Insight Myanmar

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.”

Episode #442: Yin Maung, a Myanmar-born digital-rights researcher with Aung Media, examines how non-consensual intimate images have become a political weapon in post-coup Myanmar. He places this crisis within the country's rapid digital shift. Although online communication surged during COVID-19, digital literacy, privacy awareness, and regulatory protections did not keep pace. As a result, Myanmar's population entered a politically volatile digital environment without safeguards. Following the 2021 coup, many women—some politically outspoken for the first time—used social media to oppose the junta. This visibility made them targets of harassment by male, pro-military users. Doxing became a primary tactic, with personal data such as names, ID numbers, and addresses leaked on Telegram alongside accusations of ties to resistance groups. These online attacks frequently translated into physical danger and arrests by security forces. Non-consensual pornography is another form of harassment: leaked photos, AI-altered images, etc. While some pro-democracy users have also engaged in abusive behavior, Yin Maung's research shows gendered attacks are more intense and prevalent on the military-aligned side. A legal vacuum intensifies the harm. Myanmar lacks privacy or data-protection laws, and Article 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law is widely used to suppress dissent rather than protect victims. Social norms further burden victims, as conservative attitudes toward sexuality lead to widespread victim-blaming, particularly towards women. While the emotional, social, and economic consequences often result in depression, extreme fear and even suicidal thoughts, perpetrators rarely face stigma or punishment. Support systems have only recently begun to emerge. Organizations like Stop Online Harm now partner with major platforms to expedite takedown requests and offer psychosocial assistance, though Telegram remains resistant to moderation. Yin Maung stresses that prevention requires addressing gender inequality, improving platform accountability, and fostering collaboration between digital-rights and women's-rights groups. Ultimately, he advocates for a future grounded in digital-rights principles and calls for men to share responsibility in combating systemic gender-based oppression.

Episode #441: “I just thought, ‘Someone has to stay and bear witness,'” says Paul Greening, a veteran humanitarian with the International Organization for Migration (IOM). For decades he moved between crises—Afghanistan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, East Timor—but Myanmar, and the Rohingya tragedy in particular, define his moral world. He first encountered the Rohingya in 2008 while in Aceh, when boats of desperate families arrived on Indonesian shores. Unprepared officials and global indifference convinced him to keep their story alive within humanitarian networks, a concern that eventually drew him to Myanmar itself. He arrived in August 2017, and felt strongly that a catastrophe was about to unfold. Weeks later, the campaign began. When his IOM contract ended, Greening stayed on in Rakhine, linking aid agencies with local civil society and supporting the 2019 White Rose campaign of interfaith solidarity. Trapped in Bangkok by COVID, he later moved to Mae Sot, where he now supports exiled youth and the wounded. “They're inspiring,” he says. “They're not giving up!” Greening finds particular inspiration in both the leading role taken in the resistance by Burmese youth, and by Myanmar's emerging cross-ethnic unity: “That's the real revolution,” he says, “ethnic cooperation.” At the same time, he has reasons for concern, such as the lack of full acceptance of women and LGBTQ youth in the movement, as well as in a future, post-conflict Myanmar. He also wants to ensure that the movement is not co-opted by career politicians who have fled the area for their own safety but intend to regain power in a post-conflict Myanmar. Greening is unsentimental about how many revolutions turn out, and the effects of trauma across generations, yet still has hope. “If [the people] can be more united,” he says, “then we move the revolution forward again.”

Episode #440: Rick Hanson and Brang Nan engage in a moving conversation on Myanmar's ongoing struggle for democracy, focusing on psychological resilience, Buddhist practice, and activism. Rick begins with a powerful statement: “No one can stop you from claiming the power of your own mind, but only you can claim it.” He underscores the importance of mindfulness and mental autonomy as tools to resist oppression, emphasizing, “To put it really bluntly, get the assholes out of your head.” He adds, “If I may use a phrase, fuck them. Live well, meanwhile, as best you can.” This revolutionary act of reclaiming mental freedom, Rick asserts, is foundational to individual and collective empowerment. Brang Nan shares his experiences living under military rule, speaking of survivor guilt, loss, and emotional isolation. He describes the 2021 protests as an initial “high,” followed by withdrawal and numbing as repression intensified. Despite these challenges, he finds moments of connection transformative. “If we allow ourselves to be a little bit brave, a little bit open to sharing, then what I've realized is that we're all in the same boat,” he reflects. Such openness fosters solidarity, countering the isolation imposed by fear. Rick uses the metaphor of tending a fruit tree as a guide to self-care. He says that you can have good soil, water the tree appropriately, etc., yet you can't make it yield fruit, concluding, “You can tend to the causes, but you cannot control the results.” This teaching resonates with Brang Nan, who finds empowerment in focusing on small, meaningful actions. Rick further emphasizes the value of savoring “ordinary jewels”—small, positive moments—to build resilience. Brang Nan offers a poignant reflection as the conversation concludes: “Once you get out of that fog you keep yourself in, you start to open your eyes. And when you do, you see others around you doing similar things, surviving, contributing, caring. It's this openness and connection that nourish us and give us the strength to move forward, even when everything feels impossible.”

Episode #439: “The key human rights issue within Thailand and more broadly within the region is migration related,” says Ben Harkins, a veteran labor rights and migration expert who has spent over seventeen years working across Southeast Asia. From refugee camps to industrial zones, Harkins has witnessed how migration has become both a lifeline and a trap—an act of survival in systems built on exploitation. He began his career along the Thai-Myanmar border in the 2000s, where tens of thousands of Karen and other ethnic minorities lived in sprawling camps after fleeing conflict. “It's only been this year, in fact, that we've finally seen a major transition in refugee policy in Thailand,” he notes, referring to new measures allowing some refugees to legally work outside the camps for the first time. For Harkins, this small policy shift represents freedom long denied. Over the years, he has researched the migration that sustain Thailand's economy. “The flows from Myanmar are so complex,” he explains. “These are very heterogeneous flows of migrants.” His work with the International Labour Organization (ILO) has exposed forced labor, human trafficking, and modern slavery in sectors like fishing, manufacturing, and agriculture. When Myanmar's 2021 coup dismantled years of fragile progress, Harkins says it upended everything he had worked for. “Just overnight, my entire world was turned upside down, basically,” he recalls. Colleagues and partners he had collaborated with for years were suddenly arrested, in hiding, or silenced. The military junta publicly denounced his research in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar, accusing him of spreading lies about labor conditions. “Migration itself has sort of become weaponized in many ways by the military junta,” he explains of the current reality, describing how the regime taxes overseas workers, manipulates remittances, and uses migration control to punish dissent. Now based in Bangkok, Harkins rejects claims that international businesses can operate responsibly under dictatorship. “You just can't have responsible business if you don't have fundamental labor rights for workers,” he insists. Despite everything, he continues his work with the ILO. “The least I can do is make use of the voice that I have within the UN system to try to support these principles of social justice as much as I can.”

Episode #438: Jonathan Crowley shares his journey as a practitioner and teacher in the Goenka Vipassana tradition, highlighting the conflicts that eventually led him to step away after 35 years of dedication. He describes his gradual disillusionment with the organization's rigidity, particularly its failure to address structural racism in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing—unlike many other spiritual organizations, which undertook meaningful changes. Alongside his wife, Jonathan wrote to the North American Acharyas, advocating for meaningful engagement on racial issues and emphasizing that the teachings of the Buddha support addressing social injustices. Their letter called for transparency, change, and inclusivity, yet received only two responses, one of which was completely dismissive, which further isolated them. Jonathan also questioned the tradition's claim that their Vipassana technique was the only method preserving the “pristine purity” of the Buddha's teachings: a very questionable claim, at best, which he feels fosters an environment resistant to change or critique. The emphasis on purity, combined with a fear of deviation from the prescribed path, discourageseven Senior Teachers from asking questions, voicing doubts or exploring new ideas. Jonathan felt that this rigidity ultimately hindered his spiritual growth. As he experienced deeper states of meditation, he realized the tradition's approach was too narrow, with no space for discussing experiences outside the standard teachings. This further compounded his sense of frustration and alienation. Leaving the tradition was painful for Jonathan, given his respect for Goenka and the community's significance in his life. He struggled with feelings of loss and confusion, recognizing that while the practice had transformed him, the organizational structure was now limiting his growth. Despite this, he maintains a deep appreciation for the tradition and Goenka, acknowledging their role in his spiritual journey while also embracing new paths in Dhamma that align with his continued evolution.“I am wanting to hold this deep reverence, appreciation, gratitude and a deep sense of benefit that I have received from Goenkaji and from the tradition; with a need to speak out and to be critical, and to hope that the organization will become a more open system and invite civil discourse and dialog and conversation and questioning, and not think that that's going to be a threat to the path of Dhamma.”

Episode #437: Researchers Myat Su Thwe, a human-rights scholar, and Kyaw Lwin, a socio-legal specialist, examine how Myanmar's National Unity Government (NUG) operates digitally after the 2021 coup in their study Digital Governance in Exile. They describe a government forced online by warfare and displacement, assessing whether its services genuinely meet citizens' needs through a “socio-technical framework” that weighs technology against inclusivity, language, and security. Myat Su Thwe explains that ministries of Health, Education, and Finance deliver essential services through tele-medicine, online schooling, and blockchain-based finance. Tele-Gemar connects volunteer doctors abroad with ethnic-minority patients via local interpreters; digital schools issue the Basic Education Completion Assessment; and the Spring Development Bank and Aung Pay wallet allow secure, anonymous transactions outside junta control. Kyaw Lwin notes progress but warns of weak internet, cyber-attacks, and low digital literacy. Both describe volunteers countering hacks, phishing, and state surveillance, stressing that literacy determines whether digital tools “are weaponized or contribute to society.” Survey data show moderate public trust, limited mainly by fear of surveillance. The researchers also highlight cooperation between NUG ministries and ethnic armed organizations in health, education, and local finance, along with experimental AI-based counseling and humanitarian databases. They call for interoperable systems, stronger privacy laws, and a roadmap for digital justice, arguing that courts and records must be modernized despite the war. Myat Su Thwe extends the discussion to food security, urging digital mapping and cross-border coordination with Thailand and India to address famine conditions. In closing, she asserts that NUG legitimacy depends not only on its constitutional origin but on its performance and capacity to lead. Kyaw Lwin concludes, “While others debate artificial intelligence and life beyond Earth, we are still fighting yesterday's war,” capturing the resilience of a society rebuilding governance through code and conviction.

Episode #436: “We feel like we are not a useless person. You know, even [if] we have to flee our country and come to other country, we are still a valued person.” Dr. K, a Rohingya general practitioner, shares his journey from Myanmar to the Thai border, where he now supports the resistance by training medics and running makeshift clinics. He recalls how, as a child, his family moved to Yangon from Rakhine, but had to travel in secret because the Rohingya were barred from legal travel. After achieving high grades at school, he was accepted at medical school in 2013 because his family was able to obtain the necessary documents—that otherwise would have been denied to his as a Rohingya— through bribes; even so, he callshimself “lucky” that the admissions office did not demand a birth certificate. After graduation, he worked very hard, holding posts in a private hospital by day and running his own clinic by night. Following the 2021 coup, he quietly aided the resistance while avoiding registering his clinic. But in February 2024, Dr. K was flagged as a CDM doctor at Yangon airport, detained, questioned, and later coerced into signing an agreement to join the junta's health service. Fearing the loss of all he had built and saved, he fled in March with his wife and child, crossing illegally into Thailand. Starting anew was difficult, but he eventually focused on volunteer medicine, shuttling across the border to treat malaria, gastritis, and injuries in bamboo-walled clinics. He admits to fear—especially of aircraft— at the front, describing the psychological toll it takes even when he is safely back in Thailand. In Thailand, he is finally able to fully embraces his identity as a Rohingya. He hopes the openness he feels in resistance circles that allows this freedom of identity and expression will enable hischildren to grow up in a society free of discrimination. “I am 100% human, because I don't need to hide anything of my background, my personality.”

Episode #435: “There is a person behind every piece of policy,” says Nandar, a senior digital security expert at DigiSec Lab, reflecting on Myanmar's transformation into a digital prison since the 2021 military coup. Along with researcher and trainer Vox, journalist and consultant Myat, and political researcher Candle, they discuss how the junta's technological control has reshaped daily life, eroded freedom, and forced citizens to adapt in order to survive. Nandar, who leads digital safety training and emergency response, describes Myanmar's “digital siege” as an Internet that works but no longer grants freedom. Layers of control filter access, monitor behavior, and instill fear. Through deep packet inspection, metadata tracking, and the 2025 Cybersecurity Law, the state monitors every interaction and compels service providers to surrender data. The result, she explains, is not disconnection but silence—an online world where communication feels dangerous and self-censorship has become instinct. Journalists, activists, and youth face the worst effects, yet resistance endures in small, encrypted acts of persistence. Vox, a digital safety researcher, recalls how after the coup, blackouts became “Internet curfews,” and police raids and digital fear merged into everyday life. With no protection from global companies, he and others learned that tools like Signal or Telegram could not guarantee safety. Every conversation required verification; every contact might be compromised. Digital survival meant learning espionage tactics in civilian life. Years later, he says, surveillance has become total. What began as emergency control has evolved into permanent monitoring, leaving an entire generation living cautiously under a digital authoritarian state. Myat, a journalist and media consultant, says that while before the coup, Myanmar's independent press was expanding, after the coup, licenses were revoked, reporters jailed, and websites blocked. Exiled media outlets now depend on fragile networks inside the country. Online activity itself has become perilous: VPN use invites arrest, encryption offers no safety when authorities demand passwords, and surveillance reaches into every newsroom. Myat works to train journalists in digital hygiene and security awareness, yet she warns that technology alone cannot protect them. Financial collapse and fear have made survival uncertain, and she insists that the culture of safety—and courage—must now define journalism in Myanmar. Candle, a political researcher leading DigiSec's “Duty of Care” project, focuses on how scholars must adapt research ethics to extreme risk. Fieldwork, interviews, and data collection can expose both researchers and participants to danger, so her team developed a Risk Assessment and Mitigation Plan for every project. Integrating encryption, anonymization, and storage security has become an ethical duty, not a technical choice. She explains that fear now shapes participation—many citizens decline interviews or refuse to share information. By embedding safety into research design, Candle argues, social inquiry itself becomes an act of protection as much as discovery. Together, their voices reveal a single truth: in Myanmar, speaking, writing, and researching have become acts of resistance sustained by vigilance and quiet resilience.

Episode #434: “I don't see how there could be a new social contract for a post-war, post-conflict Myanmar.” With this stark observation, Henning Glaser sets the tone for his analysis of the country's turmoil. Glaser is a German legal scholar based at Thammasat University in Bangkok, where he co-founded the German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance. His work spans Asia, but Myanmar has become one of his deepest commitments. Since the early 2010s, he has organized dialogues and seminars on the country's political transition, and after the 2021 coup, his institute shifted to documenting and analyzing the descent into conflict. Glaser describes the future in bleak terms. The junta shows no sign of collapse, while the opposition remains fragmented. Ethnic armed groups pursue divergent roadmaps, preventing unity around a federal constitution. Glaser admires the energy of younger activists and local governance experiments, yet doubts these can form a coherent national framework. He cites Kurdistan in Iraq as a warning: local stability without broader resolution. Geopolitics, he stresses, makes matters worse. “It is inevitable that a primary focus on geopolitics is creating tension and border conflicts and wars. We see that everywhere,” he says. Myanmar, he argues, is reduced to a pawn in a larger contest between China, Russia, India, and an increasingly disengaged West. The result is proxy struggles that entrench the conflict. Organized crime further compounds the chaos. Scam centers, narcotics, arms smuggling, and trafficking create a criminal economy that fuels the war. “If you have this involvement of organized crime and an organized criminal economy, then you can sustain that for a very, very long time. And that is also why a long stalemate,” he warns. Glaser dismisses upcoming elections as hollow and recalls Myanmar's earlier transition as a “democratic façade with a military heart.” Despite his dark assessment, he ends by saluting the resilience of activists and diaspora communities, whose determination to master law and policy remains, in his view, remarkable. “I totally admire all the young people, middle-aged people, and older people in the diaspora who put incredible efforts to keep up and to gain legal knowledge, to draft laws, to understand how to translate policies into law, how to interpret laws. That is remarkable.”

Episode #433: Raul Saldana's journey began in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he grew up in a Catholic household. As a teenager, he questioned the rigidity of Catholicism and turned to nature, finding inspiration in the vastness of the outdoors. Music also became a powerful part of his life, leading him into diverse spiritual practices. In his twenties, Raul joined an ecological community and was introduced to Native American rituals like the Vision Quest; he later explored Sufism, Hindu meditation, and, ultimately, Buddhist practice, which provided the answers he sought. Under the guidance of S.N. Goenka, Vipassanā became a major turning point for Raul, fostering personal insight without blind faith. During a world music tour that stopped in Macau for a performance, Raul met his future wife, Heidi, and they together they became serious Vipassanā meditators. They traveled to Myanmar for deeper spiritual exploration. There, they began to practice under Sayagaw U Tejaniya. Raul felt pulled to become a monk, and ordained (and then disrobed) three times before finally choosing to remain a monk after the fourth ordination. He is now Bhikkhu Rahula; his wife supports his decision, though it changed their relationship in many ways. Their partnership has shifted from marriage to one of spiritual camaraderie, with Heidi continuing as a lay practitioner. Bhikkhu Rahula's current plans include the establishment of Paññābhūmi Monastery in Mexico, a center aimed at sharing Dhamma practice and teachings. “What happens with Buddhism, this faith, I could hold it! Otherwise, I would have run away very quickly. I love it. Buddhism does a different approach: It tells you the reason from A to B, cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, and you arrive here. Finish! With the faith that arises from it, it is because of the understanding. Faith has no questions anymore. Faith is not vague. Faith is based on the fact. Man, do I love that faith, because that is powerful.”

Episode #432: Myanmar researcher Lin Jin Fu investigates the rise of scam compounds that blend human trafficking, digital fraud, and organized crime. His study, Scam haven: Responding to surging cyber crime and human trafficking in Myanmar, traces their expansion from Chinese “scam houses” into a transnational industry stretching across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Originally rooted in China's underground economies, these groups migrated outward as Beijing cracked down and the pandemic restricted domestic activity. They flourished in lawless borderlands such as the Golden Triangle and northern Shan State, where weak governance allowed them to create fortified compounds that combine physical captivity with online deception. Scam centers now anchor wider illicit economies— drugs, gambling, black-market banking, and prostitution— worth at least $37 billion a year. In 2023, the Three Brotherhood Alliance, with apparent Chinese backing, attacked major compounds in Laukkai during Operation 1027, rescuing trafficked Chinese nationals and handing over several ringleaders who were later sentenced to death. At the same time, Beijing launched a domestic campaign, flooding WeChat and Weibo daily with anti-fraud messages. Yet the system persists. Frightened operators briefly suspended work elsewhere, then reopened on the condition that they avoid targeting Chinese citizens. Every compound, Lin Jin Fu explains, survives by securing protection from an armed host—usually the junta or allied Border Guard Forces— while some ethnic armies tolerate or tax them. These networks adapt easily. Big bosses flee by helicopter; smaller scams need only laptops, generators, and internet. The old “pig-butchering” crypto fraud now employees sophisticated AItools, and online-gambling scams targeting countries across South America dominate Tachileik. Sadly, for many impoverished young Burmese, scam centers are the only escape from conscription and joblessness. Meanwhile, inside the compounds, workers endure coercion, sexual abuse, and debt bondage. Surrounding towns boom briefly, then collapse into ghost cities once crackdowns hit. Lin Jin Fu warns that for scam centers to fully cease operations across Myanmar, the military junta has to go. Beyond that, he emphasizes that absent legal migration routes and alternative employment, the industry will continue to endure. “For drugs, people had an alternative— grow coffee instead of poppy,” he says. “For scams, what is the alternative?”

Episode #431: “I'm a sniper,” says Maui, deputy commander of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF). He and four top commanders describe being pushed from peaceful protest into armed resistance after the 2021 coup. They say nonviolent methods failed when the military answered with bullets, mass arrests and village burnings, leaving youth to choose between submission or taking up arms. Maui—once an organic farmer and environmental activist—explains the moral conflict: killing is deeply uncomfortable and can become addictive, yet they fight to prevent future generations from inheriting tyranny. The KNDF emphasizes discipline, training and strict protocols around weapons and landmines to limit civilian harm. Recruits start with bamboo-stick drills and brief, intense training between frontline rotations. Command structure, community support and unity among groups transformed disparate volunteers into a more effective force. Khine Sitthu, the drone operator, recounts improvising an air capability from agricultural drones, adapting online resources and AI tools to rig and navigate munitions. Drones shifted the battlefield, offering local “air support” and enabling strikes that conserved scarce ammunition, though the military later fielded jammers and heavier equipment. Innovation, resourcefulness and local backing explain KNDF's tactical successes, including downing military aircraft and overrunning battalions—despite persistent shortages of weapons and ammunition. The commanders stress ethics: they target military forces, avoid indiscriminate bombing, and maintain post-conflict responsibilities (clearing mines and humanitarian support). They call on the international community for noncombat material support, including sanctions on military supply chains, while arguing that external assistance could shorten the conflict and reduce civilian suffering. Above all, they insist their struggle aims to build a democratic, nondiscriminatory Myanmar, not perpetuate violence. They remain open to negotiated outcomes if the military permanently relinquishes political power, insisting any settlement must guarantee civilian rule and institutional reform.

Episode #430: Ngu Wah is a Research Fellow at Knowledge Circle Foundation and a PhD candidate at Chiang Mai University focusing on migration and political economy. In this episode, she speaks about the struggles of Burmese migrant workers and the crucial role of remittances in Myanmar's economy, shaping the vision she has for her country's future. She explains that Myanmar remains largely resourcebased, dependent on extractive industries and agriculture. The State Administration Council (SAC) controls the formal sector, while a significant informal sphere involves both state and nonstate actors. Weak infrastructure—roads, transport, and telecommunications—continues to weigh heavily on national development. Migration, she stresses, is “in [her] heart,” a personal commitment rooted in family background and her belief that migrant workers are the “unsung heroes of Myanmar.” Before her PhD, Ngu Wah studied returnees to learn how families managed remittances and supported rural agriculture. Later, while conducting research in Thailand, she uncovered evidence of a gender wage gap: women earned less but remitted more. She attributes this to side income, skillssharing, digital networks, and community living that help women stretch their resources. Yet, women also face greater obstacles than men in finding jobs when contracts expire and in reintegrating once they return to Myanmar. Many hope to start small businesses, making remittances essential as savings and seed capital. Documentation remains another critical burden. Although official fees are low, bureaucratic hurdles and language barriers push workers to use costly agents. Some fall into debt, while others risk working without papers. Yet documentation is vital for protection, services, and bank access. “We need to be very practical to solve that issue,” she says. “We need to think for the migrant workers.” Remittances accounted for about 4% of Myanmar's GDP in 2018 and have only grown since the coup. But scams and tightening controls make safe transfers harder. She calls for flexible, secure mechanisms that also consider migrants' habits. While many describe the Burmese as resilient, she cautions against romanticizing hardship. Survival, she insists, comes at a cost. Still, after recounting these struggles, she closes with her most powerful reminder: “[the Burmese] always find a way to survive.”

Episode #429: Emmanuel Flores' journey into meditation began at the age of nine in Rio de Janeiro, seated before a candle. His formative years were marked by a quest for positivity, but without a solid practice. This changed at 20, when a friend's recommendation led him to a vipassana meditation course in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. This course was transformative, and sparked an interest in the histories of Ledi Sayadaw, Saya Thet Gyi, and Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Emmanuel's fascination with Burma's spiritual heritage deepened, and he decided to travel to the Golden Land, staying with an uncle who had just been appointed as the Brazilian Ambassador. After a course at Dhamma Joti, Emmanuel chose to ordain. He felt a special gravitas and protection once he put on the robes, which intensified his conscientiousness and dedication to the practice. Guidance from an elder monk expanded Emmanuel's understanding, stressing the importance of scriptural wisdom alongside meditation. His teacher's memorization of the teachings inspired Emmanuel to internalize the Dhamma himself. The 2021 coup was a jarring contrast to his spiritual growth, the distress of his teacher conveying the gravity of the situation. Although Emmanuel left later that year, his warm memories of his time in the Golden Land remain strong. “I'm left with a thankful feeling, with lots of love towards all the people of Burma that I met, because it enriched my life, and it enriched my practice!When practicing mettā, I always try to remember them… Burma is still in my mind, and I really wish I can go back there again, and learn from that place more.”

Episode #428: This panel gathers five voices from Myanmar's unraveling present—specialists in food, economy, energy, education, and digital life—who together trace the anatomy of a country still fighting to exist. Their stories intertwine across fields once filled with promise, now marked by loss, adaptation, and the quiet persistence of rebuilding. Thin Lei Win, a journalist and food systems expert, bridges the elemental links between nourishment and truth. She describes a nation abundant in resources yet starved by political neglect, where conflict and inflation have turned meals into measures of survival. For her, recovery begins with food sovereignty and regenerative farming— but also with journalism that insists on accountability, exposing the human costs of repression and keeping the language of truth alive. Economist Sean Turnell, once an adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, recalls the fragile optimism of Myanmar's reform years before the economy imploded. The coup, he says, erased progress overnight, returning the country to extraction and scarcity. Yet he believes that when democracy returns, stability and investment will quickly follow, because the will to rebuild already exists. From the energy sector, Guillaume De Langre describes stalled electrification and broken trust, yet sees in renewable technologies and decentralized grids the outline of a fairer, more resilient future. Education reformer Thura echoes that belief in renewal, recounting how teachers and students who refused the junta reimagined schooling underground and online— an act of defiance that made learning itself a form of resistance. And in the digital realm, Bradley charts the turn from openness to surveillance, yet also the rise of encrypted communities that protect connection and expression. Together, these voices reveal that even in collapse, Myanmar's pulse endures— in food and light, in words and classrooms, in the stubborn will to begin again.

Episode #427: Daniel M. Stuart describes his newest work, Insight in Perspective, as the product of decades of scholarship and meditative practice, aimed at practitioners and academics alike. The book, a follow-up to his earlier Emissary of Insight, examines the historical and cultural formation of the S. N. Goenka Vipassana lineage. He says it began as a short academic critique, but grew into a comprehensive study seeking to bridge lived religious experience and historical analysis. Stuart situates his work partly in dialogue with Eric Braun's The Birth of Insight, which links modern Vipassana to “Buddhist modernism,” a rationalized response to colonialism and ongoing Western influence. While acknowledging the general acceptance of Braun's influence, Stuart contends that this model is too narrow, overlooking the hybrid, lay-based traditions that complicate the monastic-centered story. Figures such as U Ba Khin and Goenka, he argues, cannot be reduced to the rational and secular; their teachings blend the scientific, the mystical, and the cosmological. Stuart identifies a central tension between scholarly critique and devotional participation, describing the scholar-practitioner's task as being willing “to complicate things” with remaining loyal to the tradition. But it's not easy uncovering all the threads of this complex story. For example, he notes that many witnesses to early Goenka history have remained silent, while other informants, such as Friedgard Lottermoser, only shared guardedly, out of a wish to protect what they saw as esoteric knowledge. Stuart challenges Western scholars like Braun for “thinning out” the richness of Burmese Buddhism by forcing it into modernist categories, which also results in erasure. He emphasizes that elements like spirit consultation, protective rituals, and supernormal powers are not anomalies but continuations of Burmese cosmology, and still exist today in many “modern” mindfulness traditions. While Goenka's public-facing dialog emphasizes the rational and secular nature of the practice, meditation hall arrangements, and the playing of protective chants such as the Patthāna, at Goenka centers, reveal a much more rich and complex reality. For Stuart, modernization in this context means reorganization, not disenchantment. The global Vipassana movement, he concludes, was not born of one or two events, but emerged through an evolving genealogy, one that joins textual scholarship, colonial encounters, lay experimentation, and enduring cosmological belief into a single, multifaceted birth of insight.

Episode #426: The Karenni Interim Executive Council was formed in 2023 to provide services to people in dire need, with an estimated 80% of the civilian population displaced by the conflict. As people return to their homes, landmines placed by the military pose a multi-layered threat, causing injuries and deaths, creating a climate of fear for people on their own land, and making normal life dangerous on a daily basis.“Fear now makes the land become evil so they are afraid to even to step on the area where they are used to play happily,” Banya Khung Aung says. “Force people to flee their lands and ensure they cannot return. This is a crime against humanity.”Civilians returning to their homes cannot wait for permission for de-mining according to international standards, Banya Khung Aung says. People need to grow food and maintain their livelihoods in already challenging circumstances. In the absence of major international support, the Karenni are using their own model and local knowledge for mine risk education and to conduct de-mining. Methods include disarming mines with knives or bamboo sticks at great risk, clearing areas with tractors, and controlled fires to detonate or damage explosive devices.The landmine threat cannot be viewed in isolation. The military's persecution of civilians in ethnic states is a strategic campaign of fear, Banya Khung Aung says, intensified amid the widespread resistance triggered by the coup, with airstrikes and targeting civilians central to military operations. The immense challenges to people's ability to grow food and sustain themselves, combined with long-term trauma and psychosocial impacts, are shared by the Karenni and many other populations across the country.

Episode #425: Dr. Lalita Hanwong, a Thai historian and analyst, has dedicated her career to understanding Myanmar and its ties to Thailand. “I'm morally attached to the peoples of Myanmar,” she says, summing up a lifetime of scholarship and advocacy that spans from the archives of colonial Burma to the war-torn Thai-Myanmar border. “I just want to talk to everybody.” Trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Lalita's research explored how British rule relied on racial hierarchies to govern Burma. “The British were pretty paranoid and suspicious of the Burmese… the specific race that they found the most difficult to rule and police was actually the Bamar,” she explains. “Their solution was pretty simple: let's bring somebody to scare the Burmese—hence the presence of the Gurkhas, the Sikhs and so on.” These studies taught her how old systems of mistrust shaped modern Myanmar. Her work later shifted from archives to activism. Returning to Thailand, she began advising parliament and the army on border affairs, refugee policy, and Myanmar relations. “There are some really good-hearted [Thai] soldiers who mean well, who want to help Myanmar as well,” she says. Mae Sot, the border town she calls her second home, has become central to her life: “Mae Sot is a really fascinating place. There's no place like Mae Sot… Thailand has been the hub of resistance from Myanmar for generations.” Lalita argues that Thailand must take a more active role as mediator and humanitarian partner. “Thailand could do a lot more,” she says. “The border is a gray zone… we cannot use the urban mindset to get the border fixed however we like it.” She rejects isolation of the junta—“you need somebody who can still negotiate and get access to Naypyidaw”—and believes dialogue is the only way forward. “War is never good for anybody except war business people.”

Episode #424: This episode opens the first of a three-part Insight Myanmar Podcast series recorded at the Decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies Conference at Chiang Mai University. The gathering brought together scholars, activists, and cultural workers exploring how colonial legacies continue to shape scholarship, storytelling, and identity in the region. In this opening episode, we hear from Jules Yim and Jochem van den Boogert, two voices who approach decolonization from distinct yet deeply connected directions. Jules Yim treats decolonization as a living practice rather than a theory—something expressed through art, performance, and community. She describes her concept of “seapunk” as a movement grounded in rebellion and creativity, a Southeast Asian counterpart to cyberpunk or steampunk. “When we refer to punk,” she explains, “we're referring to the outsider... the ungovernable, the unserious.” For Jules, this spirit of irreverence opens space for experimentation beyond political or academic boundaries. She contrasts the state-backed Korean Wave of pop culture with independent, community-based artistic movements that thrive on informality and collaboration. Jules also expresses an optimistic view that imagination itself is an act of resistance—a way of reclaiming voice, joy, and collective power. Jochem van den Boogert approaches decolonization through scholarship, tracing how colonial and Cold War frameworks continue to shape Southeast Asian studies. “The main task of decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies,” he says, “has to do with getting a good grasp of that framework... and only then can we come up with alternative explanations.” His research on Javanese Islam explores how religious practices coexist in fluid, negotiated forms. “It's about the practices,” he notes, not rigid belief. Drawing parallels to Buddhism in Burma, Jochem observes similar adaptive patterns, where communities integrate multiple truths into daily life. Both, he argues, reflect Southeast Asia's remarkable coherence within complexity—an enduring, relational way of understanding the world.

Episode #423: Ian Taylor is a Canadian photographer whose life shifted from the film industry to decades of work and travel across Southeast Asia. His first experience was with a government-sponsored Asian Studies program in the early 1990s. His early visits to Burma during the junta's “Visit Myanmar Year” left a strong impression, and he became involved for a short time in advertising there.By the late 1990s, Taylor had left advertising for photography, focusing on family portraits and NGO assignments across Asia. A formative volunteer trip to Bangladesh further deepened his commitment to humanitarian work, and led him back to Burma.Taylor left the country in 2015, but reconnected in 2023 through the Thailand-based Border Consortium (TBC). He soon embarked on a volunteer photo project in five refugee camps, describing them as “an active, bustling town with everything.” His photography resists exploitative “poverty porn” and favors portraits that reflect dignity and agency. “Every portrait, in some way, it's a collaboration.”Critical of the tourism industry's distortions, Taylor remains focused on authenticity, connection, and service. In his words: “If you could go to a holiday in the Maldives or something... well, I'd rather go [to a refugee camp]!”

Episode #422: “There is beauty in owning one's racial identity. There's beauty in owning, valuing, and respecting one's heritage, ancestors, sexual identity, and gender identity. But on the other side of the coin, there can also be imprisonment there.”So says Bhante Sumano, an African-American monk at Empty Cloud Monastery. This is the 6th episode in our ongoing “Intersections of Dhamma & Race” series, in which we examineentrenched protocols, practices and biases within the vipassana and mindfulness communities.Bhante Sumano begins by telling us how he came to take on the monk's robes. Originally from Jamaica, he moved to New York City for college and has stayed there ever since. Bhante Sumano trained under Thich Nhat Hanh and Thanissaro Bhikkhu before ultimately deciding that Empty Cloud was the best fit for him, as he appreciated the flexibility and openness in how the monastery embraced different Theravadin traditions.Bhante Sumano goes on to describe how the Buddha's teachings have guided him in understanding and responding to racism. He expresses disappointment with how he has seen the wider Buddhist community respond to the recent social justice movement, and feels that even many experienced teachers have “blind spots” that prevent deeper understanding. Finally, he shares the value in providing safe spaces where practitioners of color can come to practice the Dhamma.

Episode #421: Saijai Liangpunsakul, whose first name means “the link between two hearts,” speaks of her journey through the turbulent conflict of Myanmar, and how the kindness and resilience of the Myanmar people continue to inspire her. Now a recognized expert on digital trauma and rights, she has come a long way from her small southern Thailand village. She travelled to Costa Rica on her own at 15 years on a student scholarship, and continued her global education in Canada and the US.The spark for her defining work ignited during the Arab Spring in Egypt, where she was on an exchange program from college. She witnessed firsthand technology's power for social change. This fascination changed the trajectory of her thinking about a career, and she initially joined an organization that utilized digital technology for healthcare access around the world. Then a stopover in Myanmar between work-related destinations in 2014 changed her life. She became captivated by the country and its digital revolution, and her planned two-week detour turned into six years.However, her initial perspective on the promise of technology in Myanmar hid technology's darker underbelly. Saijai saw it transform into a “digital battleground” used for hate speech and oppression, notably against the Rohingya. She recognized Facebook's complicity in this growing problem, noting that it only had two people at that time to do all of content moderation for Myanmar. Saijai also describes a “devastating” situation now unfolding in Myanmar, one that combines real-life sexual and gender-based violence with tech-facilitated abuse. To combat this scourge – and coupled with her own terrible, personal experience of being harassed online – she felt compelled to act. She co-founded Myanmar Witness to document abuses, and also Stop Online Harm, an “online ambulance” providing crucial technical, psychosocial, and legal support for survivors of digital trauma.“The answer was the community,” she says. “It is to hear the story of another woman go through abuse, how another woman can survive, and that makes me feel like I can be that too,” she affirms.

Episode #420: “This is this shit is real. This is not a dream. This is real.” Burmese actor and public figure Khar Ra recounts a path that runs from Mogok to Yangon, into entertainment, and then—after the 2021 coup—into public dissent, displacement, and ongoing advocacy. He grew up on Mogok's west side. Money was tight; his father died from alcohol; his mother remarried and left; with no siblings, he lived among relatives and kept one house rule: don't drink, don't smoke. Before leaving he told a friend he would not return unless he had become an artist. In Yangon Khar Ra studied English at Dagon University while translating, working restaurant shifts, and taking shortterm jobs. A friend urged him into a modeling contest; he arrived in borrowed clothes, learned fast, and in 2014 was named Mr. Asia Myanmar, then placed second runnerup at the regional Mr. Asia pageant. Work followed across modeling, music, and film. He notes the limits of precoup censorship—no profanity even in gangster scripts, intimacy restricted. On January 31, 2021, Khar Ra was planning his next series of films; by morning the coup began. Within days he joined rallies with '88 Generation figures, raised the threefinger salute, shared inthe 8 p.m. potandpan protests, and posted blunt messages against the regime. He also redirected his platforms to verified needs— medicine, rent, transport— adding, “We must carry on what we are doing. We can't waste their sacrifice… We're in this together, and we will fight until the end. We can make it happen.” After a fellow celebrity's detention, his own name appeared under Section 505(a). Khar Ra hid with relatives, then left Yangon in a longyi and glasses, passing seven checkpoints. He moved toward the Thai–Myanmar border and into ethniccontrolled areas, met displaced families, and says the shift was clear: “I am on a path of revolution… It is happening.” The next phase took him to the United States. He joined fundraisers (including a San Francisco night he says raised over US$90,000), acted in a UCLA student short—his first screen role in nearly five years—and assembled a small documentary from an elevenday Karen trip. Exile, he says, cost him identity and purpose, yet his pledge stands: “I will keep supporting the movement.I'll fight until the end.”

Episode #419: “I'm just doing what is right, what is wrong, what's the matter? What should I do as a human being?”After medical school, instead of choosing comfort, Dr. Myay Latt went to the Naga Self-Administered Zone — a place with no roads or electricity, where he was often the first doctor anyone had seen. He built bamboo clinics, trained villagers, and survived falls off cliffs while fighting malaria and tuberculosis. “They think I'm a strange person,” he says, laughing, “but they thank me.”His work took him across Myanmar's forgotten corners — from Chin to Rakhine, where he ignored warnings and treated patients in areas marked No Entry for Rohingya. “I just want to heal people,” he says. “Not take sides.” In Putao, near the Kachin mountains, he reached villages by boat and foot, sleeping in leech-infested huts and learning the depth of his country's suffering.When the coup came in 2021, he and friends spent the night awake in Yangon, drinking whiskey and waiting. “It's like slapping our face,” he says. Out of that shock came an idea, inspired so many decades ago by Gandhi's nonviolent crusade against the British: What if we stop their machine? He and other doctors decided then and there, to refuse to work under the junta. By morning, the Civil Disobedience Movement was born. Within days, hospitals, banks, and ministries stood still.The regime answered with bullets and airstrikes. “They're so inhumane,” he says. “Hospitals, schools — they don't care who's inside.” He calls the attacks a clear breach of international law and urges only one thing: stop bombing civilians.Today, Myay Latt leads Heartland Union, bringing medical aid to Myanmar's war zones. Many of his colleagues are gone. Still, he meditates and carries on. “Sometimes I cry at night, just hearing a Burmese traditional song,” he says softly. “But I will do whatever I can to win this revolution.”