Insight Myanmar

Episode #517: “They are using each other for their own benefit.” With this line, Wai Yan Phyo Naing frames a sober account of SinoMyanmar relations. A researcher and lecturer in international relations and modern history who studied in Moscow and later worked with migrants in Thailand, Wai Yan Phyo Naing brings both scholarship and field experience to the conversation. For Wai Yan Phyo Naing, the relationship is transactional. “China is only interested in its national interests,” he says. “China is ready to communicate with whoever becomes powerful in Myanmar.” Myanmar engages because it must, yet, as Wai Yan Phyo Naing insists, “Myanmar is a sovereign, independent state—not a province of China.” Geography drives the rest: China seeks an outlet to the Indian Ocean, and Myanmar’s coast provides it. The pipelines from Kyaukphyu to Yunnan are operating; the rail vision remains contested—proof, Wai Yan Phyo Naing says, that consent and fair terms decide outcomes. Security realities push cooperation, as Wai Yan Phyo Naing notes that China brokered talks with MNDAA, TNLA, and AA, even “opened the observer office in Lashio,” and, as the generals realized the limits of unilateral force, they came to “appreciate the Chinese intervention.” The darker side of crossborder interdependence is the scam economy, which Wai Yan Phyo Naing calls “like a cancer.” Strategically, Wai Yan Phyo Naing recounts how Beijing once “wanted to create the tunnel… to the Ayeyarwady River and then to the sea.” That was rejected, but “the port project, gas and oil pipeline” are now real, and China is “ready to continue their highspeed railroad from Yunnan.” The moral is unchanged: both states pursue advantage, and Myanmar must bargain hard. Wai Yan Phyo Naing cautions against extremes. “Whoever holds power in Myanmar cannot forget China’s presence,” he says. “Please don’t forget we are just beside China… we shouldn’t see China as a ‘bad guy’ all the time.”

Episode #516: “I want to be able to center women in their full right and to shine a spotlight on how I think they are very much the heroes of the revolution,” says Jenny Hedström, a researcher whose book, Reproducing Revolution, examines women’s labor in the Kachin struggle. Joined by Stella Naw, a Kachin activist and scholar, they argue that the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple story of aggressor and victim. Instead, it must be understood through the everyday labor that sustains communities across generations of war. Jenny’s engagement with Kachin women began in the early 2000s while working with the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand. She found that English-language scholarship centered male fighters and formal politics, while the women she spoke with talked about displacement, rebuilding, and survival. When she began her PhD in 2015, she initially focused on female soldiers, assuming armed actors were the proper lens for studying war. But spending time in Kachin towns, army brigades, and displacement camps shifted her perspective: she realized that labor that was not militarily or publicly celebrated proved equally essential to revolutionary endurance. Together, they argue that Kachin womens’ roles in farming, teaching, organizing, and caregiving within Kachin Independence Organization–controlled areas constitute real governance, and not merely domestic support. Stella reframes gender as relational, noting that rigid expectations of masculinity have harmed men as well. “When they can no longer perform the values that define them as Kachin men… they take their own life!” They extend this critique to the international arena, contending that legitimacy is too narrowly defined through sovereignty and armed control. The sustaining labor that makes resistance governance possible remains politically undervalued, and Jenny and Stella want conflict analysis and policy engagement to more explicitly account for this foundational layer of local governance. They stress that the governance sustained by women is politically indispensable, so it should be studied, supported—and valued—accordingly In the end, their commitment remains unequivocal: “We’d rather live and fight for freedom than to submit,” says Stella. “People are willing to die, so they will continue fighting. It's not going to end, but we can end it soon by supporting these resistance actors, who made up for pluralistic states, and support civil society groups who can hold EAOs and EROs accountable.”

Episode #515: Toru Kubota is a Japanese documentary filmmaker who believes storytelling can foster empathy beyond abstract argument. A political science student at Keio University who developed an interest in refugee issues, in 2014 he joined a student project interviewing Rohingya refugees in Japan. Using a camera for the first time, he helped produce a short documentary about their lives. In 2016, Kubota traveled to Sittwe in Rakhine State and entered camps housing Rohingya displaced after the 2012 violence. Though officially designated as internally displaced persons camps, he saw them as places of confinement, where communities were segregated and deprived of adequate services. Filming an accidental fire inside one camp became a turning point; editing the footage later convinced him of film’s power to convey lived experience. Following both the military’s 2017 campaign against the Rohingya and the 2021 coup, Kubota returned each time to Myanmar to document events unfolding there. While filming a protest in 2022,soldiers arrested him at gunpoint and used staged photographs as evidence of his participation. He was charged with incitement and immigration violations and sentenced to ten years in prison. Fortunately, diplomatic pressure was able to secure his release after 111 days in detention at the notorious Insein Prison, where he had endured solitary confinement and struggled with despair. Since then, Kubota has supported exiled Myanmar journalists in a variety of different ways. His film “Borderline Resistors” follows exile media collectives along the Thai–Myanmar border. Reflecting on his imprisonment and the fragility of civil liberties, he recalls something an activist once told him: “Freedom is like air. You never appreciate it when you can breathe freely. But you finally realize how important is when you get drowned in water.”

Episode #514: Richmond Heath, an Australian physiotherapist, longtime vipassana meditator and senior trainer in tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) discusses the involuntary movements that arise for some people in meditation. He argues they are not signs of dysfunction, but rather expressions of underlying bodily processes. It’s how a person relates to them that matters most. In his late twenties, Heath developed chronic pain that resisted conventional treatment and forced him to abandon the physical activity that had once grounded him. Turning to vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, he encountered intense discomfort but discovered that pain was partly a reaction layered onto sensation. By observing it rather than resisting it, its character changed, opening a new way of relating to the body. As his practice deepened, spontaneous movements began to arise. These ranged from subtle shifts to complex, fluid postures that felt unexpectedly free rather than painful. Because he was not consciously producing them, he experienced them as something happening through the body rather than something he was doing. Yet neither medical nor meditative frameworks could account for it. His vipassana teachers discouraged the movements, and eventually he was asked to leave a retreat; medicine, in turn, tended to framed them as manifestations of pathology. Despite this, he trusted his experience and continued observing. He later described these as “neurogenic movements” and came to understand them as part of a broader rhythm of activation and release. While initially interpreting them as trauma discharge, he expanded this view, noting similar patterns in early development, cultural practices, and states of heightened energy. This led him to conclude that no single framework fully explains the phenomenon. Encounters with Aboriginal elder Jack Beatson and later TRE provided validation and context. TRE, which deliberately elicits similar movements, confirmed that such responses can be accessed intentionally, but also reinforced that they function best when not controlled. Heath emphasizes discernment: the same process can regulate or destabilize depending on how it feels. His guiding question—“are you okay, and is it working for you?”—extends beyond meditation to everyday experiences, reframing reactions like panic as part of the body’s attempts to adjust. Even in extreme conditions, such as conflict zones, these processes may offer limited but meaningful relief. Ultimately, Heath maintains an openness to interpretation, grounded in a simple principle that the Aboriginal elder told him: “Enjoy the ride!”

Episode #513: Georgi Engelbrecht of the International Crisis Group links two stories that matter for Myanmar: the Mindanao peace process and Russia’s ties to authoritarian partners in Southeast Asia.He begins in the Philippines with what he calls the conflict’s “master cleavage” — Muslim communities inside a state seeking self-determination against what they see as colonial intrusion. That grievance was reinforced by migration, exclusion, and underdevelopment until it hardened into decades of separatist war. But the macro narrative never explained everything. Alongside it ran “horizontal violence”: clan feuds, communal disputes, and local power struggles that don’t disappear just because a deal is signed.For Engelbrecht, the 2012 and 2014 agreements with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front were a turning point, not an ending. The MILF largely abandoned fighting, the Bangsamoro autonomy project became real, and governing structures took shape after the autonomous region was established in 2019. Yet the region remains “in flux,” with delays, elite rivalries, contested legitimacy, and violence that has shifted rather than vanished.From Mindanao he pivots to Myanmar and what major powers mean by “stability.” Russia’s push into Asia, he argues, accelerated with its rupture from the West, as Moscow sought partners and arenas beyond Western leverage. In Myanmar, that lens favors the junta: Russia tends to read rebellion as instability and the central state as the default counterweight. With pipelines for hardware, parts, training, and contact, “Myanmar, because of Russia's help, is not that isolated anymore,” and perceptions of durability become a force multiplier.His wager is blunt: “Russia is banking on victory of the regime.” China, by contrast, cannot afford distance and hedges across actors because Myanmar’s disorder sits on its border. As Engelbrecht puts it, “Chechnya [for Russia] is probably what Myanmar is for China.” For Moscow, this becomes part of a broader pattern—how Russia shows it can keep partners standing, stay relevant beyond Western systems, and act as a patron for regimes the West is trying to isolate. For Myanmar, that means the relationship isn’t a blueprint for victory—but it can function as scaffolding: not determining the war’s shape, but bracing the regime’s ability to persist.

Episode #512: “The overall consequences are so bad that I myself urged the Norwegian government to stop some of this.” Hanne Sophie Greve, a Norwegian judge and long-time human rights jurist, argues that Telenor’s conduct in Myanmar created foreseeable and preventable pathways to severe human rights harm, but existing legal systems struggle to respond proportionately. She frames the case as both a corporate failure and a test of how Norway—a state that portrays itself as committed to democracy and human rights—handles the risks created when a majority state-owned company operates in a fragile political environment. Greve reconstructs Telenor’s entry into Myanmar during a period of political opening, when optimism about liberalization was widespread. She notes that Telenor had a strong reputation for transparency and human-rights due diligence, which she describes as a tool designed to identify high-risk contexts. Precisely because of that due diligence, Greve identifies the company’s first major failure: Myanmar’s telecommunications sector was structurally high-risk even during the democratic transition, because the legal system lacked safeguards, and Telenor knew this. She argues that the company should have insisted on legal protections and planned for an emergency exit. When political conditions deteriorated and sanctions reinforced those risks, Telenor still failed to act on what it knew. The second failure was Telenor’s handling of real-time interception equipment. Although lawful when imported, Telenor kept it in Myanmar after sanctions were imposed and was later operationalized by the military. She emphasizes that leaving such capacity behind in a country sliding toward authoritarian violence is not a neutral act. She also strongly criticizes Telenor’s exit and sale of its Myanmar operation to a military-linked entity, arguing that sensitive data should have been deleted rather than left accessible. Greve describes the situation in present-day Myanmar as a constant conflict in which surveillance enables arrests, repression, and lethal violence. While she says Telenor’s criminal liability under Norwegian law remains legally uncertain, she argues that if responsibility is established it would attach to the company itself, not individual employees. She concludes by treating the case as a warning about how control over communications infrastructure directly affects whether a society can function at all, and she expresses hope that Norway can support a peaceful transition for Myanmar’s people. “I would love to see my own country in Norway participating in bringing about that peaceful transition for the benefit of the people of Myanmar.”

In this bonus episode, Better Burma’s monastic donation manager, Mora, shares what he has been seeing on the ground in Myanmar after years of conflict and displacement, now compounded by the March 28, 2025 earthquake. He explains why so much of Better Burma’s work runs through monasteries and nunneries, as these communities have become frontline sanctuaries for children, providing shelter, food, schooling, and basic healthcare for thousands who have nowhere else to go. Mora describes what it takes to deliver aid under current conditions, the scale of damage and urgent rebuild needs across sites in Sagaing, Mandalay, and surrounding areas, and what Better Burma has been doing since the quake, from constructing temporary and permanent housing to repairing collapsed walls and roofs and helping communities relocate out of unsafe structures. He highlights one orphanage nunnery caring for more than 90 children, including infants, now living in unsafe bamboo shelters after their building was destroyed, and he explains how economic hardship has crushed local giving, forcing some nunneries to travel long distances just to gather rice to send back to the children. He closes by underscoring how vast the remaining needs are, from classrooms and teaching halls to restored water access and basic monastic requisites lost in the debris, and invites listeners who want to support this work to donate at betterburma.org/donation.

Episode #511: Like many young Kiwis, Jarrod Newell wanted to see the world. Taking advantage of the special working holiday visas available in the United Kingdom, he traveled to London,where he participated in the city’s wild, partying lifestyle. After saving some money, he would pick up and find some new place to visit, ultimately making his way across cities and even continents. While attending hippy festival in Greece, he met a girl who had just completed a ten-day vipassana retreat in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, and told him of an upcoming course in Crete, and Jarrod went there straight away. The course experience was brutal, but had a deep impact on him. After ten years, he finally returned home, and now a committed meditator, sat and served regularly at the local vipassana center. When Jarrod heard that Goenka would be leading a pilgrimage through Burma, he knew he had to go. As soon as he stepped off the plane in the Golden Land, he realized he was somewhere special. He was especially moved by his sitting in in a cave at Shwe Taung Oo in Monywa, where Ledi Sayadaw used to reside nearly a century ago. It was there that the idea of ordaining as a monk came to him, and Goenka eventually gave him his blessing to take robes. Now a monastic, he returned to Shwe Taung Oo Pagoda, where he decided to sit six, 10-day self-courses in the style of Goenka retreats, with just one day between each. As a monk, Jarrod was greeted with open arms and an open heart by nearly every Burmese person outside the military that he came in contact with, and on more than one occasion was invited to remain in whatever area he was in for life, with promises that all his needs would be looked after. However, in the end, he decided to disrobe, and returned to New Zealand via India, where he sat a 60-day course. When he was 32, Jarrod enrolled in medical school, and met his future wife with whom he had three daughters. He has a medical practice, and has opened a business. “I'm just very much a householder,” he notes. But the memories from his time in the Golden Land are never very far away for Jarrod, and the lessons from those years are precious.

Episode #510: “I'm not an activist,” says Bart Was Not Here, a Burmese artist whose politically oriented work reflects a life shaped by dictatorship and displacement. He argues that art creates a space where memory, humor, fear, and imagination can coexist, allowing both artist and viewer to navigate political realities in ways that ordinary language cannot. Bart sees current global politics as part of a wider shift toward more extreme forms of power. Myanmar’s experience, he explains, no longer feels unique but echoes developments now taking place elsewhere. This awareness shapes both his personal outlook and his artistic practice. As an individual he worries about the state of the world, yet as an artist he values the act of creation as a protected interior space from which to observe, reflect, and transform experience into form. Satire plays a central role in his work, as Bart argues that humor can deflate authoritarian power by exposing its absurdity; a practice that Burmese have long been trained in doing. In a society familiar with repression, he notes how humor becomes a subtle form of resistance. For Bart, absurdity reveals how power, while often appearing grand, can be exposed as brittle and theatrical. These ideas shape his recent exhibition, Threshold. The project emerged after he moved to the United States and received an immigration identification number for non-citizens. The label struck him as a strange science-fiction scenario—a “Third World alien” entering the first world. From this experience he developed the idea of a threshold: a suspended, liminal space between departure and arrival where identities shift and renegotiate themselves. It is an interconnected world rather than a series of isolated paintings, and populated by both mythic characters and archetypes from his own internal landscape. Through his layered environments, Bart explores systems of control, waiting, and escape. Ultimately, however, he insists that art should remain playful and exploratory. As he puts it, “Nothing is really that deep… it’s all spectacle and entertainment.”

Episode #509: “I don’t have hope. But I think that this is something that I should accept. It is reality.” Chalida Tajaroensuk, a longtime advocate of democratic reform and human rights across the Southeast Asian region, argues that human rights work collapses when it is built on prediction rather than conditions. Her account begins in a provincial Buddhist temple where community care wasn’t an abstract virtue but daily labor among the elderly, the poor, and those without family. From there, she traces a path through Thai student activism, the violence of the 1970s and 1990s, and a period in the jungle alongside the Communist Party, followed by disillusionment with ideologies that promise total change while leaders chased private benefit. Against grand theories, Chalida advocates a method that stays stubbornly small and specific—bailing people out of detention, negotiating with authorities, finding schools for Myanmar children who can’t study in Thai, persuading landlords to accept refugees who must report regularly, building neighborhood trust so displaced people can survive with dignity. “Do a small thing, and then when you have success, you feel success with the small.” Chalida extends that realism to refugee policy, arguing that reforms can still fail in implementation through language barriers, exploitation, and the hollowing out of camp life when key workers are forced to leave. On Thai public life, she is blunt about worsening conditions and the shortage of leaders she trusts, although what remains is obligation and repetition—ground-level fact-finding, people-to-people exchange, and the insistence that action continues even without a promised ending. Asked why she keeps going, Chalida returns to responsibility, not optimism. “I think that this is my duty.” She does not promise outcomes. She does not offer closure. She insists only on the smallest honest pledge: “Today we do today’s best.”

Episode #508: Damian Lilly, a veteran humanitarian and human-rights specialist, who has worked in conflict zones across the world, believes assistance must be joined with protection and accountability. “We can’t just be there to assist people—we also need to be there to protect them.” He formed this conviction through his work with Médecins Sans Frontières, documenting sexual violence in places such as Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Congo and turning testimony into pressure on governments. Working with the UN, he returned to South Sudan later as Senior Advisor on the Protection of Civilians. The civil war there drove more than 250,000 people into UN compounds, and although his work helped shelter so many people, he looks upon it as a failure because in the end, there was no justice or redress. Protection without justice, he says, “really loses sight of what we’re trying to do.” Later on, he was posted in Gaza in his role as UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees: during that time, there were three Israeli military incursions into the territory between 2008 and 2014, with no real repercussions, which only reinforced to Lilly how impunity fuels repeated wars. Accountability, he says, fails not for lack of law but ofpolitical will. When his wife, also a UN employee, received a posting to Myanmar, Lilly and his family moved to Yangon. This was shortly before the coup. He reports watching the tanks roll down the streets. In response, Lilly co-founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) to pursue prosecutions abroad through what is called “universal jurisdiction,” where crimes against humanity in one country can be prosecuted in another country’s national courts. MAP is seeking cases in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Turkey. Lilly critiques the International Criminal Court and UN Security Council for their paralysis, timidity in engaging the junta, and reluctance to recognize the NUG as the people’s legitimate representative. While the UN employs the claim of neutrality to justify continued relations with the junta, Lilly argues that true neutrality means fidelity to humanitarian principles, not moral equivalence. Despite bureaucratic inertia and shrinking aid budgets, Lilly insists that localization, persistence, and creative legal action can still advance justice. “It is a complex area,” he says, “but an important part of how we address many of these situations.”

Episode #507: “It’s a process of learning and unlearning, and understanding that knowledge exists in many places and is everywhere, not just in the academy,” says Davina Quinlivan, an Anglo-Burmese writer and research fellow in English and Creative Writing, of her second memoir, Possessions. Her first book, Shalimar, reconstructed her father’s wartime childhood in colonial Burma through historical inquiry, while Possessions turns toward embodiment and the present, exploring how inheritance lives in memory, belief, and the body. Quinlivan recounts her parents’ Anglo-Burmese backgrounds: born before World War II, they knew each other in Burma before their families emigrated to England in the mid-1950s amid post-independence uncertainty. After marrying other partners, they reconnected decades later and married. Raised in West London in the 1980s, Quinlivan grew up with an inherited Burma shaped by atmosphere and narrative. Though she never experienced what her parents described, their stories formed her imaginative interior. Knowledge in her childhood home was transmitted not through books or institutions but through language, food, fragments of memory, and silence. As the first in her family to attend university, she immersed herself in film and French feminist philosophy, later completing a doctorate and building a long academic career. Yet she began to question the hierarchy that privileges institutional knowledge over embodied and inherited forms. Living in rural Devon with her husband and children, she found English folklore—oak trees, medieval churches, Green Man carvings—entering into dialogue with Burmese cosmology. When her youngest son suffered recurring febrile seizures, she rendered the experience through mythic frameworks, imagining ancestors as active presences. Rather than resolve identity into a single narrative, Possessions holds together multiple landscapes, histories, and ways of knowing within one life.

Episode #506: “I think the toll of doing dedicated work even as we grow older is so small compared to that of so many brave Myanmar activists. I can support the cause, but I can also choose not to confront myself with the full reality of what’s going on in the ground. That’s a choice that Myanmar people by and large don’t have! That’s how I carry on doing the work I do,” says Patrick Hoffmann, reflecting on the personal and historical drivers behind his commitment to Myanmar's democracy movement. Patrick’s personal background indicates how individual narratives can ignite a lifetime commitment to global justice, advocating for freedom even from afar. His Jewish family heritage, marked by his father's childhood under Nazi Germany during World War II in Berlin, imbued him with a deep understanding of trauma and the devastating impact of atrocity; combined with the sense that one must never take democracy for granted, and it is always something worth fighting to preserve. This personal history, as both a German and a Jew, fuels his belief that “we, more than any other people, should stand for preventing genocide anywhere,” a conviction that propels his advocacy. Interacting with Myanmar students and activists in Yangon in 2012, he learned early the nuances in democratic models, particularly in the Asian context. After the 2021 coup, Patrick joined German Solidarity Myanmar, moving from conventional humanitarian aid work to more deeply active political lobbying. He advocates for a nuanced approach for Germany to show solidarity with Myanmar’s cause, such as not only condemning the regime but also supporting non-state actors. Through his work, he has realized the power of inclusive narrative building, as well as how art can tell “a much more approachable and human portrayal of people fighting for democracy on the ground.” Despite the immense challenges, Patrick remains inspired by the movement's resilience. “This movement feels so close,” he says. “It’s on the verge of success. We cannot give up now.”

Episode #505: In February, Timor-Leste opened judicial proceedings against Myanmar’s military regime, marking the first time one ASEAN member has initiated legal action against another. Supporting the case, the Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) submitted evidence documenting serious international crimes, including the rape of a pregnant woman, the massacre of ten civilians, an airstrike on a hospital, the killing of Christian religious leaders, and repeated attacks on churches.CHRO Executive Director Salai Za Uk Ling joins the podcast, and argues that because Myanmar’s legal system offers little protection for minority groups, international mechanisms have become essential. “Because no domestic laws really protect minority groups inside Myanmar, utilizing internationally accepted human rights standards and instruments becomes our only means by which we can promote awareness and try to address the human rights issues of people across Myanmar.”mv8r3g5fInternational legal action can serve several purposes, he explains. While pursuing long-term justice through legal processes, it also raises global awareness, increases political pressure on the regime, and may help deter future crimes. For people inside Myanmar, these efforts also carry symbolic weight. “We’re talking about ordinary people all across Myanmar. Everyone is in one way or another, directly or indirectly, affected by the regime’s actions,” Za Uk says. Even small recognition of their suffering can provide a sense that the world has not forgotten them.In Chin State, landmines are one element of a broader pattern of violence. Za Uk describes them as part of a systematic campaign to undermine communities in areas where resistance forces have driven out the military.“Landmines are just a piece of the larger puzzle of the regime trying to destroy lives that could be otherwise thriving in places that have been liberated,” he says. Used alongside indiscriminate airstrikes and other attacks on civilians, such tactics amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.More than half of Chin State’s population has been displaced since the 2021 coup. As families struggle to survive amid constant air attacks and hidden landmines, Za Uk warns the threat could become a long-term crisis. “A landmine is like a soldier that never sleeps,” he says. “And unfortunately, the target has been civilians.”

Episode #504: Michael Sladnick, an American activist who has lived and worked near the Thai–Myanmar border since the 2021 military coup, joins the podcast a second time to argue that the most consequential story of Myanmar’s revolution is not elite political maneuvering but the everyday construction of democratic practice by ordinary people under extreme pressure. He presents the movement as one in which civic life, political education, and multi-ethnic solidarity continue to develop despite war, repression, and material deprivation. Embedded in a resistance community along the border, his sustained relationships with activists, fighters and displaced families from central Myanmar have taught him that outsiders often misunderstand the social base of the resistance. He says political participation in these communities reflects ethical reasoning and conscious choice, not ignorance or simple reaction to hardship. He describes a society where young villagers debate democracy, minority rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights while remaining rooted in rural life, and he sees a hopeful trend in the growth of political consciousness within the resistance that encompasses the inclusion of ethnic minority rights as an essential component of a democratic future. Sladnick portrays the conflict as a long struggle defined by endurance rather than imminent victory or defeat. He notes that exhaustion is real, but surrender is not seen as a viable option. Instead, the people are building grassroots democratic and civic institutions, and trying to keep them alive so that when openings appear, they will still be capable of coordinated action. Indeed, to Sladnick, the movement’s weakest point is the missing bridge between those voices and the outside world: the lack of recognition, platforms, and material support that would help grassroots groups coordinate, survive, and be heard beyond Myanmar’s borders. He does not romanticize conditions—he emphasizes shortages, fear, and constant danger—but he returns to the idea that democratic capacity is being formed “on the ground,” right now, through lived participation, and that the international audience must come to recognize and act on this fact.

Episode #503: Alicia Turner shows that Burmese Buddhists were not passive subjects of British colonialism, but active agents who reimagined Buddhist responsibility, authority, and identity through the concept of the sāsana, the Buddha’s dispensation. Rather than treating colonialism as a simple rupture imposed from outside, her work reveals how Buddhists in Burma drew on their own religious frameworks to interpret crisis, decline, and moral obligation. In doing so, Turner challenges scholarly approaches that privilege nationalism, modernity, or so-called “Protestant Buddhism,” arguing that these lenses often miss how Burmese Buddhists understood and defended their tradition from within. Turner situates these developments within a much longer-standing anxiety about the decline and possible disappearance of the sāsana. This concern had always existed, but under British colonial rule it became urgent. The collapse of the monarchy brought with it the loss of royal patronage for elite monastics, creating a moral and religious vacuum. Lay Buddhists increasingly stepped into this space, taking on responsibility for preserving Buddhism through moral discipline, public accountability, and collective reform. Figures such as Ledi Sayadaw were central to this shift, expanding access to Abhidhamma study and enabling women and non-elites to participate directly in safeguarding the sāsana. Turner illustrates these tensions through the colonial “shoe controversy,” when British officials refused to remove their shoes in Buddhist sacred spaces. What colonial authorities framed as a matter of personal custom or symbolic respect was, for Burmese Buddhists, a serious desecration of sacred space and a denial of Buddhist moral authority. For Turner, the episode reveals a deeper clash over how religion itself was understood: whether ritual and embodied discipline were morally efficacious, or merely optional expressions of inward belief. The controversy shows how questions of religious authority, practice, and sovereignty were negotiated—and contested—under colonial rule. Finally, Turner traces how this moral project later fed into the post-Independence turn toward meditation. Promoted nationally under Burma’s first prime minister, U Nu, meditation was framed as a universal practice capable of renewing society itself, and it soon spread globally as something that could be taken up regardless of religious background. At the same time, Turner argues that many contemporary mindfulness movements reproduce forms of erasure, treating ritual life, cosmology, and embodied moral discipline as secondary or disposable—echoing older colonial assumptions about what counts as “essential” religion.

Episode #502: This episode, part of the Decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies Conference series, features two powerful voices—Shakil Ahmed and Tümüzo Katiry—who approach decolonization from distinct but complementary perspectives. Together, they show how imagination, identity, and place intertwine in the struggle to reclaim meaning and possibility. Shakil Ahmed, a futurist and educator, explores how his academic field can serve as a decolonial tool. “Future Studies is a study of the future, but the future has not happened yet,” he explains. “So how do you study something that hasn't happened yet? You study how people think about the future currently.” He outlines a shift from prediction to imagination, emphasizing that “there are multiple different futures as opposed to one exact possibility.” He describes key frameworks—“default future, possible futures, probable futures, and the preferred future”—which empower people to move from passive acceptance to active agency. Shakil’s “iceberg” model of Causal Layered Analysis asks listeners to look beneath visible issues to their deeper worldviews and myths: “These dominant myths and metaphors have shaped our society.” For him, decolonization means rewriting these inherited stories while balancing global structures with local wisdom. His outlook is hopeful: futures work, he insists, is about imagination, participation, and responsibility. Tümüzo Katiry speaks from the Naga homeland straddling the India–Myanmar border. “The definition of ‘Naga’ is still very much debated,” he notes, pointing to colonial borders that divided families and cultures. He grounds his reflections in food autonomy: “First thing is the question of food sovereignty… Nagas tend to be very self-sustaining.” He describes local diets rich in pork, beef, fermented soybeans, crabs, and insects— each part of an ecosystem of survival and creativity. “We say that we eat anything that moves,” he jokes. Tümüzo’s reflections expand to the environment: borders, he warns, also fragment wildlife habitats, while climate change and fragile infrastructure leave his region vulnerable. Yet his final words are generous and open: “I highly recommend people to visit the remote areas as well.”

Episode #501: “There were events going on in the world that I really cared about,” says investigative journalist Emanuel Stoakes as he reflects on the path that eventually drew him into reporting on Myanmar’s human rights crises. He began reporting on events there in 2012, first covering the Kachin conflict before turning to the Rohingya crisis. When he visited the Rohingya camps in 2013, he was shaken by the scale of deprivation: children with preventable disabilities, untreated burns, and even signs of polio. Outside the camps, he witnessed entrenched anti-Rohingya sentiment, reinforced by decades of propaganda. Conversations with nationalist Rakhine politicians exposed openly dehumanizing views, exemplified by one official’s dismissal of rape allegations because, he claimed, Rohingya women were “dirty, smelly women.” Stoakes also describes meeting the nationalist monk Wirathu, who warned that he was asking “very dangerous questions.” Leaked military psychological-operations documents later confirmed what he suspected: the military deliberately stoked communal hatred by spreading fabricated rumors and portraying Muslims as a demographic threat. He saw similar patterns in Meiktila after the 2013 riots, where footage revealed organized brutality against Muslims, including burned victims and dead children. And although the UN had published a report in 2012 after the sectarian violence in Sri Lanka that pledged to stop such atrocities from happening again, it completely failed in Myanmar. Its agencies were divided: development offices prioritized access while human-rights staff issued unheeded warnings, and the Burmese military played one side against the other, effectively marginalizing opposing voices. Since the 2021 coup, he sees a “national awakening” among many Bamar who now experience state violence themselves. But he stresses that sympathy alone is not enough. He believes Myanmar’s future depends on sustained resistance, institutional reform, and supporting local journalists who can tell the country’s story with depth and clarity.

Episode #500: “If my story offers anything, I really hope that it offers permission to question sincerely, to grow beyond structures that once served us and to hold both gratitude and discernment at the same time,” says Shelina Rose, a former Acharya in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition. Having stepped away from that role a couple of years ago, she does not reject discipline or community. Instead, she argues that the sincerity that draws someone into a spiritual container can later require them to move beyond it. For her, maturity means shifting from dependency to autonomy without losing appreciation for what once helped. Born in Nairobi to an Indian Ismaili Muslim family and raised in London, Shelina studied medicine in Cardiff and trained as a general practitioner in London. A pivotal moment came while working on a pediatric burns ward, where she witnessed a mute child begin to heal only after expressing trauma through art. The experience convinced her of the deep link between mind and body. Despite professional success, she felt unfulfilled and left her job to travel to Australia. There she encountered Vipassana meditation. A powerful experience on her first ten-day course committed her fully to the path. She later studied Pāḷi in India, became an Assistant Teacher, then an Acharya, serving in senior roles across Europe. She remembers the presence of S.N. Goenka vividlyduring these years: “The energy of that man was giant.” Over time, however, she felt the culture discouraged inquiry. “You weren’t really trained to think.” Her practice also plateaued; the technique, she says, “becomes a fossil after a while.” After long reflection, she left, losing community and security in the process. However, rebuilding through compassion and creative expression, she now emphasizes care, discernment, and growth. Her closing advice: “I encourage you to question and to continue to grow.”

Episode #499: Paul Vrieze, a Dutch journalist and PhD researcher specializing in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, has observed the country’s political trajectory for over 15 years. Drawn to Myanmar’s opening in 2012 after working in Cambodia, he joined The Irrawaddy as its first foreign editor, during a period of political reforms under Thein Sein. The February 2021 coup abruptly ended the democratic transition. Nonviolent mass protests impressed the world but were met by brutal crackdowns, prompting a rapid shift to armed resistance. Vrieze saw this as a rare case of escalation without major fragmentation. He notes a common protest dynamic: repression is experienced as a personal and communal assault, a “slippery slope” leading self-defense to evolve into armed struggle. This dynamic played itself out in Myanmar. Armed resistance in the country developed three patterns: spontaneous rural uprisings, organized ethnic acts of resistance, and individuals fleeing to the border who begin training with ethnic resistance organizations (EROs). The NUG adapted to events by formally labeling many of the emerging local resistance groups as People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) and by proposing the idea of a Federal Army. However, ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) resisted bringing their forces under a single chain of command, preferring to maintain control in their own areas. This has left tensions and limits on coordinated action, raising the question of international recognition, which depends on territorial control, national standing, and functioning governance. The NUG has the broader political mandate but lacks secure in-country presence, while EROs have effective administrations yet are still regarded as regional rather than national actors. Vrieze believes unity, inclusivity, and a shared political vision are crucial for victory, warning that without them, success will be far harder to achieve. Fortunately, the movement has been able to maintain unity across ethnic divides so far, despite political differences and Chinese attempts to broker a ceasefire between EROs and the junta. He is hopeful that this unity will be maintained, and strengthened.

Episode #498: Caleb, a research coordinator with the Myanmar-based research group Myanography, argues that participation in the military’s 2025–2026 election functioned less as a democratic exercise than as a survival mechanism for civilians living under junta rule. In his view, it reflected fear, coercion, and uncertainty, and turnout figures cannot be understood outside that context. For the first time in Myanmar’s history, a national election was divided across three dates—December 28, 2025, January 11, 2026, and January 25, 2026—while large parts of the country were excluded because they were not under military control. Myanography monitored 16 locations across 12 states and regions through community-based field research. Across these sites, Caleb identifies patterns of intimidation, administrative manipulation, and ongoing armed conflict shaping participation. Even before voting began, residents faced pressure. Officials reminded members of the Civil Disobedience Movement that their names remained on record and noted that family members were eligible for military conscription. Rumors spread that abstention could trigger retaliation. Voting slips were distributed selectively, and voter lists contained omissions and inaccuracies. Turnout varied sharply. In Haka, the capital of Chin State, participation was extremely low. In other areas, roughly one-third voted, often strategically. One resident explained, “I just pressed the buttons for the other parties… because I was only focused on avoiding the lion and the green,” referring to symbols of the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). With no meaningful campaign period, limited information, and confusion between similarly named parties, many voters lacked clarity about their options. Conflict further destabilized the process. In Mudon and Langkho Townships, explosions, drone attacks, and heavy military deployments accompanied voting. In Mandalay, residents were warned that if the indelible ink mark used for election control was not visible on someone’s finger, they could well be repercussions. For Caleb, the election’s phased structure, restricted access, and atmosphere of fear reveal its function: not democratic choice, but the reinforcement of military control.

Episode #497: “This is my life. Life is so precious, and I need to take responsibility for what I’m doing,” says Oliver Tanner, a long-term meditation practitioner and Buddhist scholar whose PhD focuses on early Buddhist textual studies. In his second appearance on the podcast, Tanner reflects on how his path has shifted from an emphasis on meditation techniques and intensive retreats, to sustained, daily practice based on the early teachings of the Buddha as presented in the suttas, all framed by a single concern: how to understand and respond to suffering honestly and clearly. Looking back on his earlier years, Tanner recounts his deep immersion in intensive meditation retreats within the Goenka tradition. At that stage of his life, his primary motivation was experiential transformation. Meditation offered him discipline, ethical grounding, and a direct encounter with his own mind, and he describes this period as profoundly beneficial. It provided stability and direction, demonstrating through lived experience that sustained effort could lead to meaningful change. He treats this phase not as something to outgrow or reject, but as an essential foundation that made later inquiry possible. Tanner affirms his conviction that the early teachings aim for independence in the Dhamma, which ultimately requires the practitioner to be willing to step outside the boundaries of their tradition as needed. And indeed, he felt an increasing need to understand what he was doing and why. While the techniques he practiced were transformative, they did not fully answer deeper questions about purpose. This led him to systematic study, first in Myanmar, where Abhidhamma and commentarial traditions were central and the suttas secondary, and then in Sri Lanka, where the emphasis shifted decisively to the suttas themselves. Encountering these texts directly, he experienced them not as abstract doctrine but as practical, existential guidance addressing suffering, behavior, and everyday life. In sum, he says that the early teachings reward careful attention and lived application rather than belief or loyalty in a particular tradition. “There’s a treasure trove waiting in these teachings and such practical guidance is there to incorporate these teachings, not just as some special thing you do on retreat, but in your daily life.”

Episode #496: Jak Bazino, a French novelist with more than a decade of lived experience in Myanmar, discusses his novel Breaking the Cycle as an attempt to make sense of the country’s Spring Revolution by situating it within a much longer, unfinished struggle for freedom. He argues that Myanmar’s current uprising is not an isolated crisis but the latest chapter in a historical arc that stretches back to the independence era. Through fiction, Bazino seeks to help readers grasp that continuity in a visceral way that conventional reporting often cannot. The novel is structured around two intertwined timelines. One unfolds in 1942 during the Japanese invasion of Burma. A British archaeologist identifies a votive tablet believed to point toward the location of sacred Buddhist relics. Working with a Burmese woman who provides essential local knowledge, and accompanied by a British colonial officer, he begins a deliberate search for the relics. As the war closes in, the group attempts to preserve the tablet and the knowledge it represents by evacuating it by plane. The aircraft crashes in remote jungle terrain, abruptly ending the search and freezing the mission in history. The story then jumps to 2024, during the Spring Revolution. Displaced civilians and resistance members stumble upon the long-forgotten wreckage and find the tablet. Initially understood only as an old religious object, they carry through an active war zone, where possession itself becomes dangerous. Information about the tablet eventually finds its way outside Myanmar, and scholars and others figure out its connection to that abandoned wartime search. This creates new risks, when external pressures collide with the immediate survival needs of those still living inside the conflict. Bazino also confronts unresolved problems within the resistance, including internal divisions and gender inequality, insisting these issues cannot be postponed without shaping the society that emerges after the war. Through the main Burmese character of Khin Yadanar, a young medic aligned with the Chin Defense Force, he articulates a broader ethical vision of resistance that values care, endurance, and responsibility alongside armed struggle. Despite the novel’s darkness, Bazino maintains a guarded hope that the Spring Revolution can finally break Myanmar’s recurring cycles of domination and defeat. “I really want this book to show that actually [breaking these cycle] can happen,” he says, “even if it’s not easy, and it’s not certain.”

Episode #495: Mark McDowell, a Canadian foreign service officer and former ambassador in Yangon from 2013 to 2016, traces Myanmar through a set of mismatches between how the country is narrated abroad and how it actually operates on the ground. He describes his first visit in the early 2000s as a moment when ordinary life could feel disarmingly quiet and culturally intact even as the background reality remained a military dictatorship and a long civil war. That doubleness, he argues, is part of why outsiders repeatedly misunderstand Myanmar, replacing contact and complexity with policy-as-story. Based in Bangkok in 2003 and travelling into Myanmar before Canada had an embassy, he built relationships with activists, emerging civil society groups, and political figures newly released from prison. He argues that Canadian engagement was often shaped by organizations and narratives that sat outside the country, rewarding moral certainty while discouraging long, inside-country investment. He describes the post-Nargis period as a mostly forgotten incubator for modern civil society, with relief funding and emergency programming spawning local networks that later mattered when political space began to open. During his ambassadorship, McDowell recalls the transition years as a brief window of porosity and improvisation, when Myanmar appeared hungry for information and receptive to new norms, even as the military retained structural power. His meetings with Min Aung Hlaing are remembered less for theatrical menace than for the normality of extended, history-heavy monologues and the general’s self-justifying thesis, proclaiming that “the military is the glue that holds the country together.” Looking back from the coup, he names the discomfort of that ordinary room: “this is now the banality of evil.” Looking on the current reality, McDowell points to capacity that now exists in dispersion, especially the proliferation of independent organizations. “You’ve got this ‘one hundred flowers blooming’ situation here,” he says, “and it’s not a monolithic opposition to the junta anymore. You’ve got huge numbers of independent organizations, whether they’re ethnic-based or interest-based and so on.” He treats that plurality as the defining feature of the present landscape, and a source of future leadership, even as it resists any neat story about unity.

Episode #494: “Any one, any countries, any government, who recognize the results of this elections, they are made a fool by the junta!” Myay Thet is a co-founder and leader of a Myanmar nonprofit research organization that operated inside the country before the 2021 coup and now continues its work through pseudonyms and a distributed network of local researchers. She describes an ethnographic approach she calls Myanography, built to document life under dictatorship not through results and statistics but through daily mechanisms of coercion, fear, and forced accommodation. The election, in her account, is not only fraudulent as an outcome, but also as a process that presses people into visible compliance while keeping punishment close and ambiguous. She explains that the election research was conducted with community ethnographers across Myanmar’s states and regions, alongside civil society partners, beginning two months before voting and tracking the three phase structure. She places the work inside a longer ethnographic project that began after the coup, when researchers themselves experienced “a very forceful political rupture” and began recording how oppression reorganizes ordinary life. In that setting, refusal is not a clean political gesture. It is a risk calculation made under the gaze of local authorities and paramilitary auxiliaries embedded in neighborhoods. Myay Thet draws a sharp divide between rejecting the election from outside the country and living inside it, where “the people inside Myanmar have to accommodate this oppression.” Economic collapse intensifies the pressure, and a single arrest or conscription order can destroy a household, making surface compliance feel like a form of protection even among those who privately resist. She describes subtle resistance continuing under the surface, but argues that the election’s real work is to force visible participation through threats, proximity, and bureaucracy rather than persuasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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