Insight Myanmar

Episode #569: When Hla Hla Win was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison at age twenty-three, she did not focus on the number. “I decided that in politics, the way things change, I will be released.” She narrowed her horizon to the day in front of her — reading, teaching other inmates’ children, and sleeping without the constant fear of arrest that had defined her underground reporting. A form...

Episode #568: “I think a world where people partner and support each other is the world I want my kids to grow up in,” says Greg Tyrosvoutis, co-founder and director of the Inclusive Education Foundation (InED) on the Thailand–Myanmar border. For fifteen years he has worked with refugee camps, migrant learning centers, and ethnic-run schools serving communities displaced by conflict. His guiding b...

Episode #567: Stella Naw, a Kachin academic activist focused on indigenous and decolonial peacebuilding, is joined by Dustin Barter, a senior research fellow at the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI, and together they argue that in the turmoil since the 2021 coup, ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) and their civil society partners are reshaping governance and legitimacy from the ground up, even...

Episode #566: Daniel M. Stuart, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina and a visiting scholar in Hamburg, examines the elusive historical figure Maung Po Thet—also known as Saya Thet Gyi—whose place in the lineage associated with S. N. Goenka reveals how modern Vipassana narratives often simplify a far more complicated past. Stuart explains that there is ve...

Episode #565: In Anyar , or the central Dry Zone, community protection is by necessity locally led and informed by facts on the ground. In a huge area comprising swathes of Sagaing, Magway, and Mandalay regions, often referred to as the country’s “political heartland”, communities have faced intensified violence since the coup and persistent barriers to access, information, and livelihoods. Kant K...

Episode #564: “We want to make federalism not just as a slogan, but also as an action. We want to turn it into action!” Neineh Plo is secretary to the International Relations and Alliance committee of the Karenni National Progressive Party, and he has worked closely with the KNPP since the 2021 coup through international relations, humanitarian work, and headquarters administration. He describes K...

Episode #563: As president of the CCDK (Chin Community in Denmark), a non-profit organization established in 2003 by refugees from Myanmar, Van Neih Thang believes he has a duty to advocate for the people of his home country and state. This unwavering sense of purpose is tied to his experience as a refugee. “I feel like I have some duty to do something, even though I’m one thousand miles away.” Va...

Episode #562: “I thought there was something, but I didn't know there was a way to get there.” That sense of longing has shaped Eion Meades’s spiritual life. His father abandoned the family when Meades was around ten years old, leaving his mother to raise six children while working long hours as a cleaner. He drifted toward crime and bad behavior before leaving home at fifteen. He hitchhiked acros...

Episode #561: The third episode in a three part series, this was recorded inside Malaysia’s Parliament during the final stretch of Malaysia’s ASEAN chairmanship. It sits where diplomacy meets consequence—non-interference, the limits of influence, and the reset button of rotating leadership. Beneath that is Malaysia’s lived reality: refugees arriving as people, not headlines, often in legal limbo a...

Episode #560: “We have to get rid of this military dictatorship. Otherwise the whole country and the coming generations will be in a really troubled situation.” Mun Awng, born in 1960 in Myitkyina, Kachin State, is one of Myanmar’s most iconic protest singers and a lifelong advocate for democracy. Raised by a teacher father and nurse mother amid conflict between the Burma Army and the Kachin Indep...

Episode #559: “Comrade,” Renata says, when asked how she would like to be remembered. A member of the People’s Defense Force and a former political prisoner, she uses the word to name what sustains her in Myanmar’s revolution: loyalty to those who have suffered, fought, been jailed, and died. Before the 2021 coup, Renata was a law student who describes her life as centered on study and office work...

Episode #558: “I've always had a certain resistance to the over-institutionalization of anything,” says renowned meditation teacher Delson Armstrong, who argues that one of the deepest obstacles on the spiritual path is attachment to the very systems intended to help people become free. Meditation methods, lineages, institutions, and teachers can all be valuable, yet they can become objects of cli...

Episode #557: Born in Yangon, Aung Tun grew up listening to foreign news broadcasts, which provided an uncensored view of a world beyond Myanmar’s military control. Inspired by the 1988 uprising in which his brother was detained, he felt compelled to ensure the truth was documented. So Aung Tun joined the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an independent media organization. His work was clandestine...

Episode #556: “I just find it so interesting that the Buddha actually talked about discussion as being a really important part of our Dhamma journey,” says Bruce Stewart, a longtime practitioner, former assistant teacher, and one of the early builders of the Goenka Vipassana meditation tradition in North America. In this second appearance on this platform, he addresses the concerns that caused him...

Episode #555: Note: this podcast episode includes frank anatomical language and extended discussion of women’s bodies, including terms for female genitalia, in the context of human rights, state abuse, and activist movements. Reader and listener discretion is advised. “[They say that] Thailand is the only country that has never been colonized. But it's not true!” Kornkanok “Pup” Khumta, an activis...

Episode #554: Bruce Stewart, an early Western student and teacher in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, reflects on a lifelong search for spiritual meaning driven by curiosity, wonder, and a desire to understand life more deeply. The sudden death of his younger sister prompted early questions about life’s meaning, while stories from traveling hippies kindled a desire to explore the wider world....

Episode #553: Naw Moo Moo Paw grew up in a Karen village near Bago where conflict and landmines were part of everyday life. “I have seen a lot of people injured or die because of the war and intense conflict,” she says. “This is very normal for me.” Today, she is a PhD candidate in Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where her research focuses on what happens to people, their...

Episode #552: Mon Mon Myat, a journalist, filmmaker, and peace scholar, frames Myanmar’s political struggle as a long contest over power, moral discipline, and the possibility of change without domination. Her account begins with U Hpo Hlaing, the nineteenth-century thinker she calls “a kind of very early political theorist in Myanmar,” and moves toward Aung San Suu Kyi, whose politics she sees as...

Episode #551: Fred Stockwell arrived in Mae Sot by accident more than twenty years ago while traveling through Thailand to photograph temples, a wrong bus dropping him off in what was, at the time, a bustling border town filled with NGOs and young volunteers. Someone told him to visit the garbage dump, and a man drove him there by a route that felt deliberately hard to retrace. “It was like it was...

Episode #550: “There was something inside of me that was calling me,” says Jerry Roy, a long-time Vipassana meditator and early student in the Goenka tradition. “Not a thought, but something pulling me.” He argues that liberation comes not from rigid adherence to technique or authority, but from direct understanding of the mind—especially craving and aversion. Raised in a Jewish household, Roy fel...

Episode #549: Mohammad Siraj, a Rohingya researcher, political analyst, educator, and aspiring legal scholar living in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, studies citizenship, constitutional reform, education, and human rights. Drawing on his work with the Rohingya Academic Research Institute and his experience teaching in refugee settings, he argues that the Rohingya crisis is not simply a humanitarian...

Episode #548: Sunda Khin shares a remarkable family journey through contemporary Burmese history. She starts with her father, U Chan Htoon, who suggested that a young Indian businessman named S.N. Goenka learn meditation from Sayagyi U Ba Khin to cure his migraines. Growing up as the daughter of the country's first Supreme Court Justice, she recalls spending time in General Ne Win's home during th...

Episode #547: Scott Leckie, an international human rights lawyer, and Jose Arraiza, a specialist in housing, land, and property rights and citizenship in conflict-affected settings, argue that land in Myanmar is not simply a resource but a central mechanism through which power is exercised, inequality is produced, and political authority is maintained. They emphasize that housing, land, and proper...

Episode #546: Recorded in Kuala Lumpur during Malaysia’s final stretch as ASEAN chair, this is the second episode in a three part series which looks less at policy language and more at political consequence. Recorded inside Parliament, lawmakers grapple with what regional diplomacy can realistically achieve while communities across Malaysia absorb the human fallout of Myanmar’s implosion — refugee...

Episode #545: The promise of justice for war crimes in Myanmar is far from perfect, says Dr. Stuart Casey-Maslen, a leading legal expert on disarmament and international humanitarian law. The military regime’s alleged war crimes continue unchecked, with airstrikes against civilian targets, the destruction of homes, schools, and places of worship, and indiscriminate use of landmines exacting a crue...