Insight Myanmar

An Undisciplined Democracy

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.

Returning to the Source

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.”

Let the Circle Be Unbroken

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.”

Maple Leaf Diplomacy

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.

A Clockwork Election

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.