Lost In Translation
Insight Myanmar29 Apr 2025

Lost In Translation

Episode #340: Having taught at Payap University in Chiang Mai from 2016–2022, Tony Waters mentored doctoral students grappling with Myanmar’s long history of war, repression, and foreign interference. His students’ pride in their cultures, alongside their questioning of the country’s fragmentation, helped shape his own understanding of Myanmar’s deeper crises and multi-layered history.

One dissertation, exploring Ne Win’s Burmanization policy, particularly influenced his thinking. It traced the policy’s roots to the CIA’s Cold War counterinsurgency training, and its evolution into the Tatmadaw’s brutal Four Cuts strategy. Waters further critiques how America’s anti-Communist strategies, enacted covertly by the CIA, indirectly empowered the expansion of the drug trade.

Waters argues that Myanmar’s ethnic militias are not reflective of any cultural deficiencies, as some outsiders have implied, but rather rational responses to the absence of a stable, inclusive state. He is also sharply critical of the Western aid sector, particularly USAID, for prioritizing donor interests over local needs, and perpetuating cycles of ineffective development. Skeptical of post-coup “political dialogue” initiatives, Waters asserts that the military junta is structurally incapable of genuine negotiation.

Ultimately, he frames Myanmar’s continued suffering as the product of Great Power rivalries, stating that as long as China and the U.S. treat the country as a Cold War playground, real change remains elusive. Waters concludes by stressing the nuance required to better understand and engage in Myanmar, “I'm not looking for good and evil, I'm [just] looking for the story and trying to understand the processes.”

Avsnitt(518)

Abandoned in Plain Sight

Abandoned in Plain Sight

Episode #456: “We will not leave them behind,” says Simon Billenness, director of the Campaign for a New Myanmar and a Burma policy advocate with more than three decades of experience lobbying the Uni...

26 Dec 20252h 8min

The Bloodiest Election

The Bloodiest Election

Episode #455: Mon Zin, a Myanmar-born pro-democracy activist based in Sydney, is a founding member of the Global Myanmar Spring Revolution, a network that coordinates Burmese diaspora communities arou...

25 Dec 20251h 39min

Into The Mystic

Into The Mystic

Episode #454: In our third episode with U Jāgara, a Canadian monk, he reflects on his journey through decades of meditation practice and teaching, focusing on the adaptation of Burmese meditation trad...

23 Dec 20251h 48min

Facing a Fraying World

Facing a Fraying World

Episode #453: Patrick Phongsathorn is a human rights advocate and Fortify Rights advocacy specialist working on Myanmar. Raised near London by a Thai–Irish–South African family, he pairs legal rigor w...

22 Dec 20251h 42min

Fever Pitch

Fever Pitch

Episode #452: “We still had a lot of ideals… but we had some illusions, so to speak.” François Nosten has spent decades on the Thai-Myanmar border, where war, disease, and displacement overlap endless...

19 Dec 20252h 12min

Paved By Good Intentions

Paved By Good Intentions

Episode #451: Marte Nilsen, senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, joins the podcast to explore Aung San Suu Kyi’s central role in Myanmar’s political life. Drawing on decades of rese...

18 Dec 20251h 24min

Learning To Fly

Learning To Fly

Episode #450: Over three days, Insight Myanmar led a Digital Storytelling Workshop with academics and activists, where we explored how presence, curiosity, and the simple invitation “tell me more” can...

16 Dec 20252h 34min

Something in the Air

Something in the Air

Episode #449: The first episode in a five-part series, these discussions were recorded at the 16th International Burma Studies Conference at Northern Illinois University, where scholars, students, res...

15 Dec 20251h 30min

Populärt inom Politik & nyheter

aftonbladet-krim
svenska-fall
rss-krimstad
p3-krim
rss-expressen-dok
fordomspodden
flashback-forever
rss-sanning-konsekvens
motiv
aftonbladet-daily
grans
rss-vad-fan-hande
rss-krimreportrarna
spar
rss-frandfors-horna
rss-flodet
blenda-2
krimmagasinet
olyckan-inifran
dagens-eko