Insight Myanmar

Enemy of the State

Episode #488: Veteran journalist and human rights advocate Chris Gunness describes Myanmar as “an extraordinarily fascinating country,” one that shaped both his early reporting career and his later work on international justice. Following events from London in the mid-1980s, he saw a nation marked by colonial legacies, ethnic fragmentation and civil war, yet so closed that major crises went unnoticed abroad. By 1986, Myanmar had become the center of his reporting as he tracked growing instability. In spite of his inexperience, he was sent undercover by the BBC to report from the country in the buildup to the 1988 uprising. Ordered to report openly, he filed news dispatches from a dilapidated Rangoon hotel. A day later, a hidden message from student leaders—coordinated by a prominent human rights lawyer—summoned him to a secret meeting. Blindfolded and taken to a safe house, he recorded interviews with organizers, a banker and a soldier. These tapes, smuggled out through diplomatic channels, were broadcast by the BBC on 6 August 1988. One interview inadvertently announced the precise moment protests would begin. At 8:08 a.m. on 8 August, millions marched across the country. The entire Burmese populace was informed ahead of time as a direct result of this reporting. Deported to Dhaka as a result, Gunness continued reporting, producing dispatches that became Myanmar’s primary source of national information during the uprising. Though he rejects credit for sparking the movement—calling the Burmese people “the real heroes”—the experience taught him how shared information empowers political action. Gunness later founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP), using universal jurisdiction to pursue legal cases against junta leaders in Turkey, the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor-Leste. He also challenges junta attempts to gain legitimacy abroad, including a current case in the UK. Despite deep skepticism toward international justice and the UN’s failures in Myanmar, Gunness believes accountability efforts can preserve evidence, empower victims and reinforce the illegitimacy of military rule. Ultimately, however, he argues that Myanmar’s hope rests with its people, whose resilience he describes as “the indomitability of the Burmese spirit.”

The Right To Belong

Episode #487: Noor Azizah, a Rohingya genocide survivor and the founder and leader of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, argues that violence against the Rohingya is still an ongoing reality shaped by military force, armed groups, legal exclusion, and regional inaction. She insists that Rohingya rights must be central to any future political settlement involving Myanmar, rather than treated as a secondary or humanitarian issue. Azizah places Rohingya persecution within a long historical trajectory beginning in 1942, when Japanese forces exacerbated tensions between Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhine; before that, Rohingya and Rakhine communities had lived peacefully side by side. Following Myanmar’s 1962 military coup, anti-Rohingya violence intensified, causing a large and growing displacement, mostly towards Bangladesh, which now hosts more than one million Rohingya refugees. The 1982 citizenship law was another defining moment, rendering the Rohingya stateless and imposing severe restrictions on movement, education, and healthcare. Finally, the 2017 military “clearance operations” represented the most extreme escalation, forcing more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee as villages were burned, civilians killed, and mass rape used as a weapon of terror. Azizah emphasizes that propaganda and hate speech have played a central role in this violence. Coordinated campaigns have portrayed Rohingya as illegal migrants and existential threats, amplified through Facebook and extremist Buddhist networks. She adds that economic interests, including infrastructure projects in Rakhine State, continued alongside mass violence. She discusses the International Court of Justice case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar as a landmark effort to enforce the Genocide Convention and stresses the failure of regional bodies such as ASEAN to protect Rohingya. Azizah concludes by describing the work of RMCN, a women-led organization providing humanitarian aid and advocacy, and reiterates that Rohingya rights are non-negotiable, and essential to Myanmar’s future.

The Erasure of Mindfulness

Episode #486: Daniel M. Stuart, a Buddhist studies scholar and vipassana practitioner, rejoins the podcast to describe his growing interest in Dr. Leon Edward Wright, a Black Christian theologian whose brief but potent connection with Burmese meditation master U Ba Khin has been nearly erased from histories of modern Buddhism and mindfulness. Stuart uses Wright’s story to illuminate a world where meditation, anti-colonial politics, ritual therapeutics, and visionary experience intertwined—far from the later scientific and universalist framing of the Goenka lineage. He situates Wright within Asia’s anti-colonial landscape, where independence movements fostered solidarity across communities. These movements influenced Black intellectuals in the United States, and Wright, already thinking about race, empire, and religion, saw global traditions as resources for liberation. Part of his time to Burma thus appears as part of a broader search for tools to support oppressed communities. Stuart highlights how Wright’s experiences fit within Burmese cosmology shaped by Ledi Sayadaw, in which modern medicine coexisted with protective chanting and ritual healing. U Ba Khin adapted this framework, diagnosing afflictions through elemental imbalances and energetic blockages. Wright’s visionary experiences—light, fire, a hand offering a yellow rose—made sense to him through Christian symbolism, and Stuart notes that “it's not at all surprising if he had some of those experiences, that he would interpret them through the lens of his own tradition.” In contrast, Goenka leans publicly on a secular presentation, but his lineage emerged from a lineage whose earlier layers were steeped in an esoteric cosmology. Ledi framed meditation, healing, and protection within a universe populated by unseen beings, karmically charged diseases, elemental obstructions, and the ritual power of chanting—what he called methods for “warding off” afflictions. U Ba Khin adapted that worldview into a system that treated ailments through energetic diagnoses in addition to teaching meditation. Goenka, however, reframed phenomena once explained through cosmological forces as natural law, and teacher-mediated energetic work was eliminated in favor of promoting the concept of a “non-sectarian” technique. Yet the tradition’s underlying course structure—chanting, the teacher’s position, the atmosphere of protection—still reflects its origins. For Stuart, Wright exemplifies cross-racial and cross-religious solidarity: a Black diplomat and cultural attaché in newly independent Burma bringing meditation back to Black communities in the U.S. He concludes that “I do think he's an important figure that deserves more attention,” not only for his own story but for what it reveals about the complex origins of modern mindfulness.

The Center Holds

Episode #485: “I am not talking as a representative of Anya. I am just a normal person from Anya,” says Saw Bosco, a Myanmar peace process practitioner, grassroots educator on federalism, and political economy researcher. Drawing on his life as a Catholic from Myanmar’s central dry zone, he connects faith, identity, violence, and economics to argue that peace cannot exist without dignity, inclusion, and material survival for ordinary people. Bosco was raised in a small Bayingyi community, descendants of Portuguese settlers long absorbed into Burmese culture. Although culturally local, their Catholic faith marked them as different within a state that rigidly links race, religion, and citizenship. Growing up as a “double minority,” Bosco learned that marginalized groups often try to blend in to survive, even when doing so offers no real protection under the law or in society. He explains that Christian identity is lived differently across Myanmar. In Christian-majority ethnic states such as Chin or Kachin, religious life is practiced publicly, even if under state constraints. In Buddhist-majority regions, however, Bamar or mixed-heritage Christians do not fit the state’s standardized race–religion templates, leaving them subject to heightened bureaucratic scrutiny over identity documents, education, employment, and mobility. After the 2021 coup, this vulnerability intensified into targeted violence in places like Sagaing, where Christian villages were destroyed not only for resisting military rule but because religious difference made brutality easier to justify. Bosco situates these experiences within a broader critique of identity politics, federalism, and peacebuilding. He warns that opposition politics remain organized around ethnic categories that fail to represent newer regional and post-ethnic identities driving resistance today. His skepticism is shaped by his earlier involvement in the National Ceasefire Agreement, which he describes as an elite-driven process disconnected from civilian lives. At the center of his analysis is political economy. Across the Sagaing region, farmers face debt, land insecurity, and military attacks that have turned agriculture into a battlefield. Bosco rejects narratives that celebrate this suffering as “resilience,” insisting instead that peace without economic justice merely reproduces inequality and leaves survival mistaken for stability. “We need to listen to what is happening in the central area as well, like why we are struggling at the political level.” he says in closing. “Of course, everything is very important, for every single political movement and for everyone. But the life of the people from central area is also a unique experience, like the other ethnic people out there.”

The Hidden War

Episode #484: In Myanmar, landmine contamination has often been attributed to relics of World War 2 or past conflicts. “But in Myanmar today, landmines are not a historical problem,” Nyein Nyein Thant Aung says. “[Landmines] are like a living system of control that continues to shape how people move, walk, and survive. They don’t appear in dramatic footage, they don’t require constant supervision, yet they often have a longer and deeper impact on a civilian life than more visible forms of violence.” Another misconception is that landmines are primarily defensive. Yet the strategic use by the Myanmar military is offensive, not only against military targets but civilians, she says, emptying villages, closing roads, blocking access to water and food, and making land unusable. The dynamic nature of the conflict, and pattern of opposing sides learning from the other’s tactics, is also apparent in the evolution of the drone war. Nyein Nyein Thant Aung divides the military’s drone use into different phases, beginning with their deployment in Kachin and Rakhine in 2016-2018 focusing on surveillance and reconnaissance. After Operation 1027 inflicted losses on its positions in 2023, the military began using dual-use drones as weapons platforms, copying tactical innovation demonstrated by resistance armed groups. These patterns of innovation and adoption are typical of present-day conflicts generally, Nyein Nyein Thant Aung says, with emerging tactics and technologies crossing borders. Foreign collaboration with the military in space and cyber affects both military domains and control of information spaces. Satellite technology provides imaging and coordinates in the military theater, giving a strategic advantage and guiding airstrikes, as well as control over communications channels. There are lessons from landmines that reflect on the wider, multidimensional conflict. “This is not an argument that landmines are culturally inevitable or accepted. Fear and resentment toward mines are widespread,” Nyein Nyein Thant Aung says. “The presence of landmines does not imply a strategic sophistication. So often it reflects insecurity rather than control… Being precise about these limits is important.”