Insight Myanmar

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.”

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

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