Episode #439: “The key human rights issue within Thailand and more broadly within the region is migration related,” says Ben Harkins, a veteran labor rights and migration expert who has spent over seventeen years working across Southeast Asia. From refugee camps to industrial zones, Harkins has witnessed how migration has become both a lifeline and a trap—an act of survival in systems built on exploitation.

He began his career along the Thai-Myanmar border in the 2000s, where tens of thousands of Karen and other ethnic minorities lived in sprawling camps after fleeing conflict. “It's only been this year, in fact, that we've finally seen a major transition in refugee policy in Thailand,” he notes, referring to new measures allowing some refugees to legally work outside the camps for the first time. For Harkins, this small policy shift represents freedom long denied.

Over the years, he has researched the migration that sustain Thailand’s economy. “The flows from Myanmar are so complex,” he explains. “These are very heterogeneous flows of migrants.” His work with the International Labour Organization (ILO) has exposed forced labor, human trafficking, and modern slavery in sectors like fishing, manufacturing, and agriculture.

When Myanmar’s 2021 coup dismantled years of fragile progress, Harkins says it upended everything he had worked for. “Just overnight, my entire world was turned upside down, basically,” he recalls. Colleagues and partners he had collaborated with for years were suddenly arrested, in hiding, or silenced. The military junta publicly denounced his research in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar, accusing him of spreading lies about labor conditions. “Migration itself has sort of become weaponized in many ways by the military junta,” he explains of the current reality, describing how the regime taxes overseas workers, manipulates remittances, and uses migration control to punish dissent.

Now based in Bangkok, Harkins rejects claims that international businesses can operate responsibly under dictatorship. “You just can't have responsible business if you don't have fundamental labor rights for workers,” he insists. Despite everything, he continues his work with the ILO. “The least I can do is make use of the voice that I have within the UN system to try to support these principles of social justice as much as I can.”

Episode #438: Jonathan Crowley shares his journey as a practitioner and teacher in the Goenka Vipassana tradition, highlighting the conflicts that eventually led him to step away after 35 years of dedication. He describes his gradual disillusionment with the organization's rigidity, particularly its failure to address structural racism in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing—unlike many other spiritual organizations, which undertook meaningful changes. Alongside his wife, Jonathan wrote to the North American Acharyas, advocating for meaningful engagement on racial issues and emphasizing that the teachings of the Buddha support addressing social injustices. Their letter called for transparency, change, and inclusivity, yet received only two responses, one of which was completely dismissive, which further isolated them.

Jonathan also questioned the tradition's claim that their Vipassana technique was the only method preserving the “pristine purity” of the Buddha's teachings: a very questionable claim, at best, which he feels fosters an environment resistant to change or critique. The emphasis on purity, combined with a fear of deviation from the prescribed path, discourageseven Senior Teachers from asking questions, voicing doubts or exploring new ideas. Jonathan felt that this rigidity ultimately hindered his spiritual growth. As he experienced deeper states of meditation, he realized the tradition's approach was too narrow, with no space for discussing experiences outside the standard teachings. This further compounded his sense of frustration and alienation.

Leaving the tradition was painful for Jonathan, given his respect for Goenka and the community's significance in his life. He struggled with feelings of loss and confusion, recognizing that while the practice had transformed him, the organizational structure was now limiting his growth. Despite this, he maintains a deep appreciation for the tradition and Goenka, acknowledging their role in his spiritual journey while also embracing new paths in Dhamma that align with his continued evolution.

“I am wanting to hold this deep reverence, appreciation, gratitude and a deep sense of benefit that I have received from Goenkaji and from the tradition; with a need to speak out and to be critical, and to hope that the organization will become a more open system and invite civil discourse and dialog and conversation and questioning, and not think that that's going to be a threat to the path of Dhamma.”

Episode #437: Researchers Myat Su Thwe, a human-rights scholar, and Kyaw Lwin, a socio-legal specialist, examine how Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) operates digitally after the 2021 coup in their study Digital Governance in Exile. They describe a government forced online by warfare and displacement, assessing whether its services genuinely meet citizens’ needs through a “socio-technical framework” that weighs technology against inclusivity, language, and security.

Myat Su Thwe explains that ministries of Health, Education, and Finance deliver essential services through tele-medicine, online schooling, and blockchain-based finance. Tele-Gemar connects volunteer doctors abroad with ethnic-minority patients via local interpreters; digital schools issue the Basic Education Completion Assessment; and the Spring Development Bank and Aung Pay wallet allow secure, anonymous transactions outside junta control. Kyaw Lwin notes progress but warns of weak internet, cyber-attacks, and low digital literacy. Both describe volunteers countering hacks, phishing, and state surveillance, stressing that literacy determines whether digital tools “are weaponized or contribute to society.”

Survey data show moderate public trust, limited mainly by fear of surveillance. The researchers also highlight cooperation between NUG ministries and ethnic armed organizations in health, education, and local finance, along with experimental AI-based counseling and humanitarian databases. They call for interoperable systems, stronger privacy laws, and a roadmap for digital justice, arguing that courts and records must be modernized despite the war. Myat Su Thwe extends the discussion to food security, urging digital mapping and cross-border coordination with Thailand and India to address famine conditions.

In closing, she asserts that NUG legitimacy depends not only on its constitutional origin but on its performance and capacity to lead. Kyaw Lwin concludes, “While others debate artificial intelligence and life beyond Earth, we are still fighting yesterday’s war,” capturing the resilience of a society rebuilding governance through code and conviction.

Episode #436: “We feel like we are not a useless person. You know, even [if] we have to flee our country and come to other country, we are still a valued person.”

Dr. K, a Rohingya general practitioner, shares his journey from Myanmar to the Thai border, where he now supports the resistance by training medics and running makeshift clinics. He recalls how, as a child, his family moved to Yangon from Rakhine, but had to travel in secret because the Rohingya were barred from legal travel. After achieving high grades at school, he was accepted at medical school in 2013 because his family was able to obtain the necessary documents—that otherwise would have been denied to his as a Rohingya— through bribes; even so, he callshimself “lucky” that the admissions office did not demand a birth certificate.

After graduation, he worked very hard, holding posts in a private hospital by day and running his own clinic by night. Following the 2021 coup, he quietly aided the resistance while avoiding registering his clinic. But in February 2024, Dr. K was flagged as a CDM doctor at Yangon airport, detained, questioned, and later coerced into signing an agreement to join the junta’s health service. Fearing the loss of all he had built and saved, he fled in March with his wife and child, crossing illegally into Thailand.

Starting anew was difficult, but he eventually focused on volunteer medicine, shuttling across the border to treat malaria, gastritis, and injuries in bamboo-walled clinics. He admits to fear—especially of aircraft— at the front, describing the psychological toll it takes even when he is safely back in Thailand.

In Thailand, he is finally able to fully embraces his identity as a Rohingya. He hopes the openness he feels in resistance circles that allows this freedom of identity and expression will enable hischildren to grow up in a society free of discrimination. “I am 100% human, because I don't need to hide anything of my background, my personality.”

Episode #435: “There is a person behind every piece of policy,” says Nandar, a senior digital security expert at DigiSec Lab, reflecting on Myanmar’s transformation into a digital prison since the 2021 military coup. Along with researcher and trainer Vox, journalist and consultant Myat, and political researcher Candle, they discuss how the junta’s technological control has reshaped daily life, eroded freedom, and forced citizens to adapt in order to survive.

Nandar, who leads digital safety training and emergency response, describes Myanmar’s “digital siege” as an Internet that works but no longer grants freedom. Layers of control filter access, monitor behavior, and instill fear. Through deep packet inspection, metadata tracking, and the 2025 Cybersecurity Law, the state monitors every interaction and compels service providers to surrender data. The result, she explains, is not disconnection but silence—an online world where communication feels dangerous and self-censorship has become instinct. Journalists, activists, and youth face the worst effects, yet resistance endures in small, encrypted acts of persistence.

Vox, a digital safety researcher, recalls how after the coup, blackouts became “Internet curfews,” and police raids and digital fear merged into everyday life. With no protection from global companies, he and others learned that tools like Signal or Telegram could not guarantee safety. Every conversation required verification; every contact might be compromised. Digital survival meant learning espionage tactics in civilian life. Years later, he says, surveillance has become total. What began as emergency control has evolved into permanent monitoring, leaving an entire generation living cautiously under a digital authoritarian state.

Myat, a journalist and media consultant, says that while before the coup, Myanmar’s independent press was expanding, after the coup, licenses were revoked, reporters jailed, and websites blocked. Exiled media outlets now depend on fragile networks inside the country. Online activity itself has become perilous: VPN use invites arrest, encryption offers no safety when authorities demand passwords, and surveillance reaches into every newsroom. Myat works to train journalists in digital hygiene and security awareness, yet she warns that technology alone cannot protect them. Financial collapse and fear have made survival uncertain, and she insists that the culture of safety—and courage—must now define journalism in Myanmar.

Candle, a political researcher leading DigiSec’s “Duty of Care” project, focuses on how scholars must adapt research ethics to extreme risk. Fieldwork, interviews, and data collection can expose both researchers and participants to danger, so her team developed a Risk Assessment and Mitigation Plan for every project. Integrating encryption, anonymization, and storage security has become an ethical duty, not a technical choice. She explains that fear now shapes participation—many citizens decline interviews or refuse to share information. By embedding safety into research design, Candle argues, social inquiry itself becomes an act of protection as much as discovery.

Together, their voices reveal a single truth: in Myanmar, speaking, writing, and researching have become acts of resistance sustained by vigilance and quiet resilience.

Episode #434: “I don't see how there could be a new social contract for a post-war, post-conflict Myanmar.” With this stark observation, Henning Glaser sets the tone for his analysis of the country’s turmoil.

Glaser is a German legal scholar based at Thammasat University in Bangkok, where he co-founded the German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance. His work spans Asia, but Myanmar has become one of his deepest commitments. Since the early 2010s, he has organized dialogues and seminars on the country’s political transition, and after the 2021 coup, his institute shifted to documenting and analyzing the descent into conflict.

Glaser describes the future in bleak terms. The junta shows no sign of collapse, while the opposition remains fragmented. Ethnic armed groups pursue divergent roadmaps, preventing unity around a federal constitution. Glaser admires the energy of younger activists and local governance experiments, yet doubts these can form a coherent national framework. He cites Kurdistan in Iraq as a warning: local stability without broader resolution.

Geopolitics, he stresses, makes matters worse. “It is inevitable that a primary focus on geopolitics is creating tension and border conflicts and wars. We see that everywhere,” he says. Myanmar, he argues, is reduced to a pawn in a larger contest between China, Russia, India, and an increasingly disengaged West. The result is proxy struggles that entrench the conflict.

Organized crime further compounds the chaos. Scam centers, narcotics, arms smuggling, and trafficking create a criminal economy that fuels the war. “If you have this involvement of organized crime and an organized criminal economy, then you can sustain that for a very, very long time. And that is also why a long stalemate,” he warns.

Glaser dismisses upcoming elections as hollow and recalls Myanmar’s earlier transition as a “democratic façade with a military heart.” Despite his dark assessment, he ends by saluting the resilience of activists and diaspora communities, whose determination to master law and policy remains, in his view, remarkable. “I totally admire all the young people, middle-aged people, and older people in the diaspora who put incredible efforts to keep up and to gain legal knowledge, to draft laws, to understand how to translate policies into law, how to interpret laws. That is remarkable.”

Episode #433: Raul Saldana's journey began in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he grew up in a Catholic household. As a teenager, he questioned the rigidity of Catholicism and turned to nature, finding inspiration in the vastness of the outdoors. Music also became a powerful part of his life, leading him into diverse spiritual practices. In his twenties, Raul joined an ecological community and was introduced to Native American rituals like the Vision Quest; he later explored Sufism, Hindu meditation, and, ultimately, Buddhist practice, which provided the answers he sought. Under the guidance of S.N. Goenka, Vipassanā became a major turning point for Raul, fostering personal insight without blind faith.

During a world music tour that stopped in Macau for a performance, Raul met his future wife, Heidi, and they together they became serious Vipassanā meditators. They traveled to Myanmar for deeper spiritual exploration. There, they began to practice under Sayagaw U Tejaniya. Raul felt pulled to become a monk, and ordained (and then disrobed) three times before finally choosing to remain a monk after the fourth ordination. He is now Bhikkhu Rahula; his wife supports his decision, though it changed their relationship in many ways. Their partnership has shifted from marriage to one of spiritual camaraderie, with Heidi continuing as a lay practitioner.

Bhikkhu Rahula’s current plans include the establishment of Paññābhūmi Monastery in Mexico, a center aimed at sharing Dhamma practice and teachings.

“What happens with Buddhism, this faith, I could hold it! Otherwise, I would have run away very quickly. I love it. Buddhism does a different approach: It tells you the reason from A to B, cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, and you arrive here. Finish! With the faith that arises from it, it is because of the understanding. Faith has no questions anymore. Faith is not vague. Faith is based on the fact. Man, do I love that faith, because that is powerful.”

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?”