Insight Myanmar

Episode #632: “I was not political at all until 1988,” says Dr. Maung Maung Myint, the National Unity Government’s (NUG) representative to Norway. He describes how dictatorship, exile, and decades of activism have shaped his conviction that Myanmar’s military regime will eventually fall.

Born in 1958, he grew up under military rule. After General Ne Win’s 1962 coup, his family’s home and business were seized. He became a dentist in 1983, but the 1988 uprising changed everything. Angered by poverty, propaganda, and the killing of two students, he led a student union, organized protests, and published an underground newsletter. After the cr...

Episode #631: “Community for me is an other-making category.” Judith Beyer, a legal and political anthropologist and the author of Rethinking Community in Myanmar, uses an ordinary word to expose a long political inheritance. Her fieldwork in Yangon began with Muslim and Hindu individuals who presented themselves to an outsider first and foremost as members of ethno-religious communities. But the closer she looked, and the more acquainted she became with these individuals, the less stable this self-categorization became.

In her book, Beyer traces the category back through British colonial rule, when law, land grants, religious property, and trusteeship help...

Episode #630: “There's no fixing saṃsāra.” Khemarato Bhikkhu heard that line from a bhikkhuni in Berkeley after the 2016 U.S. election, at the moment when his faith in progress was already failing. An American monk now seven years ordained in Thailand’s Thai forest tradition, he had come to Buddhism through university stress, a Zen meditation group, friendships with Thai students, and a 2012 journey through Thailand. The Dhamma first made sense to him as something honest about craving, not-self, and the limits of worldly identity.

Before ordination, he had also entered one of the most future-facing worlds av...

Episode #629: “They don’t sleep with their leg on.” Jason Bender, a certified prosthetist who lived and worked in Myanmar from 2014 to 2021 before supporting cross-border work from Thailand, uses that basic reality to explain why providing a prosthetic limb cannot be reduced to handing someone a device. A leg may restore mobility after a landmine injury, but the socket changes as the body changes, feet wear out, sores develop, and users must learn to walk again across environments that were difficult to navigate even before amputation.

In Myanmar, that process can require months of healing followed by a jour...

Episode #628: “We started with emotions, not with the basic fundamental facts.” Nay Chi Min Htun was a university student and hotel receptionist in Yangon before the 2021 coup. Within months, she had left the home of her police-officer father, joined an underground resistance network, and begun transporting explosives. She later moved into Karen State, where she produced ammunition, trained as a drone operator, and participated in frontline operations against military positions.

The physical details stayed with her. Ammunition production repeatedly burned her fingertips, marks she wore with pride because other resistance workers had lost limbs or died in acci...

Episode #627: Joseph Goldstein’s introduction to meditation came almost accidentally. Sent to Thailand with the Peace Corps in the 1960s, he discovered Buddhist practice through monks at a Bangkok temple before traveling to Bodh Gayā, where he trained under Munindraji in the Burmese Mahāsī tradition. What followed was a lifetime spent exploring how teachings rooted in Asian Buddhist cultures could be carried into Western society without losing their essential purpose.

His years in India brought him into contact with S. N. Goenka, Dipa Ma, and other influential practitioners whose approaches differed considerably. After returning to America in 19...

Episode #626: This is the first episode of a seven-part series reflecting voices of people who attended the Fifth International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies in Chiang Mai, which explored how people are responding to the crisis while working toward a different future. Through shorter conversations with scholars, activists, educators, and community organizers, we connect regional politics with the everyday work of sustaining care, learning, livelihoods, and solidarity.

The first guest, Fuadi Pitsuwan, a Thammasat University lecturer and former foreign policy adviser to Thailand’s Move Forward Party, questions why Thailand invests so heavily in Myanmar’s military as a...

Episode #625: “When nobody helps you, what you have to do is go. You know what? I’m just gonna do it myself.” Adrian Zaw, a Burmese-American actor, producer, and founder of Zaw Studios, has turned that refusal to wait into both a business method and a response to cultural absence. His family left Myanmar after the 1988 uprising, when his father’s political involvement made remaining unsafe. His parents had worked as rural doctors, but in the United States their credentials disappeared; they took cafeteria and laboratory jobs while Zaw learned English by imitating television.

Acting gave him a route...

Episode #624: “Even before the coup, books gave me ideas, empathy, and hope,” says Zu May Lwin, a student activist and library organizer from Magway, She argues that education and access to books are essential not only for personal growth but also for rebuilding Myanmar after military repression.

Before the 2021 coup, she explains, reading culture in Magway was limited by cost, scarcity, and exhaustion. Books were hard to obtain, many families were focused on survival, and schools did little to cultivate a meaningful relationship with literature beyond textbooks. She joined a mobile library initiative that brought books directly to p...

Episode #623: This is the third episode in a series of talks with Tempel Smith, who shares his deeper impressions of Burmese Buddhist culture, and how he became a bridge for other Americans to understand it better.

Tempel starts by continuing his reflection into the polarities that defined his early life experiences, mainly in terms of social engagement versus quiet meditation. As a young monk in Burma, he tried to consciously negotiate those apparent tensions, and questioned whether they could be integrated into a single practice. However, when he attained deeper states of calm, he realized that they...

Episode #622: “We need to recognize that we really don't know as much as we think we do about what's going on,” Jason Eligh says. As senior expert on drugs and drug markets at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Eligh argues that Myanmar’s methamphetamine economy has been misunderstood not only because it is hidden, but because governments and analysts have mistaken partial evidence for knowledge.

Myanmar’s Shan State sits inside one of the world’s major drug-producing regions, supplying opium and heroin while also forming one of the three major global methamphetamine production zones, alongside...

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

Aki Ra was about ten years old when the Khmer Rouge forced him into military life, where he learned to pl...

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

Their earliest memories hold danger and belonging together. Sahale remembers walking through the jungle at night without a headlamp so the Burma Army would not see the...

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

As a child, Elizabeth devoured Chinese martial-arts novels that inspired her belief in justice and self-discipline. The work of one Burmese author, a physician-novelist, persuaded her to enter medical school, where she had the thought to “become a doctor and then write a lot of boo...

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

U Jā...

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

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

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

Because Malaysia was not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, those fleeing conflict are permitted to remain in the country but are not legally recognized as refugees and have no pathway to...

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

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

That search began in childhood, when he attended Anglican church services and felt that something did not add up. He did not accept what he was being told about God and expected some kind of...

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

He began formal training in the late 1950s, moving through Japanese systems before encountering Burmese martial arts in the United States decades later. What held him was not spectacle but a demanding structure, built around principles, weapons work, conditioning, and long timelines for...

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

Myanmar began turning toward Russian weapons in the early 2000s after years of heavy dependence on China. Russian fighter aircraft, helicopters and training later be...

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

Raised in Mahāyāna Buddhism and shaped by the writings of Thích Nhất Hạnh, she began meditatin...

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

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

After the coup, he learned tactical combat medicine to help protesters under fire. Soon he was teaching oth...

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

At the time of the award...

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

His younger brother Ed had taken a course at Dhamma Dharā in 1987 and returned radiant, but in March 1989 he died...

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

When Myanmar’s military seized power in February 2021, Maple was a scholarship student in South Korea studying Business Management and Entrepreneurship, already thinking about how she might one day redirect her education toward reforming the system she had grown up in. School, as she experienced it, had been shaped by hierarchy and competition rather than curiosity. Students were ranked into sections, with privileges reserved for the highest group. “The top students were in section A,” sh...

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

Anusorn favors a democratic federal future for Myanmar rooted in popular participation. Political activity and free expression must be restored, he argues, followed by a genuinely free election; if the military a...

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

The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners working across Asia, creating a wide-ranging space for exchange, debate, and reflection. Within that broader setting, Burma emerged as one of several urgent areas of focus amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, setting up a small space to capture a series of short, real-time conversations with participants moving through...

Episode #604: “I chose hip hop.”

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

Hip hop entered his life through scarcity. Myanmar at the time was...

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

Saw Poe Wah’...

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

Amma Thanasanti, a meditation teacher, former Theravāda nun, and founder and spiritual director of Awakening Truth, spent more than two decades in the Ajahn Chah lineage before a conflict over women’s authority led to her expulsion. Her path had begun at UC Santa Cruz in 1979, where Jack Engler’s teaching convinced her that spiritual life would become the center of her life. Retreat practice, encounter...

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

She describes Thailand’s Myanmar policy as shaped by competing political, security, humanitarian and economic pressures. Diff...

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

The junta tried to remove him from the U...

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

Khosla credits his parents with creating a deeply spiritual home grounded in the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings on devotion, selfless action, ethics, and compassion. His fascination with the causes of suffering and inner transformation began in...

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

First, Brang (a pseudonym being used for safety) sees rare-earth mining as both a lo...

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

Of the three, Mahasi Sayadaw left the deepest...

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

Originally trained in medicine and public health, Kyaw worked in Myanmar’s nonprofit sector before receiving an Australia Awards scholarship to study development at the University of Melbourn...

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

For example, in Thailand, individuals passing through Bangkok airport may be detained and interrogated, sometimes finding that authorities already possess detailed information about them. The presence of Myanmar embassy officials during questioning suggests further coordination. However, outcomes vary: in Bangkok, visibility and legal support may prevent deportation, while in border areas such as Ma...

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

Nichols was teaching at a university in Atlanta when he took leave in 1975 and traveled overland to Indi...

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

Her study, completed in 2020 at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna, looks at the period before the 2021 coup. That timing matters; Myanmar had been brought back into the EU’s Everything ButArms trade scheme in 2013 after preferences...