Insight Myanmar

Episode #621: Please note that interview is intended solely as a record of Aki Ra’s personal experiences and historical demining work in Cambodia. His descriptions of past methods reflect what he personally did under very differentcircumstances and should not be understood as instructions, training, or advice for handling landmines, unexploded ordnance, or other explosives. Such devices are extremely dangerous and should only be approached, identified, or removed by properly trained and authorized professionals following current safety procedures.

Aki Ra was about ten years old when the Khmer Rouge forced him into military life, where he learned to plant landmines and survive in Cambodia’s war. After later fighting alongside Vietnamese forces, he eventually turned the same technical knowledge toward removing the explosives left behind. “I wanted to change from bad to be good,” he says. Since 1990, he has spent decades clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from Cambodian farmland and villages.

That experience gives his story particular relevance to Myanmar, where landmines are again shaping civilian life and will remain dangerous long after front lines move. The comparison becomes concrete around the small M14 anti-personnel mine, a weapon Aki Ra knows from his own clearance work. Touching upon the difficulty of detecting them in Myanmar, he emphasizes a distinction central to the work he does today: civilians should not search for, touch, or attempt to remove mines themselves. His education sessions instead teach people to recognize danger, mark or remember the location, and contact trained disposal teams.

Aki Ra also contrasts the conditions in Myanmar with his own memories of Cambodia. He says soldiers in his units warned villages about mined areas and tried to avoid homes, schools and religious buildings. Yet Cambodia also demonstrates how little protection wartime intentions ultimately provide. Decades after the fighting ended, mines and unexploded ordnance still remain in fields, still injure civilians, and still require organized clearance.

Aki Ra now works with trained teams, medics, metal detectors and formal safety procedures, while the Cambodia Landmine Museum near Siem Reap helps finance their work. The war that created Cambodia’s minefields is over; the labor of making the land safe is not. For Myanmar, that is perhaps the hardest part of the comparison: the mine crisis will not necessarily end when the fighting does.

Episode #620: “This was not just my family's mission, but it could also be mine through Jesus.” For Peter Eubank, that realization marks the shift that also defines the lives of his sisters, Sahale and Suuzanne: growing up inside the Free Burma Rangers bound together Burma, conflict, service, human rights, and Christian faith, but adulthood has required each of them to decide what part of that inheritance they will choose for themselves.

Their earliest memories hold danger and belonging together. Sahale remembers walking through the jungle at night without a headlamp so the Burma Army would not see the group, while holding a Karen elder’s hand and looking at the stars. Suuzanne remembers being five and packing water, a light, a lighter, and a snack as a village evacuated under approaching mortar fire. Peter remembers riding a horse while an elder taught him Karen, before he was old enough to understand that displacement was not simply ordinary life for his friends back in the United States.

After the 2021 coup, the siblings watched older divisions change as young Bamar people left universities and joined anti-coup resistance or the Free Burma Rangers. At the same time, Sahale and Suuzanne were studying in Texas, struggling with the distance as friends were killed and attacks intensified. They came to see education not as withdrawal from Burma but as preparation to return with skills: Sahale through emergency nursing and Suuzanne through veterinary medicine. Peter, who has worked in frontline medical logistics, is still deciding between missionary work, military service, or another path.

Their memories also refuse to reduce Burma to war. They recall monkeys causing chaos, meals assembled whatever could be found, hunted, or picked at hand, and relatives whose generosity shaped their idea of love. They all still hopes for a free, democratic Burma where visiting friends no longer means calculating the danger of jets, mortars, or gunfire. While the siblings choose separate futures, the people who raised them remain inside those choices.

Episode #619: “My motto is love is the most powerful magic,” says Elizabeth Yee, a Burmese medical doctor, writer, and activist who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement after the 2021 coup. Now living in Thailand, she works with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) on mental-health and psychosocial support, while also branching into art.

As a child, Elizabeth devoured Chinese martial-arts novels that inspired her belief in justice and self-discipline. The work of one Burmese author, a physician-novelist, persuaded her to enter medical school, where she had the thought to “become a doctor and then write a lot of books.” Supported by Chinese-Burmese parents who broke with tradition to favor their daughter— based largely on her father’s belief that she was the reincarnation of his father— she excelled and became an assistant surgeon. Yet she rebelled against Myanmar’s military-controlled, politically-entangled medical system. She refused to take its restrictive exam and instead studied for the UK’s MRCP (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians) qualification.

During the COVID pandemic, she began exploring digital education and saw the regime’s inefficiency firsthand. When the coup erupted, she resigned to join the protests. She was cited under Article 505A—effectively her arrest warrant. She fled her Yangon apartment and went underground while continuing to provide medical aid at demonstrations. Eventually, she fled to the countryside. After a year treating rural villagers, she crossed into Thailand, determined to stay there and not to abandon the revolution.

At AAPP, she combines medicine, psychology, and activism, learning from political-prisoner survivors and discovering feminism, which she defines as “justice with love.” She is now a dedicated artist, using AI to help compose music, and creating paintings that express her feelings and passions around the themes of feminism, ecology, and resistance. Art, she says, is both healing and defiance. “We need to fight until we are done,” she says quietly, “because there are so many unjust things.”

Episode #618: U Jāgara’s journey into Burmese Buddhism provides valuable exploration of meditation traditions and their adaptation to modern contexts. In this fourth appearance on the platform, he begins by talking about Ledi Sayadaw, a Burmese monk who revitalized Theravada meditation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making it accessible to both monks and lay practitioners through his teaching and writings. U Jāgara emphasizes Ledi Sayadaw’s dynamic and personalized approach to teaching, contrasting it with the standardized method of S.N. Goenka, highlighting the flexibility of Burmese Buddhism in addressing varied, spiritual needs.

U Jāgara also explores the tension between universal accessibility on the one hand, and preserving the nuanced richness of Burmese traditions on the other. He contrasts Goenka’s singular focus on sensation-based vipassana with Ledi Sayadaw’s multifaceted approach, which integrates textual study, personalized meditation, and understanding foundational Buddhist principles such as dependent origination and the analysis of the four elements. He believes that these distinctions underscore the need to find a balance between authenticity and modernization in Burmese Buddhism, as well as in the global mindfulness movement.

He delves into Pa Auk Sayadaw’s teachings, which emphasize deep concentration (samathā) to achieve profound insight (vipassanā) into dependent origination and karmic causality. While controversial to some, Pa Auk’s methods resonate deeply within Burmese cultural and religious norms and enrich the ongoing dialogue among practitioners worldwide about the relationship between concentration and insight.

U Jāgara reflects on the need to balance textual study with meditative practice, cautioning against overemphasizing either. He discusses the resilience of Burmese Buddhism even amid socio-political challenges. And he advocates for a deeper engagement with the ethical and philosophical dimensions of one’s practice as a transformative journey toward self-understanding and compassion, in contrast to the belief that reliance on a single meditation technique can have the same effect. U Jāgara’s narrative underscores Burmese Buddhism’s enduring relevance and adaptability.

Episode #617: This is the first episode in a seven part series, which examines how Buddhist law and institutions have shaped religious life, and how they interact with secular legal systems.

The first guest, Rebecca Redwood French, begins with a lawyer’s question: “What [is] the morality behind legal systems?” It took her from public defense work to Tibetan exile communities in India, where she interviewed former judges and officials, translated law codes, and eventually wrote her acclaimed book, The Golden Yoke. Returning to North American academia, she found Buddhism treated mainly as meditation and private morality, while its legal traditions were dismissed as monastic discipline.

French responded by helping to build a field. An initial meeting produced plans for books, conferences, a journal, and a scholarly network, eventually leading to Buddhism, Law and Society and four conferences by 2026. Her claim is that the Vinaya shaped far more than monastery life; it influenced punishment, exchange, political authority, and statecraft.

Her Tibetan cases showed judges sometimes trying to transform offenders rather than isolate them. Her later work extended Buddhist law into donation, merit, intention, and joy. The difficulty remains making these legal worlds visible without reducing them to rules or stripping away the values that gave them force.

The next guest, Sanjayan Rajasingham, is a Tamil Christian and law professor at the University of Jaffna, and he studies how Buddhism has shaped constitutions in Theravada-majority states. His concern is that religious power often enters law indirectly, through national stories that make majority control appear necessary for protecting the Dhamma.

In Sri Lanka, the unitary state and executive presidency contain little explicitly Buddhist language. Yet both are understood through the Mahavamsa story that the Sinhala people were entrusted with preserving Buddhism. Centralized authority can then appear necessary, while minorities are cast as threats.

Thailand follows a related pattern, with the monarch treated as a Buddhist guardian able to restrain elected institutions. Rajasingham argues that inherited narratives “have a power of their own,” and their consequences have included violence against non-Buddhists and repression of dissent.

Yet he sees another possibility within the same tradition: “What better way to preserve the Dhamma than to live out the fact that ‘the other’ is truly welcome?” As for Myanmar, he feels that a future constitution must prevent religious protection from becoming another route back to exclusion.

Episode #616: Joseph, a community leader among Myanmar refugees in Malaysia, and Patrick, an advocacy specialist working on refugee and migrant issues there, speak about their work and the very challenging situation faced by Myanmar refugees. Refugees themselves, while they have adapted to daily life in Malaysia, that adaptation never became security. Even after many years, they still live with constraints imposed by their legal status.

Because Malaysia was not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, those fleeing conflict are permitted to remain in the country but are not legally recognized as refugees and have no pathway to citizenship or permanent residency. There is also a large and growing group of stateless children born to refugee parents, who can neither obtain citizenship from Myanmar nor legal status in Malaysia.

Joseph and Patrick connect the cumulative effects of violence in Myanmar, dangerous flight, detention risk, economic exploitation, and prolonged legal uncertainty to a widening mental health crisis. They hear from individuals experiencing severe psychological distress, including suicidal thoughts and paranoia. At the same time, mental health services for refugees have largely collapsed there. As a result, refugees with serious psychological conditions have nowhere else to turn.

In response to all these challenges, Joseph and Patrick run community-based training programs that teach culture, language and survival skills. Many newcomers have never before lived outside Myanmar and so are unfamiliar with the exigencies of cross-cultural awareness and understanding. These programs also address the importance of dignity and restoring hope.

Both men reflect on the psychological toll of their own long-term exile and community involvement. Unlike those resettled in Western countries, they continue to imagine their return at some unknown point in the future as the only true endpoint. This prolonged suspension—neither fully rebuilding a life elsewhere, nor fully relinquishing the hope to return home—shapes how Myanmar refugees in Malaysia endure displacement.

Patrick and Joseph say the Burmese people are fighting not for leaders but for freedom and dignity, and he asks those who believe in freedom to stay with them. They end with this plea: “Please don’t forget about Myanmar!”

Episode #615: “My passion for journalism and for telling stories to others still remain,” says Min Mitchell, former executive editor at Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-funded news organization that provides independent reporting to countries with restricted media. Min is also the wife of former US Ambassador Derek Mitchell, who represented the American mission during the country's brief democratic opening. Drawing on a career spanning Taiwanese journalism, U.S.-funded international media and China reporting, Mitchell argues that independent journalism provides an essential public service by delivering trustworthy information to people living under censorship, while documenting repression, conflict, and humanitarian crises.

She explains that RFA reports for audiences living in countries where independent information is unavailable or tightly controlled, requiring journalists to adapt constantly as governments restrict the flow of news. Following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, RFA expanded shortwave broadcasting when internet shutdowns made digital communication unreliable. “Journalism,” she says, “is not just telling news. You also providing people useful information to deal with what is going on the ground.”

Mitchell believes U.S.-funded international media demonstrate democratic values by providing independent reporting rather than serving commercial interests or political agendas. During her years at RFA, covering increasingly authoritarian environments strengthened her conviction that journalists must report facts accurately and without bias. Even as social media, artificial intelligence, and state-sponsored influence campaigns reshape the information landscape, she insists that trusted journalism remains indispensable.

Although concerned by declining global press freedom, Mitchell remains hopeful that societies can reaffirm the importance of truthful reporting and shared democratic values. The quality she returns to most often is resilience. Remembering a Burmese colleague who reassured her after the coup with a simple smiling message, she concludes, “No matter what happens… people have that resilience to get through it, to endure it, and to eventually come out of it.” For Mitchell, that enduring resilience is Myanmar’s greatest lesson.

Episode #614: Richard Evans, an architect who began practice in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, describes his life as a search for truth grounded in direct experience rather than belief. In this discussion, he presents that search as the thread connecting his early skepticism, his confrontation with anxiety, and his later commitment to meditation as a way of testing what was real.

That search began in childhood, when he attended Anglican church services and felt that something did not add up. He did not accept what he was being told about God and expected some kind of consequence for that disbelief… yet nothing happened. That moment shook his trust in inherited belief and left him looking for something that could stand on its own. As he grew older, that question stayed with him. At one point, while walking down the street, he asked himself what he actually wanted from life; the answer that came was not career or stability, but the need to knowtruth itself.

His own experience of anxiety gave the search greater urgency. He describes this as a serious issue within his family, yet his own experience of it still felt isolating. Over time, however, he recognized that what he was experiencing was not unique; it was a recognition changed his search from trying to understand the world, to finding a way to relate to suffering without avoiding it.

That need led him to Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka, which became the first clearly defined method in his search. The first course was difficult, but it gave him a way to test what he was being told against what he could observe. Later, as his experience deepened, the structure of the practice and the organizational constraints no longer felt sufficient on its own. Conversations with other practitioners helped him refine his understanding, and doubt became less an obstacle than a sign of the edge of what he understood.

He describes his practice now as more self-directed, guided by observation, conversation, and continued inquiry, and no longer compelled to discover a “final answer.”

Episode #613: Mike is a lifelong martial artist who came to Myanmar through martial arts training rather than faith, and yet found himself pulled into a Burmese esoteric world he had not been looking for. The line he returns to as both method and warning is simple: “See things as they are, not as they appear.”

He began formal training in the late 1950s, moving through Japanese systems before encountering Burmese martial arts in the United States decades later. What held him was not spectacle but a demanding structure, built around principles, weapons work, conditioning, and long timelines for advancement. That discipline set the conditions for everything that followed. When he first traveled to Mogok in the mid-1990s, it was not as a spiritual seeker. He describes himself as not religious, and skeptical of claims that could not be tested.

In Mogok, he watched demonstrations that crossed into trance and invulnerability, where practitioners endured blades, flame, and boiling water while in altered states. The moment that stayed with him was not the performance but the logic offered afterward: when trance breaks, the protection leaves. Soon he was questioned about his conduct and invited into initiation rites that tied martial discipline to mental training and vows. The five precepts were treated as a foundational requirement, with specific restrictions on alcohol, drugs, and even meat on the grounds that “wild minds,” when ingested, carried effects into samathā practice.

Back in the United States, the initiation continued working on him, pushing him toward teachers across traditions and into a daily meditation routine he continues to this day, while also deepening a conviction—first raised by teachers in Mogok and later affirmed in other encounters—that he had been Ta’ang in a past life.

That same insistence on unsentimental perception shapes his political reading of Myanmar’s war. Mike rejects neat models that ignore fragmentation and uneven power, and he argues that durable outcomes depend on leverage and enforcement, not slogans. In both arenas, he is arguing for the same discipline: train the mind to stop seeing what it wants to see, or it will keep repeating the same decisions.

Episode #612: “You do create a dependency. You create a long-term relationship that also you can leverage into political influence as well.” Ian Storey, a principal fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, sees that dependency as the thread connecting Russia’s military, energy, diplomatic and nuclear ties with Myanmar. The relationship is economically small, but it gives Moscow influence in precisely the sectors the military government has needed most since the 2021 coup.

Myanmar began turning toward Russian weapons in the early 2000s after years of heavy dependence on China. Russian fighter aircraft, helicopters and training later became embedded in the military’s capabilities, creating continuing requirements for spare parts, maintenance, munitions and technical expertise. Since the coup, Russia has also supplied oil and refined products, including aviation fuel, while the two governments developed ruble-kyat payment arrangements and other ways to conduct trade under sanctions.

The political exchange is equally transactional. Myanmar’s military government endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Moscow has provided diplomatic recognition and continued military support. Yet Russia will not sacrifice its wider ASEAN interests for Myanmar, and Storey stresses that the country remains a relatively minor Russian market.

Nuclear cooperation could make the relationship much harder to unwind. After more than two decades of discussions and training, Russia has agreed to provide Myanmar with a small modular reactor, although construction has not begun. If built, the plant would tie Myanmar to Russian financing, operation, fuel and technical services for decades.

Storey doubts Moscow would commit major resources to rescue the military if it faced collapse. Russia remains a secondary power in Southeast Asia, pursuing narrow advantages in arms, energy and nuclear technology. For now, however, those narrow advantages align closely with the military regime’s needs, leaving Myanmar exposed to a partnership that can be deeply consequential without ever becoming deeply committed.

Episode #611: “I always want to be free.” Lienchi Tran, a Vietnamese American meditation teacher, first learned what unfreedom meant in postwar Vietnam. After South Vietnam fell in 1975, her father was sent to a reeducation camp, the family was expelled from Saigon, and the children were scattered among relatives. At night, Tran tied a rubber band around her fingers to keep herself awake while reciting the Buddha’s name and praying for her father’s safety and eventual return.

Raised in Mahāyāna Buddhism and shaped by the writings of Thích Nhất Hạnh, she began meditating seriously as a teenager. Yet an image of a Theravāda monk, seen just before her family emigrated in 1990, opened another direction. In California she found Bhante Khippañño, trained in Mahāsi practice, ordained as a nun, and traveled to Myanmar for an intensive forest retreat under Sayadaw U Paṇḍita. Myanmar felt like a second home, but the freedom she sought did not finally lie in austerity or ordination.

Under Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Tran found a practice built around awareness and wisdom rather than a fixed formula. Eating, engaging in her householder task as an architect, feeling anger, and caring for family could all become part of the same investigation. The task was neither to suppress difficult states nor to make them disappear, but to know what was present and strengthen a different momentum from greed, aversion, and delusion. She applies the same approach to dāna, which she defines as a kind of letting go, and to sīla, which she notes is an examination of the mind before speech or action.

Now a teacher herself, Tran no longer considers robes the measure of seriousness. She remains in the United States to care for her mother, while imagining a return to Myanmar and long practice near Sayadaw U Tejaniya when that responsibility ends. The monastery still attracts her, but not because a nun’s clothing can confer freedom. Practice must proceed through the mind and conditions she actually has, including the attachment she can admit without disguise: the bed at home is still more comfortable than the one at the center.

Episode #610: “I can't leave anymore, because if I were to leave now, I would like never be able to live the same way, because of the comrades who have fallen and the comrades that are still with me… I would not be able to have that guilt with me.”

Dr. Sunshine— a pseudonym that reflects both his warmth and resilience— is a Burmese physician whose life has become deeply intertwined with Myanmar’s modern struggle for freedom and survival.

After the coup, he learned tactical combat medicine to help protesters under fire. Soon he was teaching others—first small groups, then resistance fighters and medics hiding in the jungle. “I’ll shoot him in the hand,” he tells trainees in role-playing sessions. “He will have three minutes until he bleeds out. What are you going to do?”

After fleeing to Thailand, Dr. Sunshine continued traveling through border regions, training men and women from every ethnicity and faith. “We have Muslim soldiers,” he says. “Even during Ramadan, [the non-Muslim PDFs] respect the prayer times and fasting.” He beams when describing this unity: “It’s incredible how everyone comes together inside, even [towards] women and LGBT—they all treat them equally.”

Dr. Sunshine also helps run secret jungle clinics that treat hundreds of displaced people and fighters. “All we’re doing is trying to extend the life of a patient that comes in until they get to a hospital or clinic that can help treat them,” he explains. Supplies are scarce—“I was at one PDF base,” he adds, “they have like four or five hundred soldiers there, and only two tourniquets!”

He admits the toll is immense. “Every time I go in for a training, when I come back, I’ll cry like a baby in my room.” Yet his message remains simple and resolute: “Don’t give up on us. Even just words of support mean everything.”

Episode #609: Jostein Kobbeltvedt, director of the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights in Bergen, Norway, reflects on how the 1990 Rafto Prize awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi helped bring Myanmar’s democracy struggle to international attention and how the global narrative surrounding her later collided with the realities of governing. The Rafto Foundation was created to recognize human rights defenders while their struggles are still unfolding. Early laureates were dissidents from Eastern Europe, and the committee’s decision to recognize Suu Kyi marked an expansion of the prize’s focus beyond that region.

At the time of the award, Suu Kyi was under house arrest and largely unknown outside Myanmar. Her name came to the committee’s attention through a brief newspaper mention, yet the prize helped introduce her story to wider audiences. International recognition soon followed, including the Nobel Peace Prize. The Rafto Foundation maintained long-term contact with Suu Kyi and her family during her detention, and in 2013 she traveled to Bergen to formally receive the prize.

But the narrative surrounding Suu Kyi shifted dramatically after she entered government following Myanmar’s 2015 elections. As State Counsellor, she confronted political constraints that differed from those she faced as an opposition leader. Violence against Rohingya communities beginning in 2016, and her response to the crisis shocked many international supporters who had viewed her as a democratic icon.

The experience highlights the complexities of democratic transitions and the enduring influence of military power within Myanmar’s political system. It also illustrates how international advocacy, economic engagement, and diplomacy have shaped Norway’s evolving relationship with Myanmar. Despite continuing setbacks, Kobbeltvedt emphasizes that Myanmar’s citizens remain committed to pursuing democracy, and their struggle continues to draw international solidarity.

Episode #608: Dave Hopkins came to vipassana meditation not as a scholar, traveler, or spiritual seeker, but as a working-class tree worker carrying grief, anger, addiction, and exhaustion. Raised in Delaware after his father’s DuPont job brought the family north, he moved through school trouble, the Navy, drinking, restaurant work, and tree crews before landing at Dhamma Dharā, the Massachusetts meditation center in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. The pressure that brought him there was blunt: “Grief, yeah.”

His younger brother Ed had taken a course at Dhamma Dharā in 1987 and returned radiant, but in March 1989 he died by suicide. Hopkins smoked more pot, tried to dull the wound, and found that nothing was working. His first ten-day course was brutal. He arrived as a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker, left his cigarettes in the truck, endured craving, pain, drowsiness, and anger, then ran out on the tenth day, lit up, gagged, and never smoked again. The discipline gave him something he had repeatedly lost: a reason not to quit.

Over the decades, practice, service, and tree work became linked. Washing pots for students taught him that ordinary labor could help others receive Dhamma. Tree work taught him preservation without sentimentality. He removes dangerous trees when necessary, but his business-card principle is simple: “Ff there's a tree that can be saved, let's have a conversation.”

Yet Hopkins’ loyalty to the tradition does not erase his questions. He has seen Dhamma Dharā grow from rough accommodations into polished infrastructure, watched the community become younger and more professional, and felt the assistant teacher world become more distant. Since Goenka’s death, he senses “a little less heat” in the tradition’s momentum. He remains committed, but wonders about rigidity, taboo subjects, samādhi, jhāna, and older Burmese teachings that seem wider than what the contemporary organization now permits.

Hopkins never made it to Burma, and given the current conditions of conflict now ranging there, he doubts he may ever reach the Golden Land. “A lot of trains that I missed, a lot of boats that I missed,” he muses. Still, the deeper truth he draws from the path is less romantic than exacting: “You had the framework, and you had the technique, and no matter what length of course you're taking, you're on your own.”

Episode #607: “I could not stay under a military rule that’s been killing thousands of people,” Maple says. “I cannot just sit and watch.”

When Myanmar’s military seized power in February 2021, Maple was a scholarship student in South Korea studying Business Management and Entrepreneurship, already thinking about how she might one day redirect her education toward reforming the system she had grown up in. School, as she experienced it, had been shaped by hierarchy and competition rather than curiosity. Students were ranked into sections, with privileges reserved for the highest group. “The top students were in section A,” she recalls, describing how access to resources like the computer room followed those divisions. By fifth grade, monthly “talent” badges were awarded to the top ten students and publicly removed from anyone who fell behind. “It’s not about learning,” she says. “It’s all about memorizing everything and just taking the exams in the best way possible.”

Maple’s political awareness formed early. At eight years old, during the 2007 monk-led protests, she marched with her family and later watched video footage of crackdowns at home. “I saw the bodies and everything,” she remembers. By the time the coup trapped her in Myanmar during a visit from her Korean university during the pandemic, she initially believed international pressure might reverse it, studying United Nations statements closely before realizing those words offered no protection.

Maple began fundraising for the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, offering scholarship consultations to students who could show donation receipts. The post spread; her bank account was frozen; soldiers arrived with a warrant under Section 505A. She spent eleven months in hiding while continuing her Korean coursework online, the isolation eroding her health and pushing her toward suicide until a drawing from her younger sister interrupted that spiral. After a failed attempt to cross into Thailand and a deportation, Maple eventually made it back across the border.

In Mae Sot, she now works with displaced students navigating the legal and financial barriers that stand between them and formal education. Here she is continuing her life’s work that started many years ago, yet under very different conditions. Myanmar students, she insists, are “smart, outstanding, and hardworking,” and resilient beyond their years. What they lack is not determination but access. “If you just give them a chance,” she promises, “they would do whatever it takes.”

Episode #606: Anusorn Tamajai’s attempted intervention during Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to Thailand began with an undelivered letter. Prevented from placing his proposals directly before Myanmar’s military leader, the Thai member of parliament raised his voice instead. The act was spontaneous, but the reasoning behind it was not. “My intention was to demand for peace in Myanmar, and I would like to fight for humanity.”

Anusorn favors a democratic federal future for Myanmar rooted in popular participation. Political activity and free expression must be restored, he argues, followed by a genuinely free election; if the military authorities cannot conduct one credibly, he believes an international body such as the United Nations should do so. His support for the Panglong tradition sits inside a wider principle: Myanmar’s political order should be determined by its people rather than imposed by an authoritarian government.

That principle also governs his view of Thailand. Thai investment that benefits the junta should carry conditions supporting greater freedom and openness, and economic relations should serve ordinary people in both countries rather than privileged corporate or political interests. Thailand should engage political forces beyond the military regime, while people arriving from Myanmar should be treated according to humanitarian obligations.

Anusorn wants ASEAN to exert similar pressure, but he recognizes how slowly such mechanisms work. He does not answer that frustration by embracing political shortcuts, but instead advisesthat movements must be built over time, even when success may lie beyond a single lifetime. “You need to build up the movement. It’s a long march.”

His planned response is to keep organizing, including an ASEAN network supporting democracy, human rights, and peace in Myanmar. The urgency has not disappeared simply because the route is long: Myanmar’s people, as he repeatedly insists, have already suffered for too long.

Episode #605: Note: this podcast episode, as well as the following text describing it, includes frank language about sexuality, male sex work, and self-harm. Reader and listener discretion is advised.

The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners working across Asia, creating a wide-ranging space for exchange, debate, and reflection. Within that broader setting, Burma emerged as one of several urgent areas of focus amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, setting up a small space to capture a series of short, real-time conversations with participants moving through the conference. These interviews were shaped by immediacy—thoughts shared in the moment, rather than after the fact—and are now being extended to a wider global audience. This episode is the final in a four-part series.

Amnuaypond Kidpromma, a lecturer at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Humanities, studies a rarely discussed dimension of Myanmar’s post-coup displacement into Thailand — the rise of Myanmar male sex workers who enter the trade not as a planned profession but as an extension of migrant labor that no longer pays enough to survive.

In her research, these men usually arrive from rural Myanmar as they flee conflict and conscription, and take whatever work they can find, often in construction or restaurants. When wages fail to cover daily life, visa costs, work permits, and remittances back home, sex work becomes another shift. What interests Kidpromma is not only the economic pressure but the language the men use to absorb it. “They just say, ‘I am a man who takes the job,’” she explains. The phrase turns sex work into temporary labor rather than a fixed identity, and links it to a masculine obligation to provide.

That Burmese masculine frame shapes everything. Most of the men she interviewed entered the work still understanding themselves as straight, still calling themselves “real men,” and not speaking of the job in the same moral register that female sex workers often do. Where women in her earlier research described guilt, bad karma, religious striving, and the need to make merit, the men more often treated the work as harsh necessity. Many had once been ordained as novices or monks, and Kidpromma argues that they seem to feel they retain a kind of religious legitimacy even after entering the trade, while women work much harder to repair spiritual damage.

The movement into sex work is often gradual. Friends introduce them. They begin by drinking with clients, then allowing touch, then accepting money that far exceeds anything available in ordinary migrant labor. One man told her that after being kissed and touched, he received 5,000 baht — “this is like the whole month I earned.” From there, the line moved quickly to sexual relations.

Kidpromma does not present these men as symbols or moral lessons. She presents them as people cornered by a border economy that keeps widening after the coup. What she hears most often is not self-expression but sacrifice — the insistence that whatever is happening to them is being endured so that someone else might eat, study, or survive a little more safely.

Episode #604: “I chose hip hop.”

Born in Yangon in 1979 to parents who were nationally known singers, Anegga grew up in a household where art was both celebrated and watched. His father had helped introduce rock music to Myanmar during an earlier era of military control, and supporting opposition politics carried real risk. He remembers military visits to the family home at night and his mother having to hide because of her involvement with the NLD. Music, in other words, was never insulated from power.

Hip hop entered his life through scarcity. Myanmar at the time was largely cut off from international media, English-language books, and commercial music distribution. He encountered rap through English-language radio broadcasts, especially VOA, and was drawn first to sound rather than meaning. He did not initially understand most of the lyrics he heard from artists like LL Cool J, Nas, or Biggie, but he studied cadence, breath control, rhyme structure, and delivery. Hip hop became a way of accessing a vocabulary of frustration that felt familiar even if the geography was different. He often explains that while Myanmar did not have American-style ghettos, it lived under a different form of systemic deprivation, one that shaped the whole country rather than particular neighborhoods.

In 2000, he co-founded ACID and released what is considered to be Myanmar’s first hip hop album. The impact was immediate among young people; at the same time, every release required navigating censorship committees, submitting written lyrics in advance, altering phrasing to avoid rejection, and sometimes facing arbitrary refusals from broadcast authorities even after formal approval. The system did not operate transparently; it operated through unpredictability.

Although he has consistently argued that ACID did not begin as an explicitly political group, interpretation often exceeded intention. Songs meant as expressions of loyalty or social observation were read by audiences as indirect political commentary. That ambiguity narrowed after 2007, when the Saffron Revolution led to arrests of band members, including Zayar Thaw. Over time, Anegga moved from coded expression to open political engagement, releasing explicitly political songs, supporting the NLD, and distributing banned political literature discreetly among students. His political involvement was also shaped by family history and long-standing loyalty to Aung San Suu Kyi.

After the 2021 coup, the separation between music and politics disappeared entirely. Zayar Thaw, who had moved from hip hop into parliament, joined the resistance and was executed by the military in 2022, an act that underscored how thoroughly the country had reversed course. Anegga left Myanmar soon after and now lives in Thailand as an urban refugee, separated from his family and uncertain about permanent resettlement.

Episode #603: Saw Poe Wah assists the Karen Refugee Committee (KRC) and speaks from a life shaped by the Thai–Myanmar border camps where he studied, lived, and later worked with community-based organizations. He describes the KRC as a Karen-led body that helps coordinate care for refugees across nine camps in Thailand’s Tak and Mae Hong Son provinces, a system he places at roughly fifty years of continuous operation. Its responsibilities are basic and ongoing: keeping people fed, connecting them to health services, and sustaining a community that has been treated as temporary for decades.

Saw Poe Wah’s central argument is about strain, not ideology. Since the coup, more people have arrived from ever before to seek out safety, while the funding base that supports rations and healthcare has become more uncertain. He describes reorganizing limited support by vulnerability and pushing what self-reliance is possible through work access outside the camps, a route that depends on Thai permissions and never covers everyone. “We’ve seen so many people from inside Burma coming, seeking temporary shelter and care,” he says, and the problem is that short-term arrangements quickly harden into long-term displacement.

Saw Poe Wah also speaks about the conditions inside Myanmar that keep driving movement: landmines that shape where teams can travel, and airstrikes that make fixed clinics and schools dangerous to operate. In areas where shelter itself can attract attack, he describes care delivered in the open. “We have to treat the patients under the trees.” The camps can ration, reorganize, and coordinate with larger agencies, but they cannot control the forces that keep producing displacement or the political decisions that determine how long support can be sustained.

Episode #602: “The things that I was devoted to for liberation became the weapons that were used to harm me. The community that was a refuge became the thing that exiled me.”

Amma Thanasanti, a meditation teacher, former Theravāda nun, and founder and spiritual director of Awakening Truth, spent more than two decades in the Ajahn Chah lineage before a conflict over women’s authority led to her expulsion. Her path had begun at UC Santa Cruz in 1979, where Jack Engler’s teaching convinced her that spiritual life would become the center of her life. Retreat practice, encounters with teachers including Dipa Ma, and survival of a Himalayan black bear attack deepened her conviction that meditation opened genuine freedom.

That conviction did not prepare her for the limits of practice inside an unequal institution. At Amaravati, monks held authority while nuns lived under a separate sīladharā structure without equal access to bhikkhunī ordination. When Amma Thanasanti and three other nuns drafted a statement seeking a path out of their double bind, the response was shouting, a secret plan to reduce the nuns’ rights, and a ceremony she could not join without violating her integrity. Her talks were erased, former colleagues were told to avoid her, and the community she had treated as refuge became a source of exile.

Recovery took fifteen years. Trauma work and attachment repair showed her that liberating insight does not automatically resolve wounds formed through fear, attachment, or coercive control. Her teaching now integrates the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta with trauma-informed understanding, while challenging communities that rely on self-report and protect a teacher’s identity more readily than those reporting harm.

For practitioners, the difficulty is that belonging itself can narrow perception. Amma Thanasanti urges people to keep trusted relationships outside spiritual institutions and to notice changes in sleep, health, confidence, shame, anxiety, and the ability to speak honestly. Meditation may remain liberating even when a community becomes harmful; that split does not make the harm unreal. Her counsel is directed first toward the person whose own signals have become difficult to trust: “When the balance is such that you feel that the harm that’s happening is not something that you’re able to metabolize… Listen to that.”

Episode #601: Chalida Tajaroensuk, chairperson and founder of the Thailand-based People Empowerment Foundation, argues that responses to Myanmar’s post-coup crisis must be grounded in the experiences of refugees, migrant workers, and border communities rather than shaped primarily through elite diplomacy and state-centered policymaking. Her organization conducts fact-finding missions, works with refugee communities and ethnic organizations, and brings information from camps and border regions into discussions with Thai authorities because she believes policymakers often lack direct understanding of conditions on the ground.

She describes Thailand’s Myanmar policy as shaped by competing political, security, humanitarian and economic pressures. Different governments therefore shift between diplomatic caution, economic engagement, and security-focused approaches. Although many critics see Thailand’s continued dialogue with Myanmar’s military regime as indirect support for the junta, Chalida argues that maintaining communication preserves channels through which humanitarian concerns and border realities can still be raised. She also believes the weakness of ASEAN and divisions among Myanmar’s opposition groups encourage regional governments to rely on cautious diplomacy rather than more direct intervention.

Much of her organization’s work focuses on refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border. She supports Thailand’s recent decision to allow some refugees to work outside the camps, butargues that the policy remains unevenly implemented. Her organization found that many refugees were excluded from official registration lists, preventing them from accessing work opportunities. Many camp residents also lack language skills, job training, and familiarity with the outside economy after decades of confinement. At the same time, humanitarian aid continues to decline while resettlement opportunities abroad have narrowed sharply.

Chalida argues that Thailand must move beyond emergency management and create long-term systems that allow refugees to work and support themselves economically. Despite political obstacles and regional instability, she maintains that gradual policy change, long-term cooperation, and grassroots advocacy can eventually help displaced Myanmar communities rebuild their lives with dignity.

Episode #600: “I won’t be disappointing the people.” Before Kyaw Moe Tun took the UN General Assembly floor on February 26, 2021, that was as much as he had disclosed about the position he intended to take. Myanmar’s permanent representative—its ambassador to the UN—and a diplomat since 1993, he had received the junta’s instructions after the coup but secretly prepared a statement siding with the public and the ousted elected government. Almost no one knew his words in advance. Once delivered, they placed both his position and his safety at risk.

The junta tried to remove him from the UN and later an assassination plot against him brought FBI intervention and a month of round-the-clock Secret Service protection. Kyaw Moe Tun nevertheless retained the seat after the UN Credentials Committee deferred competing claims in 2021. That arrangement has continued, but at a price: he has withdrawn from the General Debate speakers list each year and kept a lower profile to protect the consensus that excludes the junta’s nominee.

The next decision is formed through a process he cannot directly address. China, Russia, and the United States are expected to sit on the nine-country committee, while the other six members may emerge only when the new General Assembly session begins. Informal discussions can settle the language before a November meeting, and the full General Assembly may approve the report within seconds. The mission defending Myanmar’s democratic claim has meanwhile shrunk from fourteen people to five, surviving on funds held before the coup.

Losing the seat would remove the channel through which Kyaw Moe Tun conveys the people’s aspirations and seeks international action. It would also strip him of the office from which he has resisted the junta while deepening his exile. He says the military has sentenced him for treason and that he must protect his wife and two children. The institution will decide who represents Myanmar; its current representative cannot safely return there.

Episode #599: “I've been blessed to be on a spiritual journey for well over the last 50 years,” says psychiatrist Raman Khosla, reflecting on the lifelong search that eventually led him to S.N. Goenka’s Vipassana tradition. In this, the first in a series of ongoing conversation with Insight Myanmar, he traces the influences that shaped his quest to understand suffering and the mind.

Khosla credits his parents with creating a deeply spiritual home grounded in the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings on devotion, selfless action, ethics, and compassion. His fascination with the causes of suffering and inner transformation began in childhood. He recalls asking why a classmate was sad, noticing that physical pain changed while sitting quietly during family yoga sessions, and questioning why religious chants described moral transformation without explaining how it could be achieved.

As a teenager, an underlying dissatisfaction persisted despite an outwardly fortunate life. Reading about the Buddha, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and encountering dedicated religious figures strengthened his conviction that genuine inner freedom must be possible. He explored numerous traditions, learning from Osho Rajneesh, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Bihar School of Yoga, and especially Jiddu Krishnamurti. While each offered valuable insights, none fully answered his central question: how can profound psychological transformation actually be realized?

Believing the mind to be the most important subject of study, Khosla pursued medicine and psychiatry, hoping science and spirituality would illuminate the same mystery. During postgraduate training, however, he concluded that while Western psychiatry effectively treated mental illness, it offered far less guidance for cultivating humanity’s highest mental potential. Ajahn Sumedho’s Chitta Viveka further convinced him that the Buddha’s teachings described a lived reality rather than an abstract philosophy.

Everything changed in 1987 when Khosla attended his first ten-day Goenka Vipassana course. He describes it as “the biggest single life-changing event of my life,” transforming the study of the mind from an intellectual pursuit into direct experience. Although he immediately wanted to dedicate himself fully to the practice, Goenka advised him first to complete his psychiatric training and allow the transition to unfold naturally, setting the stage for the next chapter of his journey.

Episode #598: Rare earth mining has drawn Kachin State into a global struggle over minerals essential to electronics, green technologies, automobiles, and defense, while communities near the mines bear the environmental and social costs of extraction. Produced by Insight Myanmar for the International Development Research Centre’s Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar Initiative (K4DM), this episode brings three Kachin researchers into conversation with themes from their August 13 Dialogue on Sustainable Development, including transboundary pollution, community vulnerability, environmental governance, and regional cooperation across the Mekong.

First, Brang (a pseudonym being used for safety) sees rare-earth mining as both a local disaster and a geopolitical asset. Heavy rare earths from Kachin feed defense, electronics, automobiles, and green technology, while mining clears forests, contaminates water, destroys crops, and damages health; around the Chipwi River, he points to vanished fish and cattle dying after drinking polluted water. China, he argues, has pushed toxic extraction across its borders while retaining control over processing technology. Western access therefore depends on more than securing ore; in Brang’s view it also depends on political change in Myanmar rather than a commercial accommodation with the military.

Tu Nan (a pseudonym being used for safety) approaches the industry through environmental and transitional justice, asking not only who carries the damage now but who will be responsible for repair after conflict. His focus stays with communities whose livelihoods, forests, water, and cultural practices are being depleted. Yet he also documents their activity: villagers create protected community forests and defend watersheds against mining pressure. “They have that kind of agency to respond to a threat of oppression.” For Tu Nan, the Kachin Independence Organization’s claims to future statehood will be tested by whether resource governance includes public participation and protects community welfare even while extraction finances conflict.

Seng Li studies the gap between KIO mining regulations and conditions on the ground. He sees greater institutionalization since 2025, but environmental restoration, labor, and gender protections remain weak. Women seeking mine work can face sexual coercion from Chinese operators, while polluted water and lost agricultural markets reshape village life. Conflict has expanded extraction by increasing desperation and armed groups’ need for revenue. Seng Li’s final concern reaches the international system: resource-governance frameworks often ignore non-state authorities, even though those actors control mines and communities. Accountability, for him, requires bringing them within the standards applied to state governments.

Together, these accounts frame Myanmar’s rare-earth industry as a regional concern requiring credible monitoring, community participation, accountable state and non-state governance, supply-chain responsibility, and cooperation that gives affected communities a voice and a fair share of the benefits.

Episode #597: Victor Chan’s life began not with a spiritual calling but with motion. Born in Hong Kong and trained in physics, he left without a fixed destination and spent the early 1970s moving across Europe and Asia along the hippie trail. “I was into sex, rock and roll and hedonism,” he says. Yet through a chance encounter in Kabul, he was introduced within a single year to three figures who would stay with him: the Dalai Lama in India, Mahasi Sayadaw in Rangoon, and Chögyam Trungpa in Colorado.

Of the three, Mahasi Sayadaw left the deepest mark. Chan found formal meditation nearly unbearable, but Mahasi’s presence stayed with him for decades. The Dalai Lama made a very different first impression: when Chan arrived in Dharamsala in 1972, road-worn, unwashed, and dressed like a wandering hippie, the future Nobel laureate could barely suppress his laughter.

Later, Tibet itself became Chan’s great field of movement. Entering during a brief window of looser restrictions in the early 1980s, he walked far beyond the usual routes, reaching monasteries, pilgrimage circuits, and remote artistic sites that had survived the Cultural Revolution. What drove him was not money or institutional backing, but compulsion, curiosity, and a nomadic instinct he still cannot fully explain.

That work led to the Tibet Handbook, a vast guide documenting places, histories, and routes that were almost unknown to outsiders. It also brought him into the orbit of scholars like Michael Aris and, through those circles, into early contact with Aung San Suu Kyi, long before her political emergence.

In later years, Chan’s attention shifted toward another kind of movement: conversation. Through public events and intimate dinners, he came to value not instruction or mastery, but the exchange itself—an active, searching encounter between people, ideas, and worlds, forged in travel, risk, attention, and lifelong restlessness.

Episode #596: “I needed to find another way... through research, writing, education, mentoring, community work,” says CS Kyaw, a Myanmar-born doctor turned development researcher now based in Australia. She argues that Myanmar’s future depends not only on financial support from abroad but also on social remittances, the transfer of knowledge, skills, values, and relationships across borders that allow displaced Myanmar people to continue contributing even when returning home is unsafe.

Originally trained in medicine and public health, Kyaw worked in Myanmar’s nonprofit sector before receiving an Australia Awards scholarship to study development at the University of Melbourne. Her work convinced her that health could not be understood through medicine alone. While serving as an outreach doctor, she saw neighboring villages with strikingly different access to education and healthcare because of unequal resources and opportunities. The experience led her to see well-being as inseparable from broader social and political conditions.

The 2021 military coup became another turning point. It overturned her plans and forced her to ask how she could continue serving Myanmar when she could no longer do so safely inside the country. That question led her toward research, education, mentoring, community work, transnationalism, and social remittances. Now living in Australia as an asylum seeker, she identifies as a “transmigrant,” someone whose identity and responsibilities continue across borders.

Kyaw puts these ideas into practice by volunteering with refugee and migrant women through the River Nile Learning Centre, co-founding Mohinga Hub for Myanmar diaspora communities, and teaching through Spring University Myanmar, while acknowledging the funding, security, and volunteer challenges these initiatives face.

She also reflects on tensions between Myanmar communities inside and outside the country, the decolonization of language and knowledge, and the importance of local voices in education, research, and advocacy. Throughout the interview, she returns to the values that unite her work—dignity, equality, knowledge, community, and freedom. Asked to describe Myanmar’s future in one word, she says, “hope.”

Episode #595: Salai Vanni Bawi, a Chin researcher focused on migration, refugees, and transnational repression, speaks about how the country’s crisis extends beyond its borders into a system that continues to shape the lives of displaced people even after they have fled the country.

For example, in Thailand, individuals passing through Bangkok airport may be detained and interrogated, sometimes finding that authorities already possess detailed information about them. The presence of Myanmar embassy officials during questioning suggests further coordination. However, outcomes vary: in Bangkok, visibility and legal support may prevent deportation, while in border areas such as Mae Sot, enforcement is harsher and more unpredictable. Charges like illegal entry or human trafficking can be used to justify detention or pressure detainees, sometimes reframing political cases as criminal ones.

Corruption further shapes outcomes, as bribes may determine whether someone is deported—an outcome that can lead to imprisonment, forced conscription, or death. At the same time, local relationships and informal arrangements can allow limited movement, showing that authority is negotiated as much as enforced.

Vanni Bawi situates these regional dynamics within a broader structural problem: the way international engagement with Myanmar is still overwhelmingly organized around state-to-state relations. In practice, this means external actors continue to prioritize engagement with the military regime—treating it as the primary interlocutor—while the resistance and ethnic groups remain largely excluded. He argues this is not simply a political choice but a built-in limitation of conventional foreign policy frameworks, which are not designed to engage meaningfully with non-state actors.

What is missing, he argues, is sustained and direct engagement with the actors actually shaping events inside Myanmar. Without incorporating these perspectives into regional and international dialogue, any attempt at resolution will remain fundamentally incomplete.

Episode #594: “We fumble through life a little bit, and we end up doing different kind of things.” Arthur Nichols uses this modest explanation for a life that has now been shaped by Vipassana for fifty years. At eighty-three, he has spent four decades conducting courses in the tradition of S. N. Goenka and helped establish the practice across Latin America. Yet he refuses to describe his path as heroic, carefully planned, or inherently wiser than the lives other people build.

Nichols was teaching at a university in Atlanta when he took leave in 1975 and traveled overland to India. A book by Jiddu Krishnamurti opened his interest in living differently, and travelers later directed him toward a vipassana meditation course in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. He soon joined the first students at the newly opened Dhamma Giri center in Igatpuri, visited U Ba Khin’s International Meditation Centre in Rangoon, sat long courses, and was appointed one of the very first assistant teachers in 1986. Although he repeatedly considered returning to academic work, conducting courses and maintaining twice-daily practice gradually became his full-time life.

Beginning in Venezuela in 1994, Nichols worked across Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and much of Latin America, often conducting retreats in temporary rented sites before permanent centers existed. He learned Spanish and Portuguese for the courses and watched small local groups develop into a regional network that has held thousands of retreats. He credits neither persuasion nor personal leadership for that growth, but the pāramīs (or spiritual potential) that he believes draw people toward practice when their time ripens.

Nichols also resists presenting total dedication to meditation as a prescription. A monk, a parent, a professional, and a course server may each follow a different path. And in Burma, where war and displacement are now making sustained practice all but impossible, he offers no easy spiritual answer to abject physical suffering. At eighty-three, he continues to meditate, answer questions, and travel where courses need him. The work has expanded across continents, but his own measure remains deliberately small: practicing sīla, following right speech, and staying dedicated to this path.

Episode #593: “Why are values included in international trade?” Arianna Bondi’s research begins with that question, but Myanmar turns it into a problem of limits. A PhD candidate at McGill University studying international political economy, Bondi examined how the European Union tried to promote human rights through trade policy, focusing on Myanmar’s place in the EU’s Generalized System of Preferences.

Her study, completed in 2020 at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna, looks at the period before the 2021 coup. That timing matters; Myanmar had been brought back into the EU’s Everything ButArms trade scheme in 2013 after preferences were withdrawn in 1997 over forced labor concerns. The policy was supposed to support development while encouraging respect for international standards. Bondi found that this created two different tools: positive conditionality, through engagement and market access, and negative conditionality, through the threat or use of withdrawal.

Her interviewees saw little evidence that withdrawal had produced human rights change. Negative conditionality could send a signal, but it risked punishing workers while failing to reach the military structures responsible for the gravest abuses. Positive conditionality seemed more promising, especially in the garment sector, where EU-linked trade could improve wages, standards, and opportunities for largely female workers. But that success remained narrow. It could touch factory floors more easily than constitutional power, military violence, or the Rohingya crisis.

Bondi’s account keeps returning to mechanism. Human rights cannot be treated as one broad category that trade either improves or fails to improve. The question has to be which right, which sector, which actor, and which channel. EU policy also carried other motives: business access, regional influence, concern over China, and member-state interests. That makes the application of values uneven.

Myanmar leaves the trade instrument under pressure. A tariff preference may help workers, a withdrawal may make a statement, and neither may reach the institution doing the most harm.

Episode #592: In this, the 7th installment of a series of discussions with Jonathan Crowley, a former longtime practitioner and assistant teacher in the Goenka Vipassana tradition, he reflects on his decades-long relationship with the Goenka Vipassana tradition. For many years he believed the technique was complete, consistent, and capable of carrying a diligent student all the way to liberation. The emotional rewards of early practice reinforced that certainty, and the culture’s strong discouragement of outside study made alternatives seem unnecessary. Only later did he realize how those conditions prevented him from seeing the limits built into the system itself.

A turning point came when he started reading the suttas. He saw that key concepts—in particular, vedanā, saṅkhāra, jhāna—were taught in ways far narrower than their Canonical meanings. Vedanā was treated almost exclusively as physical sensation, rather than the full affective tone of experience. Saṅkhāra became a simple “reaction” rather than the broad field of conditioned formations. And jhāna, central to the Buddha’s description of the path, was omitted entirely. These gaps shaped the expectations of long-course students, who were told that deep meditation would unfold through patient observation of bodily sensations alone. Without strong samādhi, however, the clarity needed for deeper insight never develops.

He links these doctrinal limitations to cultural ones: a spectrum of fundamentalist tendencies, discouragement of inquiry, fear of “confusion,” and a social environment where silence and equanimity become tools of conformity. Yet he also speaks with affection for what the practice gave him and hopes his reflections give others permission not to abandon the tradition, but to think more freely within and beyond it.

Episode #591: “The war may end, but for years and years, landmines indiscriminately will kill and maim people, quite often children, as well as farm animals, long after the act of fighting has ended.” Ken Maclean, a cultural anthropologist and human-rights fact-finder, traces Myanmar’s landmine crisis from early-2000s interviews with prisoners forced to walk ahead of soldiers through suspected minefields to the political obstacles that still prevent systematic clearance. His central concern is not only what mines do when planted, but what they continue to control after troops leave.

During research in 2013–14, possible refugee return from Thailand exposed the lack of safe routes, reliable maps, or an agreed authority for mine action. Military units, ethnic armed groups, and villagers used different mines for battle lines, camp perimeters, resource sites, roads, and community protection. Lightweight devices shifted in rain and soil, old mines remained live, and armed groups sometimes dug up and reused them, leaving no side with a dependable record of contamination.

Removing a device can cost hundreds of dollars or more, even when it cost only a few dollars to make. A low-cost tractor fitted with a spiked hedgehog roller cleared some flat farmland in Karen State, but formal standards, ceasefire fears, and rivalries prevented the experiment from expanding. Mine-risk education faced its own contradiction: material that taught civilians to recognize booby traps could also teach fighters how to build them. Maclean still argues that multilingual risk education should be broadcast nationwide as immediate harm reduction.

Peace would not settle who controls clearance or owns the land made usable. A national mine-action center could centralize authority in ways ethnic organizations reject, while clearing profitable roads and towns first could favor elites over refugees and displaced families. With conflict now dispersed and contamination no longer confined to the borderlands, Maclean sees no logical place to begin. Even if fighting stopped, the mines would continue to shape movement, livelihood, and return for decades.

Episode #590: Chie Ikeya’s work on colonial Burma began almost by accident. Trained as a historian and originally planning to study the Japanese occupation, she found herself in Yangon waiting for archival access that never came. In the meantime, she read Burmese newspapers and periodicals from the early twentieth century, where the notion of the “modern woman” appeared again and again as a source of fascination, fear, hope, and moral panic.

Her later work, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, follows that figure through education, print culture, nationalism, consumer desire, sexuality, Buddhism, and race. In colonial Burma, women’s education expanded sharply, especially through missionary schools, and opened paths into medicine, law, teaching, journalism, and public life. Yet those openings also made women symbolic terrain. Their clothing, schooling, work, marriages, sexuality, and public presence became ways for others to debate whether Burma was becoming modern, losing itself, resisting colonialism, or protecting the nation.

Ikeya complicates the familiar claim that Burmese women traditionally enjoyed high status. Certain legal rights around property and marriage were real, but rights on paper did not erase domestic violence, social control, class inequality, or the difficulty of forcing law into practice. The claim that Burmese women needed no feminism also carried political force: it could defend Burma against colonial arguments for “uplift,” while feeding a wider ideology of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism.

That ideology later shaped debates over intermarriage, religious belonging, anti-Muslim politics, and the boundaries of the nation. Ikeya does not treat exclusion as only state propaganda. It is diffuse, historical, and embedded in ordinary assumptions about who belongs, who does not, and whose presence must be regulated. Yet she also refuses to make violence the whole record. “Burma has not always been like this,” she says. Alongside histories of estrangement, she asks historians to recover the quieter histories of affection, belonging, and difficult intimacy that rarely survive in the archive.

Episode #589: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners focused on Asia, with Burma emerging as a key topic amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, capturing a series of short, real-time conversations with participants and sharing these perspectives with a wider global audience. This is the second of a four part series, and features two guests.

First up is Ponpavi Sangsurasdej, a Thai historian of modern Burma. She studies the years around independence not as the inevitable birth of a nation, but as a struggle among rival political futures, where communists, socialists, and ethnic minority leaders were all attempting to shape what a free Burma might become. The problem, she argues, is that later nationalist history flattened that contested moment into a far cleaner story than it was, since “we only focused decolonizing movement that were successful,” pushing other anti-colonial visions to the margins. In her telling, Burma’s history cannot be reduced to a single Burman-centered trajectory, especially given Rangoon’s role as a transnational hub of ideas, ideologies, and political networks, where categories like communism or decolonization carried unstable meanings across different actors and contexts. Rather than replacing one dominant narrative with another, she returns to sidelined figures and failed negotiations, asking who was excluded and how labels like collaborator or nationalist concealed deeper fractures. Those omissions, she suggests, continue to shape the distrust and fragmentation that define Burma today, where “there’s no easy, simple answer to it,” only the ongoing work of tracing how these narratives were formed and what was lost when one version prevailed.

Next up is Wenxu Zhang, a historian of the Indian Ocean world. He examines Rangoon in the interwar period as a cosmopolitan port caught between global connection and social fracture, focusing on the 1930–31 riots to understand how Chinese diaspora communities experienced that instability. What began as labor conflict during the Great Depression escalated into broader violence, where anti-colonial sentiment, economic distress, and opportunistic attacks blurred together, leaving Chinese merchants increasingly vulnerable despite their partial cultural integration. Zhang resists reducing the events to a single narrative, showing how British, Burmese, and Chinese perspectives framed the same violence as revolution, nationalism, or banditry depending on position, while for those on the ground, the sense that society was becoming unstable remained the dominant reality. He situates this moment within a larger shift toward a more inward Burmese nationalism, where identity hardened and cosmopolitan fluidity receded, leaving behind traces still visible in Yangon today—a city that retains the physical remnants of its global past, even as the networks and vitality that sustained it have largely disappeared.

Episode #588: Historian Douglas Ober began questioning the standard history of Indian Buddhism while traveling to Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and other sacred sites in his twenties. The dates he found on buildings and inscriptions did not fit the familiar sequence in which Buddhism vanished, European scholars rediscovered it, Anagarika Dharmapala revived it, and B.R. Ambedkar restored it in 1956. His research led him to argue that “this idea around Buddhism’s disappearance from India is kind of a modern myth, and I call it a kind of useful fiction.”

Ober does not deny the collapse of monasteries, patronage, and literary production after the thirteenth century. He instead recovers evidence that extinction language excludes: Buddhist images produced into the seventeenth century, manuscripts copied by devotees near Bodh Gaya, and continuing pilgrimage networks linking India with Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Chittagong, Arakan, and Burma. Colonial scholarship further narrowed the record by recognizing textual, monastic forms while treating yogis, borderland communities, and mixed traditions as doubtful or irrelevant.

The Bay of Bengal becomes central to this longer history. Rakhine monks and patrons moved through Bengal and northern India; U Chandramani studied with Mahavir, helped establish a Buddhist rest house at Kushinagar, and later officiated Ambedkar’s mass conversion of Dalits at Nagpur. Ambedkar’s movement therefore emerged from a century of anti-caste Buddhist organizing and transregional monastic connections, even as his rationalist Navayana Buddhism transformed inherited doctrines around karma and rebirth.

After independence, Nehru placed Buddhist symbols at the center of Indian statecraft through the dharma wheel on the flag, the Ashokan lion capital, and relic missions across Asia, including Burma. These objects carried genuine devotion and political purpose at once. Ober’s history leaves both forces intact: Buddhism survives not outside politics, but through people and institutions repeatedly deciding what it means, who may claim it, and what power can do in its name.

Episode #587: Su Thit, the founder of Spouses of People’s Soldiers, frames military defection in Myanmar less as a single brave act than as an extended struggle against survival math. Leaving the institution means losing salary, housing, rank, and the thin protection that comes with uniform. Staying can mean remaining inside a system that demands obedience to violence. She describes the decision to defect as the hardest part of her own life—everything afterward is hardship with consequences: exile, scarcity, psychological strain, and the persistent ache of being unable to return home.

In her account, the main barrier for those considering defection is not ideology but logistics—how to eat, how to earn, where to live once the military salary and accommodation vanish. Fear is reinforced by internal punishments: prison terms for running from the compound and even harsher consequences for fleeing a frontline battalion. Against that pressure, motivations vary. Some refused the illegality of coup initially. Some run because they do not want to die. Some remain inside for years because a parent’s illness or family needs make departure feel impossible, even while quietly feeding information outward.

Su Thit’s organization operates as a set of practical supports meant to turn defection from a leap into hunger into a survivable transition. She describes arranging accommodation and food, supporting families with children in forest conditions, and providing monthly basic assistance from the Thai border—growing from dozens of families to now over 200. She argues spouses are a crucial leverage point inside the military household, and she invests heavily in testimony-driven media meant to weaken indoctrination. “If we can remove their brainwashing, at least they will not kill the civilians,” she says, treating reduced violence as a minimum gain even when full transformation is slow.

The work expands into conscription cases as well, with families pleading for help to retrieve young men sent to the front line. Success depends on reach—knowing the area, having resistance links, being close enough to act. What remains, for her, is endurance under constraint and the insistence that defectors and their families—often undocumented, underpaid, and exhausted—still do not go back.

Episode #586: This is the sixth installment of our ongoing discussions with Friedgard Lottermoser. Drawing on decades of firsthand experience with Sayagyi U Ba Khin and other teachers, she offers a different account—one that sits alongside the established narrative and quietly complicates it, grounded in her own lived experience rather than directly opposing what came later.

Friedgard begins with a historical episode during the 1948 Karen insurgency, recounting how, in hopes of keeping Rangoon safe, U Ba Khin undertook a rigorous vow—living on rice and salt while continuously reciting protective Pāḷi texts—for seven days, after which the threat to the city subsided. While she stops short of claiming causation, she emphasizes this as an example of the power of strong determination (adhiṭṭhāna) in Burmese Buddhist practice. This theme was reinforced in her own life, where she herself made three such vows—to fully learn from her teacher, to avoid any marriage that would obstruct practice, and ultimately to ordain as a bhikkhuni.

A central tension in this discussion is the contrast between lived experience and later narratives about lineage and the technique’s “pristine purity.” Friedgard notes that U Ba Khin rarely emphasized lineage; in Burma, claiming descent from Ledi Sayadaw would have been unnecessary, even absurd, since he influenced so many modern Burmese Vipassanā traditions. Instead, U Ba Khin presented himself simply as an experienced teacher whose authority rested on results, not pedigree.

She further challenges the idea of an unbroken, exclusive lineage by pointing to historical evidence. Ledi Sayadaw, for example, appears to have developed his meditation practice largely through study and experimentation rather than direct transmission from a single teacher. This undermines the claim of a singular, preserved technique passed unchanged from the Buddha. Friedgard suggests that Goenka’s emphasis on lineage and purity emerged partly from the exigencies of context—adapting teachings mainly for Indian and Western audiences and in order toestablish legitimacy. While she acknowledges Goenka’s success in spreading meditation globally, she raises concerns about inaccuracies, institutional rigidity, and the use of tapes, which she feels limited teacher autonomy.

Ultimately, she returns to a pragmatic view: the effectiveness of practice—not claims of lineage—is the only meaningful proof of a tradition.

Episode #585: “We can’t go back to the normal life, because our country is not even normal,” says Tone Tone, a former psychology student from Yangon, describing how Myanmar’s 2021 military coup shattered any hope of remaining apolitical. In this conversation she is joined by Liberia, a civil engineering graduate who became a strike organizer, and together they recount how violence transformed them from ordinary students into underground activists willing to risk prison and death.

Before February 1, 2021, neither had political ambitions. Tone Tone was finishing university and helping with her family’s silk-screen printing business, and Liberia had completed an engineering degree and was pursuing further vocational training. When the military detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and seized power, both joined peaceful street protests in Yangon, believing public resistance might restore democracy.

That belief eroded as soldiers began shooting demonstrators. In December 2021, Tone Tone witnessed troops ram a vehicle into protesters, killing and injuring friends. Liberia shifted from humanitarian COVID relief work to organizing flash mobs through the Yangon People’s Strike, using small, cell-based groups to avoid detection.

On August 8, 2022—the anniversary of the 8-8-88 uprising—they staged their most iconic act: four black umbrellas printed with the Burmese numeral eight, photographed near Sule Pagoda under heavy security. Days later, Liberia was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of hard labor in Insein Prison. Tone Tone narrowly avoided arrest but endured psychological torture when soldiers beat her parents in the background while they called her on a phone.

Both eventually fled Myanmar. From exile, they continue supporting underground actions and fundraising through the umbrella symbol. Acknowledging fatigue but rejecting compromise with the military, they insist resistance continues. Their message remains urgent: “Please help to save Myanmar!”

Episode #584: Lora Roy, a longtime Vipassana meditator in the S.N. Goenka tradition, reflects on a lifelong effort to live truthfully from direct experience rather than fear, social expectation, or rigid authority. She traces that orientation back to childhood, when her authoritarian father’s controlling approach pushed her inward. Isolated for long periods, she developed habits of reflection and self-observation while struggling with anger and emotional suppression. As an adolescent, she deliberately forced herself to become more socially engaged, and later, while studying architecture, a professor’s insistence that meaningful design required genuine self-knowledge deepened her determination to understand herself more fully. After university, she traveled through Europe seeking freedom from inherited identity and social conditioning.

Although she had begun exploring spirituality through figures such as Ram Dass, Roy says she still lacked a practical way to work with emotional suffering, until she encountered Vipassana meditation through Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. “Oh, my God, this is what I've been waiting for all my life!” she recalls thinking during her first retreat. Meditation gave her a method for observing experience without reacting impulsively, and she committed herself intensely to the practice. She later became deeply involved with S.N. Goenka’s tradition, admiring both his power and his humanity while also recognizing the emotional intensity and rigidity that emerged within the growing organization.

Roy’s later training in whole systems design shaped how she interpreted those developments. Drawing on both meditation experience and systems thinking, she argues that institutions often begin with genuine insight but gradually become rule-bound and protective of identity. Reflecting on changes within the Goenka organization, she explains that authoritarian tendencies emergeincrementally because people feel protected by belonging to a shared worldview. Yet she continues to speak with gratitude about what the practice gave her. Now in her eighties she describes meditation less as a strict discipline than as an integrated way of living grounded in openness, self-knowledge, and compassion.

Episode #583: “If you can maim them, you can get multiple people off of a battlefield, and it’s also a terror tactic as well.”

Collin Mayfield, an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, spent months with the resistance group People’s Defense Force Zoland in western Myanmar’s Chin State in 2023 and 2025. During his second trip, he stepped on an M14 mine near a former resistance police checkpoint, losing part of his foot and nearly his left eye. The blast exposed a weapon whose damage extends far beyond the explosion, consuming evacuation teams, scarce medicine, repeated surgeries, rehabilitation, and years of care.

Mayfield had already seen that toll when a PDF-Zoland soldier underwent an emergency amputation on a plastic tarp in the forest. Across Chin State, residents warned him away from mined ground, soldiers lived with missing limbs, and even retrieving a wandering animal could force a family to gamble its survival. The regime’s mines do not merely obstruct fighters; they punish villages sympathetic to the resistance and drain the clinics, schools, and local institutions resistance groups are trying to sustain.

After Mayfield was wounded in late 2025, it took hours to reach a clinic where staff amputated part of his foot under an epidural. Limited antibiotics could not contain the infection, and the wound became black and necrotic. An exceptional intervention by American and Indian authorities allowed him to reach a hospital in Aizawl, where doctors removed more infected bone and told him another week in Myanmar likely would have killed him. Most Myanmar survivors have no comparable route out.

Treatment and physical therapy in Poland have allowed Mayfield to walk, hike, and run again, although pain, imbalance, embedded shrapnel, and further surgery remain. A disabled friend now transports supplies with a prosthetic leg, but a replacement spring alone costs roughly $3,000. The mine did not end either man’s contribution; it left both dependent on care that remainsinaccessible to countless survivors while the military continues laying the weapons.

Episode #582: “If you're having weird meditative experiences, I'll be happy to talk to you about those for free. I won't even take a donation.” Daniel Ingram, a physician, meditation teacher, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha,and cofounder of theDharma Overground, has spent nearly three decades creating language and support for contemplative experiences that can be mistaken for pathology, exaggerated into attainment, or silenced by Buddhist institutions.

His concern began with lucid dreams, blissful states, energetic surges, and an out-of-body experience during childhood and adolescence. He hid them from his pediatrician father, who later admitted that he might have responded in a harmful way. Intensive retreat practice in the 1990s made the phenomena reproducible, but the decisive moment came at the Malaysian Buddhist Meditation Center, where an old recording of a Burmese monk described the sequence Ingram had just undergone. Burmese insight maps transformed private confusion into a path that others had already observed.

Those maps also placed him in conflict with Western meditation communities that discouraged open discussion of stages and attainments. Ingram accepts that maps can produce scripting, competition, and inflated claims, but argues that silence leaves practitioners isolated and clinicians unprepared. His book and the Dharma Overground created public spaces for experiences that conventional settings often refused to name. After a 2003 retreat with the younger Sayadaw U Paṇḍita, he claimed arahantship as a permanent loss of belief in a separate subject, while acknowledging that fear, irritation, and desire still arise—a result that conflicts with strict readings of the Theravāda ten-fetter model.

Ingram now supports research intended to bring physicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, and contemplative practitioners into the same inquiry. Rather than resolve doctrinal disputes through authority alone, he proposes testing advanced practitioners under controlled conditions to see whether classical claims about the eradication of fear, anger, and desire can be observed. The maps once helped him survive territory that seemed unintelligible; he now wants medicine and Buddhism to submit their competing explanations to the same unresolved experiment.

In this bonus episode, we share a special online fundraiser for Better Burma led by Richmond Heath, a certified TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises) provider and trainer based in Australia, whose full conversation on Episode 514explored the meeting point between meditation, trauma, spontaneous movement, and the body’s own intelligence. In this conversation, Richmond moves from theory into practice, guiding participants through an accessible introduction to the exercise.

Richmond explains that stress and trauma do not live only in memory or thought; they also appear as patterns in the muscles, breath, and nervous system. He reframes shaking and trembling not as symptoms to suppress, but as instinctive recovery responses the body uses to come out of fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown. Drawing on TRE, polyvagal-informed language, and examples from other cultures, he invites participants to understand the body not simply as the place where trauma is stored, but also as the place where release and regulation can begin.

The heart of this event is experiential. Richmond carefully leads attendees through a guided tremor session, continually emphasizing safety, choice, self-regulation, and the importance of stopping whenever the body needs rest. Participants are encouraged to listen deeply, move slowly, and allow the body’s natural intelligence to unfold without forcing anything.

The episode closes with reflections on how TRE might support communities affected by Myanmar’s violence, and a hope that future funding could bring this training directly to local caregivers, educators, organizers, and border communities who need it most right now. Please consider making a donation of any amount to support our continued programs!

Episode #581: Tin Tin Htar Myint, a medical epidemiologist based in France who has worked in vaccines for more than two decades, describes Myanmar’s immunization collapse as a problem of governance as much as medicine. Before 2021, she argues, the national program had been expanding in concrete ways, adding vaccines that could reduce childhood pneumonia and diarrhea and protect girls from HPV. Then the coup shattered the human infrastructure that makes routine immunization possible. Health workers joined the Civil Disobedience Movement, hid, fled, or were arrested, and the country’s vaccine system became a set of reported numbers that no longer match the conditions on the ground.

Tin Tin points to official coverage figures that appear to rebound after 2021, but says they cannot be reconciled with the reality of airstrikes, displacement, and villages trapped behind checkpoints. In surveys she describes from Sagaing, the most isolated areas show catastrophic “zero dose” rates for children born after the coup—no BCG, no DTP, no MMR—while villages near large cities can still manage partial coverage because access exists and parents take risks to reach it. Some organize ad hoc “vaccination trips,” moving groups of children through military checkpoints to get a shot and return home.

For her, the downstream damage is already visible. She describes signs of vaccine-preventable outbreaks appearing again through social media reports, and she that tuberculosis is resurging rapidly in places with limited detection and no reliable drug supply. The collapse does not stop at vaccines. Tin Tin argues that immunization normally arrives with basic care packages, health education, and family planning, and that when the program breaks, those services break too, driving rising pregnancies, miscarriages, and the reemergence of sexually transmitted infections.

The most painful detail she offers is also the simplest proof of what is missing. “They still carry the vaccine booklet of their children.”

Episode #580: Professor P. L. Dhar, a longtime Vipassana teacher in the S.N. Goenka tradition, reflects on his life-long spiritual journey. A decade immersed in Vedanta and other Indian traditions, along with a meditative and devotional practice, helped him develop deep concentration. Yet he gradually became dissatisfied, wondering whether these practices investigated reality deeply enough.

Then a series of crises transformed his spiritual search. Political violence in India, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the Bhopal disaster, and most importantly the death of his young son in 1985 pushed him into profound grief and self-doubt. These events moved him to enroll in one of Goenka’s ten-day Vipassana courses, where he discovered a form of practice that seemed to reach levels of suffering he had not previously been able to address.

Over the next several years he devoted himself intensely to Vipassana, completing long retreats, becoming a teacher, and eventually helping introduce meditation programs into Delhi’s Tihar Jail, one of India’s largest and most notorious prisons. He regards the Tihar project as a remarkable demonstration of meditation’s transformative potential. Yet it was connected to an issue that concerned Professor Dhar. He had always been troubled by Goenka’s frequent criticisms of other spiritual traditions, and indeed, some Tihar inmates were very angry when they heard them. Goenka responded by removing the offending parts and adding in more positive messaging, which were very well received in Tihar. Yet for whatever reason, these revised Hindi versions were not used other than at the Tihar courses. Later, as Dhar gained more responsibilities within the organization, he also became concerned that institutional growth, hierarchy, and status were receiving more attention than deeper questions about liberation.

His most significant concern was around anattā, the Buddhist doctrine of not-self. Professor Dhar explains that while years of practice gave him a deep experiential appreciation of impermanence, he eventually concluded that neither the Goenka technique nor the culture surrounding it sufficiently examined how the sense of self is constructed, nor was there much enthusiasm within the organization for doing so. While he remains forever grateful to Goenka, these concerns led to his departure from the organization in 2010. Since then, his investigationsinto non-self have led him to believe it is the key link between meditation practice and liberation.

Episode #579: “I did not expect to be conversing in Urdu with someone in Yangon.” Bilal Hassan, a Pakistani creator and doctor, traveled to Burma after noticing how much of Karachi’s everyday culture carried unexplained Burmese traces: khao suey, family names, old songs about Rangoon, and stories no one could quite complete. His trip began as a search for those missing links, but Yangon gave him something more complicated than recognition.

The city felt to him like the place where South Asia and Southeast Asia meet, with Urdu-speaking caretakers at Bahadur Shah Zafar’s shrine, Surti and Memon mosques tied to Karachi business families, Tamil and Chulia Muslim institutions, halal food, and Burmese Muslim cuisine shaped by migration. Yet those familiar traces existed inside a post-coup country marked by checkpoints, fuel shortages, surveillance, airport controls, and a visible gap between wealth and hunger. A roadside woman near Bago had only white rice to offer, while a hotel buffet back in Yangon complete with French champagne cost dozens of dollars.

The deepest tension came through Muslim life itself. Downtown Yangon looked visibly Muslim in ways Bilal had not expected, but when the subject of Rohingya was broached, it changed the air in the room. Some Muslims distanced themselves; others admitted fear and sadness but refused to keep speaking. Bilal came to see Muslim communities as connected, careful, and guarded, maintaining names, food, language, and religious life while learning how not to stand out.

He left resisting both tourist denial and headline simplification. Burma was not only a war zone, not only a beautiful country, and not only a forgotten extension of South Asian memory. It was all of those at once, and the connections he found could not be separated from the silences people used to survive.

Episode #578: Aye Myat Thwe is a Burmese lay Buddhist practitioner raised inside the Mahasi Vipassana world, where devotion, meditation, and study were braided into ordinary family life. Watching her grandmother sit daily, she grew up assuming the classic Burmese hierarchy of authority was stable and complete, the commentaries as canon, Abhidhamma as the tradition’s intellectual summit. For years, she accepted that inheritance without friction.

Then scholarship cracked it open. Learning that Abhidhamma may not be the Buddha’s original teaching shocked her, not because it erased its value, but because it revealed how much Burmese certainty is cultural as well as doctrinal. Once that door opened, she began questioning everything, and felt the social cost of doubt in a society where deference and inherited interpretation can outweigh inquiry.

Her widening view extended to lineage identity. Early impressions, shaped by polemics against Pa Auk, taught her suspicion before she had direct experience. Later, encountering Mogok and Pa Auk more honestly, she came to see these traditions as parallel approaches rather than rivals, with conflict often generated by institutional competition and the anxieties of authority rather than by founding masters themselves.

She also rethought the role of samathā and “powers,” recognizing both the risks of misuse and the legitimacy of deep concentration when ethically grounded. And she became attentive to how communities code-switch about cosmology, sometimes muting supernatural discourse to appear rational or modern, even while insiders quietly acknowledge it.

The Rohingya crisis then forced an ethical reckoning. She saw how fear of protecting the Sāsana could override compassion, and admits she stayed quiet under communal pressure, turning blame inward.

After the coup, the fractures deepened. She believes Burmese Buddhism’s future depends less on defending institutions than on recovering moral credibility and everyday application, a reform that keeps roots while refusing corruption.

Episode #577: Thomas Shapwon, a Naga elder and former politician, recounts the long struggle of the Naga people for sovereignty and survival between India and Myanmar. He describes the Naga as an ancient, independent nation with distinct language, culture, and traditions. From the formation of the Naga Club in 1918 to the declaration of Naga independence in 1947— one day before India’s own— the community has resisted external domination. Mahatma Gandhi supported their independence, but his successor, Prime Minister Nehru, rejected it, eventually dividing the Naga homeland along the India-Myanmar border without consultation.

Shapwon explains that the Naga people have traditionally lived under village councils with no kings or centralized rulers, embodying a democratic, republican ethos. He traces their ancestry to Mesopotamia and describes their migration through China before settling in the region. Christianity, brought by American Baptist missionaries, became central to Naga identity, with 95% of the population now Christian— a fact Shapwon sees as a potential bridge for international support.

He emphasizes peaceful advocacy over armed resistance, using careful language: the Naga, he says, “request” recognition of independence rather than “demand” it, asserting equality rather than subjugation. Yet he acknowledges the armed movements that arose after Indian and Burmese military aggression in the 1950s, which forced the Nagas to form their own militias. The Burmese army’s campaigns of violence and forced Buddhist conversions devastated Naga villages, while internal divisions— fueled by politics and drug infiltration— further weakened their cause.

Despite assassination attempts and near-death experiences, including a bear attack he survived through what he interprets as divine intervention, Shapwon remains devoted to peace. Through his NGO, the Eastern Naga Development Organization, he promotes education, healthcare, women’s empowerment, and opium eradication. Reflecting on the post-coup era, he calls for cooperation with other ethnic groups and envisions a future decided peacefully by the Naga people themselves.

Episode #576: “I have been attempted [at assassinations] twice when they shot me, but I escaped. My family, my brother, they are targeted, and armed groups are always behind us. They kill in a second.”

Peter Saiful, a pastor with the Rohingya Christian Fellowship and a human rights defender, describes what it means to live as a Rohingya Christian refugee in Bangladesh after his family fled Myanmar in 1992. His account centers on a community he estimates at around 3000 Christian individuals in Bangladesh, dispersed across camps where concealment becomes a survival strategy rather than a choice. In blocks dominated by Muslim majorities, he says, Christians often cannot identify themselves safely, and “now they are pretending to be Muslim,” because discovery can bring abduction, beating, torture, and ransom.

Saiful argues that the primary engine of fear is not the broader Rohingya population, but small armed factions with outsized power. A group of “very few people [are able to] control the Rohingya, because [the armed groups] have access to weapons that we cannot imagine,” leaving the majority too frightened to speak out. He traces this environment into specific violence, including attacks culminating in January 2020, when he says more than 400 youth set fire to Christian shelters, destroyed documents, and injured community members.

On repatriation, Saiful rejects near-term promises as unrealistic, pointing to continuing flight from Myanmar and the lack of enforceable guarantees, while still insisting on belonging and citizenship rights, warning that without equal treatment and access, any return risks repeating a cycle in which Rohingya are moved and renamed for other people’s purposes. “The government must ensure us that [they will] welcome us as a child, the way we welcome our children,” he says, and without that, he expects the same cycle will repeat and “we will be treated as a football.”

Episode #575: Lindsey Kennedy, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker focused on organized crime, corruption, and conflict, argues that the scam-compound economy across Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos can no longer be treated as a marginal criminal problem. It has become a governing force in parts of the region, shaping infrastructure, labor flows, border management, and even the logic of war. “They are not a separate organized crime phenomenon. They are a core part of the economic activity of a country.”

Her account widens the frame far beyond online fraud. Inside these compounds, people can be trafficked through fake job offers, trapped behind guarded walls, tortured for missing targets, sold between operators, or pushed into sexual exploitation. Many do not even realize which country they have been taken to until they arrive. “People are completely tricked into working somewhere they have no idea what's happening.” Others enter under economic pressure and discover too late that there is no easy line between coercion and consent once the system closes around them.

Kennedy is especially focused on state responsibility. These industries do not grow into cities without permissions, land access, military or police protection, and a wider network of businesses willing to build, transport, finance, and normalize them. “They just cannot take root without state sponsored backing,” as she puts it. Casinos, special economic zones, and new fintech platforms help move and launder money while giving criminal infrastructure the appearance of development.

In Myanmar, those same criminal economies blur into conflict itself. Armed groups need revenue, illegal industries expand, and even landmine contamination becomes harder to address when crime, territory, and war finance overlap. Survivors, meanwhile, are left with little support. “There's not a lot of thought for aftercare,” Kennedy says, pointing to a system that recycles people through exploitation rather than helping them exit it.

What emerges is not a hidden underworld but a visible structure of power—one that continues to expand and harden.

Episode #574: Diego Prieto, a Chilean filmmaker, embarked on a journey to explore the Buddha's legacy and its modern relevance. His documentary started as an effort to explain the core teachings of Buddhism but evolved into a personal and transformative journey. Together with co-producer Camila Arias, he traveled to key sites in Buddhist history, including India and Sri Lanka, to trace the historical Buddha's life and teachings. At one point, Diego faced an intense personal challenge while attending a meditation retreat, which shifted the documentary's focus from an external exploration to one reflecting an internal journey.

Through interviews with scholars and practitioners from diverse Buddhist traditions, Diego came to appreciate the adaptability of the Buddha's teachings. He realized that Buddhism cannot be confined to a single formula; instead, it offers varied paths tailored to individuals. This understanding reshaped the documentary into a motivational tool meant to inspire personal exploration of Buddhism, rather than providing definitive answers.

Diego’s final message is that spiritual growth is deeply personal and cannot be systematized. The documentary aims to encourage viewers to embark on their own journeys, embracing the multiplicity of approaches within Buddhism. As Diego concluded, “We found out that the Buddha taught different practices for different people... there is no one-size-fits-all path.”

Episode #573: “I brought you here to the United States not so you could forget our homeland,” Salih Hudayar remembers his father telling him, “but so you could become educated and one day return to liberate our people and our country from the Chinese occupation.”

Hudayar, now Foreign Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, traces his political life to that instruction. Born in 1993 near Kashgar, he grew up amid tightening state control and left for the United States as a child after his father fled repression. He situates the current crisis within a longer history that includes two short-lived East Turkistan republics before Communist consolidation in 1949.

He describes a post-2009 escalation of surveillance, detention, and forced labor under the banner of counterterrorism. Citing Chinese government documents and satellite imagery, he argues that mass internment, religious repression, family separation, and demographic engineering amount to genocide.

Now based in Washington DC, Hudayar presses U.S. lawmakers to move beyond condemnation. Recognition of genocide, he says, is not enough without confronting what he calls the root problem of colonial rule. Running a government in exile, dispersed across continents and sustained by diaspora donations, requires coordination, discipline, and constant vigilance against external pressure.

Myanmar surfaces repeatedly in the interview as both comparison and caution. Hudayar draws parallels between the Rohingya genocide case and his own effort to bring a complaint before the International Criminal Court, noting that the Rohingya precedent shaped the jurisdictional argument he pursued. He also references Myanmar’s strategic importance to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, particularly access to the western coast and energy corridors that could reduce Beijing’s vulnerability in the Strait of Malacca. At a broader level, he frames the Uyghur and Myanmar struggles as linked by geography and power politics—both situated along China’s periphery, both affected by Beijing’s economic leverage and security influence, and both navigating how global powers respond when human rights concerns collide with strategic interests.

Episode #572: “The government will survive for as long as it can feed the people,” says Christopher Lamb, former Australian Ambassador to Myanmar, distilling what he believes defines the country’s political fate more than any ideology. He reflects on a relationship with Burma that began in the early 1970s, when the generals were drafting a Socialist Constitution and creating a surveillance state, and evolved through the 1988 uprising, which began not as an idealistic revolt but as a desperate reaction to hunger and daily indignities. Years later, he reconnected with Myanmar around humanitarian work in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and then academic engagement in 2013, when he co-founded the Australia–Myanmar Institute as a platform for academic and civil-society exchange

Lamb situates Myanmar’s politics within a wider regional frame, drawing on Shan history, federalism debates, geography, and Chinese influence to show why the struggle against the junta cannot be reduced to a simple clash between dictatorship and democracy. He also contrasts the current military leadership with earlier eras, noting that Min Aung Hlaing lacks the ideological projects—whether national unity or the “Burmese Way to Socialism”—that once guided previous generals. Instead, Lamb sees today’s junta as driven largely by personal ambition, with Min Aung Hlaing positioning himself to transition into a civilian presidency through a tightly controlled electoral process. Without this sort of guiding ideology, Lamb believes the regime’s future becomes harder to predict and possibly more brittle.

Myanmar remains close to Lamb’s heart. It shaped him as a diplomat, it shaped his curiosity and it shaped his friendships. When asked whether any memory stays with him above all others about the country, he references a remark offered by the senior Burmese official decades earlier over tea: “The government will survive for as long as we can feed the people.”

Episode #571: “For students living through uncertainty, I think online learning and online education becomes a lifeline rather than simply an alternative.” Eaint Thet Hmu, a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) student at Parami University, came to education through disruption rather than continuity. COVID-19 interrupted the expected path after matriculation; the 2021 coup closed off the university future she had imagined in Yangon. Online learning became the route through which she found Parami, community work, and a new way of reading Myanmar.

At Parami, Eaint’s Bamar-majority background was unsettled by studying with classmates from ethnic nationalities she had rarely encountered before. She began to understand what it meant to move “from being the ethnic majority and becoming a minority in the classroom.” That shift shaped her interest in civic education, gender equality, and the kind of learning that does not stop at theory. For one thing, she came to understand that “the role of the student isn't to save the community but is to learn with them.”

Her youth-led Project PyitTineHtaung brings sexuality and gender education to underserved secondary students, including monastic education students in Magway and Mandalay. Eaint sees this work as part of survival in a country where misinformation spreads more easily than accurate guidance about their bodies, gender, and safety. “Restrictions are not always the solution,” she says.

Her research on the Civil Disobedience Movement extends the same question into the political sphere. After the coup, students who refused military-controlled universities were refusing more than classes; they were refusing legitimacy. Among twelve higher education students she interviewed, all said the decision came at once: “they decided immediately, they didn’t hesitate for a moment.”

Eaint’s account keeps returning to education as a contested space. A degree is not the whole of learning. In Myanmar now, learning means recognizing power, resisting false legitimacy, and continuing to think when the official institutions meant to teach have become part of the pressure.

Episode #570: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners from around the world, creating a dense, fast-moving environment of panels, conversations, and informal exchange across the full breadth of Asian studies. Within that wider landscape, Burma surfaced as one of several pressing areas of focus, shaped by the realities of its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited by the organizers to work from within the conference itself, setting up an on-site recording space and speaking with participants as they moved between sessions. The result is a series of short, real-time conversations—captured in the midst of the event rather than in hindsight—now shared with a wider global audience. This is the first of a four-part series.

Gita reconstructs the return of Buddhism to modern India not as a simple story of rediscovery, but as a struggle over ownership, identity, and political meaning. Beginning with Anagarika Dharmapala’s late nineteenth-century campaign to reclaim the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya, she follows the networks that linked India to Sri Lanka, Burma, Japan, and other Buddhist worlds across the Bay of Bengal. The result is a far wider picture than the familiar colonial tale of British archaeologists unearthing lost Buddhist sites.

Her argument is that modern Indian Buddhism emerged through mobility as much as excavation through pilgrims, monks, courts, relics, shipping lines, railways, and reform movements. Burma is especially important in that story. Burmese courts recognized and patronized Bodh Gaya long before Buddhism became newly legible to colonial scholarship, and later Burmese monks and pilgrims helped restore visible Buddhist practice at key sites in India.

That revival unfolded alongside a competing effort to absorb Buddhism into a Hindu civilizational frame. As Hindutva thinkers tried to define India as fundamentally Hindu, Buddhism became both useful and inconvenient: useful as proof of India’s past influence across Asia, inconvenient when Buddhists insisted on separateness or when Ambedkar turned to Buddhism as a rejection of caste Hinduism. And then, “Nehru chooses Buddhism,” Gita says, describing how the Indian state later used Buddhist symbols, relics, and diplomacy to project a different moral and geopolitical language after independence.

What remains unresolved in her account is the question of what kind of Buddhism has reemerged in South Asia. It is now highly visible, but that visibility can serve very different ends. Her interest finally is less in Buddhism as state identity than in whether an older ethical and transnational imagination can still be recovered.

Episode #569: When Hla Hla Win was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison at age twenty-three, she did not focus on the number. “I decided that in politics, the way things change, I will be released.” She narrowed her horizon to the day in front of her — reading, teaching other inmates’ children, and sleeping without the constant fear of arrest that had defined her underground reporting.

A former teacher turned DVB journalist after the 2007 Saffron Revolution, Hla Hla Win was arrested in 2009 for interviewing monks about military killings. During interrogation, she protected a secret Yangon office by answering almost everything truthfully — except the one question that mattered. “They asked ten questions. I answered nine questions true, and then one is false!”

After her release, Hla Hla Win refused to return to party politics. “If the government or the NLD party or other people do some mistake, I would report them,” she says. “Everyone!” She rejected campaigns that shielded power from criticism and insisted, “We have to report both sides, [where there are] human rights violation.”

Following the 2021 coup, Hla Hla Win resumed reporting despite being a new mother, and with internet blackouts in place, she uploaded frequent livestreams and reports. Eventually the military recognized her voice, and so she had to flee to Thailand. Now based along the border, she repeatedly returns to some of the worst-hit conflict zones, working as both journalist and fixer.

Hla Hla Win admits that airstrikes are the one thing she cannot control. “I can’t do nothing,” she says of the twenty seconds between hearing a jet and impact. She has filmed fighters meeting newborn children over video calls and listened to young resistance members shout from mountains, “I want to go home!”

The war has expanded, reshaping territory and institutions. The strain is visible — especially among young fighters — yet she does not believe morale has collapsed. “I believe people continue to fight to the end of the military.”

Episode #568: “I think a world where people partner and support each other is the world I want my kids to grow up in,” says Greg Tyrosvoutis, co-founder and director of the Inclusive Education Foundation (InED) on the Thailand–Myanmar border. For fifteen years he has worked with refugee camps, migrant learning centers, and ethnic-run schools serving communities displaced by conflict. His guiding belief is that education in crisis settings is not charity, but long-term partnership built on shared responsibility.

Greg arrived in 2010 after graduating from Teachers College in Ottawa. Simultaneously offered a stable teaching job in Canada and a volunteer role on the border, he chose Mae Sot, assuming it would be temporary. Teaching displaced students at a GED-equivalent higher education program, he encountered youth who viewed schooling as a lifeline. Over time, he watched former students return as teachers, reinforcing his belief that education creates generational continuity.

After funding shifts ended his position with an international organization, Greg and colleagues founded what became the Inclusive Education Foundation (InED) They expanded from teacher training to out-of-school enrollment, youth programs, and emergency relief during COVID-19, when migrant communities were locked down without income.

InED’s mission addresses what Greg describes as a steeply narrowing triangle of enrollment: many children enter early grades, but only one in five finish school. Today, InED supports roughly 1000s of teachers annually and 1,200 students through enrollment and classroom support. Access to technology is problematic, and funding instability remains acute. “They're doing something meaningful, but it's a band aid on cancer, essentially,” he says of short-term grants. Still, he perseveres, and continues to adapt, in the strong belief that creativity and innovation are born of necessity.

Episode #567: Stella Naw, a Kachin academic activist focused on indigenous and decolonial peacebuilding, is joined by Dustin Barter, a senior research fellow at the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI, and together they argue that in the turmoil since the 2021 coup, ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) and their civil society partners are reshaping governance and legitimacy from the ground up, even as international recognition and aid decline.

Stella traces the problem to Myanmar’s founding. Before 1948, indigenous communities governed themselves. The creation of the Union imposed internal and external borders that divided communities and ignored longstanding political realities. After the military consolidated power in the 1960s, governance became increasingly centralized, and divide-and-conquer tactics deepened ethnic and religious fragmentation. In response to state neglect, EROs began to build parallel systems—schools, clinics, land administration, and local dispute resolution—in areas beyond effective central control.

During the 2010s political opening, international engagement centered on Naypyidaw and Yangon. The Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), a centralized peace framework between the military and selected ethnic armed organizations, drew major donor funding and pressure on non-signatories. While it introduced some reforms, Stella and Dustin argue it ultimately reinforcedcentralization and sidelined federal visions emerging from border regions.

After the coup, urban protest evolved into nationwide armed resistance aligned with longstanding EROs. As junta control contracted, regional authorities expanded governance. In Kachin and Karenni, resistance-linked institutions collaborate with civil society and religious networks, emphasizing accountability. Stella challenges international definitions of legitimacy, arguing it should derive from sustained relationships between governing actors and communities.

Though some fear decentralization may marginalize minorities within minority regions, Dustin maintains that complexity requires inclusive negotiation, not disengagement. With humanitarian funding shrinking, he calls for cross-border aid and sustained diplomatic pressure. As he concludes, “The best pathway forward… is for the revolution to succeed.”

Episode #566: Daniel M. Stuart, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina and a visiting scholar in Hamburg, examines the elusive historical figure Maung Po Thet—also known as Saya Thet Gyi—whose place in the lineage associated with S. N. Goenka reveals how modern Vipassana narratives often simplify a far more complicated past. Stuart explains that there is very little firm historical evidence about him, the available sources limited mainly to a colloquial Burmese meditation manual and a later biography written in the 1970s. While these texts preserve important memories, they also reflect the conventions of religious writing, elevating the teacher and blurring the line between devotion and documentation. As a result, Saya Thet Gyi remains historically important yet difficult to reconstruct with certainty.

From those sources, Stuart presents a portrait that differs from the polished lineage figure often found in contemporary meditation accounts. He explains that Saya Thet Gyi was a lay farmer who turned to meditation after suffering painful, personal losses, connecting this to other important lineage figures for whom healing was an important part of their Vipassana story. He was also a practitioner whose authority came from disciplined practice and communal recognition rather than scholastic rank or monastic recognition.

Saya Thet Gyi’s importance also lies in his role as a lay person in the dissemination of the teachings, as the influential monk Ledi Sayadaw recognized his progress and encouraged him to teach. This moment opened the possibility that lay practitioners could become meditation teachers themselves, helping Burmese meditation spread through lay communities and eventually beyond Burma.

Stuart also emphasizes that Saya Thet Gyi’s training complicates simplified portrayals of Vipassana. Before becoming known for insight meditation, he intensively practiced samathā, or concentration meditation, a practice that many modern mindfulness iterations downplay vis-à-vis vipassana. Within traditional Buddhist cosmology, such concentration could involve experiences interpreted as encounters with spiritual beings, elements that the rational and scientific presentations of contemporary teachers often minimize. By restoring these dimensions, Stuart argues that Vipassana’s history becomes more understandable as a tradition shaped by interpretation and change.

Episode #565: In Anyar, or the central Dry Zone, community protection is by necessity locally led and informed by facts on the ground. In a huge area comprising swathes of Sagaing, Magway, and Mandalay regions, often referred to as the country’s “political heartland”, communities have faced intensified violence since the coup and persistent barriers to access, information, and livelihoods.

Kant Kaw is a protection specialist, and she explains how humanitarian work, including humanitarian mine action, is being implemented on the ground under these challenging conditions.

Unlike many ethnic areas in Myanmar, Anyar was relatively untouched by armed conflict prior to the 2021 military takeover. Communities were largely free from contamination by landmines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), unexploded ordnance (UXO), and explosive remnants of war (ERW).

“There are a lot of casualties in central Dry Zone due to military patrols, airstrikes or incidents of landmines and UXO in the community,” Kant Kaw says. “This is a heartbreaking moment for our area.”

As a protection specialist, her work focuses on supporting youth empowerment, education, and community protection, including risk assessment and protection strategies to mitigate threats from landmines and other forms of conflict. Airstrikes rank as the most serious threat to civilians, with military patrols and checkpoints posing serious dangers for civilians, alongside the growing threat of landmines and ERW.

The humanitarian mine action brief includes risk education and victim assistance, without direct involvement in ad hoc demining being carried out by some armed groups as well as civilians. Kant Kaw provides training to staff covering risks related to landmines and UXO, how to identify such devices, and safe behaviors, using posters, pamphlets, and storybooks for children.

Episode #564: “We want to make federalism not just as a slogan, but also as an action. We want to turn it into action!”

Neineh Plo is secretary to the International Relations and Alliance committee of the Karenni National Progressive Party, and he has worked closely with the KNPP since the 2021 coup through international relations, humanitarian work, and headquarters administration. He describes Karenni State as a place where resistance actors are forced to do two things at once under war pressure: protect civilians at scale, and build an interim governing system credible enough to hold a diverse state together.

Neineh Plo argues that Karenni State’s diversity makes unilateral leadership both illegitimate and self-defeating. “KNPP cannot do it alone,” he asserts, “and should not also do it alone and impose its agenda on other people.” He describes the KNPP reaching out to other stakeholders and forming the Karenni State Consultative Council, then drafting interim arrangements meant to translate coordination into real authority. Those arrangements created interim executive, legislative, and judiciary bodies, with the interim executive council providing the most visible services. The list he gives is bluntly practical: humanitarian assistance, food and shelter, civilian protection, education, healthcare, and limited rehabilitation and livelihood support.

On the international side, Neineh Plo describes access as constrained by aid systems built to work through the junta’s capital. He says organizations willing to cooperate with non-state actors are limited, even as needs expand in displacement and war zones. Here he references cross-border assistance as a longstanding pathway, but argues for an added channel that can reach resistance-held areas directly, including a proposed inclusive humanitarian forum meant to bring donors and Myanmar stakeholders into a workable design.

Neineh Plo treats negotiation as a daily discipline inside the wider resistance ecosystem, including relationships with the National Unity Government. “We disagree,” he says simply, “but at least we are on the same side of the movement.” Federalism, in his framing, is the only model capable of accommodating Myanmar’s differences without returning to domination, and he insists that it has to be practiced now through structures and coalition governance rather than promised later.

Episode #563: As president of the CCDK (Chin Community in Denmark), a non-profit organization established in 2003 by refugees from Myanmar, Van Neih Thang believes he has a duty to advocate for the people of his home country and state. This unwavering sense of purpose is tied to his experience as a refugee. “I feel like I have some duty to do something, even though I’m one thousand miles away.”

Van Neih Thang’s parents made the difficult decision to leave Myanmar when he was just thirteen years old. He describes his humble life in Chin State, one of Myanmar’s most beautiful yet most deprived regions, before being swept away at such a young age to a place where the people look and sound very different. Learning the Danish language was hard, he admits, but that was the only aspect of his new home that he found difficult. Amid the culture shocks, he made friends and developed a passion for education, eventually becoming an influential community leader within the Chin diaspora.

His connection to Chin State and its people never disappeared. He says that providing humanitarian assistance to the Chin people, as well as the wider population in Myanmar, is crucial. Since the coup in 2021, the military has devastated the region, destroying whole towns, while its people lack equipment and financial support. Van Neih Thang discusses the Chin groups that are fighting the junta, how these groups are divided by generations and language. When asked to consider what a post-military Myanmar might look like, it is clear he does not believe in easy answers.

Van Neih Thang reflects on how life could’ve been different, especially as a young Chin. He is conscious of his privileged position, calling that privilege a blessing. But, he says, “it is a blessing with a purpose.”

Episode #562: “I thought there was something, but I didn't know there was a way to get there.”

That sense of longing has shaped Eion Meades’s spiritual life. His father abandoned the family when Meades was around ten years old, leaving his mother to raise six children while working long hours as a cleaner. He drifted toward crime and bad behavior before leaving home at fifteen. He hitchhiked across Australia and New Zealand, then traveled through Asia.

Not finding a clear spiritual path on his travels, be returned to Australia to join Chenrezig Institute, a fledgling Tibetan Buddhist community there. Meades became one of the earliest residents and builders of what later grew into a major Tibetan Buddhist center. The Buddhist community gave him structure, intellectual clarity, and a disciplined path toward awakening. “I felt, ‘Ah, this is it, I'm home!’” The commitment of the community to building the center inspired him.

Over time, however, he sought more meditative depth than he felt Chenrezig provided, and turned to Robert Hover, an American teacher from the U Ba Khin Vipassana lineage. Under Hover’s guidance, Meades’s practice became an intense confrontation with fear, emotion, and altered states of consciousness. He describes Hover as almost shamanic, representing a more personal and experimental form of Vipassana practice.

Another decisive influence came through Mary, an older psychic medium connected to the Tibetan Buddhist community. Through her, Meades encountered trance mediumship, spirit guides, visions, and other experiences that defied “rational” explanation. Mary eventually led him away from the security of institutional Buddhism and into a more uncertain but deeply personal spiritual path.

Later, another U Ba Khin lineage teacher, John Coleman, became important to Meades because he was willing to seriously discuss experiences that seemed to blur the boundary between deep meditation and psychic phenomena. Meades came away feeling that some advanced meditative states naturally opened unusual capacities, even if Buddhist traditions often hesitated to speak openly about them.

Through all his experiences, Meades never lost sight of awakening as the central aim of spiritual life. Looking back, he describes spiritual growth as a long process of integration and transformation. By the end of his reflections, he speaks less about institutions or psychic abilities than about what spiritual practice ultimately leaves behind. As he puts it, “the wisdom and love you gain in this life will never be lost.”

Episode #561: The third episode in a three part series, this was recorded inside Malaysia’s Parliament during the final stretch of Malaysia’s ASEAN chairmanship. It sits where diplomacy meets consequence—non-interference, the limits of influence, and the reset button of rotating leadership. Beneath that is Malaysia’s lived reality: refugees arriving as people, not headlines, often in legal limbo and reliant on UNHCR papers. MPs speak of gaps in data, barriers to legal work and schooling, strained clinics, and the politics of backlash.

The first guest is Zahir Hassan, a first-term MP for Wangsa Maju in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s most densely populated constituency. An engineer and disaster-risk advocate, he treats displacement as a systems failure that has turned permanent. Refugees were meant to be part of “a few months transition,” yet some families are now third or fourth generation in Malaysia. With no legal status, “they technically cannot work. They cannot earn a living here, [so] for them to survive over the years, they have got to work illegally,” he says. Hassan also warns that Malaysia can’t drift year after year without proper data, planning, burden-sharing, and serious leadership at regional levels, and that stronger action needs to be taken towards the crisis.

Mohammed Suhaimi Abdullah, MP for Langkawi and a former two-term senator, describes Bukit Malut as a settlement that began in 1982 with about 12 Rohingya families, and has grown to nearly 15,000 today. Some residents, he says, “have got blue identity card,” adding, “when you have a blue card, you have to treat them like Malaysians;” despite this, he laments that much of the region is plagued by poor infrastructure and few schools. Abdullah rejects stereotypes, asserting that these Rohingya communities are “not poor people! They’re very hard-working,” and adds that this fact that has created resentment among local populations who are not willing to take on equally strenuous jobs.

Finally, Hassan Karim is a MP for Pasir Gudang and a lawyer shaped by civil-liberties fights. Referencing his youth, he says: “We fought any attempt by the [Malaysian] government tosuppress the space for democracy.” Karim’s actions aligned with his words then, as he notes that he was arrested on sedition charges for protesting authoritarian tendencies. Concerning thecurrent influx of refugees, he calls out Malaysian society for not extending sympathy to those fleeing conflict. “This kind of humanism must transcend religions and race,” he insists. If Malaysians can mobilize around Palestinians in Gaza as a matter of human rights, he argues, they cannot practice moral compartmentalization when the persecuted are nearer, poorer, and politically inconvenient. As Karim ask openly, if Muslim solidarity is invoked loudly elsewhere, why is it so thin here? His harshest criticism, however, is for Myanmar’s military, adding that currently, “I feel pessimistic. I never heard or saw any tangible effort [of progress.]”

Episode #560: “We have to get rid of this military dictatorship. Otherwise the whole country and the coming generations will be in a really troubled situation.”

Mun Awng, born in 1960 in Myitkyina, Kachin State, is one of Myanmar’s most iconic protest singers and a lifelong advocate for democracy. Raised by a teacher father and nurse mother amid conflict between the Burma Army and the Kachin Independence Army, he learned early about danger and resilience. Music became his refuge — “We only had shortwave radio that I could listen to, so that was my main source of knowledge about music,” he recalls. The Beatles and Western pop inspired him, even as such influences were banned under General Ne Win’s regime.

By the 1980s, Mun Awng led the band The Rhythm, known for original songs that defied the trend of copying Western tunes. His 1984 debut album 8/82 Inya became a sensation among students and marked a new era in Burmese music. But as censorship tightened, he grew disillusioned and joined the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, where he witnessed deadly crackdowns before fleeing into exile.

At the Thai-Myanmar border, Mun Awng joined the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF) and began composing revolutionary songs. “We believe that armed struggle is the only way we can remove the military dictatorship,” he says. His revolutionary anthems — Battle for Peace, Tempest of Blood, and Moment of Truth — were smuggled into Burma, hidden under luggage and buried underground, eventually becoming rallying cries for generations.

Granted asylum in Norway in 1996, he has continued performing for the diaspora, reminding audiences that “music can do that” — bridge generations and renew hope. Today, Mun Awng remains devoted to his cause: “We have to unite… we have to give our life for the country… until we achieve the ultimate victory.”

Episode #559: “Comrade,” Renata says, when asked how she would like to be remembered. A member of the People’s Defense Force and a former political prisoner, she uses the word to name what sustains her in Myanmar’s revolution: loyalty to those who have suffered, fought, been jailed, and died.

Before the 2021 coup, Renata was a law student who describes her life as centered on study and office work. Following the coup, she hesitated initially to take part in direct action, and instead chose to participate online, calling herself a “keyboard fighter” then. But as the crackdowns intensified, she joined street protests, and then learned to make Molotov cocktails and small bombs for her brother and his friends.

In June 2021, she was arrested with her mother and four-year-old sister, who became the country’s youngest political prisoner. Renata was sentenced to three years with hard labor but freed after four months upon signing a pledge not to participate in revolutionary activity. She describes prison as lasting trauma.

After her release, she joined the PDF in northern Shan State. Jungle life revolved around food and water scarcity, physical endurance, and evading airstrikes and landmines. For young people anxious to join the resistance, she says they must prepare physically and mentally for hunger, discrimination, sleeplessness, and trauma; women, she adds, will face additional burdens. Her own ability to sustain herself through these challenges is rooted in her relationships with her comrades and her dedication to defeating the junta.

Yet Renata still allows herself to imagine a peaceful future after this long struggle. “Please keep on watching our revolution!” she pleads to the international audience.

Episode #558: “I've always had a certain resistance to the over-institutionalization of anything,” says renowned meditation teacher Delson Armstrong, who argues that one of the deepest obstacles on the spiritual path is attachment to the very systems intended to help people become free. Meditation methods, lineages, institutions, and teachers can all be valuable, yet they can become objects of clinging when practitioners mistake the tools for the goal. Throughout his reflections on meditation, tradition, and authority, Armstrong returns to two principles: liberation requires a willingness to continually examine and release attachment, and genuine understanding must be grounded in direct experience rather than inherited certainty.

Armstrong's perspective emerged through a long exploration of contemplative traditions. Raised in a Catholic environment, he later studied yoga, Vedanta, Sankhya, and a range of Buddhist systems, including Dzogchen, Mahamudra, and Theravada practices that emphasized deep concentration. Over time, however, he became dissatisfied with approaches that seemed more concerned with achieving meditative states than understanding the causes of suffering.

A turning point came when he encountered Brahma Vihara practice and later Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM), associated with Bhante Vimalaramsi, which emphasizes relaxation, observation, and the gradual unraveling of mental conditioning. Armstrong argues that concentration can suppress disturbances without transforming the conditions that create suffering; relaxating into practice, by contrast, allows practitioners to directly see how craving, resistance, and identification operate.

Armstrong maintains that practice should be judged by how people respond to ordinary life rather than by what happens during retreats, even in very challenging situations. “Meditation is life; life is meditation,” he says.

He warns against turning traditions, attainment maps, teachers, or institutions into unquestionable authorities. Useful frameworks become dogma when they stop being questioned. Teachers can guide, but they cannot replace personal understanding: “The map is one thing, but your journey is your own.”

Ultimately, Armstrong presents spiritual development as an ongoing process of inquiry rather than certainty. His guiding principle remains simple: “Do not just take my word for it, do not take the word of the lineage for it, do not take the word of tradition for it. But see for yourself!”

Episode #557: Born in Yangon, Aung Tun grew up listening to foreign news broadcasts, which provided an uncensored view of a world beyond Myanmar’s military control. Inspired by the 1988 uprising in which his brother was detained, he felt compelled to ensure the truth was documented.

So Aung Tun joined the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an independent media organization. His work was clandestine and risky—using hidden cameras to document the regime's brutality and the resilience of the Burmese people. In 2007, Aung Tun played a vital role in filming large parts of the Saffron Revolution, an uprising led by monks. His footage became part of the documentary "Burma VJ," which garnered international acclaim for bringing Myanmar’s struggle to global attention.

Despite a temporary setback after being arrested during the revolution, Aung Tun returned to the streets to continue documenting the protests. He believes in the power of citizen journalism to transcend borders and inspire action.

In 2021, Myanmar once again faced a military coup, and while technology had evolved, the danger of speaking out remained the same. Aung Tun stresses the importance of learning from the past, being transparent, and fostering growth through self-critique. Now living in exile, he continues to train young Burmese journalists, ensuring that Myanmar’s fight for democracy is not forgotten. His dedication stands as a testament to the unyielding spirit of Myanmar's people.

"In Saffron, all I could do is to just to keep recording," he says. “So as long as you survive, you keep recording! Somebody will use your footage. Even though I am in exile, and I cannot film, I still keep telling the story, like I'm telling right now. So don't think too much! Sometimes you think too much, you'll be overwhelmed by what you have to do. Just look at the present moment."

Episode #556: “I just find it so interesting that the Buddha actually talked about discussion as being a really important part of our Dhamma journey,” says Bruce Stewart, a longtime practitioner, former assistant teacher, and one of the early builders of the Goenka Vipassana meditation tradition in North America. In this second appearance on this platform, he addresses the concerns that caused him to question key aspects of the organization, which culminated in his being barred from even visiting centers in the tradition.

Drawing on decades of committed involvement, including being appointed a Senior Teacher (Achariya), Stewart reflects on the challenges that have emerged as the Goenka tradition became a large, global institution. He became particularly concerned with what he calls the tradition’s purity and prophecy narratives—beliefs about the unique authenticity and historical mission of the Goenka tradition that have become difficult to question now that they are embedded in organizational culture.

Over time, he also observed that some teachers and students alike privately expressed a variety of concerns while hesitating to raise them publicly, leading him to wonder whether, ironically, a culture that encourages self-observation was itself uncomfortable with institutional self-examination. Those concerns deepened through a project in which Stewart and others gathered feedback from seventy experienced practitioners, and conducted extensive video interviews with a small group of them. After nearly a year of preparation, the findings were presented to Senior Teachers, but the response was largely negative. For Stewart, this raised a broader question about whether institutions can remain open to information that challenges established assumptions. He also began questioning whether the tradition’s success in spreading meditation had outpaced the development of teacher training, individualized guidance, and mechanisms for learning from criticism.

At the same time, Stewart’s study of Early Buddhist Texts began to widen his understanding of Buddhism beyond the Goenka lineage, and raised some theoretical questions about the accuracy of some of Goenka’s interpretations concerning the technique itself. Although he remains grateful for the practice and the community he helped build, he ultimately stepped down from leadership and later found himself barred from centers in the tradition. Even so, he remains hopeful that future generations can preserve what is valuable while becoming more open to honest dialogue, historical inquiry, and critical reflection.

Episode #555: Note: this podcast episode includes frank anatomical language and extended discussion of women’s bodies, including terms for female genitalia, in the context of human rights, state abuse, and activist movements. Reader and listener discretion is advised.

“[They say that] Thailand is the only country that has never been colonized. But it's not true!”

Kornkanok “Pup” Khumta, an activist from Isaan, argues that the myth of sovereignty hides a colonial order, where Bangkok defines language, history, development, and which bodies are allowed to exist. Isaan, she says, is Lao in language and culture, and the borders that separate people along the Mekong are still newer than the state admits. “People in Isaan, we have been brainwashed to be Thai people,” she says, adding that even the word “Thai” itself is a recent invention.

Pup describes Siam’s consolidation as violent, then sustained through schooling that punishes local speech and replaces regional memory with a Siam-centered story. The same center–periphery structure shapes “development” as extraction: resources flow to Bangkok while poverty in the northeast is treated as normal. Generations migrate to the capital for education and wages, leaving Isaan hollowed out, a place many return to only for Songkran or New Year.

At Thammasat University, Pup expected democratic critique but instead found classmates aiming for bureaucratic power. She pushed back, arguing provincial governors should be elected, not appointed from Bangkok. After the 2014 coup, she tested the regime’s limits with quiet protest and was arrested, learning that visibility alone can trigger punishment. Later, after refusing to sign a pledge to stop political activity, she was sent into prison, and processed through searches that turned discipline into bodily violation.

That experience sharpened her feminism. She framed organizing around bodily autonomy, using taboo-breaking protest—speaking openly about female body parts and insisting democracy includes control over one’s body. Pup then moved to extend her politics beyond borders, rejecting ASEAN’s “non-interference” policy as a cover for authoritarian cooperation, including support for Myanmar’s military. For her, constitutional change in Thailand is the hinge between refuge and repression—and survival requires joy: “I believe in fun,” she says, because despair is also a weapon.

“We are at the point that we don't have to belong to any state,” she says. “I mean, we can just treat each other as a humans and we can all come together against all forms of repression.”

Episode #554: Bruce Stewart, an early Western student and teacher in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, reflects on a lifelong search for spiritual meaning driven by curiosity, wonder, and a desire to understand life more deeply. The sudden death of his younger sister prompted early questions about life’s meaning, while stories from traveling hippies kindled a desire to explore the wider world.

Leaving New Zealand, Stewart worked his passage to Europe on a cargo ship and spent several adventurous years traveling through Europe and Africa and immersing himself in the hippie counterculture. Eventually Stewart found his way to a Sivananda ashram in Canada, where his spiritual interests were given structure. There he met his future wife, Maureen. Together they returned to New Zealand and founded one of the country’s first yoga centers, creating a vibrant community centered on yoga, vegetarianism, retreats, and alternative culture.

Later, Stewart took a vipassana course with John Coleman, a student of U Ba Khin; the experience was life-changing. Soon after, he and Maureen dissolved their yoga center and traveled to India to became involved with the fledgling Vipassana center at Dhamma Giri in Igatpuri, where they worked closely with S.N. Goenka.

As the movement expanded, Stewart and Maureen were heavily involved in helping the tradition take root in the U.S. Yet over time, he became increasingly uneasy with organizational culture, leadership styles, and narratives of purity and authority. Historical study and deeper inquiry eventually led him to question long-held assumptions, and eventually his decision to broaden his practice and step down from his Senior Teacher responsibilities. Still, he remains grateful for the practice and its benefits, viewing his spiritual life as a series of valuable stages that collectively formed a rich, demanding, and deeply meaningful journey.

Episode #553: Naw Moo Moo Paw grew up in a Karen village near Bago where conflict and landmines were part of everyday life. “I have seen a lot of people injured or die because of the war and intense conflict,” she says. “This is very normal for me.”

Today, she is a PhD candidate in Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where her research focuses on what happens to people, their bodies, livelihoods, and place in their communities affected by political violence.

She has interviewed civilians, injured soldiers, and active resistance fighters, gaining access to armed groups most outside researchers cannot reach.

Resistance groups in ethnic Karen communities have used landmines primarily as a defensive tactic, but the warnings offered to civilians are frequently imprecise. For many, the warning changes little. “Civilians, they have to work on a daily basis, so that they can survive, for their economy, to take care of their family.” People are warned, but they have to go on with their lives.

She finds that accountability is increasingly difficult to establish. Mines captured from military bases are reused by resistance groups, propaganda obscures who planted what, and records of mine locations can die with the soldier who laid them. “I think both sides are violating the law,” she says.

Civilians, she finds, rarely assign blame. They understand the nature of war, fear the land’s growing unpredictability, and keep moving because they have no choice. Those injured in warned areas often face community ostracism, and too many take their own lives.

As a Karen scholar, Naw Moo Moo Paw wants local knowledge, history, and experience placed at the center of any peace. “I want [Karen people’s] voices to be included in the future, too.”

Episode #552: Mon Mon Myat, a journalist, filmmaker, and peace scholar, frames Myanmar’s political struggle as a long contest over power, moral discipline, and the possibility of change without domination. Her account begins with U Hpo Hlaing, the nineteenth-century thinker she calls “a kind of very early political theorist in Myanmar,” and moves toward Aung San Suu Kyi, whose politics she sees as part of the same search for accountable authority.

For Mon Mon Myat, U Hpo Hlaing matters because he complicates the idea that democracy arrived in Myanmar only through Western influence. He studied Western parliamentary systems, but tried to translate them into Burmese moral and Buddhist terms, creating what she calls “Burma-native democracy.” His work was not a full modern system, but it offered a principle: rulers must be bound by ethical restraint, not merely by power.

Aung San Suu Kyi, in Mon Mon Myat’s view, widened that principle. She did not speak only to rulers, but to citizens. Through speeches, radio broadcasts, and years of nonviolent resistance, she helped Mon Mon Myat understand politics as personal responsibility. “Politics had nothing to do with me,” she says of her younger self, before Aung San Suu Kyi’s example changed her sense of what citizenship required.

That is why nonviolence remains central to Mon Mon Myat’s reading. She knows it is slow and costly, but argues that armed struggle leaves wounds across society, while nonviolence risks the masses less than others. The post-coup conflict has only deepened her fear of trauma that may last for generations.

Her defense of Aung San Suu Kyi during the Rohingya crisis rests on a difficult distinction. Mon Mon Myat does not present her as flawless. She insists that Aung San Suu Kyi was a politician trying to hold together a fragile country, preserve civilian rule, and avoid further conflict under military pressure. Critics saw silence. Mon Mon Myat sees constraint, calculation, and a refusal to inflame communal violence.

The hope she still holds is narrow but persistent: that Myanmar’s future depends not only on removing military rule, but on whether power can be morally restrained before it consumes everything around it.

Episode #551: Fred Stockwell arrived in Mae Sot by accident more than twenty years ago while traveling through Thailand to photograph temples, a wrong bus dropping him off in what was, at the time, a bustling border town filled with NGOs and young volunteers. Someone told him to visit the garbage dump, and a man drove him there by a route that felt deliberately hard to retrace. “It was like it was a secret where it was,” he recalls. At the dump, Burmese migrant families survived by salvaging and selling recyclables, building shelters from whatever they could pull from waste. “They were living on top of the garbage!” he says. “Everything they built was what they found in the garbage.”

Before Mae Sot, his life had already been shaped by self-taught risk and logistics—having introduced paragliding in the U.S. through early testing and instruction, and later becoming the first person to fly in and photograph the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, doing so from the air, when ground access had largely collapsed. And now back in the United States after that first Mae Sot visit, the contrast stayed with him: a comfortable life at home, and a border world where small failures—transport, housing, medical access—could turn fatal. His mind now made up,he returned to Mae Sot, and the first step he points to is concrete: “You’ve got to start somewhere. I started with one kid,” he says, describing a girl “as close to death as you’re ever going to get” and taking her to the hospital, then building outward through routines that held children in school, kept housing standing, and kept people connected to services they otherwise could not reach.

The critique that follows stays procedural. People arrived wanting to help and then stalled, not from cruelty but because they lacked a method for what came next, and the same problem appeared in organizations that could arrive with structure and still fail to change the conditions at the dump, or elsewhere in the town. “I saw a lot of people here, no disrespect to them, that came in to help but didn’t have a clue what to do.”

He ties effectiveness to the pairing of resources and competence, and reduces the mismatch to a single blunt line. “There’s a very large gap between the people that want to help and the people that need help. That gap is huge.”

Episode #550: “There was something inside of me that was calling me,” says Jerry Roy, a long-time Vipassana meditator and early student in the Goenka tradition. “Not a thought, but something pulling me.” He argues that liberation comes not from rigid adherence to technique or authority, but from direct understanding of the mind—especially craving and aversion.

Raised in a Jewish household, Roy felt pressure to conform to a shared identity he experienced as restrictive. He rejected its religious element early, identifying instead as a “cultural Jew,” and developed a lasting determination not to live “in a box.” That impulse aligned with the 1960s counterculture, where he immersed himself in experimentation and activism. Psychedelics presented a spiritual potentiality, yet, as he later reflects, “It opened a door, but it didn't show me how to walk through the door.” Disillusionment with activism, along with the suicide of a housemate, pushed him toward a deeper inquiry into suffering.

That search led him to India. He rejected both the hedonistic hippie scenes and guru-centered traditions he came across, but then discovered Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka. “I realized that I had found what I was looking for,” he says. He became deeply involved in the tradition, valuing its discipline and accessibility.

Over time, however, he began to see increasing rigidity within the organization, especially after his divorce led to a feeling of being excluded from the community. His practice also continued to evolve beyond the strict technique of the Goenka tradition, towards more continuous awareness. “The practice is not a technique,” he explains. “The practice is being present in the moment.”

Today, Roy emphasizes direct experience over doctrine. “All you need to do is understand the root cause of suffering, which is craving and aversion.”

Episode #549: Mohammad Siraj, a Rohingya researcher, political analyst, educator, and aspiring legal scholar living in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, studies citizenship, constitutional reform, education, and human rights. Drawing on his work with the Rohingya Academic Research Institute and his experience teaching in refugee settings, he argues that the Rohingya crisis is not simply a humanitarian emergency but a political and institutional crisis rooted in discriminatory law, particularly Myanmar’s citizenship framework and constitutional structure.

Siraj’s own life reflects the realities he studies. He once hoped to become a doctor, but military violence forced his family to flee Myanmar. In Bangladesh’s refugee camps, he continued studying through limited educational opportunities and later pursued research training. Statelessness created major barriers: even when he received university offers, he could not accept them because he lacked a passport or travel documents. He turned toward law because he believes legal systems have excluded Rohingya from citizenship, political participation, and protection.

He repeatedly highlights statelessness as one of the greatest obstacles Rohingya face. Without citizenship, movement, higher education, and professional opportunities remain difficult to access. His own studies through the online University of the People illustrate both determination and the limits of such alternatives.

Siraj’s research and teaching are rooted in these same conditions. At the Rohingya Academic Research Institute, a community-led organization in the camps, he helps Rohingya scholars document their history and rights. He also criticizes humanitarian education programs that prioritize administrative requirements over meaningful learning. In response, Rohingya teachers have created community schools using the Myanmar curriculum, though their certificates are rarely recognized by universities.

For Siraj, the deeper cause of the crisis lies in Myanmar’s 1982 citizenship law, which stripped Rohingya of citizenship and legal protection. He argues that lasting reform must restore equal citizenship and dismantle constitutional structures that entrench military power, while dialogue across communities remains essential for building a democratic Myanmar where all ethnic groups share citizenship, representation, and dignity.

Episode #548: Sunda Khin shares a remarkable family journey through contemporary Burmese history. She starts with her father, U Chan Htoon, who suggested that a young Indian businessman named S.N. Goenka learn meditation from Sayagyi U Ba Khin to cure his migraines. Growing up as the daughter of the country's first Supreme Court Justice, she recalls spending time in General Ne Win's home during the "Caretaker Government" years. Ne Win's coup in 1962 marked a shift, leading to economic turmoil and loss of civil liberties, including the arrest of her father. As a means for explaining the many challenges that have befallen her country since 1958, she explains the Burmese Buddhist concept of "tha gyarr thar tha nar," which is a Burmese prophecy that signifies the end of the Buddha’s protective period after 2,500 years.

Sunda Khin shares several international situations that her father was involved with. The most complex of these was when South Vietnamese members of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB) demanded the organization stand up against Ngo Dinh Diem's discrimination of the country's Buddhist minority. The US was concerned that this move could weaken their ally against rising Communist influence in the region, and indeed, that the influential WFB might be falling under Communist control. U Chan Htoon was making some headway is mediating this crisis, but unfortunately, before it could be resolved, Ne Win had him arrested, perhaps out of a political fear of his popularity and influence.

Sunda Khin also describes her father’s rather unexpected acquisition of a lakefront property, which was later inherited by Aung San Suu Kyi, and where she endured decades of house arrest.And she discusses her childhood friendship with Louisa Bensen, who transformed from a beauty queen to a Karen insurgent leader, and their involvement together in the democracy movement many years later.

“A lot of things have happened, but I have a lot of hope for things to change,” she says regarding the current resistance movement. “I might not see it right now, or before I die, but I'mhoping that it will change and that the people will be able to have their own government and their freedom. That is my hope.”

Episode #547: Scott Leckie, an international human rights lawyer, and Jose Arraiza, a specialist in housing, land, and property rights and citizenship in conflict-affected settings, argue that land in Myanmar is not simply a resource but a central mechanism through which power is exercised, inequality is produced, and political authority is maintained. They emphasize that housing, land, and property (HLP) rights extend beyond formal ownership to include anyone whose ability to remain on land is vulnerable to arbitrary interference.

The roots of Myanmar’s current land system can be traced to colonial policies that classified inhabited land as “wasteland,” which enabled appropriation. This framework was later adopted by the country’s military regimes; as a result, this legacy persists in a system where land can be taken with minimal process and little recourse, allowing authorities to reallocate land and consolidate control.

The effects of this system are most visible in the interaction between conflict and land governance. While large-scale displacement is primarily driven by armed conflict, the land system determines what happens afterward. Displaced people frequently lose practical control over their land, as it is reclassified or repurposed, often for commercial activities such as mining or agriculture. In this way, temporary displacement is transformed into longer-term dispossession. The same system also shapes economic outcomes, directing the benefits of land use toward elites and those with political connections rather than affected communities.

These practices diverge from international legal standards, which require safeguards such as compensation and access to remedies. The situation is further complicated by citizenship and documentation issues, which weaken individuals’ ability to assert claims, particularly for marginalized groups such as the Rohingya.

Although reforms between 2011 and 2021 showed that alternative approaches were possible, the 2021 coup reversed these changes. Today, governance is fragmented between military authorities and ethnic resistance groups, with some efforts to develop alternative land systems. Civil society organizations continue to support affected populations but face reduced capacity due to declining international support. Despite these challenges, Leckie and Arraiza argue that any future transition must center land rights, restitution, and legal protection, and that meaningful change remains possible.

Episode #546: Recorded in Kuala Lumpur during Malaysia’s final stretch as ASEAN chair, this is the second episode in a three part series which looks less at policy language and more at political consequence. Recorded inside Parliament, lawmakers grapple with what regional diplomacy can realistically achieve while communities across Malaysia absorb the human fallout of Myanmar’s implosion — refugees navigating precarious legal status, strained public systems, and a debate that grows sharper the longer the crisis drags on.

The first guest, Willie Mongin, is the Member of Parliament for Puncak Borneo in Sarawak and a former deputy minister who now serves as Deputy Chair of Malaysia’s parliamentary select committee on international trade and international relations. His engagement with Myanmar deepened after joining the committee three years ago, when he began closely monitoring ASEAN geopolitics. For Mongin, the logic is simple: regional peace underpins shared prosperity. “When we have a peaceful region, we can actually work together and work towards prosperity together,” he says. Instability in Myanmar, he argues, threatens ASEAN cohesion and fuels refugee pressures in Malaysia. While acknowledging Malaysia’s limits, he calls on the United Nations and major powers to press for a democratic resolution led ultimately by Myanmar’s own leadership.

The second guest, Ahmed Tarmizi, is the Member of Parliament for Sik in Kedah and Deputy Chairman of Malaysia’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugee Policy. Before entering politics, he worked in humanitarian relief connected to Myanmar, traveling to Rakhine State and refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. He describes Myanmar’s crisis as regional in impact, calling it “like a cancer for the Asian community.” In Malaysia, he highlights the presence of more than 180,000 refugees, mostly from Myanmar, and the country’s lack of a formal legal framework recognizing them. “We don't have any legal [act] to recognize the refugees,” he says, urging clearer policy and stronger ASEAN and UN action to stop the violence driving displacement.

Episode #545: The promise of justice for war crimes in Myanmar is far from perfect, says Dr. Stuart Casey-Maslen, a leading legal expert on disarmament and international humanitarian law. The military regime’s alleged war crimes continue unchecked, with airstrikes against civilian targets, the destruction of homes, schools, and places of worship, and indiscriminate use of landmines exacting a cruel toll. On a different scale, some resistance armed groups have also been accused of war crimes.

“Justice can, and sometimes does, catch up with you even many years afterwards,” says Casey-Maslen, who is editor of the Mine Action Review and has written extensively on international law related to landmines. “If a member of the Tatmadaw, or a senior official in the Myanmar government, travels in years to come to one of many countries that have legislation for war crimes or crimes against humanity… that can also be a prosecution of the use of an anti-personnel mine.”

Anti-personnel landmines fall into a distinct class of “victim-activated” weapons, which are designed to be detonated by the victim. The deliberate delay between the deployment and detonation also distinguishes landmines from weapons such as firearms or artillery, in which a specific target is chosen and impact is relatively immediate. This delay makes accountability much more difficult, including identifying who laid the mine.

Prosecutions for crimes committed in Myanmar face considerable challenges, but the facts of the case remain. “The use by the Tatmadaw and by certain rebel groups, but particularly the use by the Myanmar military, has been indiscriminate,” Casey-Maslen says. “They have committed war crimes through their use of anti-personnel mines. In certain instances, they have forced people to walk through minefields. That is a war crime. That kind of conduct is beyond any rule of IHL, and hopefully one day those who are responsible will be brought to account.”

Episode #544: May Shine, a recent graduate of the Elliott School of International Affairs, approaches policy work from the position of someone shaped by displacement and minority identity within Myanmar’s Chin community. Her work focuses on a persistent gap between lived realities and international policy, particularly in how crises like Myanmar’s remain underrepresented despite ongoing conflict and displacement.

Her research along the Thailand–Myanmar border reveals how issues such as child labor emerge directly from structural pressures like legal insecurity and economic instability. “I have also come across with child labor,” she adds, describing how children miss school not by choice but necessity. These observations inform her critique of humanitarian aid systems that often fail toreach affected communities due to political and logistical barriers.

She argues that more representation within policymaking spaces is essential, noting that Myanmar remains underrepresented globally. At the same time, she situates this within broader geopolitical realities, where competing crises limit sustained international attention.

Within Myanmar’s movement, she emphasizes collective leadership over reliance on singular figures, even as fragmentation across ethnic and community lines complicates unity. “The strength of Myanmar’s movement should not depend on a single figure or leader,” she says, advocating for collaboration across differences.

Her work remains grounded in a constrained but deliberate role: to carry lived experience into policy spaces that often operate without it, despite the difficulty of translating between the two.

Episode #543: “We believe in dialogs among people of different backgrounds,” says Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, a Thai professor at Chiang Mai University and director of the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD). While Myanmar’s crisis is often framed in political and humanitarian terms, he argues that Myanmar is also living through an “interregnum”: that is, the old political order has lost legitimacy, but no coherent alternative has yet taken shape, and foundational questions about national identity, federalism, and shared values remain unresolved. This instability, he explains, creates both the danger of ethno-political fragmentation and the opportunity for developing a more inclusive framework for Myanmar’s post-junta future

RCSD is one of those platforms now attempting to articulate and synthesize this future. Long before the 2021 coup, the center brought together journalists, activists, and researchers to examine land issues, education, and social transformation. It collaborated with universities and organized Myanmar-focused conferences. After the coup, it established a scholar-at-risk fellowship program in Thailand for journalists, artists, and civil society researchers, creating a relatively safe academic space at a time of growing repression.

Chayan frames this support as urgent. Many young people who fled Myanmar, including participants in the Civil Disobedience Movement, are stranded in Thailand without stable documentation or access to higher education. Their continued exclusion would harm not only Myanmar but the region as a whole, as Thailand depends economically on migrant labor and stability across its borders.

At the heart of his argument is the need for what Chayan calls “organic intellectuals”—individuals who remain rooted in their communities while developing analytical tools to interpret them—and developing “counter-hegemonic knowledge.” Resistance alone is insufficient, he stresses; Myanmar must imagine what comes after military rule. He warns against reducing political identity solely to ethnicity, and calls for a framework that respects differences but is grounded in shared values.

Episode #542: Max Ante, a former deeply committed practitioner of the Goenka Vipassana tradition, describes a spiritual journey shaped by a relentless desire to understand reality directly, regardless of where that search might lead. From early in his practice, he committed fully to a structured path that promised liberation through disciplined meditation, organizing his life, relationships, and sense of purpose around that goal.

Early on in his practice, he traveled to Myanmar on a pilgrimage led by Goenka, where he received permission to become a monk. The experience was immersive and meaningful, offering a glimpse into a life fully dedicated to spiritual practice. Yet it also revealed the intensity and demands of that path, and he recognized that he could not sustain that level of renunciation.

Over time, his confidence in the system began to erode. And as he encountered alternative interpretations of Buddhist teachings, his doubts expanded beyond specific ideas into a broader uncertainty about how to understand his life. He came to feel that he had internalized a system that had overridden his own independent judgment, resulting in this departure from that tradition.

However, without the structure that had defined his identity and progress, he had no clear direction. He turned to other sources, including the writings of Jed McKenna, which challenged the assumption that there is a stable self that progresses along the path.

Ante’s inquiry eventually extended beyond meditation, to a culminating psychedelic experience in Mexico that fractured his sense of identity, and reinforced his growing view that no fixed system could fully resolve the question he was pursuing. He continues to meditate and live ethically, but without grounding these practices in a prescribed framework. He now approaches his life as an open-ended process, no longer guided by a single system or final answer.

Episode #541: “There is no such thing as ‘traditional Buddhism.’”

For Marte Nilsen, this idea defines her career-long exploration of how faith and power intertwine in Myanmar. A senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), she studies how religion evolves with politics, art, and everyday life. “I’m a scientist, and I’m a researcher,” she says. “So I’m always looking at religion as part of society, not as an individual endeavor.”

Nilsen explains that religion in Myanmar has long been a political tool. During the late socialist era, the military built pagodas to project spiritual legitimacy. “The military really needed to take control of politics, obviously, but they did it through religion in many ways.” Yet communities quietly resisted, reclaiming symbols through ritual and art. “Religion is never a static thing,” she says. “It always evolves.”

Her research also explores the Ma Ba Tha movement, which gained strength by serving local needs where the state and political parties did not. “It’s incredibly important for people who want to have a political impact or social impact to actually be there with the people,” Nilsen says. The movement’s success, she argues, revealed both the vulnerability and adaptability of faith amid Myanmar’s ongoing struggle for justice.

She also notes that Myanmar’s struggle is not only political but psychological and spiritual — a revolution of the mind. The country’s future depends not just on ending military rule, but on unlearning the fear and obedience instilled by decades of dictatorship. Real freedom, she says, will come when people reclaim the empathy and moral courage that oppression tried to erase — a reminder, in her words, of how all things shift and pass. “Life isn't permanent,” she says, referencing Buddhist teachings, “and everything will change. Nothing will stay.”

Episode #540: This episode marks a different kind of experiment for Insight Myanmar. Instead of following a single guest, we step back and listen across hundreds of conversations gathered over years of documenting Myanmar’s revolution. What emerges is not one story, but a living network of voices—activists, artists, monks, organizers, journalists, and fighters—all wrestling with what it means to endure the collapse of a society and imagine something beyond it.

The conversation unfolds across four interconnected themes. The first is “Coming Together”: the quiet, invisible labor that makes resistance possible long before protests fill the streets. Organizers describe years spent building trust, underground networks, and systems of mutual support in the absence of a functioning state.

The second is “Creative Expression.” Artists, musicians, photographers, and cooks reveal how humor, storytelling, food, and music become tools for survival and resistance, helping people process trauma while keeping movements emotionally alive.

The third dimension, “Moral Alignment,” centers on Buddhist monks grappling with questions of ethics, violence, and responsibility. Their stories expose the tension between spiritual practice and political engagement in a country where suffering can no longer be ignored.

Finally, the episode turns to “Conflict” itself. Ordinary people—a tour guide, a hip hop artist, former nonviolent activists—describe being pushed into armed resistance and the irreversible emotional costs that follow.

Taken together, these voices reveal a revolution that is not only political, but deeply human: creative, fractured, moral, traumatic, and unfinished.

Episode #539: In his analysis of Myanmar's democratic transition, Elliot Prasse-Freeman highlights the failures of a system that was inherently flawed from its inception. Although the 2010s brought real change to some, the military also retained significant control, making any possibility at political reform superficial. This left marginalized groups without meaningful change, and created a transition that, as Prasse-Freeman says, was “moribund” from the start.

Economic reforms during that time emphasized privatization and the commodification of land, disregarding the needs of small-scale farmers. These policies led to land grabs, exacerbating the vulnerabilities of those already struggling. In parallel, he notes that this period failed to address ethnic justice, leaving the grievances of non-Bamar communities, including the Rohingya, unaddressed, and further deepening divisions. Grassroots activism emerged as a critical response, driven by frustration with both the military and the NLD's failure to enact real reform; local groups symbolized sustained resistance, organizing actions to reclaim land and assert their rights.

Despite the many flaws, the resilience of the people of Myanmar remains evident. As Prasse-Freeman poignantly states: “One of the things that they talk about is that you have to make people be their own heroes! But in order to do so, you have to act like a hero yourself, because people aren't prepared to be their own heroes in front of a military that's constantly exploited them.”

Episode #538: The fifth episode in our five-part series features conversations recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners gathered under the theme Dealing with Legacies in Burma. Held in the midst of political upheaval and humanitarian crisis, the conference offered a rare space for open exchange, collective reflection, and connection. Insight Myanmar was welcomed into this setting to record dialogues with a diverse range of attendees, produced in collaboration with NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. With these episodes, we hope to bring listeners into the atmosphere of the gathering and into conversation with the people who continue to shape the field today.

Khaing Wai Wai Zaw taught English in Myanmar for eight years, and went to Northern Illinois University for a higher degree in her field. But she also became a research assistant there cataloging artifacts, in particular 228 rare, scared sasi jo ribbons. While having no qualifications in this area, she relied on her Buddhist literacy and background to interpret inscriptions, andensure they have a safe home at the NIU library, at least until her country regains its stability. She also reflects on the political crisis in Myanmar and wrestles with the role monks should play, balancing her own reluctance to criticize with her belief in social responsibility.

“I’m a totally different person when I get on stage.” With this feeling, Karen dancer and community leader Hsa Win reflects on how dance preserves his identity. He grew up in a refugee camp in Thailand after his family fled Burma, and later moved to the U.S. Wanting to educate others about his Karen heritage, he began performing traditional dances at community events. Hedescribes competitions, bamboo dances, and the spiritual dances of the thirty-seven natspirits. Onstage, he feels confident and transformed, adopting the personalities of the spirits he portrays, and American audiences are enthusiastic. He now lives in Ohio, where he teaches dance to Karen youth to help them “embrace their identity” and keep their culture alive.

Researcher and artist Ni Ni Win describes how Burmese marionettes have become a powerful link to her identity now that she lives in America. She explains that puppetry developed to portray particularly sacred Jataka Tales that humans were not permitted to depict. Under royal patronage, puppet shows became very popular; the marionettes conveyed religious teachings, history, and even political concerns, since civilians sometimes asked puppeteers to voice criticisms through the puppets. This art form declined when the monarchy was dismantled by the British, and then as other forms of entertainment became increasingly popular. Amy also draws inspiration from pagoda engravings, known as gnotpatterns, which are used on traditional Burmese textiles as well. Living abroad has increased her appreciation for these traditions, which help her stay connected to her homeland.

Episode #537: “Refugees are incredibly remarkable. They're working day-in and day-out to provide for their communities, but they're working under a set of assumptions and a set of regulations that prohibited them from working.”

Maximillian Mørch, Head of Program Development and Quality Assurance at The Border Consortium, describes how a system built as an emergency response in 1984 has hardened into a four-decade reality along the Thai–Myanmar border. TBC has long provided food, shelter materials, cooking fuel, nutritional support, and technical assistance across nine border camps. Today, more than 100,000 refugees live inside those camps, with tens of thousands more in rural border areas outside the camp system and at least 50,000 in Thailand’s cities. The displacement is not temporary, and it has only further deepened again since the 2021 coup.

For decades, camp refugees were largely confined. Leaving without authorization risked being treated as an undocumented migrant, and work outside the camps was prohibited. That restriction made food aid the central pillar of survival. Mørch emphasizes that dependence was structural, not moral: refugees sustained their communities through constant labor, but under rules that prevented real economic participation.

Over time, the camps evolved from transplanted villages into organized settlements with homes, schools, clinics, markets, religious life, and refugee-led governance. The Karen Refugee Committee and Karenni Refugee Committee oversee services, coordinate with Thai authorities and NGOs, and manage disputes. Yet the system’s viability rested on uninterrupted funding—and in 2025 it began to fail. Food and fuel alone exceptionally costly, and funding gaps at one point left camps without food support for weeks, as global humanitarian crises competed for shrinking resources.

With return to Myanmar unsafe and resettlement opportunities collapsing—especially after the suspension and termination of a major U.S. process—Thailand’s August 2025 resolution granting eligible refugees the right to work marked a historic rupture. The policy reframes survival around income, with research suggesting a week’s wages can exceed a month of past food assistance. Labor shortages in Thailand, particularly after reported departures of Cambodian workers, helped push the reform.

Eligibility remains limited, rollout is complex, families generally stay in camps, and around 10% of residents will still need direct aid. “Everyone wants to be self-dependent,” he says. “No one wants to be held hostage to the changing fluctuations” of humanitarian funding. Mørch’s portrait is of a system forced to reinvent itself—opening a breach in confinement, but not yet a full pathway out.

Episode #536: “I never feel that war is this close to me,” Bencharat Chua, a Thai human rights professor and activist, reflects as she explains how decades of engagement with Myanmar have reshaped her understanding of conflict, democracy, and regional responsibility. Her central argument is that without democracy and a lived culture of human rights in Myanmar, Thailand will continue to experience instability, displacement, and violence spilling across the border. Human rights language, she insists, only matters if it becomes political practice and public will.

Her involvement with Myanmar began in 1999, when she worked with the NGO Friends Without Borders and spent two years visiting refugee camps along the Thai–Myanmar border. There, she learned directly from displaced Burmese communities about repression and conflict, while also witnessing widespread hostility toward them within Thai society. She later joined the Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies at Mahidol University, where she worked with Burmese students and long-time activists, including members of the 1988 generation living in exile.

During Myanmar’s political transition in the late 2010s, she became deeply involved with universities inside the country. Around 2018–2019, she helped train law lecturers after international human rights law became mandatory in Myanmar’s law faculties. Although many lecturers initially struggled, she later saw lasting gains in confidence and political awareness that endured even after the 2021 coup dismantled the formal education system.

Bencharat also traces political change through shifting attitudes toward the Rohingya. She recalls earlier denial among democracy supporters, followed by a significant shift, noting that “now everyone acknowledges what happened.” For her, this signaled that Burmese human rights advocates were beginning to extend rights principles beyond nationalist exclusion.

She situates these changes within a broader regional context. While Thai state policy toward Myanmar remains cautious, tied to business interests and the “ASEAN way,” she identifies the Thai youth movement as a countercurrent, arguing that prolonged military rule has politicized a generation despite severe repression. After the 2021 Myanmar coup, her work shifted towards supporting parallel education for students resisting the junta, where she continues to confront the gap between human rights ideals and lived violence. These experiences have made war feel immediate and reinforced her belief that change depends on people willing to insist on dignity and rights, even at great cost. “We are ready to fight for democracy, we are ready to fight for human rights!”

Episode #535: “Meditation kind of lost its traditional sense of going really deep to finding Nibbana,” says David Johnson, a longtime practitioner and senior teacher at the Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center, describing what he sees as a drift away from the Buddha’s original intention.

Johnson has always had an interest in spirituality. He joined his first retreat in his teens, and at nineteen, he left college to follow his teacher, the monastic Sujata, to the Still Point Meditation Center in California. He cooked, cleaned, and lived among young seekers there for years in what he remembers as a “golden era,” when teachers like Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Munindra passed through.

After Still Point closed, Johnson entered the emerging world of Silicon Valley. Fast forward a number of years, and he learned that a Bhante Vimalaramsi was trying to find him. He found out that this monastic had been a lay acquaintance long ago at Still Point, and who had since become a monk after extensive training in Asia. Visiting him in Missouri, Johnson encountered a method centered on relaxation, kindness, and direct reliance on the suttas. He eventually left his tech career to join Dhamma Sukha, convinced that this approach preserved what the Buddha actually taught about the mind’s capacity for liberation.

Meditation at Dhamma Sukha is based in the Brahmaviharas, and taught as a gentle, natural process grounded in relaxation rather than force. The emphasis is on tranquilizing bodily and mental tension, allowing awareness to open easily, and letting the mind move through increasingly calm states without strain, effort, or suppression. Johnson says that neuroscience is validating the higher states that meditators in that tradition can reach.

He ends by affirming his confidence in the Buddha’s path and the transformation it brings. “There is a way out of suffering!” he affirms, expressing the same hope for others that began his own journey.

Episode #534: Tracy Bawi Hlei Iang, a Chin activist and co-founder of Myanmar Action Group Denmark, reflects on a life shaped by early family separation, forced migration, and political rupture, and argues that sustained, small-scale collective action—especially across ethnic and religious lines—is both possible and essential for Myanmar’s future.

Tracy grew up in rural Chin State, and when she was about seven, her father fled Myanmar because of his political activities, landing in Denmark, and her mother left soon afterward, unable to remain safely in the country. After being raised by grandparents, she left Chin State at the age of fourteen to reunite with her father. Language was a major obstacle. She taught herself by reading children’s books late into the night with a dictionary, eventually becoming fluent in the Danish language. Cultural integration took longer. Entering school as a teenager in a small town left her feeling invisible, until two years at a Christian boarding school allowed her to form friendships, learn Danish norms, and feel a sense of belonging grounded in social trust.

Before the 2021 coup, Tracy was not politically active, but the military takeover shocked her into action. She helped organize a public demonstration in downtown Copenhagen that brought together multiple ethnic communities from Myanmar, an experience that galvanized her commitment. This led to the founding of Myanmar Action Group Denmark, a volunteer-run, registered association focused on advocacy and humanitarian support.

From the outset, Tracy has insisted that the organization work for all of Myanmar rather than a single ethnic or religious group. Despite persistent divisions, she has observed growing openness, especially among younger people. Activism has transformed her personally, giving her skills, purpose, and solidarity with those still inside the country. It is important, she believes, for diverse diaspora communities to unite in solidarity.

In the end, Tracy considers her efforts as quite small in the scheme of things, yet is satisfied with the impact she is able to make. So she closes with a simple message: “Please don't underestimate [the power of small actions].” She stresses that supporting Myanmar does not require grand gestures; it requires persistence, courage, and willingness to act where one is.

Episode #533: “Before COVID-19 and before the Myanmar coup, I thought that ‘memory of war’ meant only World War Two inside Myanmar. But after 2021, I realized for local people the condition is like a war now.”

Hitoshi Kameyama, a Japanese photographer, first came to Burma in 2005 on a photography tour. Expecting a repressive environment, he was instead struck by the warmth and friendliness of local people. This impression drew him back repeatedly, and he eventually made more than 25 trips before the pandemic, building close ties by photographing villagers and returning later with prints for them.

Myanmar’s political opening after 2011 allowed greater freedom for photographers and journalists. While Japanese companies began investing, Kameyama focused on documenting memories of the Japanese occupation in World War Two. He was inspired by encounters with elderly villagers who recalled both suffering and small gestures of kindness from Japanese soldiers. In one case, a woman whose brother had been killed by soldiers still preserved a grenade and other wartime objects for decades, hoping they might be returned to Japan. Such stories led to his book Burma Myanmar Memories of War 2019–2024.

The pandemic and the 2021 coup forced him to expand the project beyond historical memory. Unable to enter Myanmar, he traveled to India and Thailand, where refugees had fled. He visited Mae Sot clinics, schools, and camps, meeting displaced families and injured resistance fighters. His work began to connect past and present, showing how conflict continues to shape lives.

Many of his images highlight this continuity: a child playing with a Japanese helmet, a tiny tank carried into Chin State by soldiers, ceremonies where survivors still gather to honor the dead, and a 2012 community meeting once seen as ordinary but later understood as a fleeting sign of democracy.

Kameyama is critical of Japanese businesses that continue to operate in Myanmar, arguing that profits inevitably aid the junta. Reflecting on two decades of engagement, he stresses that personal bonds matter more than politics. As he put it, “It’s important to me, this personal relationship with the Myanmar people.”

Episode #532: “Constitutions need power,” says Henning Glaser, a Bangkok-based lawyer working on constitutional politics in Asia. In his second appearance on the podcast, he argues that Myanmar’s constitutional problem is less about drafting the perfect text than about whether any text can bind the actors who hold force, and whether there is enough unity to sustain a shared political community.

He describes the early post-independence settlement as broken at its origin, saying the promised autonomy that predated the first constitution “was never really done so from the beginning,” leaving what he calls “the original sin of constitutionalism and statehood” that still shapes mistrust. Later military-era constitutions, in his view, often functioned as cover for power rather than restraint, with the 2008 charter operating as “insurance” that preserved military vetoes and control.

Glaser insists a viable constitutional state “needs a certain degree of unity,” and that unity cannot be manufactured by constitutional language alone. Federalism and peace-making become inseparable challenges, because the constitutional design question sits on top of armed realities, competing visions of federation versus confederation, and minority-within-minority tensions that do not map neatly onto territory.

He also emphasizes “constitutional infrastructure” as a precondition for any genuine rule of law: courts that function, legal education that produces doctrine rather than slogans, a press able to criticize judgments, and citizens able to engage without fear. Courts can guard a constitution only if judges can rule independently and if the broader system accepts rulings without reverting to coercion.

Glaser’s most pragmatic conclusion is that Myanmar may need a tentative constitution first—a minimal framework that can be implemented while institutions, doctrine, and civic capacity develop—because constitutional ambition that exceeds enforceable power risks repeating the cycle of promises made on paper and withdrawn in practice.

Episode #531: “The laws that govern the monks’ organization were written before 1988, during a one-party dictatorship! In the Sangha organization, you cannot have different voices… everything comes from the top-down. If you say anything unorthodox, your writing will be censored.”

U Pandita explains the challenges within Myanmar’s Saṅgha, where rigid hierarchies and censorship laws stifle independent thought and research. He critiques the authoritarian governance of the monastic order, noting that senior Buddhist monks resist change because they benefit from the status quo. Monks lack autonomy, and dissenting voices face severe consequences, including disrobement or legal action.

He contrasts his current freedom in Sri Lanka with the restrictions in place in Myanmar, where his academic work would be censored, and he would be in danger. He highlights how the Saṅgha’sinability to modernize perpetuates problems like corruption, and silence around controversial topics. He also criticizes the Sangha’s role in promoting nationalist and anti-Islamic sentiments, driven by the military’s claim of “protecting Buddhism,” which he dismisses as a self-serving excuse.

U Pandita delves into Buddhist ethics. His academic work challenges the idea of universally fixed precepts, and believes that ethical standards depend on societal and cultural context, using the precept of sexual misconduct as an example. This perspective, he admits, is unconventional and may surprise and even unsettle many traditional and religious Buddhists.

Reflecting on Myanmar’s identity as both a source of spiritual wisdom and a nation embroiled in conflict, U Pandita attributes its current struggles to historical cycles of power and aggression. He expresses concern over the military’s exploitation of Buddhism, which distorts its teachings and erodes public trust in the monastic community. While acknowledging the resilience of Myanmar’s Buddhist traditions, he warns of the risks posed by political turmoil and the resulting decline of the public’s faith in monks.

U Pandita advocates for research as a means to revitalize Buddhism’s intellectual tradition and bridge gaps between Myanmar’s heritage and global audiences. He believes a progressive, inclusive approach can ensure Buddhism remains relevant and meaningful in contemporary society.

Episode #530: “I don't want to live under fear, obeying [the military]. I could survive, but would be in fear, like every movement I would feel I don't have freedom, and I think I don't want that for myself,” says JC, a Karen illustrator and activist now based in the Netherlands. Raised in Yangon, JC was unaware of Myanmar’s civil war due to school propaganda. Only after moving to Thailand to be near her father did she learn the extent of ethnic conflict and oppression. Seeing refugee camps and hearing stories of the Karen struggle left her angry and determined to understand more.

JC earned a communications degree in Bangkok and initially envisioned a career in journalism. A political science course taught by a former prisoner, combined with life among marginalized migrant workers, deepened her sense of purpose. She returned to Myanmar during its brief democratic opening, working with a civil society group serving Karen communities. That optimism collapsed with the 2021 coup.

Turning to illustration after protest and journalism became too dangerous, JC found a new outlet for storytelling. “By doing illustration, I feel like I'm contributing,” she says. Inspired by editorial art, she developed a minimalist, emotionally expressive style. Her illustrations accompany stories of trauma and displacement, including one of a pregnant woman who lost twins while fleeing war—a piece she says still haunts her. Creating pieces like this take an emotional toll, however, and she often needs to take breaks between pieces to reground herself.

JC’s art bridges personal and political experience, offering a visual language that speaks across cultures. she says, “Emotions are universal,” and her work often introduces Myanmar’s crisis to unfamiliar audiences. Still in legal limbo, she draws to stay connected. “Since I cannot be there physically, it’s a way of me to stay contributing,” she says. “I wish [people] don’t forget about Myanmar.”

Episode #529: Daniel Dodd is one of the two center teachers at Dhamma Patapa, a Vipassana meditation center in Georgia in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. Alongside his work as a meditation practitioner and teacher, he has built a career in community organizing, nonprofit leadership, and federal service focused on low-income communities. But it has not been an easy journey.

Dodd was born in Brazil to a Colombian mother and an American father. The family later moved to the United States, and much of his childhood unfolded in rural Maine after his parents separated. His mother raised three children on a homestead without plumbing, where daily life required endurance and adaptability. His adolescence and early adulthood were marked by confusion and drift: He struggled in school, barely graduating, and began drinking and smoking marijuana, uncertain about his future, an angry and agitated young man. A period teaching English in Bogotá during Colombia’s violent drug-war years broadened his outlook but did not resolve deeper internal struggles. After a painful breakup left him feeling unmoored, he took a ten-day Vipassana retreat. The experience proved transformative, and meditation gradually became the organizing center of his life. Rather than turning away from society, the practice deepened his awareness of suffering’s personal and social dimensions.

That perspective guided his later work organizing low-income communities and eventually serving at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For Dodd, meditation does not remove concern about injustice; it changes how that concern is carried. As he reflects near the end of the conversation, “We’re all kind of trying to figure these things out and become better people as we’re sitting and living our lives.”

Episode #528: Ola Elvestuen has devoted his political career—and much of his life beyond politics—to tackling the most urgent environmental and societal challenges facing the global community. A member of Norway’s Liberal Party since 2013, he has served as Minister of Climate and the Environment and held several high-ranking positions in both local and national government.

As a young man in the late 1980s, Elvestuen witnessed a world in upheaval: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and Myanmar’s 8888 Uprising. The latter left a particular mark on him and many in Norway, embedding the Burmese struggle deep within Norwegian politics and foreign policy.

During the democratic opening of the 2010s, Norway emerged as an important player, pairing diplomatic support with investments in critical industries such as hydropower, oil and gas exploration, and telecommunications. Yet Elvestuen points to a defining controversy in 2022, when Telenor—Norway’s majority state-owned telecom giant—sold its Burmese operations to entities with close ties to the junta, effectively handing over sensitive user data. The decision drew sharp criticism from activists and rights groups who warned of the dangers for dissidents, journalists, and civil society.

When the military launched a coup in 2021, Elvestuen watched with dismay, arguing the international community should have reacted immediately and forcefully. “The demonstrations that were held were incredible,” he says, “but they did not get the support that they should have gotten in the early days!”

For Elvestuen, the path forward is clear: only a federal democracy can secure Myanmar’s future, and Norway must play a meaningful role in supporting it. He argues that sustainable environmental initiatives should progress alongside the political struggle, pointing to Myanmar’s extraordinary biodiversity and the severe climate threats it faces.

In closing, Elvestuen reminds listeners that the urgency of Myanmar’s situation extends far beyond its borders. “That is what we [Norway and the West] had to do with Ukraine,” he says, “and that is also the position that we should have with the revolution in Myanmar.”

Episode #527: Nay Chi, a senior researcher with the Myanography project, describes Myanmar’s post-coup election as an exercise in coercion rather than public choice. Drawing on reports from community researchers across the country, she says most people were not interested in voting and did not believe the process would change anything. What moved them was pressure: warnings tied to conscription, threats at checkpoints, loudspeaker announcements, and the wider fear created by a military already known for violence. As Nay Chi puts it, “people are forced to vote,” a phrase that strips the election of any democratic pretense.

That pressure took different forms depending on the place. Displaced families were told that relatives of military age could be taken if they did not vote. Government staff were steered toward military-aligned parties. Travelers were questioned about voter registration. Even where no direct order was given, people understood what refusal might invite. The point was not to persuade them politically, but to make participation feel safer than refusal.

The structure of the election reinforced that logic. Candidates had to report campaign movements and materials in detail to military authorities, and even where local ethnic parties won seats, Nay Chi says the most important positions still flowed toward military-backed figures. For many communities, the result was something already assumed in advance. “We cannot even imagine our future,” she says, describing a public that no longer sees voting as a path toward representation.

What followed was not relief. Community researchers reported that conscription pressures intensified after the vote. Families kept paying money to try to shield sons from recruitment, often unsuccessfully. Young men hid in forests. Parents rushed children away after exams, fearing military abduction into forced conscription. In that atmosphere, the election quickly faded behind the larger struggle to stay safe, fed, and out of military reach.

Nay Chi’s argument is blunt. The election did not reconnect people to politics or representation. It extended a system in which procedure is used to mask force, and in which international recognition would only deepen the sense that the suffering imposed on Myanmar’s people can be turned into paperwork and accepted as normal.

Episode #526: “I actually was anti-Muslim when I was in high school!” recalls Thet Swe Win, describing how he was influenced by nationalist propaganda in his youth. But his involvement in the 2007 Saffron Revolution began to change him. Marching with barefoot monks, he witnessed Muslims come from a mosque to give them water, medicine, and slippers. “We do not have to hate each other, but we have to unite and fight back the military,” he realized.

His mother, fearful for his safety because of his participation in the protests, sent him to Singapore. Immersed in a multiethnic workplace there, he gradually shed lingering prejudices, concluding that there are only good and bad people, not good or bad religions. Returning to Myanmar, he resumed activism after anti-Muslim violence erupted in Rakhine State in 2012 and spread to other towns, stoked by state television propaganda. In response, he and his peers launched the “Blue Sticker Campaign” to counter the extremist 969 movement and its hate speech. Still, he confesses that the anti-Rohingya propaganda he had absorbed throughout his life left him with lingering bias toward that community—until Rohingya activist Wai Wai Nu drew him into her campaigns and encouraged him to learn their history, which ultimately reshaped his perspective.

Later on, Thet Swe Win founded Synergy, an organization dedicated to fostering social harmony. One of its well-known initiatives was the White Rose Campaign of 2019, where Buddhists offered roses to Muslims facing harassment. The gesture spread nationwide as a symbol of solidarity. His activism has drawn threats from MaBaTha, harassment by police, and raids on his office. Yet he remains firm in his resolve, and has refused to leave the region.

Thet Swe Win insists Myanmar’s future requires moral leadership, curiosity, and accountability. “The revolution without the political leadership or the moral leadership will be a chaos,” he warns. For him, real change “begins within, from within.”

Episode #525: Heidy Quah, founder of Refuge for the Refugees in Kuala Lumpur, describes her work supporting migrants and refugees in Malaysia, particularly those fleeing Myanmar. She began volunteering at a refugee learning center at eighteen and was transformed by what she witnessed, particularly seeing children on the verge of losing their only access to education because of funding shortages. From that moment, she committed herself to ensuring refugees could access basic rights such as education, healthcare, and dignified livelihood.

Quah’s organization now supports dozens of refugee learning centers, shelter homes for trafficked and abused women, and a livelihood initiative which enables refugee women to earn income through craft production. She emphasizes restoring dignity and agency, not charity or pity.

Quah recounts harrowing stories of new arrivals—young people fleeing forced conscription, sexual violence, and the killing of family members—who survive perilous overland journeys to reach Malaysia. Many arrive already indebted to smugglers, having borrowed heavily to finance their escape. Despite deep physical and psychological trauma, they often must begin working almost immediately, driven by the urgency of repaying those debts and protecting the families they left behind.

A central concern for Quah is the contradiction she observes in Malaysian society: strong public advocacy for Muslim refugees in distant conflicts, such as Gaza, yet hostility toward refugees trying to live locally, like the Rohingya. She notes that Rohingya refugees in particular face racialized prejudice tied to skin color and stereotypes about cleanliness or criminality. For her, the deeper issue is selective empathy—why compassion extends across oceans but falters at the shoreline.

Throughout her work, Quah centers storytelling, representation, and hope. She believes lasting change comes when affected communities speak for themselves and when advocacy preserves dignity rather than reinforcing victimhood.

Episode #524: Max Ante’s story begins not with a gradual curiosity, but with a sudden rupture. At twenty, after a series of chance encounters, he found himself on a ten-day Vipassana retreat in the Goenka tradition—an experience that would reorder his life almost overnight. The stillness he encountered at the end of that course carried an authority that eclipsed everything that came before. Ambitions, identity, relationships—all of it fell away in the face of something that felt more real, more urgent, more true.

What followed was not casual interest, but total commitment. Max structured his life entirely around the practice, meditating daily, sitting increasingly long retreats, and traveling internationally to deepen his experience. Liberation from suffering became his central aim, grounded in what he believed was direct insight into the nature of reality. The framework was complete, self-reinforcing, and supported by a community that validated both his experiences and his interpretations of them.

Over time, this commitment extended into every aspect of his life. Relationships, work, and personal decisions were filtered through the logic of the practice. Challenges—whether emotional, psychological, or relational—were met with more meditation, under the assumption that the technique itself was sufficient. But instead of resolving these tensions, many quietly accumulated beneath the surface.

Years later, cracks began to appear. Personal loss, unresolved strain, and contradictions within the tradition itself forced Max to reexamine what he had taken as unquestionable. He began to see how the system had shaped not only his experiences, but his interpretation of them—closing off alternative ways of understanding his own life.

Looking back, Max holds a complex view. The practice gave him discipline, clarity, and access to profound inner states. But it also narrowed his world, guiding decisions in ways that, in retrospect, limited his autonomy. In his current view, the issue is not the practice itself, but the degree of authority he had given it. He emphasizes that systems become self-reinforcing when they define both the experience and the “correct” interpretation of that experience, leaving little room for critical thinking.