The Center Holds
Coming Soon
“I am not talking as a representative of Anya [အညာ, Myanmar’s central “dry zone”]. I am just a normal person from Anya,” begins Saw Bosco, a Myanmar peace process practitioner, grassroots educator on federalism, and researcher of political economy. In this interview, he reflects in on decades of personal history, national failure, and ongoing struggle, weaving together faith, identity, violence, and economics into a single argument: peace in Myanmar cannot exist without dignity, inclusion, and material survival for ordinary people
Saw Bosco was raised in a small Catholic community in central Myanmar, part of the Bayingyi people, who were descendants of Portuguese settlers who had been exiled centuries earlier and absorbed into Burmese culture. While the community spoke Burmese, farmed like their neighbors and identified culturally as local, their Catholic faith marked them as different. Growing up, Bosco lived the reality of being a “double minority”: Christian in a Buddhist-majority state and culturally peripheral within a political system that rigidly tied race, religion, and citizenship together. These early experiences formed his understanding that marginalized groups in Myanmar have to try to blend in to survive, even if that does not mean a commensurate level of protection within society and under the law.
Bosco expands on this point, explaining that Christian identity in Myanmar is experienced differently depending on where one lives. In ethnic-majority Christian states—such as Chin, Kachin, and parts of Karen—religious life can be practiced more publicly, though still under state constraint. Elsewhere, the experience is more fraught and complex. In practice, Myanmar’s administrative system operates as though ethnicity and religion are fixed, mutually reinforcing categories. Those whose identities do not align with these expectations often become administratively suspect; Bamar or mixed-heritage Christians, in particular, do not fit the state’s standardized race-religion templates, leading to recurring bureaucratic scrutiny. National identity cards, citizenship status, passports, university access, and employment eligibility are frequently questioned, delayed, or denied when religious identity does not correspond with the ethnicity the system expects. While similar obstacles exist in Christian-majority ethnic states, recognized ethnicity there provides an administrative legibility that makes Christian identity more intelligible to the system—and therefore less fraught.
After the 2021 coup, this general vulnerability of non-Buddhist Bamar or mixed heritage Christians intensified into targeted violence. Christian villages in Sagaing were burned not only for resisting military control but also because religious differences became an excuse for soldiers to justify more destructive action, even if the victims shared ethnicity or kinship with them. Bosco is careful to note that military brutality has affected communities across religious and ethnic lines, and often in more deliberate, overt and brutal ways, most famously the terrible violence against the Rohingya; at the same time, however, he wants to highlight this lesser known kind of violence against non-Buddhist Bamar/mixed-heritage Burmese, which has affected him and his family directly.
Bosco then turns to identity politics more broadly. He situates authorities’ obsession with race and religion within colonial-era classification systems that were later weaponized by the military. Over time, the state promoted rigid ethnic categories, encouraging communities to cling to identity for survival while simultaneously denying protection. Mixed-heritage individuals, like Bosco, often found no political home. He recalls hesitating to work under any single ethnic banner during peacebuilding efforts, aware that mistrust could surface at any moment.
Following the coup, a new form of identity dynamics emerged. Regional identity became almost as important as ethnic identity, especially in central Myanmar where mass resistance unfolded. People increasingly identified as belonging to Sagaing, Mandalay, or Yangon rather than to an ethnic group. Many young people rejected ethnic and religious labels altogether, identifying instead as humanists or ideological radicals. Bosco notes that while these regional, mixed-heritage, and post-ethnic identities actively shape participation in resistance and local governance, they remain largely absent from formal opposition political structures, which continue to organize representation primarily along ethnic lines.
This disconnect has become especially apparent in debates over federalism. Bosco discusses his involvement in grassroots education on federal democracy and his engagement with the Federal Democracy Charter process. He views the charter as an important roadmap rather than a solution, with its inclusive language and ambition. However, he cautions that documents alone cannot transform society. “If the charter remains only a text, it will fail. It must become a culture of federalism, lived in daily practice.”
He explains that governance in liberated areas already faces immense challenges, including mass displacement, collapsed supply chains, and the near absence of public services. Under these conditions, decentralization that prioritizes separation over coordination risks deepening fragmentation rather than enabling effective self-governance. Federalism, he argues, has to respond to lived realities rather than elite negotiations. Otherwise, it will replicate earlier failures, just under a new name.
This caution draws from his past work as a technical advisor involved in creating the National Ceasefire Agreement. The NCA developed out of negotiations begun in 2013 under the Thein Sein government to create a unified ceasefire framework to manage and contain Myanmar’s long-running civil wars, particularly ongoing fighting between the military and ethnic armed organizations in Kachin and other ethnic states, while channeling signatory groups into a formal political dialogue process. Bosco explains that unfortunately, this “peace” was negotiated primarily among armed elites, with no input from civilian voices, such as farmers, women, youth, and displaced communities. When the NCA completely collapsed after the coup, he found it telling that ordinary people did not feel they had lost anything, because they felt they’d had no stake in it in the first place. “It was designed from the start as an elite-driven project, more about managing stability and attracting investment than addressing the root causes of the conflict.”
Bosco sees worrying parallels today. Although civil society participation has increased compared to the NCA era, armed actors still dominate decision-making. International and regional actors continue to privilege ceasefires and negotiations that promise short-term stability. He expresses concern that military-to-military dialogue could once again sideline civilians, repeating a cycle of elite agreements followed by popular disillusionment.
Bosco defines the ideology of Western governments regarding involvement in Myanmar during the NCA period as “liberal peacebuilding,” and says this has not changed. However, he explains that they now exert far less financial and institutional influence. As a result, regional states—more concerned with stability than democratic reform—now play a more dominant role by default, reinforcing an approach that prioritizes the absence of fighting over the resolution of the structural conditions that produced conflict in the first place. Peace, then, is still largely imagined as a matter of ceasefires and negotiation by elites, with deeper questions of justice, accountability, and social transformation remaining unaddressed. For Bosco, this dynamic risks reproducing the very conditions that have repeatedly pushed Myanmar back into crisis.
At the heart of Bosco’s analysis is political economy. His research focuses on the Sagaing, regions, which are critical to the country’s agricultural production. Even before the coup, farmers faced debt, land insecurity, and exploitative market systems. State support was minimal; since then, the situation has become catastrophic. The military began burning fields, blocking harvests, and severing supply chains to starve resistance areas. Agriculture itself became a battlefield. Class divisions widened as wealthier families fled to cities or abroad while poor farmers remained trapped in conflict zones. Credit collapsed, input costs soared, and food prices rose even as production fell.
Amid this devastation, communities have still managed to create informal survival networks, sharing food and shelter across villages during military raids. That said, Bosco adamantly rejects the common framing of farming community responses by NGOs, donors, think tanks, UN agencies and others as “resilient.” This perspective transforms endurance under violence and neglect into a virtue, obscuring the structural failures and deliberate harms that force people to survive without protection. The farmers, themselves, do not characterize this situation other than as “survival,” and Bosco emphasizes that the issues have driven farming communities into survival mode—abandonment, exploitation and oppressions—need to be the focus, not the response to them; otherwise, the conditions that result in the need for survival are normalized.
Bosco recounts stories like these with deep respect but also anger at political leaders who ignore them, and engage in political debates focused on constitutional principles and power-sharing while millions still struggle to eat. He reiterates that without land rights, fair markets, and sustainable supply chains, any future federal system will merely reproduce inequality. Peace without economic justice, he argues, is temporary and hollow.
As the interview closes, Saw Bosco returns to Anya—not as a symbol of dominance but as a neglected center whose suffering mirrors that of ethnic borderlands. He urges listeners to hear the voices of farmers, women, and rural communities whose experiences rarely reach policy tables. Their lives, he insists, are not footnotes to Myanmar’s future but its foundation. “We need to listen to what is happening in the central area as well, like why we are struggling at the political level.” he says in closing. “Of course, everything is very important, for every single political movement and for everyone. But the life of the people from central area is also a unique experience, like the other ethnic people out there.”