Insight Myanmar

Episode #432: Myanmar researcher Lin Jin Fu investigates the rise of scam compounds that blend human trafficking, digital fraud, and organized crime. His study, Scam haven: Responding to surging cyber crime and human trafficking in Myanmar, traces their expansion from Chinese “scam houses” into a transnational industry stretching across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Originally rooted in China’s underground economies, these groups migrated outward as Beijing cracked down and the pandemic restricted domestic activity. They flourished in lawless borderlands such as the Golden Triangle and northern Shan State, where weak governance allowed them to create fortified compounds that combine physical captivity with online deception.  Scam centers now anchor wider illicit economies— drugs, gambling, black-market banking, and prostitution— worth at least $37 billion a year. In 2023, the Three Brotherhood Alliance, with apparent Chinese backing, attacked major compounds in Laukkai during Operation 1027, rescuing trafficked Chinese nationals and handing over several ringleaders who were later sentenced to death. At the same time, Beijing launched a domestic campaign, flooding WeChat and Weibo daily with anti-fraud messages. Yet the system persists. Frightened operators briefly suspended work elsewhere, then reopened on the condition that they avoid targeting Chinese citizens. Every compound, Lin Jin Fu explains, survives by securing protection from an armed host—usually the junta or allied Border Guard Forces— while some ethnic armies tolerate or tax them. These networks adapt easily. Big bosses flee by helicopter; smaller scams need only laptops, generators, and internet. The old “pig-butchering” crypto fraud now employees sophisticated AItools, and online-gambling scams targeting countries across South America dominate Tachileik. Sadly, for many impoverished young Burmese, scam centers are the only escape from conscription and joblessness. Meanwhile, inside the compounds, workers endure coercion, sexual abuse, and debt bondage. Surrounding towns boom briefly, then collapse into ghost cities once crackdowns hit.  Lin Jin Fu warns that for scam centers to fully cease operations across Myanmar, the military junta has to go. Beyond that, he emphasizes that absent legal migration routes and alternative employment, the industry will continue to endure. “For drugs, people had an alternative— grow coffee instead of poppy,” he says. “For scams, what is the alternative?”

Episode #431: “I’m a sniper,” says Maui, deputy commander of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF). He and four top commanders describe being pushed from peaceful protest into armed resistance after the 2021 coup. They say nonviolent methods failed when the military answered with bullets, mass arrests and village burnings, leaving youth to choose between submission or taking up arms. Maui—once an organic farmer and environmental activist—explains the moral conflict: killing is deeply uncomfortable and can become addictive, yet they fight to prevent future generations from inheriting tyranny. The KNDF emphasizes discipline, training and strict protocols around weapons and landmines to limit civilian harm. Recruits start with bamboo-stick drills and brief, intense training between frontline rotations. Command structure, community support and unity among groups transformed disparate volunteers into a more effective force. Khine Sitthu, the drone operator, recounts improvising an air capability from agricultural drones, adapting online resources and AI tools to rig and navigate munitions. Drones shifted the battlefield, offering local “air support” and enabling strikes that conserved scarce ammunition, though the military later fielded jammers and heavier equipment. Innovation, resourcefulness and local backing explain KNDF’s tactical successes, including downing military aircraft and overrunning battalions—despite persistent shortages of weapons and ammunition. The commanders stress ethics: they target military forces, avoid indiscriminate bombing, and maintain post-conflict responsibilities (clearing mines and humanitarian support). They call on the international community for noncombat material support, including sanctions on military supply chains, while arguing that external assistance could shorten the conflict and reduce civilian suffering. Above all, they insist their struggle aims to build a democratic, nondiscriminatory Myanmar, not perpetuate violence. They remain open to negotiated outcomes if the military permanently relinquishes political power, insisting any settlement must guarantee civilian rule and institutional reform.  

Episode #430: Ngu Wah is a Research Fellow at Knowledge Circle Foundation and a PhD candidate at Chiang Mai University focusing on migration and political economy. In this episode, she speaks about the struggles of Burmese migrant workers and the crucial role of remittances in Myanmar’s economy, shaping the vision she has for her country’s future. She explains that Myanmar remains largely resourcebased, dependent on extractive industries and agriculture. The State Administration Council (SAC) controls the formal sector, while a significant informal sphere involves both state and nonstate actors. Weak infrastructure—roads, transport, and telecommunications—continues to weigh heavily on national development. Migration, she stresses, is “in [her] heart,” a personal commitment rooted in family background and her belief that migrant workers are the “unsung heroes of Myanmar.” Before her PhD, Ngu Wah studied returnees to learn how families managed remittances and supported rural agriculture. Later, while conducting research in Thailand, she uncovered evidence of a gender wage gap: women earned less but remitted more. She attributes this to side income, skillssharing, digital networks, and community living that help women stretch their resources. Yet, women also face greater obstacles than men in finding jobs when contracts expire and in reintegrating once they return to Myanmar. Many hope to start small businesses, making remittances essential as savings and seed capital. Documentation remains another critical burden. Although official fees are low, bureaucratic hurdles and language barriers push workers to use costly agents. Some fall into debt, while others risk working without papers. Yet documentation is vital for protection, services, and bank access. “We need to be very practical to solve that issue,” she says. “We need to think for the migrant workers.” Remittances accounted for about 4% of Myanmar’s GDP in 2018 and have only grown since the coup. But scams and tightening controls make safe transfers harder. She calls for flexible, secure mechanisms that also consider migrants’ habits. While many describe the Burmese as resilient, she cautions against romanticizing hardship. Survival, she insists, comes at a cost. Still, after recounting these struggles, she closes with her most powerful reminder: “[the Burmese] always find a way to survive.”

Episode #429: Emmanuel Flores' journey into meditation began at the age of nine in Rio de Janeiro, seated before a candle. His formative years were marked by a quest for positivity, but without a solid practice. This changed at 20, when a friend's recommendation led him to a vipassana meditation course in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. This course was transformative, and sparked an interest in the histories of Ledi Sayadaw, Saya Thet Gyi, and Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Emmanuel's fascination with Burma's spiritual heritage deepened, and he decided to travel to the Golden Land, staying with an uncle who had just been appointed as the Brazilian Ambassador. After a course at Dhamma Joti, Emmanuel chose to ordain. He felt a special gravitas and protection once he put on the robes, which intensified his conscientiousness and dedication to the practice. Guidance from an elder monk expanded Emmanuel's understanding, stressing the importance of scriptural wisdom alongside meditation. His teacher's memorization of the teachings inspired Emmanuel to internalize the Dhamma himself. The 2021 coup was a jarring contrast to his spiritual growth, the distress of his teacher conveying the gravity of the situation. Although Emmanuel left later that year, his warm memories of his time in the Golden Land remain strong. “I'm left with a thankful feeling, with lots of love towards all the people of Burma that I met, because it enriched my life, and it enriched my practice!When practicing mettā, I always try to remember them… Burma is still in my mind, and I really wish I can go back there again, and learn from that place more.”

Episode #428: This panel gathers five voices from Myanmar’s unraveling present—specialists in food, economy, energy, education, and digital life—who together trace the anatomy of a country still fighting to exist. Their stories intertwine across fields once filled with promise, now marked by loss, adaptation, and the quiet persistence of rebuilding. Thin Lei Win, a journalist and food systems expert, bridges the elemental links between nourishment and truth. She describes a nation abundant in resources yet starved by political neglect, where conflict and inflation have turned meals into measures of survival. For her, recovery begins with food sovereignty and regenerative farming— but also with journalism that insists on accountability, exposing the human costs of repression and keeping the language of truth alive. Economist Sean Turnell, once an adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, recalls the fragile optimism of Myanmar’s reform years before the economy imploded. The coup, he says, erased progress overnight, returning the country to extraction and scarcity. Yet he believes that when democracy returns, stability and investment will quickly follow, because the will to rebuild already exists. From the energy sector, Guillaume De Langre describes stalled electrification and broken trust, yet sees in renewable technologies and decentralized grids the outline of a fairer, more resilient future. Education reformer Thura echoes that belief in renewal, recounting how teachers and students who refused the junta reimagined schooling underground and online— an act of defiance that made learning itself a form of resistance. And in the digital realm, Bradley charts the turn from openness to surveillance, yet also the rise of encrypted communities that protect connection and expression. Together, these voices reveal that even in collapse, Myanmar’s pulse endures— in food and light, in words and classrooms, in the stubborn will to begin again. 

Episode #427: Daniel M. Stuart describes his newest work, Insight in Perspective, as the product of decades of scholarship and meditative practice, aimed at practitioners and academics alike. The book, a follow-up to his earlier Emissary of Insight, examines the historical and cultural formation of the S. N. Goenka Vipassana lineage. He says it began as a short academic critique, but grew into a comprehensive study seeking to bridge lived religious experience and historical analysis. Stuart situates his work partly in dialogue with Eric Braun’s The Birth of Insight, which links modern Vipassana to “Buddhist modernism,” a rationalized response to colonialism and ongoing Western influence. While acknowledging the general acceptance of Braun’s influence, Stuart contends that this model is too narrow, overlooking the hybrid, lay-based traditions that complicate the monastic-centered story. Figures such as U Ba Khin and Goenka, he argues, cannot be reduced to the rational and secular; their teachings blend the scientific, the mystical, and the cosmological. Stuart identifies a central tension between scholarly critique and devotional participation, describing the scholar-practitioner’s task as being willing “to complicate things” with remaining loyal to the tradition. But it’s not easy uncovering all the threads of this complex story. For example, he notes that many witnesses to early Goenka history have remained silent, while other informants, such as Friedgard Lottermoser, only shared guardedly, out of a wish to protect what they saw as esoteric knowledge. Stuart challenges Western scholars like Braun for “thinning out” the richness of Burmese Buddhism by forcing it into modernist categories, which also results in erasure. He emphasizes that elements like spirit consultation, protective rituals, and supernormal powers are not anomalies but continuations of Burmese cosmology, and still exist today in many “modern” mindfulness traditions. While Goenka’s public-facing dialog emphasizes the rational and secular nature of the practice, meditation hall arrangements, and the playing of protective chants such as the Patthāna, at Goenka centers, reveal a much more rich and complex reality. For Stuart, modernization in this context means reorganization, not disenchantment. The global Vipassana movement, he concludes, was not born of one or two events, but emerged through an evolving genealogy, one that joins textual scholarship, colonial encounters, lay experimentation, and enduring cosmological belief into a single, multifaceted birth of insight. 

Episode #426: The Karenni Interim Executive Council was formed in 2023 to provide services to people in dire need, with an estimated 80% of the civilian population displaced by the conflict. As people return to their homes, landmines placed by the military pose a multi-layered threat, causing injuries and deaths, creating a climate of fear for people on their own land, and making normal life dangerous on a daily basis.“Fear now makes the land become evil so they are afraid to even to step on the area where they are used to play happily,” Banya Khung Aung says. “Force people to flee their lands and ensure they cannot return. This is a crime against humanity.”Civilians returning to their homes cannot wait for permission for de-mining according to international standards, Banya Khung Aung says. People need to grow food and maintain their livelihoods in already challenging circumstances. In the absence of major international support, the Karenni are using their own model and local knowledge for mine risk education and to conduct de-mining. Methods include disarming mines with knives or bamboo sticks at great risk, clearing areas with tractors, and controlled fires to detonate or damage explosive devices.The landmine threat cannot be viewed in isolation. The military’s persecution of civilians in ethnic states is a strategic campaign of fear, Banya Khung Aung says, intensified amid the widespread resistance triggered by the coup, with airstrikes and targeting civilians central to military operations. The immense challenges to people’s ability to grow food and sustain themselves, combined with long-term trauma and psychosocial impacts, are shared by the Karenni and many other populations across the country.

Episode #425: Dr. Lalita Hanwong, a Thai historian and analyst, has dedicated her career to understanding Myanmar and its ties to Thailand. “I’m morally attached to the peoples of Myanmar,” she says, summing up a lifetime of scholarship and advocacy that spans from the archives of colonial Burma to the war-torn Thai-Myanmar border. “I just want to talk to everybody.” Trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Lalita’s research explored how British rule relied on racial hierarchies to govern Burma. “The British were pretty paranoid and suspicious of the Burmese… the specific race that they found the most difficult to rule and police was actually the Bamar,” she explains. “Their solution was pretty simple: let’s bring somebody to scare the Burmese—hence the presence of the Gurkhas, the Sikhs and so on.” These studies taught her how old systems of mistrust shaped modern Myanmar. Her work later shifted from archives to activism. Returning to Thailand, she began advising parliament and the army on border affairs, refugee policy, and Myanmar relations. “There are some really good-hearted [Thai] soldiers who mean well, who want to help Myanmar as well,” she says. Mae Sot, the border town she calls her second home, has become central to her life: “Mae Sot is a really fascinating place. There’s no place like Mae Sot… Thailand has been the hub of resistance from Myanmar for generations.” Lalita argues that Thailand must take a more active role as mediator and humanitarian partner. “Thailand could do a lot more,” she says. “The border is a gray zone… we cannot use the urban mindset to get the border fixed however we like it.” She rejects isolation of the junta—“you need somebody who can still negotiate and get access to Naypyidaw”—and believes dialogue is the only way forward. “War is never good for anybody except war business people.”

Episode #424: This episode opens the first of a three-part Insight Myanmar Podcast series recorded at the Decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies Conference at Chiang Mai University. The gathering brought together scholars, activists, and cultural workers exploring how colonial legacies continue to shape scholarship, storytelling, and identity in the region. In this opening episode, we hear from Jules Yim and Jochem van den Boogert, two voices who approach decolonization from distinct yet deeply connected directions. Jules Yim treats decolonization as a living practice rather than a theory—something expressed through art, performance, and community. She describes her concept of “seapunk” as a movement grounded in rebellion and creativity, a Southeast Asian counterpart to cyberpunk or steampunk. “When we refer to punk,” she explains, “we’re referring to the outsider... the ungovernable, the unserious.” For Jules, this spirit of irreverence opens space for experimentation beyond political or academic boundaries. She contrasts the state-backed Korean Wave of pop culture with independent, community-based artistic movements that thrive on informality and collaboration. Jules also expresses an optimistic view that imagination itself is an act of resistance—a way of reclaiming voice, joy, and collective power. Jochem van den Boogert approaches decolonization through scholarship, tracing how colonial and Cold War frameworks continue to shape Southeast Asian studies. “The main task of decolonizing Southeast Asian Studies,” he says, “has to do with getting a good grasp of that framework... and only then can we come up with alternative explanations.” His research on Javanese Islam explores how religious practices coexist in fluid, negotiated forms. “It’s about the practices,” he notes, not rigid belief. Drawing parallels to Buddhism in Burma, Jochem observes similar adaptive patterns, where communities integrate multiple truths into daily life. Both, he argues, reflect Southeast Asia’s remarkable coherence within complexity—an enduring, relational way of understanding the world.

Episode #423: Ian Taylor is a Canadian photographer whose life shifted from the film industry to decades of work and travel across Southeast Asia. His first experience was with a government-sponsored Asian Studies program in the early 1990s. His early visits to Burma during the junta’s “Visit Myanmar Year” left a strong impression, and he became involved for a short time in advertising there.By the late 1990s, Taylor had left advertising for photography, focusing on family portraits and NGO assignments across Asia. A formative volunteer trip to Bangladesh further deepened his commitment to humanitarian work, and led him back to Burma.Taylor left the country in 2015, but reconnected in 2023 through the Thailand-based Border Consortium (TBC). He soon embarked on a volunteer photo project in five refugee camps, describing them as “an active, bustling town with everything.” His photography resists exploitative “poverty porn” and favors portraits that reflect dignity and agency. “Every portrait, in some way, it’s a collaboration.”Critical of the tourism industry’s distortions, Taylor remains focused on authenticity, connection, and service. In his words: “If you could go to a holiday in the Maldives or something... well, I’d rather go [to a refugee camp]!”