Insight Myanmar

Episode #544: May Shine, a recent graduate of the Elliott School of International Affairs, approaches policy work from the position of someone shaped by displacement and minority identity within Myanmar’s Chin community. Her work focuses on a persistent gap between lived realities and international policy, particularly in how crises like Myanmar’s remain underrepresented despite ongoing conflict a...

Episode #543: “We believe in dialogs among people of different backgrounds,” says Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, a Thai professor at Chiang Mai University and director of the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD). While Myanmar’s crisis is often framed in political and humanitarian terms, he argues that Myanmar is also living through an “interregnum”: that is, the old politi...

Episode #542: Max Ante, a former deeply committed practitioner of the Goenka Vipassana tradition, describes a spiritual journey shaped by a relentless desire to understand reality directly, regardless of where that search might lead. From early in his practice, he committed fully to a structured path that promised liberation through disciplined meditation, organizing his life, relationships, and s...

Episode #541: “There is no such thing as ‘traditional Buddhism.’” For Marte Nilsen, this idea defines her career-long exploration of how faith and power intertwine in Myanmar. A senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), she studies how religion evolves with politics, art, and everyday life. “I’m a scientist, and I’m a researcher,” she says. “So I’m always looking at religion a...

Episode #540: This episode marks a different kind of experiment for Insight Myanmar. Instead of following a single guest, we step back and listen across hundreds of conversations gathered over years of documenting Myanmar’s revolution. What emerges is not one story, but a living network of voices—activists, artists, monks, organizers, journalists, and fighters—all wrestling with what it means to e...

Episode #539: In his analysis of Myanmar's democratic transition, Elliot Prasse-Freeman highlights the failures of a system that was inherently flawed from its inception. Although the 2010s brought real change to some, the military also retained significant control, making any possibility at political reform superficial. This left marginalized groups without meaningful change, and created a transi...

Episode #538: The fifth episode in our five-part series features conversations recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners gathered under the theme Dealing with Legacies in Burma . Held in the midst of political upheaval and humanitarian crisis, the conference offered a rare space for open exc...

Episode #537: “Refugees are incredibly remarkable. They're working day-in and day-out to provide for their communities, but they're working under a set of assumptions and a set of regulations that prohibited them from working.” Maximillian Mørch, Head of Program Development and Quality Assurance at The Border Consortium, describes how a system built as an emergency response in 1984 has hardened in...

Episode #536: “I never feel that war is this close to me,” Bencharat Chua, a Thai human rights professor and activist, reflects as she explains how decades of engagement with Myanmar have reshaped her understanding of conflict, democracy, and regional responsibility. Her central argument is that without democracy and a lived culture of human rights in Myanmar, Thailand will continue to experience...

Episode #535: “Meditation kind of lost its traditional sense of going really deep to finding Nibbana , ” says David Johnson, a longtime practitioner and senior teacher at the Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center, describing what he sees as a drift away from the Buddha’s original intention. Johnson has always had an interest in spirituality. He joined his first retreat in his teens, and at nineteen, he l...

Episode #534: Tracy Bawi Hlei Iang, a Chin activist and co-founder of Myanmar Action Group Denmark, reflects on a life shaped by early family separation, forced migration, and political rupture, and argues that sustained, small-scale collective action—especially across ethnic and religious lines—is both possible and essential for Myanmar’s future. Tracy grew up in rural Chin State, and when she wa...

Episode #533: “Before COVID-19 and before the Myanmar coup, I thought that ‘memory of war’ meant only World War Two inside Myanmar. But after 2021, I realized for local people the condition is like a war now.” Hitoshi Kameyama, a Japanese photographer, first came to Burma in 2005 on a photography tour. Expecting a repressive environment, he was instead struck by the warmth and friendliness of loca...

Episode #532: “Constitutions need power,” says Henning Glaser, a Bangkok-based lawyer working on constitutional politics in Asia. In his second appearance on the podcast, he argues that Myanmar’s constitutional problem is less about drafting the perfect text than about whether any text can bind the actors who hold force, and whether there is enough unity to sustain a shared political community. He...

Episode #531: “The laws that govern the monks’ organization were written before 1988, during a one-party dictatorship! In the Sangha organization, you cannot have different voices… everything comes from the top-down. If you say anything unorthodox, your writing will be censored.” U Pandita explains the challenges within Myanmar’s Saṅgha, where rigid hierarchies and censorship laws stifle independe...

Episode #530: “I don't want to live under fear, obeying [the military]. I could survive, but would be in fear, like every movement I would feel I don't have freedom, and I think I don't want that for myself,” says JC, a Karen illustrator and activist now based in the Netherlands. Raised in Yangon, JC was unaware of Myanmar’s civil war due to school propaganda. Only after moving to Thailand to be n...

Episode #529: Daniel Dodd is one of the two center teachers at Dhamma Patapa, a Vipassana meditation center in Georgia in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. Alongside his work as a meditation practitioner and teacher, he has built a career in community organizing, nonprofit leadership, and federal service focused on low-income communities. But it has not been an easy journey. Dodd was born in Brazil to...

Episode #528: Ola Elvestuen has devoted his political career—and much of his life beyond politics—to tackling the most urgent environmental and societal challenges facing the global community. A member of Norway’s Liberal Party since 2013, he has served as Minister of Climate and the Environment and held several high-ranking positions in both local and national government. As a young man in the la...

Episode #527: Nay Chi, a senior researcher with the Myanography project, describes Myanmar’s post-coup election as an exercise in coercion rather than public choice. Drawing on reports from community researchers across the country, she says most people were not interested in voting and did not believe the process would change anything. What moved them was pressure: warnings tied to conscription, t...

Episode #526: “I actually was anti-Muslim when I was in high school!” recalls Thet Swe Win, describing how he was influenced by nationalist propaganda in his youth. But his involvement in the 2007 Saffron Revolution began to change him. Marching with barefoot monks, he witnessed Muslims come from a mosque to give them water, medicine, and slippers. “We do not have to hate each other, but we have t...

Episode #525: Heidy Quah, founder of Refuge for the Refugees in Kuala Lumpur, describes her work supporting migrants and refugees in Malaysia, particularly those fleeing Myanmar. She began volunteering at a refugee learning center at eighteen and was transformed by what she witnessed, particularly seeing children on the verge of losing their only access to education because of funding shortages. F...

Episode #524: Max Ante’s story begins not with a gradual curiosity, but with a sudden rupture. At twenty, after a series of chance encounters, he found himself on a ten-day Vipassana retreat in the Goenka tradition—an experience that would reorder his life almost overnight. The stillness he encountered at the end of that course carried an authority that eclipsed everything that came before. Ambiti...

Episode #523: The fourth episode in our five-part series brings you conversations recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, researchers, and practitioners convened around the theme Dealing with Legacies in Burma . Held amid ongoing political turmoil and humanitarian crisis, the gathering became a rare space for open dialo...

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 na...

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...

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 compe...