Insight Myanmar

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...

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

That p...

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

His mother, fearful for his safety because of his participation in the protests, sent him to Singapore. Immersed in a multiethnic workplace there, h...

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

Quah’s organization now supports dozens of refugee learning centers, shelter homes for trafficked and abused women, and a...

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

What followed was not casual interest, but total commitment. Max structured his life e...

Episode #523: The fourth episode in our five-part series brings you conversations recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners convened around the theme Dealing with Legacies in Burma. Held amid ongoing political turmoil and humanitarian crisis, the gathering became a rare space for open dialogue, reflection, and communal care. Insight Myanmar was invited into this environment to record discussions with a wide range of attendees, produced in partnership with NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Through these episodes, we hope to carry listeners into the atmosphere of the co...

Episode #522: “We became interested in understanding how distrust toward official institutions influences the way humanitarian aid actually moves on the ground, and how donors decide where to place their trust in such a complicated environment,” begins Than Htike Zaw, who, along with Pablo Gassilloud, studies humanitarian aid in Myanmar. Drawing on surveys of roughly 78 donors—primarily Burmese nationals—and interviews with civil society organizations, their work examines how political conditions shape aid delivery in constrained environments.

Institutional distrust, already longstanding, intensified after the coup and the 2025 earthquake. Military interference, surveillance, checkpoints, and financial restrictions complicate humanitarian response, delaying...

Episode #521: “The weapon itself just cannot tell the difference between a soldier stepping on it, or a kid on the way to school, or your grandma on her way to the place of worship.”

For Erin Hunt, Executive Director of Mines Action Canada (MAC), the harms inflicted on civilians by anti-personnel landmine have motivated her organization’s humanitarian work for three decades. MAC was founded in the 1990s “to end the suffering caused by indiscriminate and inhumane weapons such as landmines, cluster munitions, autonomous weapons, explosive weapons in populated areas and nuclear weapons.”

In 1997, the Ottawa Tre...

Episode #520: “Ancestors are not dead. They’re not the living dead. Rather, they should be best thought of as ‘the always living.’” Dr Micah Morton, a cultural anthropologist and professor at Northern Illinois University, describes Akha life across the Upper Mekong borderlands as a struggle to keep that relationship intact while everything around it shifts—states hardening borders, religions competing for allegiance, and markets remaking livelihoods.

Morton traces an origin narrative tied to Jadae Mirkhanq, a remembered homeland city-state whose meanings have changed as Akha have become citizens of five countries. The past, he argues, is not a single inh...

Episode #519: Friedgard Lottermoser, a German student of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, describes the unique character of meditation at the International Meditation Center (IMC) in Rangoon between 1959 and 1971. Unlike the large,standardized courses later developed by S. N. Goenka, U Ba Khin taught only one ten-day course a month to small groups. Each student received individualized instruction based on temperament and background. “He went by feeling,” Friedgard recalls, noting that he could sense a student’s meditative progress even from afar. She contrasts U Ba Khin’s flexibility and adaptability with Goenka’s standardized system of recorded discourses and fixed schedules...

Episode #518: The story of the KMT irregulars in Burma is a historical anomaly tied to the Chinese Civil War, the Cold War, and Burma’s early independence. Following their defeat, remnants of the Nationalist Army under General Li Mi crossed into Burma’s Shan States. Claiming to continue the anti-communist struggle, they later turned to the opium trade as a means of survival. This trade, expanded under the KMT’s control, expanded exponentially, transforming the region into the Golden Triangle—an epicenter of the global drug trade.

The KMT’s activities also destabilized Burma and strained Prime Minister U...

Episode #517: “They are using each other for their own benefit.” With this line, Wai Yan Phyo Naing frames a sober account of SinoMyanmar relations. A researcher and lecturer in international relations and modern history who studied in Moscow and later worked with migrants in Thailand, Wai Yan Phyo Naing brings both scholarship and field experience to the conversation.

For Wai Yan Phyo Naing, the relationship is transactional. “China is only interested in its national interests,” he says. “China is ready to communicate with whoever becomes powerful in Myanmar.” Myanmar engages because it must, yet, as Wai Yan Phyo Naing i...

Episode #516: “I want to be able to center women in their full right and to shine a spotlight on how I think they are very much the heroes of the revolution,” says Jenny Hedström, a researcher whose book, Reproducing Revolution, examines women’s labor in the Kachin struggle. Joined by Stella Naw, a Kachin activist and scholar, they argue that the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple story of aggressor and victim. Instead, it must be understood through the everyday labor that sustains communities across generations of war.

Jenny’s engagement with Kachin women began in the ea...

Episode #515: Toru Kubota is a Japanese documentary filmmaker who believes storytelling can foster empathy beyond abstract argument. A political science student at Keio University who developed an interest in refugee issues, in 2014 he joined a student project interviewing Rohingya refugees in Japan. Using a camera for the first time, he helped produce a short documentary about their lives.

In 2016, Kubota traveled to Sittwe in Rakhine State and entered camps housing Rohingya displaced after the 2012 violence. Though officially designated as internally displaced persons camps, he saw them as places of confinement, where communities were segregated and deprived of...

Episode #514: Richmond Heath, an Australian physiotherapist, longtime vipassana meditator and senior trainer in tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) discusses the involuntary movements that arise for some people in meditation. He argues they are not signs of dysfunction, but rather expressions of underlying bodily processes. It’s how a person relates to them that matters most.

In his late twenties, Heath developed chronic pain that resisted conventional treatment and forced him to abandon the physical activity that had once grounded him. Turning to vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, he encountered intense discomfort but di...

Episode #513: Georgi Engelbrecht of the International Crisis Group links two stories that matter for Myanmar: the Mindanao peace process and Russia’s ties to authoritarian partners in Southeast Asia.

He begins in the Philippines with what he calls the conflict’s “master cleavage” — Muslim communities inside a state seeking self-determination against what they see as colonial intrusion. That grievance was reinforced by migration, exclusion, and underdevelopment until it hardened into decades of separatist war. But the macro narrative never explained everything. Alongside it ran “horizontal violence”: clan feuds, communal disputes, and local power struggles that don’t disappear just b...

Episode #512: “The overall consequences are so bad that I myself urged the Norwegian government to stop some of this.”

Hanne Sophie Greve, a Norwegian judge and long-time human rights jurist, argues that Telenor’s conduct in Myanmar created foreseeable and preventable pathways to severe human rights harm, but existing legal systems struggle to respond proportionately. She frames the case as both a corporate failure and a test of how Norway—a state that portrays itself as committed to democracy and human rights—handles the risks created when a majority state-owned company operates in a fragile political environment.

Greve...

In this bonus episode, Better Burma’s monastic donation manager, Mora, shares what he has been seeing on the ground in Myanmar after years of conflict and displacement, now compounded by the March 28, 2025 earthquake.

He explains why so much of Better Burma’s work runs through monasteries and nunneries, as these communities have become frontline sanctuaries for children, providing shelter, food, schooling, and basic healthcare for thousands who have nowhere else to go. Mora describes what it takes to deliver aid under current conditions, the scale of damage and urgent rebuild needs across sites in Sagaing, Mandalay, and...

Episode #511: Like many young Kiwis, Jarrod Newell wanted to see the world. Taking advantage of the special working holiday visas available in the United Kingdom, he traveled to London,where he participated in the city’s wild, partying lifestyle. After saving some money, he would pick up and find some new place to visit, ultimately making his way across cities and even continents.

While attending hippy festival in Greece, he met a girl who had just completed a ten-day vipassana retreat in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, and told him of an upcoming course in Crete, an...

Episode #510: “I'm not an activist,” says Bart Was Not Here, a Burmese artist whose politically oriented work reflects a life shaped by dictatorship and displacement. He argues that art creates a space where memory, humor, fear, and imagination can coexist, allowing both artist and viewer to navigate political realities in ways that ordinary language cannot.

Bart sees current global politics as part of a wider shift toward more extreme forms of power. Myanmar’s experience, he explains, no longer feels unique but echoes developments now taking place elsewhere. This awareness shapes both his personal outlook and his artist...

Episode #509: “I don’t have hope. But I think that this is something that I should accept. It is reality.” Chalida Tajaroensuk, a longtime advocate of democratic reform and human rights across the Southeast Asian region, argues that human rights work collapses when it is built on prediction rather than conditions.

Her account begins in a provincial Buddhist temple where community care wasn’t an abstract virtue but daily labor among the elderly, the poor, and those without family. From there, she traces a path through Thai student activism, the violence of the 1970s and 1990s, and a period...

Episode #508: Damian Lilly, a veteran humanitarian and human-rights specialist, who has worked in conflict zones across the world, believes assistance must be joined with protection and accountability. “We can’t just be there to assist people—we also need to be there to protect them.”

He formed this conviction through his work with Médecins Sans Frontières, documenting sexual violence in places such as Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Congo and turning testimony into pressure on governments. Working with the UN, he returned to South Sudan later as Senior Advisor on the Protection of Civilians. The civil war...

Episode #507: “It’s a process of learning and unlearning, and understanding that knowledge exists in many places and is everywhere, not just in the academy,” says Davina Quinlivan, an Anglo-Burmese writer and research fellow in English and Creative Writing, of her second memoir, Possessions. Her first book, Shalimar, reconstructed her father’s wartime childhood in colonial Burma through historical inquiry, while Possessions turns toward embodiment and the present, exploring how inheritance lives in memory, belief, and the body.

Quinlivan recounts her parents’ Anglo-Burmese backgrounds: born before World War II, they knew each other in Burma before their families e...

Episode #506: “I think the toll of doing dedicated work even as we grow older is so small compared to that of so many brave Myanmar activists. I can support the cause, but I can also choose not to confront myself with the full reality of what’s going on in the ground. That’s a choice that Myanmar people by and large don’t have! That’s how I carry on doing the work I do,” says Patrick Hoffmann, reflecting on the personal and historical drivers behind his commitment to Myanmar's democracy movement.

Patrick’s personal background indicates how...

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. “Becaus...

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 cent...

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...

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 fu...