Insight Myanmar

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

Stella traces the problem to Myanmar’s founding. Before 1948, indigenous communities governed themselves. The creation of the Union imposed internal and external borders that divided communities and ignored longstanding political realities. After th...

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

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

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

Unlike many ethnic areas in Myanmar, Anyar was relatively untouched by arm...

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

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

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

Van Neih Thang’s parents made the difficult decision to leave Myanmar when he was just thirteen years old. He describes his humble life in Chin State, one of Myanm...

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

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

Not finding a clear spiritual path on his travels, be returned to Australia to join Chenrezig Institute, a fledgl...

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

The first guest is Zahir Hassan, a first-term MP for Wangsa Maju in Kuala Lu...

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

Mun Awng, born in 1960 in Myitkyina, Kachin State, is one of Myanmar’s most iconic protest singers and a lifelong advocate for democracy. Raised by a teacher father and nurse mother amid conflict between the Burma Army and the Kachin Independence Army, he learned early about danger and resilience. Music became his refuge — “We only had shortwave radio that I could listen to, so that was my main source of knowledge about music,” he...

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

Before the 2021 coup, Renata was a law student who describes her life as centered on study and office work. Following the coup, she hesitated initially to take part in direct action, and instead chose to participate online, calling herself a “keyboard fighter” then. But as the crackdowns intensified...

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

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

So Aung Tun joined the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an independent media organization. His work was clandestine and risky—using hidden cameras to document the regime's brutality and the resilience of the Burmese people. In 2007, Aung Tun played a vital role in filming large parts of the Saffron Revolution, an uprising led...

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

Drawing on decades of committed involvement, including being appointed a Senior Teacher (Achariya), Stewart reflects on t...

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

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

Kornkanok “Pup” Khumta, an activist from Isaan, argues that the myth of sovereignty hides a colonial order, where Bangkok defines language, history, development, and which bodies are allowed to exist. Isaan, she says, is Lao in language and culture, and the border...

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

Leaving New Zealand, Stewart worked his passage to Europe on a cargo ship and spent several adventurous years traveling through Europe and Africa and immersing himself in the hippie counterculture. Eventually Stewart found his wa...

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

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

She has interviewed civilians, injured soldiers, and active resistance fighters, gaining access to armed...

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

For Mon Mon Myat, U Hpo Hlaing matters because he complicates the idea that democracy arrived in Myanmar only through Western influence. He studied Western parliamentary system...

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

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

Raised in a Jewish household, Roy felt pressure to conform to a shared identity he experienced as restrictive. He rejected its religious element early, identifying instead as a “cultural Jew,” and developed a lasting determination not to live “in a box.” That impulse align...

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

Siraj’s own life reflects the realities he studies. He once hoped to become a doctor, but military violence forced his family to f...

Episode #548: Sunda Khin shares a remarkable family journey through contemporary Burmese history. She starts with her father, U Chan Htoon, who suggested that a young Indian businessman named S.N. Goenka learn meditation from Sayagyi U Ba Khin to cure his migraines. Growing up as the daughter of the country's first Supreme Court Justice, she recalls spending time in General Ne Win's home during the "Caretaker Government" years. Ne Win's coup in 1962 marked a shift, leading to economic turmoil and loss of civil liberties, including the arrest of her father. As a means for explaining the many challenges that...

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

The roots of Myanmar’s current land system can be traced to colonial policies that classified inhabited land as “wast...

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

The first guest, Willie Mongin, is the Member of Parliament for Puncak Borneo in Sarawak and a former deputy minist...

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

“Justice can, and sometimes does, catch up with you even many years afterwards,” says Casey-Maslen, who is editor of the Mine Action Review...

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

Her research along the Thailand–Myanmar border reveals how issues such as child labor emerge directly from structural pressures like legal insecurity and economic instability. “I have also come across with child labor,” she adds, describing how children miss schoo...

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

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

Early on in his practice, he traveled to Myanmar on a pilgrimage led by Goenka, where he received permission to become a monk. The experience was immersive and meaningful, offering a glimpse into a life...

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

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

Nilsen explains that religion in Myanmar has long been a political tool. During the late socialist era, the military built pagodas to project spiritual l...

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

The conversation unfolds across four interconnected themes. The first is “Coming Together”: the quiet, invisible labor that makes resistance possible long before protests fill the streets. O...

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

Economic reforms during that time emphasized privatization and the commodification of land, disregarding the needs of small-scale farmers. These policies led to land grabs, exacerbating the vulnerabilities of those already struggling. In parallel, he n...

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

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

Maximillian Mørch, Head of Program Development and Quality Assurance at The Border Consortium, describes how a system built as an emergency response in 1984 has hardened into a four-decade reality along the Thai–Myanmar border. TBC has long provided food, shelter materials, cooking fuel, nutritional support, and technical assistance across nine border camps. Today, more than 100,000 refugees live inside those camps, with tens of thousan...

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

Her involvement with Myanmar began in 1999, when she worked with the NGO Friends With...

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

Johnson has always had an interest in spirituality. He joined his first retreat in his teens, and at nineteen, he left college to follow his teacher, the monastic Sujata, to the Still Point Meditation Center in California. He cooked, cleaned, and lived among young seekers there for years in what he remembers as a “gol...

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

Tracy grew up in rural Chin State, and when she was about seven, her father fled Myanmar because of his political activities, landing in Denmark, and her mother left soon afterward, unable to remain safely in the country. After being raised by grandparents, she left Chin State...

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

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

Myanmar’s politica...

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

He describes the early post-independence settlement as broken at its origin, saying the promised autonomy that predated the first constitution “was never really done so from the beginning,” leaving what he calls “the original sin of constitution...

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

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

He cont...

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

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

Dodd was born in Brazil to a Colombian mother and an American father. The family later moved to the United States, and much of his childhood unfolded in rural Maine after his parents separated. His mother raised...

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

As a young man in the late 1980s, Elvestuen witnessed a world in upheaval: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and Myanmar’s 8888 Uprising. The latter left a particular mark on him and many...