exhilarating period when military-linked officials introduced new laws and appeared surprisingly open to external advice. International organizations were energized, and citizens sensed real hope. But with the NLD's 2015 election victory, momentum stalled. Mendel points to the 2015 broadcasting law, which could have created an independent broadcasting council, but was never implemented by the NLD. By the 2021 coup, Myanmar still had only twelve licensed radio stations, evidence of a media sector “absolutely not developed.” At the core, he argues, was the NLD's reluctance to practice democracy in full: they affirmed it in principle but resisted certain aspects, such as a free, critical press. Concerning the Rohingya genocide, he expresses disappointment that Aung San Suu Kyi, despite her “enormous moral authority... just went along with it”; in his view, not using “her moral and political authority is a significant failure as a leader.” Since the coup, however, he has seen attitudes shift as more Burmese experience the military's repression first-hand, prompting rethinking about the Rohingya and entrenched patriarchy. Despite NLD shortcomings, progress was still made in some areas. For example, CLD worked with a Women's Health Organization on the right to information, showing how openness could strengthen women's rights. Mendel also established the Myanmar Media Lawyers Network, helping build capacity for democratic media law. The coup was a rupture that few foresaw. Officials once moving toward democratic reforms were jailed overnight. Since then, CLD has pivoted to supporting civil society in conflict zones, developing adaptable democratic frameworks, and aiding local “statelets” experimenting with governance. Mendel stresses that replacing the military with something “less toxic” is not enough—Myanmar needs real democratic structures. While free elections are impossible today, local initiatives adopting media policies and civil society rules mark fragile but vital first steps. Looking outward, he warns of China's export of authoritarian models and the spread of disinformation, and urges Western governments, especially Canada, to prioritize democracy support. “The people of Myanmar are engaged in an epic struggle,” he concludes, one that demands far greater international backing.

Episode #480: Michael Santi Keezing, a former Thai Forest monk, describes himself as both a Buddhist and a “post-Buddhist,” shaped by a lifelong effort to understand the mind, culture, and the limits of spiritual practice for someone raised in an intensely individualistic Western society. He recalls that before he ever meditated, he felt a persistent longing to understand consciousness, a “free-floating yearning” that led him into Eastern spirituality through books like Be Here Now, Siddhartha, and the works of Carlos Castaneda. Discovering a nearby monastery in the Ajahn Chah lineage, he eventually ordained, believing he was pursuing clear insight through what he calls Buddhist phenomenology. Only later did he recognize that trauma and a desire for safety also influenced his decision, as the monastery offered structure, belonging, and a refuge from uncertainty. Inside monastic life he set aside the intellectual world that once defined him, devoting himself to meditation and the Vinaya. Meditation gave him emotional clarity, while the discipline cultivated humility and restraint. Yet he also saw rigidity within Western monastic communities—an absolutism around hierarchy and rules that sometimes obscured compassion. A turning point came when he lived among Indonesian and Thai monks in Queens, where identical rituals felt more human and flexible, revealing that Western monastics inadvertently reshaped the tradition through their WEIRD conditioning. That conditioning, he says, produces inward-focused individuals burdened by psychic wounds, often misreading Buddhism through a modern psychological lens. Returning to the act of reading late in his monastic years, he encountered books on neuroscience, which reframed experiences he once interpreted through Buddhist metaphysics. Realizing that no single framework held all answers, he eventually moved beyond monasticism. Michael now emphasizes a practical understanding of not-self, rejects political quietism, and argues that wisdom must express itself as action and responsibility. Reflecting on Burma's struggle, he affirms that “justice can be achieved for the Burmese people,” holding hope while remainingcommitted to engagement.

Episode #479: “Thailand is not about people, it's about diversity. People are a very important resource to build a country, no matter where you're from, or who you are, right?” Born in Thailand's Deep South near the Malay border, Koreeyor Manuchae embodies layered identities— Muslim, Malay, Thai— and has become one of the country's boldest advocates for migrant and refugee rights. Her path began almost by chance: a volunteer posting after law school brought her to Mae Sot, along the Thai-Myanmar border. There, she met people fleeing repression and poverty and saw that her legal education meant little unless it served those excluded from its protection. This realization became her life's compass. Starting with simple tasks like filing wage complaints, she uncovered deeper systems of exploitation. She saw that Myanmar migration was an act of survival— and that Thailand's prosperity depended on those it marginalized. “Without migrant workers, Mae Sot would be nothing,” she says. Yet while migrants sustain Thailand's industries, they're often vilified as criminals or disease carriers. She notes that this is a kind of hypocrisy, given how much migrants have contributed to the development of Thai society and prosperity. Manuchae's criticism of Thailand's migrant policies is fierce. Legal channels are so costly and slow that people fall into illegality by necessity. She argues for a system that is simple, affordable, and humane—one that values dignity over control. Her landmark “chicken farm” case, where enslaved workers won justice, proved that freedom isn't defined by unlocked doors. But she knows victories are fragile: courts still blur the line between forced labor and trafficking. Koreeyor Manuchae often speaks of the need to recognize humanity before nationality, believing that identity is defined not by documents but by the simple fact of existence. Or as she says, “We need to care about fundamental things like fundamental right for human rights as well.”

Episode #478: The second episode in a five-part series, these conversations were recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners came together for presentations, forums, roundtables, and cultural exhibitions centered on the theme “Dealing with Legacies in Burma.” Taking place amid ongoing political turmoil and humanitarian crisis, the gathering offered a rare space for open dialogue. Insight Myanmar was invited into this environment to record interviews with a wide range of attendees, produced in collaboration with NIU's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. We hope these episodes carry listeners into the atmosphere of the conference and into conversation with the people who continue to shape the field today.Thuta, a Burmese educator and poet, moved to the US to study Education Policy and Leadership at the University of Oregon. He talks of his love of literature, especially poetry, which he describes as an emotional companion that shifts with physical place and inner state, offering solace during joy, heartbreak, and national turmoil. Identifying himself as a “word player,” he blends languages to express identity, exemplified by his coined term “Oregon Padauk,” which later inspired an educational organization focused on trauma-informed practices. Thuta's time in Oregon shaped him deeply through its natural beauty, progressive spirit, and the generosity of its people—especially senior citizens engaged in social justice. He concludes with the belief that individuals can be the light for others during difficult times.Alicia Turner reflects on how Burma Studies has transformed during her twenty-five years in the field. She critiques the colonial assumptions behind the idea of scholarly “objectivity” and stresses the need for researchers—both foreign and Myanmar-born—to examine their own assumptions, positionality, and embedded privileges. Stressing a “decolonized” approach, she notes the newly prominent role of young Myanmar scholars whose perspectives offer essential correctives to earlier, outsider-dominated research. Turner also argues that research undertaken during the current conflict cannot be neutral, since even seemingly apolitical fieldwork carries political consequences. In discussing Buddhism and the Western mindfulness movement, she acknowledges both its personal benefits and its distortions of Burmese traditions.Kathryn, a student researching political violence, the resistance, and the country's democratic aspirations, notes that people are contributing in diverse ways to the fight based on their circumstances. However, she wishes major resistance leadership was more grounded, similar to past leaders who remained physically embedded in public life. She stresses the need to reject rigid “us versus them” thinking by recognizing the humanity of ordinary soldiers who joined the military for survival. As a Gen Z member, she says the current youth motivation is shaped by past experiences of relative freedom during the 2010s, which offered a glimpse of a more hopeful future. She warns that the proliferation of arms can create the illusion of immunity from long-term consequences and emphasizes the need for restraint to avoid repeating global patterns where victims become oppressors.

Episode #477: “I found Myanmar a really interesting case study,” says Gerard McCarthy, a political sociologist and author of Outsourcing the Polity. His work explores how deeply divided,impoverished societies emerge from conflict and build political settlements. Drawn to Myanmar during its 2010 transition, McCarthy focuses his research on provincial regions like northern Bago and Karen States—areas largely ignored in existing scholarship, which tends to center on Yangon and Mandalay. McCarthy examines how Myanmar's military regime, following the collapse of socialism, strategically withdrew from welfare provision and encouraged businesspeople and religious institutions to fill the gap. This “social outsourcing,” he argues, gave rise to a form of “moral citizenship” in which the public relies on voluntary charity, not state entitlements. Buddhist ideas such as parahita were reinterpreted to support this system, laying the groundwork for broad civil society engagement—including the response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008. Post-coup resistance, including support for PDFs and displaced communities, builds on these same networks. But McCarthy warns against romanticizing civil society: non-state welfare is often uneven, unregulated, and unsustainable, he cautions. He notes that as a legacy of this “moral citizenship” dynamic, both elites and the general public now undervalue state-based social protections. To move forward, he suggests, Myanmar must learn from as well as build on the transparency and trust embedded in charitable systems. “The state might try to mimic the aspects of the non-state sector which people have faith in,” he argues. For him, voluntary generosity is not a substitute for nationwide systems of justice or systematic redistribution.

Episode #476: Minnthonya, a deeply committed Burmese monk, recounts his remarkable journey from traditional monastic education to becoming a key figure in Myanmar's resistance movements. Initially drawn to the Buddhist path as a young boy, he studied under teachers who encouraged a deep engagement with both Buddhist scriptures and broader knowledge. It was this education that opened his eyes to the true political situation in his country, where the military regime had not only oppressed the people but also controlled religious institutions. As a teenager, Minnthonya's desire to change Myanmar grew, and he began organizing underground reading groups with fellow monks to discuss the country's dire political situation. Despite the regime's brutal repression, he and his peers covertly shared political writings and inspired others to question the status quo. His efforts culminated in his leadership role during the 2007 Saffron Revolution, where monks took to the streets, reciting the Metta Sutta, demanding freedom from military oppression. One of their key actions was the "Patta Nekku Sanna"—a symbolic boycott of the military's offerings, which united the monks in their defiance against the regime.Forced into exile after the regime's crackdown, Minnthonya continues his activism from Thailand, setting up libraries, education centers, and organizing resistance efforts among exiled Burmese communities. His commitment to the Dhamma has never wavered, as he believes that true Buddhist teachings must address the suffering of the people. For him, the fight for democracy and justice is inseparable from the spiritual path. He continues to advocate for both inner and outer peace, teaching that monks have a duty to stand up against oppression and that the path to freedom lies not only in meditation but also in courageous action against injustice.“We never believe in the military regime!” he exclaims. "For a very long time, [the military] has been destroying our Buddhism. They've killed many monks, sent countless others to jail, and destroyed monasteries—even now!”

Episode #475: “So many peoples in Myanmar who are fighting for democracy and human rights... they don't get any title or any recognize, but they did what they believed in.” Wut Hmone Win carries a legacy of resistance that began long before her. Her father, a student leader in the 1974 uprising involving U Thant's funeral, was imprisoned for his defiance of Ne Win's regime, and her family lived under surveillance. “The whole life of me and my family is [being] watched by the military,” she says. That experience taught her that freedom always has a cost. Educated in economics in Yangon and Norway, she had once hoped to live an ordinary life, free from politics. But when the 2021 coup struck Myanmar, the safety and democracy she enjoyed in Norway became unbearable reminders of what her people had lost. “I am living in Norway. I feel democracy and freedom and safety here, and human rights,” she says, with the understanding that all of this was lost completely back home. Within days she began organizing protests, helping to found the CRPH Support Group, Norway—a coalition of over twenty-one ethnic and religious organizations fighting for Myanmar's democracy from exile. As General Secretary, she oversees its humanitarian aid programs and international advocacy. “I do need money to support people who are suffering in Myanmar,” she says. “That's my simple strategy… we do need to support human rights… we do need [to be] shouting out loudly effectively.” Wut Hmone Win is critical of diaspora groups that remain confined to their own circles. “They are [remaining] in their own group, and that is a limited amount,” she says, emphasizing the need to reach Norwegians who “don't know about Myanmar.” Traveling beyond Oslo, she holds cultural events in towns like Lillehammer to “show our culture, dancing and then what happened in Myanmar.” For her, crossing those boundaries is how the revolution's voice can truly be heard. “We are standing here like a diaspora group in Norway,” she says. “We do need support, and we do need [recognition] too.”

Episode #474: Scott Aronson, a career humanitarian and conflict expert, describes his years in Myanmar between 2015 and the 2021 coup as “a really dynamic but also very challenging time to work in Myanmar.” He reflects on how his professional experience, field expertise, and moral convictions converged during a period of both democratic optimism and deepening crisis. Beginning his humanitarian career in the early 2000s, Aronson worked in Darfur and northern Uganda, where he learned the importance of coordination, adaptability, and respect for civilians in violent settings. Later, with USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, he managed disaster and conflict responses, including the 2015 Nepal earthquake. In 2016, he became USAID's senior conflict and governance advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, supporting Myanmar's transition from dictatorship to democracy. His work focused on strengthening civil society networks and promoting inclusion in a fragile peace process. The 2017 Rohingya crisis shifted his attention to Rakhine State, where he worked with both Rohingya and Rakhine partners to provide humanitarian aid and document abuses. He calls this a time of hope mixed with heartbreak, when Myanmar's potential for democratic unity collided with long-standing ethnic and religious divisions. When the 2021 coup struck, Aronson was in Yangon under COVID quarantine. He helped coordinate emergency communication and funding for local partners after banks and networks collapsed. He credits Burmese activists with sustaining resistance, describing how local groups organized safe houses, escape routes, and covert aid despite mortal danger. Aronson argues that supporting Myanmar's democracy serves both moral and strategic U.S. interests, rejects isolationist arguments, and acknowledges the personal toll of the crisis. He remainshopeful that unity among Myanmar's diverse movements will eventually rebuild the nation: “When that day comes, and it will come,” he says, “there's going to be so much growth and opportunity in the country.”

Episode #473: “The military was pursuing an illiberal strategy to peace, and Norway became complicit, not necessarily by design, but by its effect, it became a de facto sponsor of a strategy for illiberal peace building by the military.” Kristian Stokke draws on decades of research across Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Indonesia, where Norway's peace efforts often reinforced state dominance rather than confronting inequality. He argues that Myanmar followed the same trajectory. “Norway became the envoy of the West that went in to test the waters,” he recalls, acting as a diplomatic go-between for Western powers eager to engage Myanmar's generals. “When we came to Myanmar, it was very clear that Norway's engagement was interest-based. It was no longer pretending to be just altruistic.” Norway's involvement, he continues, was driven as much by self-interest as by moral aspiration: “as a diplomat, as an aid donor and as an investor.” He goes on to describe that as a result, the so-called democratic opening of the 2010s was not a genuine transition: “This was not the negotiated transition of South Africa or Latin American countries in the 1980s,” Stokke explains. “It was an authoritarian-led transition to less closed dictatorship or electoral autocracy.” He believes Norway's peacebuilding “actually undermined the forces for power sharing and democracy,” focusing too much on the state and too little on democratic and ethnic movements. Reflecting on the years since the coup, Stokke laments Norway's caution: “At times, I find it surprising or unfortunate that they don't come out in support of those actors who are really at the forefront of the struggle for better democracy in Myanmar.”

Episode #472: “Where is my grandmother's vote?!” asks Thiri. Her core argument is that Myanmar's struggle today is not a failed revolution, but the evolution of a long, cyclical people's movement, whose legitimacy most recently derives from a valid election overturned by the military, and from the accumulated sacrifice and sustained moral agency of ordinary people. For Thiri, the most powerful form of resistance now is preserving dignity, voice, and mutual care amid prolonged uncertainty. She grounds this argument in lived experience. Her grandmother, eighty-two at the time, insisted on voting in person in the November 2020 general election despite being eligible for early voting at home. On election day morning, she woke before dawn and went to the polling station to cast her ballot for the National League for Democracy; a week later, she died. She never witnessed the coup that overturned the election results, sparing her the pain of seeing what she regarded as a sacred civic duty rendered meaningless. For Thiri, the legitimacy crisis begins there: millions of votes, like her grandmother's, were cast in good faith but never honored. From this starting point, Thiri argues that any new election organized by the same military lacks moral and political legitimacy. She describes it as an attempt to erase their unresolved theft. Democracy, she insists, cannot be reset without reckoning with the original violation. The election matters deeply to the military and to some international actors seeking closure, but not to people living with airstrikes, displacement, and fear. To the junta, it functions as an exit strategy that just sustains their oppressive rule in the guise civilian governance. To put the despair surrounding these times in Myanmar in context, Thiri turns to movement theory. She describes movements as cyclical, marked by peaks of hope followed by repression and exhaustion. The downturn now, she emphasizes, is but a natural phase, and to not get overly caught up in it. Thiri believes the present moment calls for reflection, role clarity, and recognition of small victories that preserve people power. Survival itself becomes a form of resistance. She frames emotional self-preservation as defiance, concluding, “I would rather choose to remember the kindness and the community and the resilience of people that are against any form of oppression.”

Episode #471: Sebastian Copija's journey from being a Buddhist monk to embracing lay life is a story of deep introspection and balance. Monastic life had afforded him security and structure, but Sebastian felt detached from the broader world. So after ten years as a monk in Thailand and Myanmar, he disrobed, and returned to Europe to care for his parents.Lay life introduced him to new ways to apply his practice, including re-engaging in relationships. The challenges of navigating the strong and sometimes messy emotions that often accompany social and personal interactions has become an essential aspect of his practice, testing his ability to stay open-hearted amidst everyday struggles. He speaks of his present, romantic relationship as a spiritual partnership, focusing on mutual support and non-attachment.Sebastian emphasizes that the lay path is not a lesser one, requiring mindfulness and insight just as being a monastic does. He is now a lay Dhamma teacher in Poland, focusing on integrating mindfulness into daily life and creating supportive community environments where students openly share their challenges and growth. “When you disrobe, it's just gone! Ten years of your life is gone, and suddenly, the only thing you have is the clarity of the Dhamma you've developed. It's not the robes that define my practice but the application of Dhamma to every moment of life.”

Episode #470: This episode of Insight Myanmar continues our three-part series covering the Decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies Conference at Chiang Mai University, bringing together voices exploring how colonial legacies still shape knowledge, identity, and power in the region. Thai scholar-activist Thiti Jamkajornkeiat argues that true decolonization requires more than inclusion—it demands structural transformation. “The problem about Southeast Asian studies,” he explains, “is that it has a colonial baggage and is exterior—it's been developed outside of Southeast Asia.” He calls for scholarship that centers local thinkers as equal contributors and research that serves the needs and livelihoods of Southeast Asians. For Thiti, decolonization must confront global hierarchies of knowledge, funding systems, and academic validation that continue to privilege Western authority. His vision is both intellectual and emotional: a call for courage, tenderness, and solidarity in reclaiming the power to define one's own story. From Myanmar, Kyaw shares reflections rooted in his upbringing within the country's monastic education system. Growing up as a novice, he experienced how Buddhist and secular teachings intertwined, shaping his understanding of education as a moral as well as intellectual pursuit. Today, amid crisis and repression, he highlights the resilience of Myanmar's people. “Despite everything going in a negative way, the resilience of this community is huge,” he says. For Kyaw, endurance is an act of care—protecting the collective spirit and reimagining the nation's future together. Khaing expands on this, focusing on the importance of communication and advocacy in a time when truth itself is dangerous. Having long listened to Insight Myanmar, she describes it as a vital platform allowing citizens to speak and be heard despite censorship and internet blackouts. “Your podcast is more than useful,” she insists. “It's advocacy, and information awareness.”

Episode #469: “This is not simply about solving the conflict, but about understanding the conflict to begin with,” explains Bhanubhatra “Kaan” Jittiang, an assistant professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University and director of the Nelson Mandela Center for Conflict Resolution and Human Security. He argues that most external efforts to mediate or manage Myanmar's conflict fail because they begin from the false assumption that Myanmar functions as a centralized, coherent nation-state. In his view, this assumption collapses because Myanmar is structurally complex, rapidly changing, and shaped by fragmented authority, layered identities, and long-normalized violence. Any workable approach, he insists, must start from how power, legitimacy, and survival actually operate, rather than from abstract peace formulas or standardized political templates. Kaan describes that Myanmar is often perceived in Thailand as a centralized state similar to Thailand itself, with ethnic diversity acknowledged but poorly understood in political terms. Descriptions of Myanmar as “federal,” he argues, are filtered through a centralized Thai frame that mistakes rhetoric for lived governance. This frame breaks down in practice. During early fieldwork after the coup, he encountered a dense landscape of armed groups and organizations that defy simple categorization. That confusion becomes emblematic of Myanmar's reality: political and social organization operates through overlapping layers, and distinctions within ethnic groups matter deeply for authority and representation. Kaan argues that this complexity defines the conflict itself. Simplifying Myanmar leads outsiders to false solutions such as “bringing everyone to the table” without confronting who “everyone” actually is. He also emphasizes how quickly conditions change, warning that static narratives lead actors to misread shifts in control and governance. “In just two to three weeks, things change,” he notes. Anchoring his analysis regionally, he argues that Thailand experiences Myanmar's crisis as a direct security pressure, rather than as a pressing tragedy. Capital-focused engagement, he contends, misreads a fragmented reality shaped largely at the border. Turning to humanitarian and security policy, he insists that long-term displacement demands investment in dignity, livelihoods, and prevention, not emergency response alone. He concludes that durable engagement must center people rather than rigid state frameworks, stating, “People have to be at the heart, and it must always be at the heart.”

Episode #468: Friedgard Lottermoser, born in Berlin in 1942, first came to Burma in 1959 when her stepfather was sent there on contract. What began as an expatriate posting soon turned into a lifelong spiritual journey, as she became one of the very few Westerners to study closely with the renowned meditation master Sayagyi U Ba Khin at the International Meditation Center (IMC) in Rangoon. At IMC, Friedgard encountered a teaching environment unlike anything she had known. U Ba Khin emphasized the direct observation of saṅkhāras—mental forces—teaching that liberation lay not in theory but in carefully watching the mind and body in real time. Friedgard recalled how his presence alone could anchor those around him, and how he often combined meticulous discipline with compassion and mettā. Her own training was rigorous. She sat thirteen courses at IMC, more than most Burmese were ever allowed, and experienced periods of deep absorption that were both transformative and challenging. She once became ill but refused medicine, convinced that meditation itself would cure her—an ethos that many disciples shared, with sesame oil and turmeric serving as the only remedies at the center. She also witnessed U Ba Khin heal himself of a severe eye infection by meditating directly into the pain, as well as accounts of him easing snake bites and tuberculosis among students through focused awareness and compassion. Friedgard's life intertwined with other close disciples, such as Mother Sayama, whose delicate meditative states required careful support, and Ruth Denison, who once received “mental healing” from U Ba Khin across continents. Looking back, she emphasized that U Ba Khin never sought breadth but depth—he believed only those with strong spiritual potential would be drawn to him. Foreigners like Friedgard were the exceptions, allowed to stay longer and carry the Dhamma forward, especially after the military regime blocked U Ba Khin from traveling abroad.

Episode #467: “We still believe that engaging is more useful than not engaging,” says Kiat Sittheeamorn , former Thai Deputy Prime Minister and international trade negotiator. In this discussion, Kiat draws on decades of experience in engineering, business, and international diplomacy to reflect on the tough moral and practical choices facing Southeast Asia today. Kiat's approach to public service was shaped by hardship, self-reliance, and a code rooted in early struggle. From power plant engineer to director of the Board of Trade, to an “accidental” entry into politics at the height of Thailand's 1997 economic crisis, he moved quickly into three terms as Member of Parliament and one as Deputy Prime Minister. Carrying technical expertise into public life, Kiat saw integrity as the only defense against the temptations and the “confusion” of power. In Parliament, he explains how he fought corruption, intimidation and bribery, and helped force the repayment of billions in ill-gotten gains. Internationally, Kiat rejects “market fundamentalism,” insisting that global progress requires fairness alongside growth. For this reason, he prefers the term “free and fair trade” than “free trade” alone. Kiat views Southeast Asian economic integration as essential, but laments that Thailand's “bad politics”—corruption, disunity, and passive excuses—have held the country back. His perspective on Myanmar is equally blunt. Thailand has borne refugee burdens faithfully, he says, while Western partners fail to deliver on their promises. On the value of sanctions or “megaphone diplomacy,” Kiat argues that quiet engagement—pragmatic, persistent, and rooted in genuine empathy—offers a better path forward, even when dealing with deeply flawed elections and authoritarian regimes.

Episode #466: Jonathan Moss, a Free Burma Rangers (FBR) volunteer and former U.S. Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, speaks on the topic of landmines. He notes that the Burma Army routinely employs these devices around military camps, along roads and trails, and in villages. After the military takes a village, often accompanied by widespread looting and arson, it routinely seeds the ground with landmines near homes, places of worship and transit routes. Displaced villagers returning home face a stark choice: conduct ad hoc demining now or live with constant danger.“Mines are being laid, not only for defense, but to target civilians,” Moss says. “IDP routes, food paths, water access points – they're increasingly contaminated.” Mines have been found at church entrances and home doorways, deliberately targeting civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law.More than 1,600 mine and UXO casualties were recorded in Myanmar in 2024 – the worst in the world for the second year running. Beyond deaths and injuries, contamination creates fear and economic hardship for communities.“Demining, it's already happening with or without international support,” Moss says. “People just really can't wait. They're clearing paths to farms, water sources, medical clinics and schools out of necessity.”In partnership with communities, FBR is working to establish an Explosive Hazard Mitigation Center that would support existing efforts and upholding International Mine Action Standards as much as possible. In the midst of the uncertain conflict and a shortfall of international support at the local level, demining efforts face considerable challenges but also solutions that are in sight.

Episode #465: In a rich discussion on Buddhist manuscript cultures in Southeast Asia, Professor Volker Grabowsky and Dr. Silpsupa Jaengsawang explore how handwritten texts—especially those on palm leaf and mulberry paper—carry spiritual, cultural, and scholarly significance. They distinguish literature from manuscript study, which emphasizes the importance of materials, format and scribal context as much as the content.Manuscripts, they argue, are not just vessels of content, but cultural artifacts, and often used as sacred objects in monastic rituals. In Theravāda traditions, monks often preach from memory, andholding a manuscript mainly to symbolically evoke the connection to the Buddha's teachings. They explain how traditional manuscript forms can also be used to convey secular content—such as histories and political commentary—and sometimes serve as tools of cultural preservation, such as in the Tai community in China.The scholars highlight the many challenges of preservation due to the deleterious effects of a tropical climate and natural disasters, as well as the social barrier of restricted access to manuscripts for women. Another challenge to preservation is the declining knowledge of traditional scripts in the modern world.Digitization efforts like the Hamburg-based Digital Library aim to safeguard these texts, but both scholars insist on the need for public engagement. The pair concludes that manuscript traditions persist not as relics but as dynamic forms coexisting with print and digital media—integrating past, present, and future in a living continuum of cultural practice.

Episode #464: Dr. Tun Aung Shwe, a researcher, former public health practitioner, political activist, and National Unity Government representative to Australia discusses Myanmar's proliferating scam centers, calling them a symptom of a far deeper political and economic system rooted in decades of military rule. He explains that they began as small, family-run operations in northeastern Shan, operating initially on the borderlands, but have expanded rapidly, even into Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw. Scam centers operate under the protection of the military and its allied militias, continuing a long-standing pattern in which armed patronage and illicit economies sustain military power. The notorious Border Guard Forces are an example of this dynamic. Formed from splinter groups of ethnic armed organizations under military pressure, these forces control territory, protect scam compounds, and support the junta's political agenda, including its planned elections, in exchange for freedom to conduct illegal business. He describes this arrangement as consistent with earlier strategies used under General Ne Win half a century ago, linking counterinsurgency directly to criminal enterprise. Tun Aung Shwe dismisses the military's public crackdowns on scam centers as mere propaganda. While resistance groups preserve evidence and invite international observers when they close down a center, the military quickly destroys anything that can be traced back to it. He explains how, when Chinese authorities presented evidence implicating senior officers in scams targeting Chinese nationals, that pressure prompted limited internal action, but otherwise, the junta continues its institutional involvement in centers targeting other countries. He links the military's staged anti-scam actions to the junta's ongoing effort to regain international legitimacy. Contrast all this, he says, with the post-coup revolutionary movement, which has articulated shared principles for a federal democratic union without military involvement and now prioritizes security sector reform to build a professional federal force. “No one believes the Myanmar military today,” he concludes, “because the military lied again and again.”

Episode #463: “You know, I'm not a superwoman or anything, but at least I can do what I can do,” says Moe Thae Say with quiet conviction. Once a creative director and successful entrepreneur in Yangon's digital and design scene, she lived comfortably, surrounded by friends who continued their middle-class lives even after the coup. But when Myanmar's military seized power in 2021, Moe Thae Say could no longer accept normalcy under dictatorship. She used profits from her small business to support resistance groups—until she made a life-altering choice to join them. Leaving behind her career and family, she left the city and traveled to the border to train with the People's Defense Force (PDF). For two months she endured grueling combat drills under defected soldiers, confronting fear, exhaustion, and discrimination as one of only seven women among sixty trainees. “My heartbeat was louder than the gunfire,” she recalls. Though barred from the frontline, she contributed through medical training, management, and fundraising, finding strength in solidarity— and in the presence of her longtime partner, now fiancé, whom she married amid airstrikes as an act of defiance and hope. Haunted by the constant threat of bombings, she slept with her shoes on, ready to flee. Yet her determination deepened. “I enjoyed it,” she says. “I'm thinking that my life is meaningful over there.” Now recovering from heart problems, she awaits the call to return, unafraid of death: “Once I die, I won't remember anything— it just disappears.” Moe Thae Say remains critical of the revolution's leadership in the NUG, urging decision-makers to “come to the ground and listen.” She believes art can bridge divides and awaken empathy in a desensitized urban middle class. Her call is simple but profound: to listen—to one another, to the suffering, and to the shared humanity that must fuel Myanmar's struggle for freedom.

Episode #462: Dulyapak Preecharush, an associate professor of Southeast Asian studies and comparative political scientist specializing in Myanmar, argues that Myanmar's post-independence political trajectory is best understood as a deliberately managed hybrid political system rather than a failed democratic transition. Drawing on his long-term research, he explains that this system combines limited political opening with entrenched military dominance, allowing reform and conflict management to proceed indefinitely while structurally blocking the emergence of genuine federal democracy. In his view, only a decisive rupture in military political power, rather than continued reform within the system, could produce a fundamentally new political order. He situates Myanmar alongside other hybrid regimes, such as Singapore and Cambodia, where elections and civilian institutions exist but core authority remains tightly controlled. Myanmar's 2008 Constitution exemplifies this model by permitting parties and elections while guaranteeing the military veto power and reserved parliamentary seats. The concept of “disciplined democracy,” articulated by military leaders, captures this logic of participation without vulnerability. The relocation of the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw in 2006 serves as a concrete illustration of this hybrid logic. Dulyapak explains the move as combining strategic, developmental, and symbolic aims. Shifting the capital inland reduced exposure to foreign intervention and mass uprisings, strengthened command-and-control capacity, and improved logistical reach across the Burman heartland. At the same time, the military sought to inscribe itself into a longer historical narrative by emulating precolonial monarchs through ritual practices, including pagoda construction and the ceremonial raising of white elephants as markers of legitimate rule. Naypyidaw's deliberately zoned layout—separating civilian population, administration, and military command—physically embodies a system designed to allow limited political opening without threatening military control. Turning to federalism in Myanmar, Dulyapak traces its origins to the 1947 Panglong negotiations and its suppression after the 1962 military takeover, which centralized power and eliminatedpolitical debate. Federal ideas re-emerged after 2011 under a hybrid system, but their fragility was exposed by the 2021 coup. Today, he argues, Myanmar contains multiple governing forms simultaneously: centralized unitarian control in the heartland, near-autonomous rule in some frontier areas, and continued pursuit of democratic federalism elsewhere. This fragmentation, reinforced by regional geopolitics and constrained international engagement, sustains stalemate rather than resolution. Myanmar, he concludes, remains a revealing case for understanding why partial reform under hybrid rule fails to resolve foundational political conflict.

Episode #461: “I think this time, there is even more hope for a fundamental shift and change in [Myanmar],” says Gus Miclat, co-founder of Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID). He contrasts today's Myanmar resistance with earlier elite-led struggles, seeing in it the potential for “a more systemic change.”Miclat traces his activism to high school protests in the Philippines, sharpened during Ferdinand Marcos Sr.'s dictatorship. He became a journalist, educator, and organizer, later co-founding IID in 1988 to build “South-South solidarity” linking democracy and liberation movements across Asia. Early work focused on East Timor, where IID organized the landmark 1994 Asia-Pacific Conference, defying government pressure and catalyzing a coalition that contributed to Timor's eventual independence.In 2000, IID turned to peacebuilding in Mindanao, helping to bring civil society into negotiations that led to the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region. That experience informs IID's renewed engagement in Myanmar since the 2021 coup, which Miclat views as uniquely promising because of grassroots leadership, ethnic unity, and what he calls a new “culture of care” among activists.Miclat highlights initiatives such as exchanges between Rohingya women leaders and displaced women in Marawi, which bridge local struggles with regional advocacy. He also stresses the need to adapt activism to authoritarianism's resurgence, harnessing social media without losing sight of real-world organizing. His focus is always, first and foremost, centered in the importance of people being mobilized and acting, and not on institutions, governments or media attention.“Even the smallest act,” he says, “is part of a larger effort. A little wound in your pinky is felt by your entire body… Healing one scar helps heal the whole.”

Episode #460: “This is not only my interest—it is also my duty,” says Khay, a research fellow in Berlin, describing his work to better understand Myanmar's crises. Raised in Karen State during an era of conflict, Khay became inspired by a sense of ethnic pride and a responsibility as a university student, causing him to shift his interest from engineering to political research, a path that eventually brought him to Germany. After the 2021 coup, he returned temporarily to Karen State to document displacement, refugee flows, and the rise of grassroots governance in resistance-held areas. This firsthand experience deepened his understanding of how ethnic organizations adapt to state collapse. His research focuses on the Karen National Union (KNU), which has moved from peace negotiations to a strategy combining armed resistance, diplomacy, alliances, and training for local administrators to advance “bottom-up federalism.” He also notes a generational divide, with younger Karen and diaspora activists demanding greater autonomy, and describes how the coup has reduced religious divisions, while fostering unity against the military. In the end, Khay stresses that the only road to real, stable, democratic future in Myanmar is through genuinely addressing the country's long-standing ethnic grievances. Yet despite the immense challenges facing the country, Khay remains hopeful. He cites not only a new interethnic solidarity, but also a significant change in majority Bamar attitudes towards ethnic communities. He also has a great deal of faith in the country's youth, who have shown their dedication to overcoming the military, and creating a free and united nation.

Episode #459: This is the third episode in a three-part series that emerged from a three-day Digital Storytelling Workshop hosted by Insight Myanmar Podcast, with support from ANU and IDRC. What began as a room of strangers slowly became a community through the simple act of sharing stories. We were reminded that communication is not just the exchange of information, but the creation of a shared emotional world, built through attention and care. “Tell me more” became our refrain, and this episode is an invitation to step into that circle. On this episode, you'll hear the result of those few transformative days: honest voices, emerging perspectives, and storytellers beginning to find their footing. First up is Chit Tun, a teacher and marketing manager before the coup, who now lives as a refugee in Thailand with his family. The 2021 coup transformed his life. With his wife pregnant, he refused to let his child grow up under dictatorship. He supported her CDM participation, and became a protest leader before joining the armed resistance. However, he became disillusioned with some resistance groups, and eventually fled to Thailand. To make ends meet, he aids fellow refugees, teaches Burmese, and produces a podcast amplifying revolutionary voices. Zue, a Burmese language teacher and artist, roots her work in the beauty of her rural childhood, where weaving looms, bullock carts, and open fields shaped her creative and educational passions. After years of volunteer teaching and curriculum work, she founded the online Akkhaya Burmese Language Institute during COVID-19. Her YouTube and podcast projects also advance cultural preservation and pride. She was Myanmar's sole recipient of the selective Global Ambassador Fellow granted by the International Council on Human Rights, Peace and Politics (ICHRPP). Zue hopes to continue her teaching and art work to better serve communities. August describes a shift from engineering to the study of religion and philosophy after becoming disillusioned with Myanmar's education system. His academic path grows out of his work as a gender and LGBTQ rights trainer, where he has seen religion repeatedly misused to justify discrimination. He argues that Buddhist teachings emphasize compassion, morality, and nonviolence, not stereotyping or exclusion, and he wants to ground this claim in textual and scholarly evidence. Drawing on experiences with LGBTQ individuals from religious communities, he highlights the heavy social pressure they face. August hopes education can challenge conservative mindsets and support social change.

Episode #458: Lilianne Fan is a long-time Myanmar analyst and advocate who served as an adviser to the ASEAN Special Envoy on Myanmar and as part of Malaysia's advisory group during its ASEAN chairmanship. Drawing on that insider role, she argues that ASEAN's response to the 2021 coup must be judged by how ASEAN actually functions, not by expectations of decisive moral intervention.Fan explains that ASEAN's Five-Point Consensus was never meant to resolve Myanmar's crisis. Its real purpose was to create a diplomatic framework that allowed ASEAN to remain engaged while denying the junta regional legitimacy. Most significantly, it institutionalized the exclusion of Min Aung Hlaing from high-level ASEAN meetings, preventing the military from claiming regional endorsement.She acknowledges ASEAN's early failures, particularly its initial reliance on shuttle diplomacy with the junta and its slow recognition of Myanmar's mass civilian resistance. Over time, however, ASEAN adapted. Under Indonesia and especially Malaysia, engagement broadened to include resistance actors, ethnic organizations, and civil society.Fan highlights Malaysia's chairmanship as a turning point. Kuala Lumpur invested heavily in preparation and conflict analysis, convening confidential, structured Track One meetings with resistance stakeholders, complemented by Track 1.5 dialogues with experts and civil society. These processes treated resistance groups as serious political actors without granting formal recognition.She also points to a major humanitarian shift: ASEAN's formal acknowledgment that aid cannot rely solely on the AHA Centre and must include cross-border assistance and local delivery networks. Fan concludes that while ASEAN cannot force outcomes or reform the military, it plays a critical role in maintaining political red lines, preventing premature legitimization of the junta, and slowly reshaping ASEAN's own approach to conflict and legitimacy.

Episode #457: Brang Min, a Kachin State civil society organizer and student activist with the Kachin State Civil Movement; Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a leading organizer and deputy director of the Anti-Sham Election Campaign Committee representing the General Strike movement; and Aung Moe Zaw, a veteran democracy activist associated with the Democratic Party for a New Society, discuss the upcoming elections. Despite their differing backgrounds, all three agree that the 2025 election is designed to entrench military power under a civilian façade. Brang Min grounds his analysis in conditions in Kachin State, where airstrikes, artillery attacks, displacement, and internet shutdowns dominate daily life. Under such circumstances, he argues,elections are irrelevant. Having voted in 2020 with hopes for political change, he views the current election as fraudulent, and intended to manufacture legitimacy rather than reflect popular will. He acknowledges that some ethnic minority parties may participate in hopes of gaining limited influence, but maintains that this dynamic is shaped by coercion. With fighting ongoing, ordinary Kachin civilians who participate do so under pressure, while military-aligned actors engage willingly. Thinzar Shunlei Yi explains that the military revealed its intentions immediately after the 2021 coup by dismantling the Union Election Commission and rebuilding it under junta control. She argues that elections have always been treated as a tactical reset, not a democratic process. She emphasizes widespread disenfranchisement, noting that of Myanmar's 330 townships, the junta's phased election plan initially included only 193; elections are already cancelled 56 of those, and others remain uncertain as fighting continues. She also describes intensified repression, including arrests under “election protection” laws and escalating violence to secure territory ahead of polling. Aung Moe Zaw places the election in historical context, describing decades of manipulated votes, overturned results, and tightly controlled political participation. He argues that opaque electoral laws and proportional representation systems are designed to guarantee military victory and obscure accountability. All three conclude that the election will not weaken resistance. They warn against international acceptance of the electoral façade and stress that Myanmar's democratic future depends on sustained internal struggle, accountability for war crimes, and rejection of military-imposed political frameworks.

Episode #456: “We will not leave them behind,” says Simon Billenness, director of the Campaign for a New Myanmar and a Burma policy advocate with more than three decades of experience lobbying the United States Congress on sanctions policy, congressional appropriations, and accountability for Myanmar's military. In his second appearance on the podcast, Billenness focuses on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Burmese nationals, which he views as both a humanitarian crisis and a sharp rupture in longstanding U.S. policy. Billenness explains that TPS had allowed nearly 4,000 Burmese nationals to remain legally in the United States because conditions at home made safe return impossible. With DHS giving recipients just sixty days before protections expire, he describes the consequences as stark. Many TPS holders, he notes, have been told by immigration attorneys that no realistic legal pathways remain for them to stay, leaving forced return to a conflict as a terrifying prospect. He emphasizes that those affected are not abstractions or mere statistics. Many arrived as students or professionals before or shortly after the 2021 coup and remained because returning home would expose them to grave danger. Some support the Civil Disobedience Movement from abroad; others belong to ethnic or religious minorities targeted by the military. Young men face forced conscription, while all confront a country still engulfed in instability, indiscriminate military violence, and overall repression. From Billenness's perspective, ending TPS misrepresents both American interests and values. He argues that TPS recipients are among the United States' strongest allies within Myanmar society and that their presence strengthens American communities. DHS's justification—citing ceasefires, elections, and stability—he dismisses as false and misleading and moreover, contradicting the State Department's analysis. The elections, he says, are sham exercises under military rule, while airstrikes on civilian populations continue despite so-called ceasefires. While legal challenges and congressional efforts to restore TPS move forward, Billenness stresses that sustained constituent advocacy remains the most effective tool. Even amid an unpredictable moment for U.S. foreign policy, he insists on endurance and resolve, concluding, “We will fight back. We will not abandon the Burmese people.”

Episode #455: Mon Zin, a Myanmar-born pro-democracy activist based in Sydney, is a founding member of the Global Myanmar Spring Revolution, a network that coordinates Burmese diaspora communities around the globe. GMSR's advocacy targets sanctions, diplomatic recognition, and the financial lifelines of the junta, particularly revenues from oil and gas. In this conversation, Mon Zin analyzes the upcoming military-led elections, which she emphasizes are fraudulent and dangerous. She argues that the junta's phased election is not intended to reflect popular will but to test whether the appearance of an election can secure international acceptance. She contends Min Aung Hlaing seeks to rebrand himself from war criminal to electedhead of state, thereby legitimizing continued violence. She believes this will only spur increased, armed resistance, intensifying the country's downward spiral. Mon Zin cites reporting by the Asian Network for Free Elections that argues the system is structurally rigged in favor of the military-aligned USDP. Rather than relying on crude ballot-stuffing, she says the military's election mechanisms are cleverly designed to seem legitimate: an apparently contested election at the local level that also feeds into proportional representation. However, with opposition parties banned, criminalized, or tightly constrained—along with rampant fear, surveillance, electronic voting machines without independent audits, and manipulated diaspora voting—local election outcomes are all but predetermined. Moreover, while proportional representation is normally used to give parties with smaller vote shares locally some level of representation at the regional and/or national level, the military has distorted the design to amplify the majority votes of the (predetermined, military-backed) local winners, thus giving the junta a complete stranglehold on local, regional and national governance in the guise of fair elections. The results will then be certified as legitimate by junta-aligned and other authoritarian nations, such as Russia and China. She warns the election will intensify violence, deepen sanctions, and worsen economic hardship, while enriching military affiliates. Still, she urges diaspora communities to refuse legitimacy, support resistance efforts, speak openly, and hold emerging political movements accountable, insisting that long-term freedom depends on building a genuinely democratic system.

Episode #454: In our third episode with U Jāgara, a Canadian monk, he reflects on his journey through decades of meditation practice and teaching, focusing on the adaptation of Burmese meditation traditions to contemporary contexts. Following earlier discussions that explored his formative years and monastic journey, this conversation delves into the figures, methodologies, and insights that have shaped his path. U Jāgara's experiences with prominent teachers like Pa-Auk Sayadaw highlight the intricacies of meditation practices. Pa-Auk's teachings, rooted in the Visuddhimagga, emphasize samathā (concentration) as a precursor to vipassana (insight), offering practitioners a detailed analysis of experiential reality through the four elements. However, the demanding nature of these practices has often limited progress to a small percentage of practitioners. U Jāgara observes the initial mixed reception of Pa-Auk's application of samathā, noting both its transformative potential and its challenges within the broader context of Burmese meditation history. As Pa-Auk's methods gained international recognition, U Jāgara worked to adapt these teachings for Western audiences. Tailored guidance became central to U Jāgara's teaching methodology as he addressed the frustrations of students struggling with its rigor, demonstrating how adjustments could unlock their transformative potential. But his flexibility provoked tensions in some practitioners from different traditions, including Goenka's students who expressed concerns about any changes to established techniques. He also touches upon the delicate balance between preserving tradition and fostering accessibility. Ultimately, U Jāgara has chosen to take an independent path, and advocates for adaptable practices that remain faithful to the Dhamma's core principles. "Truth is universal,” he says. “Truth also is beyond any kind of cultural values. Having understood [the Dhamma] in the ways that a culture has maintained it, it enables you to shape it into another culture or in a frame that is going to be slightly different than the original one, but still with the same roots, with the same kind of material content, but not necessarily with the same language and expressions and social kind of conventions."

Episode #453: Patrick Phongsathorn is a human rights advocate and Fortify Rights advocacy specialist working on Myanmar. Raised near London by a Thai–Irish–South African family, he pairs legal rigor with practical savvy about how ministries, courts, and donors move. After abandoning an early push toward medicine, Patrick rerouted into politics and human rights, studying at SOAS and Sciences Po's Human Rights and Humanitarian Action program. He learned by doing: Human Rights Watch work on detention and refugee children; IOM in TimorLeste's smallstate bureaucracy; UNHCR in Lebanon at the height of the Syria crisis. After settlingin Thailand, he joined Fortify Rights in 2019, built monitoring systems, and now leads advocacy while training partners to craft evidencedriven strategies. Patrick's approach is simple and demanding: investigate carefully, argue from law, and listen first. As he puts it, “the most important people that I've spoken to about Myanmar are Myanmar people.” In Myanmar he sees a twotrack mission— minimize harm now and make justice possible later— because “if you don't reconcile the injustices that people face, then they will come back.” Fortify Rights has documented a pattern of indiscriminate airstrikes on civilians and protected sites—churches, IDP camps, hospitals, schools—often rising when the junta loses ground. Patrickcalls for an arms embargo and restrictions on aviation fuel alongside individual command accountability. The red lines are nonnegotiable: “It's never right to bomb a hospital, it's never right to bomb a school, it's never right to kill civilians in times of war.” Accountability, he insists, binds all parties, including the NUG, PDFs, and ethnic forces. He is also skeptical of sham elections and “safe zones,” urging instead a real Thai asylum system and sustained international pressure through the UN and universaljurisdiction cases. He also reflects on ‘the day after' the military's anticipated defeat, noting that they must avoid victors' justice while building institutions that can fairly try atrocity crimes. And as the global order frays, he reminds that Myanmar is a test of whether law can still restrain power, reminding listeners that “even if you're not interested in international politics, international politics will be interested in you.”

Episode #452: “We still had a lot of ideals… but we had some illusions, so to speak.” François Nosten has spent decades on the Thai-Myanmar border, where war, disease, and displacement overlap endlessly. He arrived in the 1980s, a young doctor from Toulouse with Médecins Sans Frontières, drawn by a sense of purpose. What he found was devastation: malaria sweeping through camps, killing faster than bullets. “There were more of the student dying of malaria than from the fighting,” he recalls of the post 1988 movement. Nosten met British scientist Nicholas White, and their work helped pioneer artemisinin-based treatments, which transformed malaria care worldwide. “If you test and treat systematically, early, quickly, then the people don't die anymore,” he explains. For a moment, it seemed victory was possible: “One year later, malaria was gone from the Thai side.” But the disease returned, mutating and persisting through poverty and conflict. When Myanmar's 2021 coup collapsed its health system, millions were displaced. Aid stopped, clinics closed, and outbreaks flared again. “Tuberculosis is still very serious worldwide… more than HIV,” he warns. “If funding is being cut… I think that tuberculosis will explode again.” Nearby, scam compounds now imprison thousands in unsanitary, lawless towns. “They are like towns,” he says, almost as big as Mae Sot itself.” Nosten still reflects on the conviction and purpose that drove his early ambition as a young doctor. “I did my medical school to be able to travel and to do something that I think was useful,” he says. Now, decades later, he continues that same work, even as the border he serves teeters once again on the edge of collapse. “If you have a stable country… you can control malaria,” Nosten says. “But here, everything conspires against stability.”

Episode #451: Marte Nilsen, senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, joins the podcast to explore Aung San Suu Kyi's central role in Myanmar's political life. Drawing on decades of research across Myanmar and Thailand, she also reflects on Norway's complex engagement with Myanmar—from early solidarity movements and reform-era optimism to today's challenges of diplomacy, reversals, and rebuilding. Norway's involvement began in the wake of the 1988 uprising and Suu Kyi's 1991 Nobel Prize, when exiles and NGOs forged ties across the Thai border. The devastating Cyclone Nargis in 2008 highlighted the capacity of local civil society, prompting Oslo to expand support in that direction. Then when President Thein Sein launched reforms in 2011 and Suu Kyi contested the 2012 by-elections, Norway began engaging state institutions more directly again. Suu Kyi's NLD triumphed in 2015 and 2020, though ethnic groups criticized her Bamar-centric focus, and her stance the Rohingya crisis posed a very serious dilemma for Western nations otherwise wanting to support the country's democratization process. The 2021 coup, of course, ended the reform era. Nilsen stresses that Myanmar's current junta bears no resemblance to the military of 2010, back when foreign nations were willing to deal with the junta. Today, it is widely seen as a desperate, illegitimate regime that is waging war on its people. She rejects any notion that the 2025 elections could be free or fair. In the end, Nilsen insists that while outside solidarity and support matter, “the changes on the ground, it comes from the Burmese people.”

Episode #450: Over three days, Insight Myanmar led a Digital Storytelling Workshop with academics and activists, where we explored how presence, curiosity, and the simple invitation “tell me more” can open real dialogue in a polarized Myanmar. What they created was tender, courageous, and deeply human — conversations that welcome not only each other, but also the unseen listener they hope to reach. This is the second of three episodes in this series. Sarah, a former international relations student, describes how the coup abruptly ended her studies and forced her from academic ambition into survival mode. Realizing she might never return to university, she fled Myanmar for Thailand, where initial safety gave way to fear once she became undocumented. Repeated police harassment and bribery threats left her anxious and isolated, struggling with unstable finances and the emotional strain of living alone. She relies on counseling to cope, yet continues supporting Myanmar's revolution however she can. Despite everything, she hopes to someday return home, resume her studies, and urges exiles to show kindness to one another. Alex, an academic advisor with the online Parami University, traces her path into humanitarian and transcultural education through formative experiences in multicultural and miultilingualsettings. Working with children in India and later in a refugee camp in Athens showed her how education can create trust and stability, even in crisis. She now advises Burmese students in Chiang Mai, many of whom face displacement and legal insecurity, and has also visited Kenya's Kakuma camp. Her long-term commitment is centered in her students: their determination, cultural pride, and efforts to build community. Elsa, a student from Yangon now living in Thailand after fleeing the coup, reflects on the foods she grew up loving—especially sweet and spicy Burmese dishes and the many regional versions of mohinga she cannot easily find in Thailand. She notes the overlap between Thai and Burmese flavors and imagines creative blends using coconut cream. Her long-held dream is to open a Burmese tea shop that recreates Myanmar's communal, welcoming atmosphere with simple wooden furniture, shared spaces, and small acts of hospitality. Although she anticipates challenges with Thai regulations and staffing, she remains committed to building a place that shares culture and kindness through food.

Episode #449: The first episode in a five-part series, these discussions were recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners gathered for presentations, forums, roundtables, and cultural exhibitions exploring the theme “Dealing with Legacies in Burma.” Amid political turmoil and humanitarian crisis, this represented a rare space for open dialogue, and one in which Insight Myanmar was invited to record interviews with diverse attendees, produced in collaboration with NIU's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. We hope that these episodes bring listeners into the atmosphere of the conference and into conversation with those shaping the field today. The first guest, Ko A, is an academic from Rakhine State pursuing a PhD in the United States, and he reflects on Myanmar's political trajectory and the forces shaping its conflicts. Ko A turned to political science following the 2021 coup, realizing that Myanmar's crises are structural, rooted in institutions, militarized power, and historical patterns. He argues that early twentieth-century Burman ethnonationalism distorted the country's political development, and the military's alliance with Japan in World War II embedded in authoritarian tendencies. He explains that political institutions tend to retain their initial character and reinforce themselves over time. Despite the complexity and conflict, he remains optimistic, trusting that an informed younger generation and honest engagement with historical truths can guide Myanmar toward a better future. Next, Chit Wit Yi Oo discusses her work studying water and air quality, in order to understand how environmental change is affecting public health. She launched a study on groundwater that spanned Yangon to Mandalay and the southern coast, and learned that deep wells in downtown Yangon remain relatively safe, but nearby shallow wells show severe saltwater intrusion, forcing residents to rely on rainwater for drinking while using contaminated sources for daily chores. In Mandalay, meanwhile, heavy-metal contamination from textile-dye factories has polluted wells, but families continue using this water because purified alternatives are unaffordable, with doctors reporting widespread kidney disease consistent with the findings. She also warns that many of Myanmar's rivers, once safe to drink, are now polluted by mining, though rural families still depend on them out of necessity. Additionally, her research documents dramatic declines in Yangon's air quality, with PM2.5 levels far above WHO guidelines since 2016 due to rapid urbanization, post-Cyclone Nargis loss of green space, traffic, dry-season burning, and pesticide-laden crop fires. Despite systemic obstacles she faced in her own education, such as not being from an elite or military family, she sees hope in the growing Burmese diaspora of researchers and experts. She ends with a plea: “We need your support. And then please help our people, and then please listen our voices and our people.” Finally we hear from Lugyi No, a PhD student who describes how displacement, violence, and the collapse of schooling shape children's lives in today's Myanmar. “It is what it is,” he sharessadly. “You have to learn how you're going to survive out of those adverse situations.” Lugyi No sees many children exhibiting deep trauma— trembling and even fainting at loud sounds— yet also remarkable resilience, supported by...

Episode #448: In the second of our three-part series with Steve Smith, a teacher in the Mahasi tradition, he continues reflecting on his half-century exploration into the country's spirituality, culture, and politics, while also sharing what he learned from prolonged and intimate contact with some of the greatest meditation teachers and civil leaders of the day. Steve went to Seikhun, Mahasi Sayadaw's village, and started his practice there. He practiced with local villagers, as well as senior government ministers, future democratic leaders, business magnates, and others with elite social standing. Between meditation sessions, Steve remembers long conversations that meandered between politics and practice. His fascinating, first-handaccount of the role that meditation practice played in the upper echelons of the democracy movement is one that perhaps has never been examined thoroughly by any past scholar or historian. When Steve traveled or return back home to Hawaii, he often found himself disappointed that Buddhist and mindfulness communities elsewhere weren't able—or even interested in trying—to integrate meditation with social engagement. He was convinced that in Myanmar, the Dhamma was a seamless aspect of people's everyday lives, that “the same generative and ancient teachings of the Buddha [were being] applied in their deepest personal, psychological, emotional, spiritual lives, as well as how it influenced their social, and government and business lives as well...” He learned much from his monastic teachers about how to respond effectively to tyranny, in particular, Sayadaw U Pandita. This great teacher never engaged in acts of overt defiance or explicit advocacy, yet unmistakably signaled his displeasure in subtle ways. To Steve, this was the Burmese Saṅgha in its very best form: a calm nobility in standing up for righteousness, creating a ripple effect that impacted all of lay society. Steve feels tremendous gratitude for the instructions he received so generously as a lay meditator and monk in Burma, the result of painstakingly care in assuring the transmission of the teachings from one generation to the next… and ultimately to foreign seekers. In return, he has given back in different ways over the years, from supporting health and education projects throughout the Sagaing Hills, to fundraising for nuns, to organizing annual acupuncture treatment for villagers. He also lent a hand when his Burmese friends found themselves in the crosshairs of the regime.

Episode #447: Maw Shein Win, a Burmese-American poet, teacher, and literary organizer based in the Bay Area, reflects on her creative path, heritage, and commitment to poetry as witness and connection. Maw Shein Win turned to poetry while in college. She also immersed herself in the punk and experimental music scene of 1980s Los Angeles. This affected the arc of her career, as collaboration across disciplines— music, performance, and visual art— became central to her practice, and is a hallmark of her work. Her published collections include Invisible Gifts (2018), Storage Unit for the Spirit House (2020), as well as smaller works like Tales of a Lonely Meat Eater and Scorned Bone. Storage Unit for the Spirit House emerged from time spent in storage spaces during a personal transition, merging that imagery with Burmese “spirit houses.” She says a major theme in her work is “containers”— whether memory, the body, or physical spaces— along with impermanence, healing, and family. Deeply connected to Myanmar, she collaborates with Burmese writers to raise awareness and funds, emphasizing poetry's role as witness. She stresses the importance of keeping the country's struggles visible, given the decline in international media coverage. “Even if a reader has never been to Myanmar or knows nothing about it, a poem can be an entry point into understanding,”she explains. To emerging poets, she advises “find your communities,” since no single circle can sustain a writer. For Maw Shein Win, poetry bridges cultures and art forms, opening doors for connection, empathy, and new ways of seeing.

Episode #446: This episode marks the beginning of a three-part series created during a three-day Digital Storytelling Workshop hosted by the Insight Myanmar Podcast, with support from ANU and IDRC. Over those days, emerging storytellers came together to practice something both ancient and profoundly human: telling stories. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the workshop served as a reminder that genuine connection — the kind built through care, honesty, and the courage to speak and listen — can never be automated. Guided by Caleb Gattegno'sinsight that “speaking is easy, communication is a miracle,” and grounded in the simple phrase we kept returning to, “tell me more,” this episode invites you to pull up a metaphorical third chair. You'll hear participants discovering their voices in real time, offering stories that create presence, intimacy, and shared understanding through one of humanity's oldest rituals: someone speaking, and someone listening. The first discussion features Mora, a social worker from central Myanmar, who contrasts a peaceful childhood with the subtle discrimination he faced because of his family's pro-democracy leanings. Disillusioned with the university system, he studied at the British Council in Mandalay, inspiring a return to his rural hometown to expand educational access there. After training at a monastic college, he introduced child-centered teaching, built a library, created safe play spaces, and partnered with INGOs on community projects. After the coup, he remained in in the country despite threats to his family to continues humanitarian work for displaced children, believing that helping even one life remains meaningful. Nan Gyi Thoke, a Chinese visual anthropology researcher and filmmaker in Thailand, reflects on her background, her creative path and her research into migrant Myanmar filmmakers working along the Thai–Myanmar border. Her own difficulties abroad—language, culture, legal barriers and limited resources—inspired her to study how Myanmar artists persist and support one anotheramid challenging conditions and restraints. She also co-runs a volunteer Chinese-language platform that shares everyday stories from Southeast Asia to counter stereotypes. Her upbringing in a borderland minority community shapes her commitment to cultural preservation, documentary work and building meaningful connections between Chinese and Burmese communities. Eugene is a young Shan journalist from Taunggyi who creates safety content for Shan communities and translates Burmese news for international readers. Reporting and translation have shown him how conflict, displacement, exploitation, and landmine contamination affect civilians across Shan State, which led him to develop public-education materials on landmines mines and explosive ordnance for Shan communities. He hopes to expand into original reporting, long-form and visual storytelling, and mentoring younger Shan creators. Jeremy describes traveling widely across Myanmar and later throughout Asia. He stresses preparing for weather, food, and transportation before traveling. His work in digital policy gives him opportunities to attend conferences abroad. Japan is his favorite country for its food, culture, politeness, and cool weather. Regarding study opportunities, he encourages young Burmese to pursue scholarships, and to build skills through reading, volunteering, and gaining experience.

Episode #445: Born in Yangon in 1984 and raised in the small town of Ye, Shakeel grew up as a Muslim in a deeply divided Myanmar. His childhood was shaped by the tension between his artistic passions and the restrictions of a conservative religious environment. When he began to draw, his relatives told him it was forbidden by faith. School brought little relief—there, Buddhist classmates bullied him with the slur “kalar,” while only a few offered friendship. Books and music became his refuge from isolation. In 2004, Shakeel began his career as a translator and editor at a sports journal. Despite his talent, he faced persistent discrimination from Buddhist colleagues who asked insulting questions about his faith. Feeling alienated, he resigned after a year. Later, at The Voice newspaper, prejudice again forced him out. “I decided I will never apply for a permanent job at a Burmese organization,” he recalls. Instead, he chose the independence of freelance journalism. Photography became his calling—a continuation of his early love for images. But soon after he turned to photojournalism full-time, Myanmar's 2021 coup changed everything. While documenting protests, Shakeel was arrested and tortured; his Muslim identity only made the physical abuse he suffered even harsher. Fleeing arrest, he escaped to Mae Sot, Thailand, where he continues his work documenting the conflict. Shakeel has witnessed harrowing scenes: airstrikes on civilians in Karenni State, families torn apart, children killed. Haunted by what he saw, he photographs the dead with reverence. “I always apologize to their souls,” he says, “and promise I will use these photos for justice.” Despite lingering prejudice, Shakeel finds hope in the unity of Myanmar's revolution. “All minorities sacrifice their lives for the country,” he says. “After the revolution, I hope we will live in a place with no discrimination, where everyone has the same opportunity.”

Episode #444: After more than 40 years of Burma advocacy, Larry Dohrs sheds light on the strategies that have exposed corporate and military abuses in the country, inspired meaningful action, and exacted costs from multiple incarnations of the junta. Inspired by his parents' travels in the 1960s, he first visited Burma in 1982 and was captivated, with lifelong consequences. When he tried to return in 1988, however, the 8888 uprising and bloody crackdown intervened. “I was not too politically focused – history and culture and economics were more what I was interested in,” Dohrssays. “In subsequent years it was people looking at it as a normal country, a normal situation, that I found offensive. That's where I started to push back.” As a principal figure in groups such as the Seattle Burma Roundtable, Free Burma Coalition, and U.S. Campaign for Burma, Dohrs has been inspired by and worked with a roster of well-known human rights and pro-democracy activists, including author and historian Edith Mirante, activist leader and coalition founder Maung Zarni, and Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead CorriganMaguire. In that journey, he discovered the power of narrative formation pitting him and his allies against a merciless military: “When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion.” He questions the black-and-white portrait, which he admittedly crafted in his advocacy, to describe a country as diverse and complex as Burma, while maintaining clarity on the military's horrific crimes and the complicity of multinational corporations in their mendacity. Within that reflection, however, are major victories forcing companies such as PepsiCo and Eddie Bauer to cease enriching the military, and the landmark case against Unocal on human rights violations connected to the Yadana gas field. The fight will outlive him, Dohrs says, as the resistance against the military continues. In his assessment, the generals instrumentalize peace talks to forestall accountability, while neighboring states and the UN insist on maintaining a unified nation state that has never existed. The role of the activists, he says, is to promote a more nuanced view that embraces complexity and recognizes the military's brutality for what it is.

Episode #443: Ei, a former member of the People's Defense Force (PDF), shifted from armed resistance to humanitarian work, and now focuses on child soldiers and youth affected by conflict. She joined the PDF at 28, witnessing both bravery and abuse—including harassment and executions over financial disputes—which convinced her that real revolution required education and ethics. “We have different skills for education, for healthcare, for the citizens,” she said. “My mastery is not in my arms, it is in my brain.” After leaving the camp, Ei lived for three years in a rural Karen village, overcoming mistrust through practical work— helping teachers, planting vegetables, and raising livestock to improve food security. Despite airstrikes and instability, she helped build schools and a library, insisting that education must continue even in war. Drawing from these experiences, Ei founded the A Lin Eain Shelter in Mae Sot, Thailand. It provides education, trauma counseling, and vocational training for children under 18 from all sides of the conflict—the military, PDFs, and ethnic armed groups. “If you have any under 18 years old soldier who would like to go to school, we can accept,” she tells resistance leaders. The shelter aims to reintegrate children through practical skills and mental health support. Ei warns that trauma and lost education will shape Myanmar's future. “If their childhood life is really bad, if they become a soldier, it becomes worse when they hold a weapon,” she said. “Our young people are human resources for the future, and they have to study [to] build a free and just society for the next generation.” She urges both revolutionary and international leaders to invest in education and end child recruitment: “Taking the children out of war is not a loss. It is an investment in our future.”