Insight Myanmar

Conflict Takes Root

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.” mv8r3g5f International 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.”

Holding the Line

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.

In the Name of the Sāsana

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.

Dreaming Forward

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.”

The Train Wreck Ahead

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.