Insight Myanmar

The Transparency Paradox

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 supplies and limiting the transfer of funds. As Than Htike Zaw explains, “Trust in state institutions has been very low and the humanitarian environment has become extremely complicated.” The authors emphasize that their analysis focuses on how donors perceive these risks rather than proving direct manipulation of aid flows. In this context, donors face a tradeoff. Large organizations offer formal accountability but are often slower and more vulnerable to obstruction due to reporting and coordination requirements. Gassilloud notes that this does not mean they are untrustworthy, but that they are perceived as less effective for rapid response. Smaller, community-based organizations act more quickly and reach affected populations, though with less formal oversight. As a result, donors prioritize speed, proximity, and confidence in delivery. Than Htike Zaw explains that trust is shaped by social connection and shared understanding of the crisis. Smaller organizations rely on informal verification—updates, direct communication, and gradual release of resources—while maintaining a minimal baseline of transparency. Trust develops incrementally through repeated interaction and cross-checking among actors. These decentralized networks, however, are difficult to scale and coordinate across large areas. This network of smaller, more flexible organizations is rooted in Myanmar’s social world, and a result of decades of having to navigate the country’s authoritarian rule and oppression of marginalized communities. As Gassilloud emphasizes in closing, “There's nothing more precious than the ability of humans to be able to pull each other up,” capturing both the necessity and the resilience that define humanitarian action in this context.

Victims of Success

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 Treaty, or Mine Ban Treaty, was ratified, with the campaign behind it winning the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. It has since become a model of humanitarian disarmament. That model today faces serious challenges, including its relevance to Myanmar, which has recorded the world’s worst casualties from landmines and unexploded ordnance for two years in a row, according to the Landmine Monitor. In a recent interview as part of Insight Myanmar’s Navigating a Minefield [https://insightmyanmar.org/navigating-a-minefield] series, Hunt described how international policy spaces often overlook “the people who have lived with these weapons who are the experts.” Their expertise, she explains, comes from lived experience—mitigating risk as part of everyday life—rather than from formal qualifications or academic training. This perspective has informed MAC’s work, particularly in elevating young people and women as leaders in mine action and disarmament. While men and boys are statistically more likely to be landmine casualties, women and girls are disproportionately affected in less visible ways. Gender-based violence and trafficking risks are heightened in conflict and communities under attack. In families that suffer a death or injury, “increased caregiving responsibilities are going to fall on the women and girls”, Hunt says, forcing women and girls to take on additional work or withdraw from school, reinforcing cycles and intersectionality of inequality. As emerging technologies are being adopted to the battlefield in Myanmar, most notably drones in recent years, Hunt points to broader challenges shaping modern conflict including the use of AI and autonomous systems and nuclear command structures. “The big issue is the lack of accountability and the potential for mistakes with no one held accountable,” she says.

The Akha Way

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 inheritance but a set of stories shaped by migration, hierarchy, and dissent, including legends of Mongol pressure and internal conflict around a powerful king whose era is credited with laying down the “Akha way.” At the center of Morton’s account is Akha customary law, rendered as ghanr, an encompassing system that governs life and death through obligations to ancestors and the maintenance of “vital life giving energy.” Genealogies, ritual offerings, and village gates are not symbolic leftovers but mechanisms that produce health, prosperity, and moral order. Yet modern schooling and language shift change how this knowledge is carried, pushing remembrance from oral mastery toward written records. Morton follows these pressures into a cross-border effort to standardize an Akha writing system, one that was attempted to be designed “by and for Akha,” and into the fractures created when writing becomes a tool for competing missions—Christian evangelism on one side, and neo-traditionalist reform on the other. He frames Christian conversion not as a private belief swap but, in traditionalist terms, an “entirely new set of customary laws,” with the village gate becoming the emblem of rupture, exile, and later reconfiguration. Coffee then arrives as both bridge and threat. In Lawcavq Pu (Doi Chang), wealth from global coffee markets has funded new forms of status and debt, while also underwriting intensified funerals and gatherings aimed at reforming ancestral practice so it can survive beyond the village gates. In the end, Morton does not frame the Akha as trapped between tradition and modernity. He instead regards them as managing competing jurisdictions—ancestral law, church discipline, state regulation, market dependency—none of which can fully absorb the others, and none of which can simply be ignored. “It’s an ongoing cultural system of customary law that Akha have, over time, adapted to their particular circumstances.”

Aniccā with Feeling

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 centered on a single technique. When political restrictions prevented U Ba Khin from traveling abroad after Ne Win’s 1962 coup, he could not realize his own dream of teaching dhamma outside Burma. So he trained several non-Burmese teachers to undertake this mission, as well as Goenka, who as an Indian businessman was able to obtain a passport. In particular, Goenka’s organizational talent and charisma transformed meditation into a vast global network. Yet Friedgard stresses that U Ba Khin never intended his teaching to be wholly standardized; he expected these teaching disciples to adapt the practice to their own cultures. In explaining the technique, Friedgard cites a pamphlet, The Essentials of Buddha Dharma in Meditative Practice, written by U Ba Khin where he outlines ten stages of vipassanā insight. These range from theoretical understanding (samasana) to deep dissolution (bhaṅga) and ultimately to detachment and realization. Unlike Goenka, he placed less emphasis on equanimity and more on “continuity of awareness—anicca with feeling.” Friedgard also goes into great detail about her friendship with Ruth Denison, an U Ba Khin disciple who adapted vipassanā for Western students through movement and mindful walking. Though Denison and her teaching approach was controversial in the conservative, Burmese Buddhist community at IMC, Friedgard believes U Ba Khin would have understood such adaptations. His genius, she says, lay not only in teaching meditation but in trusting that each culture must find its own expression of the Dhamma.

The Leftovers

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 Nu’s administration, leading to tensions with British and American stakeholders. Meanwhile, the CIA engaged in a covert mission tofund and arm the KMT, further complicating the geopolitical landscape. Meanwhile, the KMT’s exploitative practices alienated local ethnic groups, such as the Karen and Mon, deepening mistrust and fragmenting resistance. By 1953, international pressure forced U Nu to address the KMT’s presence at the United Nations. This led to evacuations supported by the CIA, though the process was incomplete and fraught with challenges. Many KMT forces remained, leaving an enduring legacy. The Golden Triangle’s drug trade flourished, ultimately reaching American inner cities; while regional instability persisted and the Tatmadaw grew in power, setting the stage for military rule in Burma. “By the mid to late 1950s, only about seven or eight thousand had gone [back to Taiwan], which was satisfactory for the government,” Baron says, noting the lasting footprint of the KMT’s presence in Burma, and highlighting the incomplete resolutions and ongoing legacies of this historical chapter. “But there was simply in the region, loads that just stayed, loads that never left, and you see their relatives or their descendants still there now.”