Transcript: Episode #307: Ghosts of Empire

Below is the complete transcript for this podcast episode. This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and has not been reviewed by a human editor. As a result, certain words in the text may not accurately reflect the speaker's actual words. This is especially noticeable when speakers have strong accents, as AI transcription may introduce more errors in interpreting and transcribing their speech. Therefore, it is advisable not to reference this transcript in any article or document without cross-referencing the timestamp to ensure the accuracy of the guest's precise words.

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Host 0:16

During the current crisis unfolding in Myanmar, events are happening so fast it can feel challenging just to keep up with them, and we're working to increase our podcast production to stay abreast of this ever changing crisis. And besides our podcast, we encourage you to check out the blogs on our website, insightmyanmar.org where you can also sign up for our regular newsletter, and you can follow our social media sites. Just look for Insight Myanmar on your preferred social Media platform. With that, let's Head into our show.

Host 1:43

Ashley for this episode of Insight Myanmar podcast, we're very pleased to be joined by Ashley south, who has been a researcher and academic and author on many things Myanmar for many years, and we're going to go into his background of research over the years and the decades, as well As updating that to the present day, and how much has changed and what's stayed the same since 2021 So Ashley, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. Thank you for having me. Joah, yeah. So a lot to get through in your your academic career, your career as an author, but before we get into all of that, what I'm curious to know about and all these decades that you've brought to studying many different things about Myanmar. Can you tell us how you got there in the first place?

Ashley South 2:25

Well, at the time, it felt like a series of random events. I hope there's a bit of rationale to it. I came out here in 1992 as a backpack English teacher. After I graduated from university, I went to teach English in Greece for a year in Thessaloniki, and had a marvelous time. But I've always been interested in Buddhism, and so I did want to spend some time living in a traveling in a Buddhist country. So I actually came out here to teach English and spent three months in Bangkok and Hachi teaching in the private sector, which I didn't enjoy much. It was quite different to the experience previously in Greece. And so I figured, why not do something different, and maybe even teach English to refugees? And actually, I was preparing to head to panacom, which was at that time, a processing center for Cambodian and Lao refugees who had been accepted for resettlement in the United States. And they were having English language and I think, sort of basic cultural orientation lessons. So it's all good to go. And then I bumped into a friend of a friend who said, Well, if you're going to teach English to refugees, why not head to masa and teach Khin refugees. And really, at that time, I knew nothing about Burma, Myanmar. I didn't know even where maisot was. I think the bus fare to Mae Sot was maybe a bit cheaper than palat lecom from Bangkok. So I got on a bus to me SOT. And long story short, I taught English in Hua coheren refugee camp for six months, and that was my first exposure to Burma and the Karen. And one thing led to another after that.

Host 4:20

What do you remember about that early experience?

Ashley South 4:24

I remember that I was probably quite unprepared, emotionally and intellectually. I remember my anti religious attitude at the time, because I have since become a Christian, and that's really the most important thing, together with, I think, family in my life. But back then, I had very different views on the subject. And I remember being angered by the use of prayer in Khin schools and by the beautiful singing on Sundays we were right next to the church building. And now when I hear Khin. Ren choral, hymn singing. I think it's just so beautiful and inspiring, but back then, it made me cross. So I guess I was maybe a different person in some respects. But also I remember feeling how incredibly focused and committed students and teachers were, despite the very, very limited resources they had, and the great difficulties and challenges in even making it to the refugee camp, let alone sort of turning up to school every day, and how different that was to my own country, where I think people have it much easier, really, and particularly having taught in a couple of countries by this point, having seen how often Joah and their families take education for granted and many other aspects of, I think, basic sort of human security, as we would call it these days, and so to see how those comforts were just not available to the refugees that I was living among and teaching that made a big impression on me.

Host 6:01

So that's kind of interesting, because just off the bat, you talk about being drawn to this part of the world, partly through your interest in meditation, and then ending up among the Christian largely Christian Korans and their Christian prayer being an anathema at first to you, but then later, a big transition transformation in your life, becoming a Christian. So that, in and of itself, is quite a theological journey.

Ashley South 6:22

Yeah, yeah. It's been, it's been quite a long journey now, and it does feel like a journey. I think that sounds like a bit of a cliche, but it, but it's real. I mean, for me, I was working with Karen refugees for a couple of years. So after the refugee camp, I went back to the UK for a while, and then I came back out here to the Thailand Burma border, and I taught English at the Karen Teacher Training College, which in those days, was at poibou, which is a Karen village on the MOE River, just opposite the old KNU headquarters At manipla. So I lived there for 18 months, taught English to trainee Karen teachers, and got to know a bit more about CO sulei and the Karen nationalist movement. And started to read some books, etc, and got interested. After that, I went to work for the Burma border consortium, the BBC, as they then were called, currently the organization known as the TBC. But in those days it was the BBC. I was the San cleberry field coordinator from 1994 to 97 and it was during that period that, of course, up in manipla, in Pueblo at the kttc, many of the many of my colleagues, the students, teachers, those I met with, were Christian, and it still bugged me, and I think this is still an underlying tension in Karen society, the religious differences which aren't always acknowledged or, I think, properly addressed. So that was still sort of on my mind back in the days up in manipla when I was teaching at the ktgc, but when I started to work with the refugees in the mid, late 1990s in San clubbury, I worked with mon refugees. And really from that period, I've had, I think I can say quite a kind of strong relationship with a lot of mon friends, some of whom I'm still very close to now, and with the Newman state party, with CSOs, etc. And most of those people, of course, are Buddhists. And as I say, I have a long term interest in Buddhism. Of course, I think, as in many societies, that a lot of my Moe Buddhist friends, it's they are not necessarily practicing their religion very regularly in the same way as many nominal Christians. You could say the same thing. Anyway, I also was working with the Karen Refugee Committee, and Karen refugees from the fourth brigade, that's telling region and sixth brigade, which is Southern Karen state, dupliah district, and also these Karen communities mixed as well, by no means all Christian, particularly in sixth brigade, but many of the refugee leadership and the local K new officials I worked with were Christian, and I found it very challenging and really provoking, thought provoking that these people were so much motivated by their love of Jesus and by their intention, motivation to work with and support their own community And so spending time with Karen refugees in particular, and the refugee word, I guess, kind of should go in quote marks there, just because back in those days, most of the refugee camps south of mesot were situated along a border which is not very well demarcated. I think most of the Thailand, Myanmar. Even up to today is not officially demarcated, so these were camps quite deep in the jungle that were nominally in Thailand, but the area was generally controlled by the KNU. But these were people who had fled from Myanmar army attacks. They had mostly lost everything, literally, all they had was the shirts on their backs and maybe some small amount of food and shelter, which was shared among the community. And I remember then seeing how people would join together in prayer and would sing in praise of God and thank God for the what they did have, and how that Christian identity really inspired people to help and support each other, and many of the Refugee Committee people I was working with, the local KNU officials were also motivated by this same strong feeling of Christian fellowship. And I found that very inspiring. And it was this that really set me to be much more well looking back, it set me on the road to becoming a Christian. And so it was a very transformative experience for me, those years from 94 to 97 during which period I also fell in love with my wife of 27 years now, and she certainly guided me on this path as well.

Host 11:16

Wow, that's great. Now you mentioned when you first got to that refugee camp, you said that you were not only intellectually unprepared, but also emotionally unprepared. And so I'm wondering, in what ways, looking back now, you found yourself to be emotionally unprepared, and then through that journey that you're talking about, of moving on from one camp to another, one position to another, deeper into a relationship with the community, the faith, the people, I assume, the language as that journey progressed. How would you describe that emotional unpreparedness, perhaps being prepared or comfortable or integrated?

Ashley South 11:52

I'm not sure that I feel really more comfortable or mature emotionally, really, I've learned a lot more about Burma and the act of becoming a Christian has very much changed the way I feel about myself and the world. That's kind of been an iterative process. You know, when I was first baptized, I had maybe a rather sort of complicated and idiosyncratic view of what it was I was signing up for. And so the 28 years since have been a process of, I think, really kind of learning what that meant. Certainly along the way, part of it has been also, as per your question, deepening the understanding, for me, the appreciation of the ways in which ethno linguistic and faith based networks, which are long and it's kind of academic jargon, but it does mean something. And I think the ways in which to take, for example, the Karen people, but we could also have, I think, a similar conversation around the Buddhist mon community or other ethnic groups. I think it's almost not even specific to Christianity, but the ways in which faith align with ethnic identity to produce a kind of shared solidarity and loving commitment to help each other and to help those in need, which is really inspiring, and I think, from my own experiences, is absent in our own societies. But the other side of that, of course, is also the potential of faith based or ethnic identities to be exclusionary as well, and violent even Yeah. So I think that appreciation of the importance of ethnic identities, which has been really an underlying a lot of my own work, in terms of the kind of programs I've been involved with as an aid worker and working in the humanitarian, political development sectors, but also in my own writing and analysis, a lot of it's been about the importance of ethnic identities, but I think that does need to be balanced with the exclusionary tendency as well. So I guess over the years, to answer your question, I've been very privileged to travel extensively in Myanmar and some other places. The only other country I've really done much travel and research would be the southern Philippines, but that does allow for a bit of a comparison. And within Myanmar, I've traveled quite extensively in Khin state, parts of San state, which, of course, is a big place, and then particularly in the South East and in the Karen mon Kni areas. And that's an immense privilege as a as an outsider, as a foreigner. I think we have the opportunity to travel and sometimes make comparisons in a way that's not so easy for local people, and I feel that privilege brings with it. I. Also responsibilities as well, but in terms of how that's helped me to deepen my own understanding, I would say, Yeah, I'm very grateful for the various opportunities I've had and the networks that have welcomed me to try and still, you know, it's again, it's such a cliche to say that the more you know, the more you know you don't know. But it really is true, and I think it's true in general of life, and certainly when it comes to Burma, it's such an incredibly rich, complex country that, you know, I'm quite a poor linguist as well, I have to admit. So I still feel that what I know is just very much the tip of the iceberg.

Host 15:35

That's that's really, that's a really interesting combination, intertwining the the personal, leading to the academic, and taking a story of young backpacker ending up teaching English in some particular place that then becomes a lifelong vocation and and to say nothing of the personal life and faith that are brought on with that and leading to that, then the journeys within Myanmar, As you say to all these different communities, and, you know, it's just there's the diversity that one finds, even beyond the big labels or boundaries of ethnics, but going deeper and deeper into the divisions and subdivisions. And there's, I don't think there's even an academic agreement now exactly on how those subdivisions are playing out, because there's been so little research there, given the closed nature of the country, but this is a an excellent time, really, to check in with you of and and, and I know this will be a tough question to answer, because I'm asking you a to summarize or bring out the highlights of many years of rigorous academic work, but I can't help but Ask and inquire about what, about what these journeys have led to, and the personal journeys to these diverse ethnic communities that, as you say, you've been able to see how one community is living in a way that another community beside it maybe doesn't know. Because you have the privilege of being able to travel around, travel around, and you're also academically trained to know what to look for, and what questions to ask and and which would then go into your thesis of what you're trying to understand, putting into different academic models. And so just to perhaps tease our audience with some of your findings that we then would encourage them to go and look at your more extensive writings, but just to follow up on that experience of traveling extensively throughout the country, meeting these diverse ethnic groups, being able to contrast and see how they're how they happen to all be living in the same geographical place with, let's say, British colonial imposed borders to make them one nation state today, or one barely nation state today. What? What would you say has stood out from those extensive travels over the course of many decades.

Ashley South 17:42

Gosh, yeah, quite a lot to go on there. Joah, one thing that just kind of jumped out is the geography, because, of course, there's not a common geography, and I think we should always be careful of mono causal explanations. So I said, I'm a Christian, and to me, that is a transformative truth and reality. But as an academic, as an analyst, I come at it sort of very broadly from, I guess, a sort of critical theory, sort of post Marxist approach, but I'm therefore all the more cautious to come up with a single causal explanation for any of the kind of phenomena we're talking about, and that includes geography. So I don't think geography is the sole cause, but the diversity of geography in Myanmar from north to south and from upland to lowland, different agricultural types, you name it, I think does result in an incredible diversity. And so I think this is one of the most ethno, linguistically, anthropologically diverse countries in the world. Not to get too distracted, but I guess another part of question about Myanmar as a nation state, my thinking for what it's worth, and honestly, I don't really think the analysis of us outside as always is that valuable, you know, even though that's what I mostly do for a living these days. But my view has changed over the years anyway, and I guess nowadays, I don't really think of Myanmar as really a very successful example of a nation state. I mean, the country was sort of put together by the Aung Pia and his successors in the Khin Aung dynasty. And then, of course, it was that was one period of Burmese imperial expansion, which was then taken over by the British at a period of sort of maximum expansion. And then the colonial state, I think, was really sort of an artificial creation of violence, which was then inherited by the independence government. And of course, we know the rest of the story the military coup in 1962 etc. And so it seems to me that one of the things we're seeing. Now, since the coup, is really calling the bluff on the idea of Myanmar as a coherent and credible entity, and I think we actually now see the RE emergence of societies with claims to people use different terminology, so state Blitz, or I want to say sovereign ethnic nations that have always been there, that were suppressed, really, I think since the 18th century, one could argue, and are now re emerging. So that's sort of a bit of an aside, but in another part of this, of course, again, in your question is yet the great diversity, but the subgroups which exist and so but for me, I'll talk a little bit in a moment about how I first came to sort of be a writer and researcher working on the Mon and I didn't kind of realize it at the time, but in some ways, I got an easy entry into Burmese politics, and I should be very careful what I say, I think, because I don't want to sound stupid, but or more so than usual. But the Mon community in Myanmar and to a certain extent Thailand, all speak pretty much the same language with some very minor regional variations. They're nearly all the in Buddhists. And I think, without being too simplistic about it, this is partly because the Mon are a lowland literate civilization, and were so for 1000 years, before the arrival of the Kanban dynasty in the British Empire. Whereas upland groups such as the Khin the khuren, I think partly because of geography and a number of other factors, there's a lot more internal diversity. So that has led some commentators over the years even to question whether is such a thing as the current because of the different dialects which exist and material culture is sometimes quite different and upland score animus communities really often quite different to lowland poor Buddhist communities, for example. And yet, I think if you spend time with these people and reading around the literature, which is quite extensive, and as a researcher there, actually there is a sense of commonality among those. Amid the diversity, there are enough common elements to talk about, I think, in a meaningful sense, the current nation, just as much as there is the MOE nation. But in terms of the my journey to being a Christian was accidental, but I do believe guided. And my journey to being an aid worker was kind of accidental, and my journey to being an academic also was accidental. And I think I I was up to the story of how I lived in San February for three near two, three pagodas pass for three years. And that was really extraordinary time. And that's when I really, I think, got to know something about Burma. And in those days, as I said, the refugee camps were on the very poorly demarcated border. So I spent a lot of time in the 90s, I think, hundreds of cross border journeys, sometimes just a few hours, sometimes a few weeks at a time. So I spent quite a bit of time in khreen and Mon areas, traveling around and then, to make a long story short, in 1997 I left Thailand after three and a half years working with the refugees. I left that quite short notice at the demand of the Thai authorities, and so I had to stay away for a while. I won't say too much more about that, but long enough in the past, I think that I couldn't mention it in passing. So I got back to the UK ballet my wife and I did, and thought, Well, what to do now? And eventually I did a master's degree. And some years after it, I did a PhD. But what I did first, when we moved back to the UK, was a bit of teaching again, but also I had always wanted to be a writer. So in 97 when I got back to the UK, rather abruptly, I thought, well, this is maybe the time to do it. When I was in university in my early 20s, I used to write poetry. Listeners, please don't laugh too much. Actually published a few poems, and I even got paid for a couple of them, and I word for word. Actually, it's probably still the best fake writing I've ever done. And then, anyway, I gave up that childishness for a decade or so 97 when I arrived back in the UK, having spent this very intense period working with mon and Karen refugees. And that was during the period of the 1995 Newmont state party ceasefire, followed in 1996 by the more or less forcible repatriation by the Thai authorities of the Mon refugees. So this was a really quite important period in mon political history that I happened to have a pretty close ringside seat for working with the TVC, and when I got back to the UK, I realized that the. Not much had been written about the Mon in the modern period. If you look in libraries and academic databases, there's a lot in there on the role the Mon played in pre colonial Southeast Asia as a vector of Buddhism, bringing Theravadin reform, Theravadin Buddhism, to Southeast Asia in the 16th, 17th centuries, for example, and Modern Linguistics as part of mon Khmer language group is quite widely studied, very little out there on the modern politics, particularly in the post independence period. So that's what I started writing about. And when I started the book, I didn't have any academic training, just as a bachelor's degree in philosophy. And actually, I didn't know that much about them on either I thought I did. I thought that the book would be a history of the new moon state party. And in many ways, it is. I mean, it's the biggest index entry for some way.

But I was very fortunate, really, that researching my first book about the Mon caused me to take a fairly deep dive into pre colonial Southeast Asian history, because of the important historical role the Mon have played, and also because the Mon, the NMSP, had a ceasefire through the 90s and well up to now, really, Although obviously things are a bit more complicated recently, it caused me to take more seriously the study of what's happening inside Myanmar beyond the war zones, because up until the 90s, my experience of Burma had been really only the borders. So I first went to Yangon with my passport in 1999 I think it was maybe my 100th visit to Burma, but it was the first time I used my passport, and I spent I made a few trips doing historical research. Was a good cover visiting the beautiful and incredibly profoundly moving experience of visiting many religious sites. Some of these mon because this is my main area of research at the time, pagodas, etc, which there's something about sites which have been the focus of religious intention for many centuries. There's a peacefulness you know yourself to these areas, which I found very, very interesting, and particularly as a fairly recent convert to Christianity. So that gave me more to think about anyway, I then sort of discovered that there was actually more space inside Myanmar than perhaps I'd expected. I think I thought I was going to North Korea and Myanmar in the 90s and the noughties, there was a contested, not particularly large at the beginning, especially space of civil society. So that caused me to then become quite interested in civil society as an engine for social and political change, and that's what I was writing about. I pretty much finished my first book, and then I did a master's degree, and then I realized that the first book was terribly naive and not very impressive intellectually. So I was very lucky that I didn't publish it earlier, and I kind of rewrite it a bit, fancied up some of the introduction, made it a bit more theoretically relevant, and so taking a long time to answer the question, but I'm not sure I am an academic. As you introduce me, I've published now 10 peer reviewed journal articles with another one out next month, and five books, and so the peer reviewed articles, I guess that is the gold standard of academia, and I think that's been important for me in establishing my credibility as an analyst. I think it's part of the reason I can just about make a living as a consultant, because I publish these peer reviewed articles. So I must know what I'm talking about, right? But I'm not sure that the peer reviewed work is necessarily my most interesting work, and it's always for me, it's more a way of being able to research. I've never been a career academic. I've not taught courses at universities before, so I've kind of got one foot in academia, and what I've tried to do is keep the other foot in my main research interests, and to use the academic identity and the academic route as a way of allowing me to do the kind of research I want, and more and more as a way for me, it's more and more. It's about advocacy, actually, and of course, many different forms of advocacy. But I think having the academic credentials, in some ways is most valuable, because it gets a foot in the door for interesting meetings, gets me involved in stuff I wouldn't necessarily have the opportunity otherwise. But also I hope, and I'm not the best judge of this, but when I, you know, I do have quite a strong normative agenda. And so when I advocate, I hope that the academic credentials sort of back that up a bit. So it's almost a means to an end in some ways.

Host 29:47

Right now, you describe one of the early research subjects that you went into when you got back to the UK. And then as you went further on, was the Mun historically, the Mun people have. Very deep and long roots in Burma and you, I assume you researched that the old pagodas and religious monuments, as well as post 1962 and the Mun political parties and identity. So I wonder what was it that really grabbed your interest in in gravitating towards the Mun people in history.

Ashley South 30:21

Honestly, it was again, at the time felt quite arbitrary. After I finished at the Karen teacher training college, I took a job with the border consortium in San Clari. I don't think these days they would employ someone like me, and rightly so. It was I was just in the right place at the right time, and the refugees I were working with were mon and Karen. So it was really the fact that my job involved working with the Mon national relief committee, and that part of that job was basic assessment of the conditions in the Mon refugee camps, really basic stuff, like working out how many people are there, and then ordering the rice, ordering the fish paste, making sure it gets delivered, making sure it gets distributed properly, all of the work done by the Mon national relief committee. And of course, that's one of the real strengths of the TBC model, not to get too much off track. But even today, although the refugee camps are a lot, there's a smaller number of larger camps compared to back in the 90s, for various reasons, partly because of the dkba attacks on the Khin camps in the mid to late 90s. But also there's it's a more bureaucratized aid industry now than it was when I worked for the TBC, which is why I probably wouldn't get a job this time round if I was to apply again for a similar role. So I landed up in this job working with these mon people who I'd never met before or even really heard of. And I mean, I won't embarrass them by naming names now, but I think they, and many of my other friends know who they are. Some of those people who I first worked with in 1994 have become really, really close personal friends. So what was it about them on in the first case, I think it was just the opportunity being there at the time of the ceasefire. And as I mentioned that my job involved partly the basics of humanitarian response in the refugee camps, but also there were very few NGOs on the border in those days, particularly in this stretch of the border south of Mesa from San Clemente. At that time, it was just TBC, that was just me and medicine San Frontiere hand office in town, and so part of my job was also reporting on the broader context for TBC. And then occasionally, you know, I'd be asked to meet with embassies, and there were monthly coordination meetings in Bangkok I would attend and kind of get a briefing on the situation. So that led me to become more interested in, sort of the politics. And I guess another key thing in relation to the Mon was after the new mon state party was established in 1958 after the previous main mon armed group on people's front agreed a ceasefire, and they were fighting basically for autonomy, self determination, and, more recent years, for a federal political settlement, and that is still the main agenda of the newmon state party. But since 1995 a ceasefire. So the ceasefire was agreed in 1995 with Khin junta and the slough the Myanmar army really under military pressure and also under pressure from the Thai authorities as well. So it was not a very happy agreement. But nevertheless, the ceasefire has more or less stuck until today, although that does then raise questions about recent, modern politics and the emergence of the Newman state party anti dictatorship in February this year, as a as an armed group that's explicitly fighting the SAC junta, whereas the nmsb still officially has a ceasefire anyway, because of the Mon ceasefire, or directly as a consequence. Anyway, the Thai authorities burnt down the last of them on refugee settlements in Thailand, forced them on refugees back across the border. And TBC, I think we really had little choice, and were, in fact, very keen to continue supporting the modern refugees after they were repatriated to Burma. I think that we were pretty clear at the time. I certainly hope I was that this was a force for repatriation. It wasn't like Cease fire. Now we have peace in Burma. All the refugees can go home. The mon refugees were forcibly repatriated into jungle areas where they basically had to rebuild their lives from scratch, and so, of course, they needed continued humanitarian support. So my job from 95 through to 97 was before deceased to sort of scope, scout out possible locations, and then after deceased fired among refugees were repatriated. I think UNHCR called it a spontaneous repatriation, which is really, I think. Think not very accurate, but I guess it was organized by the Mon, albeit under immense pressure from ba Thai authorities. And so then I would spend time across the border in the Mon repatriation resettlement sites on the ye River, which in those days was thick jungle. I remember hearing and then seeing scores of hornbills overhead Tiger tracks. I think there was still a rhinoceros in the area back in those days, it was so beautiful. My first visit into that area was very ill judged. I had just taken over the TVC job in April, BBC, as it then was April, 1994 and by the time I kind of got started properly in June. The rainy season had come already, but I was determined to visit them on refugee camps. I wasn't going to wait until the dry season. And so off we sat into the jungle. And the first word I learned, and still sends a shiver down my spine, in mon glom, which is the Mon word for leech. And there were many leeches and many wild animals in the jungle, but it was also incredibly beautiful. And visiting these areas in that time, really, I think, helped me to sort of connect with that locale and to build strong relationships, which have persisted through many ups and downs with mon stakeholders. So, I mean, I guess in terms of organizations, I've been very close to the Newmont state party since that time, but also I have many long standing relationships with CSOs and with groups like the Mon women's organization, Human Rights Foundation and Mon land, etc, and just many friends and individuals as well. So I guess it originally came about through circumstances, and then because I wrote this book about the Mon and it's that was published in the first edition in 2003 the second edition in 2005 it's still the only it's one of three book length studies of demon. So Hallidays was published in 1917 so that was quite a long time ago that Hazel Aung also published a book about the Mon refugees, it must be said, but there's not many of us who've written about the Mon so I think that sort of really tied in my relationship. I've been very close to a number of different mon groups and friends ever since, and I do want to just say a little bit more about this, because there is something really recognizable and distinct, and to me, deeply attractive about mon culture. And I said, I'm a terrible linguist, I can just about get by and score Karen. I'm embarrassingly poor at Burmese, and my mom is almost non existent. So I'm really, you know, I'm definitely an outsider, and I've just been very privileged to have such generous friends who've shown me around and I visited many interesting places in the deep jungle and out in the islands and monasteries and etc. And there's a there's a trend, I think, in the analysis of Myanmar history and culture to question whether there is actually much difference between mon and Burmese at the end of the day, and I'm not academically qualified, really to comment on that, beyond saying that there is a distinct feeling around mon culture, which is pretty useless way of describing it for sort of so called partial academic, I feel I should do better, but something that is deeply attractive, and you know it when you see it. So it grew on me, I must say, particularly those early visits to Burma in the 90s and noughties, when I was doing my research for the first book and visiting modern religious sites and spending a lot of time in modern communities. It grows on you. And then, I guess, sort of to move the story, story forward. Same thing, but different. The other community among who I've spent a lot of time would be different, Karen groups, particularly in upland areas. Also, as I said, several other communities as well. But I think this is still relevant to the question that I've just been often just so almost overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity and sincerity of the people from Burma among whom I've spent time. I'm thinking now of Karen groups again, but it could be, you know, not sort of exclusive to the Karen. I think I touched on it partly earlier. That's, you know, putting it in terms of the common ethnic and faith based identities, which which certainly are mobilized in communities, and they're among the resources that lead to resilience and self help and mutual aid, all of which is sounds very abstract, and there is something very sort of real and meaningful there. And I just think for generosity to strangers. In my case, I think what it must be like for a Karen refugee to turn up in the UK, and I don't think they would get anything like the same generous and love. And sincere welcome, which I've experienced so many times in Korean communities as an outsider, and that really, I could tell quite early that there was something very special here. And in some ways, I think the next 25 years of my life have been an attempt to try and understand what that actually means and what to do about it.

Host 40:21

I suppose that's really beautiful, and I really appreciate the your story, intertwining the personal with advocacy, with the academic, and where those all come together, and sometimes you move a story forward by going back. And that's where my next question wants to go in looking I've always been fascinated by the Mun just partly because I haven't read so much of their history. But when I read about the history of the country and the Burmese people, you always hear about the age old mun kingdoms, and that's, I believe, that's where Buddhism came through so many centuries ago, and and how the early ba Mar Buddhist kingdoms borrowed from or stole from, depending on how you want to put at the Mun wealth of the Buddhist teachings and other things in society. So I've always been fascinated by this, and I couldn't pass up a chance to talk to someone who's really been integrated in this community and studied this far more than me. I think this is something our listeners to, however much they know or don't know about this. Would also like to hear, could you trace us back to those or the early history of mun civilization and how that influenced the rising ba Mar empires? And I also want to frame this question by saying, by referencing again, sometimes you go backwards by going forwards. And so this is not simply a history lesson, but a way of remembering how history and various points in history are informing the present and the future in current, including the current moment and where we're going now.

Ashley South 41:49

Great. Thank you. Yeah, again, I'll preface it by saying I'm a real jack of all trades. I guess politics is my thing, and I'm not an expert on modern history in an academic sense, but I like the way you phrased the question, because the Mon have great cultural prestige, and that is partly because of the historic role that mon kingdoms and queens as well have played in Southeast Asia. So the relevance of the Mon historically is still apparent today, I think, and the as I understand it, the Mon Khmer language, is separated, let's say, about 2000 years ago. So the earliest inscriptions in mainland Southeast Asia, in the lands which would later become Burma and Thailand, but also up as far as bien Chen and in Laos are in Auld Mon. And the very, it seems, the very earliest mon settlements from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era as much informed by Brahmanism as Buddhism. And so I think partly what that shows is the very long standing connections across the Indian Ocean with Indianized religious cultures and polities. So it seems that probably, if one can be, again too simplistic, that the Mon Khmer came down out of the Asian steps after the last Ice Age, X 1000 years ago. And there was probably already an earlier strata of Homo sapiens settlement in Southeast Asia at the Mon I think worked very early in the next wave. And adopt so they came from the north, from China. But the culture, I think a lot of that came from the west, from India, and by the time of the of King anurata, of pagan to bring the story forward a bit, the Mon civilization was spread across much of central and southern Thailand and Burma, As those countries are known today, and it was a high prestige, literate Buddhist political culture, definitely using mon and Pali as domain languages of rule. There's not that much left in terms of archeological evidence, so it's a rather patchy picture, but it does look like these were more civilization areas with city states rising and falling and sharing common cultures, rather than being a bounded modern state as we would sort of understand it today. And this is important, because there have been some attempts, Michael Aung fins, Mr. Roman Yangon, being the most infamous, to actually claim that there was no significant mon civilization prior to began. And I think that's been certainly disproved. Donald statner, I think, is one of several authors who've written a critique. Suggestion that there was no pre began one civilization there was. The story is that King manuha of pagan raided fat on and took with him 3000 monks and the Tripitaka, the Buddhist holy scriptures, up to began, which of course, was the founding of the first Burmese empire. I um, so quite how these events played out at the time is, of course, shrouded in history. I think even the earliest mentions of King anurata, I think, are two or 300 years after he was supposed to have lived. So we don't really know what happened? But clearly there was a strong influence of mon Buddhist statecraft on the earliest policies in pagan and famously, the Jan Sita Stella at pagan from the 11th century. It's the earliest known example of Burmese script, and I think the last example of pew script. So there's some suggestion that actually, the predecessors of the bamap, again, kingdom, may have included the pew.

Host 46:09

I was going to ask if there's any relation between the ancient pew civilization and mun?

Ashley South 46:14

I think not directly. And my understanding is, I think there's a few hypotheses out there, some have suggested that the Pew may have been the ancestors of the poor Karen. And of course, both of these could be true. The other part being, it does seem that at least some of the Pew became Burmese once pagan was established as a more systematically organized state, then we see the decline of mon civilization with the ascendancy of the began state through till the 1300s with the Mongol invasions, and then the collapse of began and the rise of the San states further to the north, and including then the beginning of the rise of Ava. But during that period, mon kingdoms remained, in fact, grew in strength across Thailand, and even new mon city states established in harapan, Jai in Lampung, Lampang area, and I said, as far north as Laos. And we really get a big resurgence of mon sovereignty in the 15th and 16th centuries, which coincides with the revised Theravada Buddhism across Southeast Asia. So Theravada Buddhism, as you probably know, pretty much died out in India by 2000 years ago, 345, 100 years of the life of Gautama Buddha, and was maintained, really just on the island of Sri Lanka, and then in the 15th, 16th century, round about the same time as we have the Protestant Reformation in Europe, there's a reformation and the introduction of a more rigorous and Orthodox School of Buddhism let her dad in school right across mainland Southeast Asia. And that comes from Sri Lanka through Damon and then from the Mon into Thailand and Cambodia and Laos, and also into the Avar kingdom and successor states in Myanmar. So there we get basically a second wave of Buddhism into Southeast Asia, again through the Mon. So This partly explains the real prestige associated with the Mon. So there was a resurgence of mon political sovereignty through till the mid 18th century, basically the Mon capital at Hong sua Thai ba go, as it's currently known. This was the again, not really a nation state in the modern sense of the world, but probably a more defined territory than the previous mon civilization prior to began. So the Hon Suu Toy Kingdom was a rival of the Burmese kingdoms. They fought wars, and actually the Mon seemed to be on the up in 1752 I think is correct, which is when the Mon actually took Ava and established control across briefly at least much or parts of Central and even as far as parts of northern Myanmar, it looks like they overextended. And I think there's a real lesson there for contemporary history in terms of how insurgents need to be careful not to overextend when they have the momentum on their side, because within a few years, the Mon had lost control of these new possessions. And in 1757 they were actually expelled from ba goen by King Aung Paya. And the rest, as they say, is history, because this was the beginning of the Kanban dynasty. And the Mon have been sometimes called a people without a country, or a nation without a country. And since the mid 18th century, the Mon, like many other ethnic communities in Myanmar, have had various periods of revival of a nationalist movement, an armed nationalist movement. There was mon insurgency against the British colonial rule, and then shortly after independence, to Mon, the more people's front that I mentioned earlier. That took up arms against the unu government for similar reasons to other ethnic armed organizations. At that time, they wanted some degree of autonomy, which had been promised by the departing British and was not actually granted under the new dispensation of Burmese independence. And so the insurgency kicked off and lasted in the Mon case through to 1995 and in many ways, the legitimacy of demon national armed movement has evoked and looked back to these periods of very well, as you know, well documented periods of history where the Mon have had their own kingdom rulers. And just one thing, in case I forget to put it back in later, talking about kingdoms, pre colonial kingdoms, but the monar actually one of the relatively few civilizations of Southeast Asia who have been ruled by Queens as well. So not on many occasions, but famously, Queen Shin Suu of BA go was a seems that she was an extraordinary politician, playing off the British against some of the early colonial powers. And she was the ruler of several decades, and then also Queen gamadevi of Harry punjay in not so far from here in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. She was a mon woman ruler. So I think it's probably fair to say, I better be careful not to get my words wrong again, that mon society is fairly patriarchal, as are many, I think, Buddhist cultures. And yet historically, there have been examples of mon Queen's ruling. And there is, of course, a very vibrant, dynamic modern civil society sector, with many women leading positions as well. So that's an agency of modern women continues through till today.

Host 51:49

That's a brilliant recounting of not just the history, but how that history of the imagined golden years are continuing to have such a profound effect today on one identity, and I think that same thing can be said with so many other ethnic groups. And another part of the story I want to go back to is actually the very beginning, because you had referenced some something about the relationship and the origins of these different ethnic identities that I think touches upon not just the particular groups you're talking about, but can be extrapolated to the whole of Myanmar, where you're referencing, as you were referencing the early civilizations of pew and Mun. There's a question of, what did these then turn into? And there's, did it, did it turn into the PO Koran? Did it turn into the BA Mar? Did it not was what? Did it not exist? And so that led me to thinking, what are as we're looking at something that is so long ago, 1000s and 1000s of years ago, what are the motivations and incentives to want to claim an earlier civilization as leading into or not leading into a modern, modern understood ethnic group as in the case of who's claiming the pew and what, what the advantages are of wanting to claim them for your own or the reverse of that, in the example, you cite, what would be the advantages of trying to erase the Mun as a people and say that, well, well, really they were, They weren't this, they weren't this ethnic group or classification, as we like to see now. And here's why and where I'm going with this is, I want to stay on this particular example, but my mind is starting to extrapolate, in, of course, the very contentious history of the Rohingya, the we even the word Rohingya and where they're from, and what their name means, and does that community exist. You can then look at how Buddhism was parts of Buddhism in Arakan was also taken, stolen at various points, and how that then was brought into the MAR empire, not only in terms of the politically and the land that was held, but also in terms of the faith and The and and and the literature that was coming from there. And so I think this question of shifting identities, and as bringing erasing or or claiming different identities into modern understanding of those ethnic groups, this is again something that is super relevant to the Myanmar we find now. And so I think staying on this particular example that you kicked off, and unpacking that can can then lead to wider questions and examinations of some of these questions, of which I know is a topic you want to get into, federalism and self determination and what that means going forward post 2021, and so how interesting is it that we're going back to a discussion of 1000s of years ago to better understand the future of the 21st century and beyond?

Ashley South 54:50

Great, yeah, thanks. So, I mean, I guess one way of getting at it is it's a bit of an old fashioned. View in academia these days, but I think still, the broad parameters are there of primordialists versus constructivists, right? I mean, is that is ethnic identity something that's ancient and inherited and changing, or is it something that's kind of invented and reinvented in real time, almost? And I think we know it's both of those things are true, I mean, and therefore for nations, quite an important claim to their credibility and legitimacy and to be taken seriously is the demonstration that these peoples have persisted in the same area for many centuries. And the further back in time you can push the origin of donation, the more there is, I think, a widespread feeling that the more that anchors donation in history and to be taken seriously. And I think there is some reality to that view of things. And I think, yeah, it is really both primordialism and constructivism. There have been attempts over the years, I think, not just in Burma studies, but across academia and analysis, to kind of discredit the idea of ethnic identities being long standing, and particularly once ethnicity starts getting mapped onto territory, and rather To say, no, these, these identities are constructed and then, but I don't think these are necessarily contradicting each other. And certainly we can see changes in ethnic orientation through the historical record often, really, then language is the best proxy we have. And so if you look, for example, at the British colonial administrative records through the 19th century, the number of keeping it on the Mon again, I don't have the numbers to hand, but my recollection is that through to the 1850s 60s, 70s, there were large numbers of mon speakers recorded in the IR Awadhi delta and around Bego, which, as I mentioned, was the historic capital of the Mon kingdom of hon Suu dai by the 20th century, the number of mon speakers had really dropped massively, and most of these people had become Burmese speakers. And there are a number of reasons for that, mostly I think because the Mon language was not sponsored during the British colonial period. But unlike some other ethnic minority communities, there wasn't much patronage of the Mon, and rather, Burmese was adopted, particularly in lowland areas, as the main language of administration and commerce, together with English, of course. And so many people stopped using Mon, and many communities stopped being modern. That's part of sort of thinking about how national identities can change, and it's inherently political. And I think a good example of that is, again, to go to ba go and to look at what's there now in terms of the historical record. And of course, you can visit the intagon Pier, which is reputed to be the place where the Mon kingdom of BA go first emerged from the waves into dry land. So the story is that during the time of the Gotama Buddha, he was flying overhead in Southeast Asia, and there was a pinnacle of land sticking out from the sea upon which a female duck was perching and a male duck was perched on the back of the female duck. And the Buddha said that a land will emerge here from the seas, and this will be a great kingdom to propagate Buddhism. And the story goes that then Indra, the Brahman God. It shows, again, obviously the collection of Buddhism and Hinduism In mon foundation myths caused the seas to recede. And the place where it all started is now marked by the Hindi go pagoda, which is indeed a hill just in just outside of downtown. But go and the statue, which we often see marking mon communities, is indeed that the duck Sheldrake, the brahminy duck, the BOP door. That's the golden Sheldrake, or the SRI hinter in Burmese. And the symbol often is one duck perched on top of the other, and it's the female supporting the male. And so this is often given as an example of how one women have significant agency anyway. Also at Bogo, we have the Suu Mordor pagoda, which is actually the tallest pagoda in Myanmar. It's, I think, 110 meters. So it's not on a hill quite the same way as. As schwedegun is, but the schweigon, as I touched on briefly, briefly, was actually known as the jack lagoon, and the gun seems to emerge into history around 678, 900 ad as far as I can remember. And was a mon pagoda up until the point where lower Burma was conquered by the Kanban dynasty, and then, famously, Aung payer renamed the goen as Yangon, and then the jack Langon became ba Suu Dagon, and get a similar story in Ba goen. So ba Suu Mordor far predates the Burmese state and was actually the site of the royal palace. If you visit now ba Suu Mordor pagoda, you can go to the reconstruction of what looks a bit like a 19th century Burmese Palace from Mandalay that has been slapped down on top of a largely unexcavated archeological site, which is the remains of 15th, 16th century and hardly excavated. So there's clearly some the stuff under the ground there? Yeah, I think the informed opinion speculation, but quite well informed of some people I've spoken to who know more about it than me, is that this would be one site among several in Burma which contain possibly very significant archeological evidence, which at least would help us to better understand the history of the Mon incredible, and given the fact that the modern have played such a leading role in religion and culture in Southeast Asia, it might actually help to explain more about the history of Southeast Asia, and presumably would reinforce the notion of the Mon as an ancient civilization which has had its own citadels and introduced Buddhism. Now, all of which, of course, be very welcome to the modern nationalist movement. And there are many amateur, but often very well trained and experienced historians in the modern nationalist movement. But I think you can see where I'm going with this, that the Burmese state first under the British who didn't really care, I think, didn't really have the skills to proceed with archeological excavations. And then under successive ba Mar dominated military regimes, there hasn't been much incentive to dig up the Mon pass, because that would, of course, then lead lend greater credibility and legitimacy to mon nationalist narratives. Fascinating. And then, just so it is fascinating, the sort of the politics of history, the politics of archeology. And in some ways, I think this is not pago as a particularly good example, but right along the seaboard, down to the way through the Tun Moe, there are many partially or unexplored archeological sites, which I think also in some ways better to keep that stuff under the ground until there are authorities there who have the skills and the will to investigate properly. I feel I can't, although I've gone on too long, no doubt, I feel that it's really important to just come back to what you said about the Rohingya as well, because as as a quote, unquote expert on Burmese politics, you know, I do bang on quite a lot about national identity, the right to self determination, etc. And I haven't personally spent much time working on the situation in Rakhine State or the Rohingya. I once visited Mongol and butong as a consultant for the World Food Program, and just thought it was a terrible, appalling situation. I think that the Ranger incredibly badly treated. As you know, obviously, I'm not the first person to make that realization, but I think it's really important for those of us and talking about myself, really, who make our living by talking and writing about Burmese politics. If self determination means anything, it means that people should have the right to determine who they are and what they are called, and that has to be the case for the Rohingya as well. And I feel often that for myself and many others, I believe that we often sort of exclude the Rohingya at least partially from our analysis of ethnic politics in Myanmar. And I just think ethically, that's really not right. And so whilst I have not done much research myself on the Ranger, I think it's really important to mention the Ranger when talking about the ethnic nations of Myanmar, in order to be inclusive.

And then that does bring us on to that other point that you made in terms of how cosmopolitan pre colonial identities were, my understanding is that the idea of ethno linguistic identity being the main characteristic which determines your political position and your access to material and symbolic resources, that's A fairly modern notion. I think in the pre colonial state language, ethnic identity was one among several factors. But more important probably was position in the Status hierarchy, in relation to the court and in relation to the religious hierarchies, artistic hierarchies. And although I'm. Not an expert. It seems to me that pre colonial Arakan was probably a really good example of that there's a very cosmopolitan state with certainly can't be certain about anything. Can we It seems certain that there were Muslim communities living in Arakan for many centuries, before the arrivals of the British I think it's probably also the case that new arrivals came during the British colonial period, and since so. I mean, both of those narratives are broadly correct, but I think the cosmopolitan nature, the multi ethnic, multi religious nature of the pre colonial the pre Aung payer Arakan society and court is actually something wonderful and beautiful and something to be celebrated. And I think it was probably, in fact, we know it was unique to Arakan. I think that many pre colonial societies were less fixated about having a single identity, and actually were more inclusive. And so if this is a bit of a stretch, I know, but my, you know, my agenda is to see the post coup context in Myanmar as one where there is really not any longer a viable Central State. I don't expect the state of Myanmar to recover in my lifetime, partly for political reasons, but also, I don't know whether we have time to get on to the impacts of climate change, I think that these are going to be devastating, and so I don't expect a coherent Myanmar state to recover. I think that does have massive humanitarian implications, which will, I think, inevitably drive huge suffering and displacement, which are not things to celebrate, but also it does create a political opportunity for the RE emergence of these identities and associated political spaces that have arguably really been suppressed since the emergence of the modern nation state in this part of the world with the at least a British imperial the colony of Burma. So if we see the RE emergence of these states as being well, I think we can just say it's an empirical fact. Personally, for reasons I've touched on, I think it's actually quite a positive thing. But more than that, it's an inevitable thing. And so I think that makes these issues around the potentially exclusionary nature of ethnic and religious identities, and the need to address that without throwing the baby out with the BA for water, as my mother used to say so, celebrating retaining supporting ethnic and religious identity whilst also calling. Calling is the wrong word, understanding the need for inclusive polities, if we can look back to examples from the pre colonial state like pre colonial Arakan and see that actually these states were more inclusive than perhaps we realized. Yeah, I think that in the same way as using these historical models to validate contemporary, modern nationalist movements, we can also use those models to validate the need for inclusive governance and administration. This is not just some sort of rights based thing that has been cooked up by NGOs in the last few decades in the post world war two dispensation, but I think that actually, there is a tradition of inclusion, sure, in many of the pre colonial states of Southeast Asia. And that seems to be very important. I'm not sure I've done justice to the argument, but that's why it's important.

Host 1:08:34

It's fascinating. And these histories that these contested histories, contrasted histories, conflicting narratives that are going back so many years. You know, one can't help but think of like ISRAEL PALESTINE. And you know, well, this happened this and with Israel Palestine, in some ways, you know, can barely get these words out of my mouth, but in some ways, it just seems so much simpler than what we find in Myanmar, because you don't quite have so many and you they're definitely conflicting, but it's well, this happened back then, but then before this, this happened. But then before this, this happened, but then you're leaving out this part. Whereas in Myanmar, you just have so many communities with so many of their own stories, which then split and Splinter and ally in their own different ways, and each of them having their own myths, that they celebrate, their own golden ages, their own unifying figures. They remember their their golden years that they want to go back to. And as and then as the BA Mar kingdoms over the years have really been the reigning authority of times where they were challenged and by the Sean kingdoms or Khan or the or Mun, as we're talking about, but for the most part, they've prevailed and so and by prevailing means, usually means by defeating and conquering, which leads, on one side, to a history of vanquishing and being and celebrating the conquering heroes returning. On their side, leads to loss and trauma and victimization and remembering old wounds. And so this is something that as we continue to go back into the past, and not just the past of the last 100 years or the last few generations, where there's actually living memories of people who who either experienced or were told by Elder family members of what happened in certain years, in certain eras, but of time immemorial, where so long ago that whatever that history was has combined with mythology in creating whatever the purposes of the modern contemporary identity should be for that particular moment in that particular group, looking at where all these contrasting and conflicting histories come together, that there is so much potential good to celebrate and to think back to the past, as well as in the ways that these groups are coming together now that we can really touch upon and appreciate in both how they've been before, as well as signs of how they're coming together now, in ways that you know, really we did not see an 88 or even 07 nearly to the same degrees now, and there's really tangible evidence that you can do to point to that. But then there are also other signs of and both historically as well as contemporary historically, of the holding on to these contrasting narratives of of conquering or being conquered, or golden ages won and lost, that want to be reclaimed, that don't that are so embedded in a cultural psyche it's hard to imagine them. It's hard to imagine what it will take for them to go anywhere and to be reframed in another way, much less this feeling among many ethnics, which I'm sure you've heard time and again, that whatever is, whatever shape is happening in the dry zone, whether you're talking about the Communist Party or the or Aung or Ne Win or the the NLD or The different iterations of the military authorities. These are all just ba Mar groups fighting each other. They're all just ba Mar groups fighting each other, whatever, whatever they say they're espousing, whether it's communism or dictatorship or socialism or democracy, whatever that means, or some version of capitalism. Hey, they're all just different ba Mar groups that are warring with each other. And we need to protect our own people and put forth our new vision, which in some ways, some could take as a as a contrast or a challenge to an idea of what a federal democracy and federalism means going forward.

Ashley South 1:12:32

Thank you. Yeah, the complexity is enormous, and I think that's why the comments I made earlier about both primordial and constructivist approaches to history and identity are both true, because I think we do have to respect diversity, but that doesn't mean that there aren't common themes, and I think the Karen society is a really good example of that, And just as you were talking, it reminded me of a visit I did a few weeks back to the KNU six brigade area. That's du Playa district, Corrie kenseji townships on Myanmar government maps. And actually, this was an area I traveled in extensively in the 90s, as I was mentioning, and hadn't been back since it was amazing to revisit. I've been to Bo, you know, quite a few times since, not to this part of the world. Wow. One side point that makes it interesting is it was a bit easier to go back this time, because so many of the Myanmar army bases that were imposed on the communities, particularly from the late 90s, have been removed. Oh, well, I think there's only one. Myanmar army base really still on the border in that area of the southern part of Karen state, really, from Aung Pang down to three pagodas Pass, which, of course, is still for now, Myanmar army controlled, more or less so anyway, visiting the telekou And so the telekou are a millenarian Buddhist sect. They certainly recognize the historic Buddha, guatema, but they are focused primarily on Aria matria, the Buddha to come. And this is bound up with Karen, traditional beliefs or tales, some of which are known as the tar, which were actually first recorded by the missionaries. And this is where it gets complicated, because it's difficult to know quite how much the early recording of the tar consisted of projections on the part of the missionaries, and how much of it was actually really there in the first place, but it does seem that there were elements of Old Testament, knowledge and mythos present in some of the Quran legends, even before the arrival of the first missionaries, which is intriguing, but not to go there for now, but just to think about the telak, who being focused on a future Buddha to come, Aria Buddha, who will bring in a golden age of justice and peace. For the Karen. And in that context, one of the reasons why the tel aku have been are still so interesting and striking is that they have a large number of taboos about what they can eat and what they can't and what they can wear and what they can't, which means that the telekou and there are several different Karen subgroups that we could also talk about different but with this same characteristic of having preserved much of the tradition. And so the tel aku would even critique Christian Karen communities for having abandoned so much of the traditional knowledge when they became Christians. And so that's been a tension within the Karen nationalist movement, which I think is generally and correctly understood as a movement which emerged in the late 19th century under missionary tutelage, particularly among newly literate English speaking Karen Baptist, primarily elites who formed a national movement which we can See The Khin you actually as an inheritor of but of course, Karen Christians make up only a minority of the larger Karen society, and no one really knows how much, maybe 20, 30% of the Karen population is Christian. And so there are other narratives there in terms of what it means to be Karen, and even what a Karen nation might look like. And so there have been millenarian movements, as I mentioned, who have sought to establish Karen societies in a very different image to that of the sort of modernized Christian tradition. And this partly, I think, explains some of the dynamics and conflict that has existed within the Karen Aung nationalist movement with, for example, the emergence of the Democratic Karen Buddhist army in 1994 95 and that huge schism within Karen society. And I mention it because I think your your comments are really, really important that it's not enough just to say we need to unpack a BA, ma centric view of Myanmar in order to take account of the Karen, the Khin. I know more about the Karen than other groups, but I think many of these comments would be relevant also for the position of the Jing poor within broader Khin society. That's somewhat similar, structurally to the position of the score elites within Karen society. So we need to, I think, take that decolonization a step further and also unpack what it means to be Karen, what it means to be Khin, and to understand as you were saying, that there are many local histories, and I think a lot of that is very difficult to recover because of war and because of the need for, frankly, better language skills than I have, and people who are proper trained anthropologists. And so again, it's this sort of challenge of, on the one hand, respecting and celebrating the diversity, but not taking that as a pretext to dismiss the idea of a national identity. I think it should be possible to celebrate diversity whilst at the same time understanding that there are common cultural cause and just another thing that occurred to me is syden hidden and secret histories as well. I remember my first visit, and I've only been a few times to the Irrawaddy delta. So this was in 2010 I think, a couple of years after Cyclone Nargis, and we were talking to communities about their experience of Cyclone, I guess, and recovery, what had been helpful, what kind of international aid had worked, you know, what were some of the different ways that communities had supported and helped each other? And part of that exercise involved timelines to have a sort of participatory approach to research. And in some of the villages in BOGO lay Township, we began to realize that there were big gaps in the timeline, particularly around the period 1991 to through to 9495 people just did not want to talk about it. And then, of course, finally, for me, the penny dropped, because I have, you know, I'm a researcher on Karen history and politics, and this was the period when the KNU sought to re, restart insurgency and armed conflict in the Irrawaddy delta by sending troops into the area. In 1992 The operation went wrong. It was detected quite early by the Myanmar army, who responded with, well, we learn how to Myanmar army responds with great violence using a really brutal version of the four cuts strategy, basically bombing villages, killing and torturing many villages, and brutally suppressing this attempt to reignite insurgency In the delta and so the communities in that in these areas, even when we met them a quarter century, coming on for 20 years later, anyway, we're still very reluctant to talk about those periods. And it was like a history that was whispered in the background, and us coming in. As outsider NGO people, people that the local Karen communities, were very reluctant to discuss this. I managed to get a little bit of an insight into what had happened because, I guess, because I, even then, I spoke a little bit of Karen. And I guess it's kind of obvious where my sympathies lie, so people were willing to share some with me, but generally, got the strong impression that this was a sort of a narrative, a history of this community that was sort of quite deeply suppressed. Another aspect of this, I guess I've talked about it already, really, but it's the situation of minorities within minorities, again, when it comes to sort of diversity, I think it's again, kind of beholden on me as an advocate for self determination on the basis of ethno linguistic and religious identities, which is, you know, my agenda really, to recognize that that can be quite exclusionary, as I've mentioned. And so this brings us to the reality that there are very few places in Burma where the local community is exclusively from one ethnic group, particularly if you get beyond the village track level, there's nearly always some intermixture of various different ethnic groups. And I think one of the concerns that is understandably expressed by many, particularly in this post coup context of the resurgence of ethnic nations. If I can put it that way, is, well, that's fine, but what about those who are not part of the locally dominant minority? So you can be a minority nationally, but in the local area a majority. And I guess you know, keeping it with the example of the Karen. I mean, the Karen, of course, are a minority community within Myanmar, taken as a country as a whole, but within the areas under the control and authority of the KNU, and unsurprisingly, the majority are Karen and E I think, on the one hand, we need to step back and say, Well, hang on, what do we mean by Karen? And I've kind of touched on that because, you know, there are quite a, quite a internal diversity. But even if we put that aside, there is still the question of, well, how about the Mon who live in areas under K new control, or the palo, etc? And of course, this can be played out chin and Arakan or Kachin and TA Aung, etc, etc. It's a It's and then these kind of issues do, I think, invoke the ghosts of the Balkans.

And so you use that word balkanization. And we, I think, see in the example of former Yugoslavia, a country which seemed to have passed through a period of very intense tribal like ethnic identities to have moved through the experience of state socialist, communist state building into creating much more of a national identity, and, of course, great deal of dissatisfaction with sort of communist autarky. But then after the fall of the Berlin Wall, rather than moving into a sort of post communist, liberal democratic state, the former Yugoslavia. Of course, I don't know very much about the history. I'm not an expert, but I think, long story short, the country fell apart along ethnic lines, and in some areas, that led to massive violence, you know, genocidal violence against locally defined minority groups. And I think we have to be very, very concerned about these issues in Myanmar, I think that there are very important and impressive efforts to address some of these issues. So I don't see this as being, by definition, a priori, something which makes ethnic based self determination unreasonable or illegitimate, but I do think that we really have to address these concerns seriously.

Host 1:23:55

So then where are we now, with it, as someone that has looked deeply at this issue of federal democracy, and now it's more pertinent than ever before in trying to figure this out as we go along, as well as self determination and as well as, I think, another aspect to bring in here that To further complicate it, that you mentioned the minority, within The minority, another question within that is even, even if you're looking within one ethnic group, where you don't have who just want to hypothesize, there's not a lot of ethnic diversity there. For simplicity sake, are they democratic? And there is a difference between elite leadership and what they're saying they want and the wishes of people on the ground of women, of even, even if you're within that same ethnic and religious minority and and how important is democracy to their systems? And so these only further complicate the matters of what is meant when you talk about self determination. Who is the self that's determining and how. Selves are included, and how are they being left out, and how are they being counted? And then you get more and more granular into this. And so as you're advocating for and looking at a federal democracy which will, which many believe will be the the greatest will provide the greatest stability for people of all different backgrounds, that if, if, if one group or one community is not threatened, then my community will also not be threatened going forward, if, as as we're looking at trying to or as I take that again, as the as the communities in Myanmar are looking towards what is going to bring that stability going forward in this ongoing experiment of generations and of centuries and this territory, how are you envisioning what could come of a self determined federal democracy at this point?

Ashley South 1:25:58

I think I want to do that annoying thing of taking a step back, yeah, before as part of the answer. So for what it's worth, my agenda for a while now has been to try and better understand and to promote ethno linguistic, faith based self determination. Why I do that, and how I do it has been kind of a learning experience, and is still an ongoing experience. And what it means, I think, has changed quite profoundly for me over the years, but I guess it has been a constant thing prior to the coup, I it was rather a lonely existence. I kind of, I, I was quite closely involved in the early days of the peace process in Myanmar. I'm taking yet another step back now, particularly from 2012 through to 2014 I was the deputy head of the Myanmar Peace support initiative, and so we were closely involved in the peace process. For what it's worth, I do believe it was useful, potentially, to try a different strategy, thinking again about the Karen and the KNU, but we could also talk about other armed groups after 70 years of armed conflict, not having really achieved the political aims of the KNU. I think it was worth trying a different strategy to see whether it was possible to actually have a negotiated, peaceful settlement to these conflicts. I think the result of the peace process, it was an experiment which demonstrated that the state of Myanmar and the Myanmar government, particularly the Myanmar army, were unable and unwilling to address the basic grievances and demands of ethnic communities. And so I think the peace process was a useful experiment that proved that Myanmar isn't ready for peace, I'm afraid. Anyway, from that period onwards, I kind of, I think I was out in the wilderness for a while, and I recall talking to donors, diplomats, embassies prior to the coup, when I was spending a lot of time in Yangon, as many of us were, of course, in those days prior to COVID as well, didn't get much of a hearing for these kind of narratives since the coup the past three years, there seems to be a lot more interest in these issues of ethnic self determination, the role of eaos, for obvious reasons. Not least is that the spring revolution has been conspicuously more successful than last time around in 8890 in actually defeating the Myanmar army on the battlefield. And a large part of that, of course, we need to acknowledge the roles of PDFs. It's a long story, but I mean, a big part of that has been the way that eaos ethnic armed organizations, of which I would say ethnic revolutionary organizations are a subset. But anyway, eaos Eros have played leading roles in this story. So then, I guess the second part of it is to think about, what does this mean, as per your question for self determination based on these ethnic armed organizations that are, by definition, really set up in terms of a particular ethnic identity or even kind of a sub identity. And so what does that mean for inclusion and for the rights of people who are not male leaders over 50, to be honest? Yeah. And I think we do actually see very I mean, as an academic, as an analyst, very interesting, but I think really quite inspiring examples of new ways forward since Tun and I think I'm still trying to work it out, and I need to do more thinking and writing on this subject. But I think we see a movement, a trajectory from self determination and political authority through ethnic armed organizations in the name of a particular ethnic group towards something that is more inclusive and that is more state based. And I guess the example that I'm really thinking of a. That is Karenni and the establishment of the Karenni state consultative Council and Interim Executive Committee. I'm slightly reluctant to use Karenni as the example, because I think it's such an obvious example, and I think Karenni friends are doing an amazing job struggling against incredibly difficult circumstances to liberate their state, and we put a lot on their shoulders when we also demand that they should be the sort of the poster advertisement for what self determination can look like. But it is amazing what they have achieved. And the important point I want to make here is that the kscc is, I think it's certainly the most inclusive governance authority in the history of Karenni. I think we could put together an argument that actually, the kscc represents the most inclusive governance authority in the history of Burma. Wow. And what's so important about it is that, unlike previous movements towards self determination, it's not exclusively based on ethnic armed organizations. So the key to the success of kscc, I think, is the early realization of the importance of the anti junta movement on the part of the kereni National Progressive Party, the knpp, which made common cause with the early Karenni PDFs, which became the kndf, to karenian nationalities Defense Force, and so those two armed groups then created the kscc, very explicitly, structurally creating space and significant voice and power for political parties and civil society. So that's why I say it's much more inclusive than the governance structures we've seen previously in ethnic self determination movements in Myanmar, and I think that kscc model is now being taken up in other areas as well. So I work a bit with the palang state Liberation Front, Tang National Liberation Army, who, as I'm sure listeners will know, have been among the most successful ethnic armed organizations in the last couple of years, in terms of defeating Myanmar army and liberating extensive new territory. And as you probably know, just yesterday, the tnla, the PSLF, actually resumed operation 1027, and are currently seeking to liberate more territory in coordination with other ethnic armed organizations representing other ethnic communities. And of course, this gets us more to the point. So one of the things that the PSLF tnla are doing is seeking to establish, ultimately, a constitution for TA Aung land, but I think, in the first instance, some basic rules of governance and administration, with the intention of including other ethnic groups, particularly San and Khin people who are living in areas where the tnla has now taken political and military control. And of course, there's been a lot of pushback. It's quite controversial. It's, I think, not been going smoothly in some areas. Nevertheless, I think the intention is there to establish a governance body that is beyond just time dominated, to include at least some representation from other groups. And we can see that in other parts of the country as well. So for example, the Mon state, Federal Council, bringing it back to mon context, the Newmont state party, the Newmont state party, ad a number of PDFs operating in mon state with varying relationships to the Mon state Federal Council that seeks to position itself as a governing body for all mon areas And the MSFC, very explicitly, reaching out to Karen ba Mar Aung communities, not just Tun Hmong stakeholders. And I guess one more example would be, I guess maybe the most important in terms of illustrating the point is the Karen National Union, which almost is a federal union in and of itself, because the seven districts of corthu le have a quite high degree of autonomy, but it's still ongoing, but there is a significant effort underway to re establish governance and authority in KNU areas under a Kothu le governing body, which will be designed to reach out to and include non Karen communities, as well as to Karen. And so I think these are different examples of a movement away from exclusively eao based governance to something which is more inclusive. And for all the reasons we've been discussing, yes, that's hugely important. Yes, it is. Yeah. I mean, I also see it as being important. I touched on this earlier, so maybe I'll just sort of keep rolling with it. Is the renewed importance of primarily ethnically defined sub states in the post coup context.

Yes, and I think that's partly for the obvious reason that the coup has been a disaster. What a stupid, stupid evil thing min Aung Lang did to his country, and he's single handedly destroyed Myanmar, I think, which is absurd, really, in a horrible, vicious way, given the self promoted narrative of min Aung min and the Myanmar army as somehow being sort of the only institution that can sort of hold Myanmar together. I mean, that myth has been thoroughly blasted out of the water by the Myanmar army itself. So I think there are, there is more territory and more population now controlled by anti junta forces than has ever been the case by anti government forces back to the 18th century. So this is, I think, the best opportunity since the 18th century for the resurgence of ethnic self determination, partly, as I said, because of the stupidity, short sightedness, plain evil of the Myanmar military, and the way that particularly the junta has conducted itself in the last few years. And then we come to climate change, which is sort of my pet topic of few years. And I mean, I'm one of those people who up till, I don't know, four or five years ago. I mean, I always realized climate change is it's a real thing, right? But I didn't think it was necessarily that relevant to my work on Myanmar until I began to see more of the impacts on the ground in my travels. And I think, not to make it all about me, but I think I probably travel more in ethnic and conflict affected areas than some other outside commentators do so, you know, and I always talk to farmers that and just getting a better understanding of the science behind climate change. So there's a lot to say on the subject. But in terms of thinking about the future of Myanmar and the coherence of the state and the credibility of sub national state units, such as those I've been talking about, I think it's pretty relevant to think about how is climate change currently impacting the country and what will be the future impacts. So I've written quite a bit about this, and I can talk more about it later, but basically we are just seeing the beginning of what will be massive impact on agriculture in particular, but the society so in coastal areas, but also inland, this will manifest in increasing numbers of cyclones and rapid onset natural disasters, as they call them, already, the rainy season in Myanmar is about 30 days shorter than it was in the 1980s so it used to be about 150 days. Now it's 120 130 days. So you get a shorter rainy season, which is bad news for farmers, because it makes planting and planning the harvest more difficult. But worse than that, the amount of rain is about the same, maybe even a bit more than previously. So you get the same amount of rain, perhaps a bit more, falling in a shorter period of time, which leads to massive flooding, and that has devastating impacts in upland areas where you have relatively thin top soils and whole forest mountain sides can just slide off the side of the mountain. So we see these landslides being more and more prevalent, which is really bad news in lowland areas. Flash Flooding is increasingly a problem, and this is all only going to get worse, but probably the most serious impacts of climate change are increasing temperatures. So the absolute temperature is one thing, but also wet bulb temperature, which is basically how the temperature is experienced, mostly talking here about human beings, and it's a it's a factor of humidity as well. So absolute temperatures of around 40 degrees centigrade, that's a wet bulb temperature of about 37 degrees centigrade, if I'm correct. Beyond this, human beings really cannot survive it. And we have seen several days this year, particularly in the dry zone around Sagaing, magui Mandalay, where temperatures were well above 37 degrees centigrade in April for a few days in middle of April, six of the hottest 10 towns in the world were in Myanmar. Temperatures regularly are. Above 40 degrees centigrade. So this means for many people living in those areas, survival has become quite marginal. So then we need to look at the future. And projections of climate in Myanmar depend in large part on global carbon dioxide emissions. So there are a number of different scenarios under pretty much all of those scenarios, central Myanmar, low lying areas around as I said, going Mandalay, about 12 million people live in these areas. They will become uninhabitable, according to the people I've been talking to, climate scientists. And I think this data is now coming on stream. I think more of the data, and importantly, the projections based on this data will be available in coming months. So I would encourage people who are interested to sort of keep give an eye on the news, because it's this science is being produced, you know, in real time almost. So the key is really days above 40 degrees centigrade this year. I think the numbers are not yet in but there were several days above 40 degrees centigrade, which correlated with several 100 heat related deaths. The trajectory is towards maybe 40 or 50 days per year of temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, if we could stick to the commitments made at the Paris Climate Conference of 1.5 degrees centigrade, global warming above pre industrial levels, those temperatures might not be experienced for another 20 years. If we stick to current emissions, then it's likely within seven to 10 years that we will see 40 to 50 days per year above 40 degrees centigrade, which will mean that large parts of central Myanmar will become uninhabitable. It seems. I'm really not an expert. My guess, really it's no more that the rice harvest will begin to suffer pretty seriously before that, and we can begin to see in some upland and lowland areas already in Myanmar, quite serious impacts on the rice harvest because of increased temperatures. And so I'm involved in a couple of research projects trying to get a better idea of actually how changing rainfall and temperature patterns are affecting the agricultural situation right now. But apart from the impact on rice growing, the impact on human beings will be appalling, and there will be millions of people who really will have to move, and that has profound humanitarian consequences. I think it's difficult to see how these factors can play out without immense human suffering, but also very significant political implications for the coherence of Myanmar as a state. So I do think that the finally getting around to the main point not to discount the horrendous humanitarian suffering, which I don't want to celebrate, and of course, is immensely troubling.

But this does mean, I think, that we're moving into a period of greater opportunity for the these emergent ethno linguistic based state lets to actually have significant resilience, particularly in as much as ethnic communities, ethnic nationality. Communities in Burma tend to generally occupy higher areas in terms of elevation, and so rising sea levels will be less of a problem. The upland Khin areas tend to be less densely populated also. So these are among the factors which lead me to speculate that upland areas will be more resilient than lowland areas. And given the inevitability of these climate change factors, I mean whether it happens in seven to 10 years or 20 years, I think it's really almost inevitable that these changes are already in the pipeline, and that then raises huge issues of climate justice, because, of course, Burma, Myanmar is one of the least industrialized countries in Asia that's done least to contribute towards climate emissions. And indeed, Burma is site of some of the best remaining forests in mainland Southeast Asia. So the climate change crisis, I think, has to be understood in terms of the need for adaptation, sure, and the some of the eaos and other governance authorities I've been talking about, I think, have responsibilities as governments of their of their respective states, micro states, if you like, they have. Responsibilities to work with communities, with farmers, to adapt to these to climate change, and indeed, if, for example, coffee le, the Karen ethnic state, does not adapt to climate change, then they're going to run out of food and be very difficult to sort of maintain a state project without some degree of food security, but also these areas, as sites of some of the best remaining forests in Southeast Asia, have significant contributions to make towards climate change mitigation as well, because we know that among the most effective ways of actually limiting Climate change is through carbon drawdown, ie photosynthesis, so forests basically extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it underground through mycelial and route networks. So arguably, eaos and other state based authorities in upland forested areas of Myanmar have globally important roles to play in mitigating climate change, which I think is very important, and maybe is another piece of the puzzle in terms of how to ensure sustainable futures for these areas, because eaos and other bodies, PDFs Now can be, of course, included in the mix. Have historically relied on logging, mining, other environmental and socially destructive activities for their income, and they need to stop doing that. I think they know they need to stop doing that, but then they're going to take a big hit on income. So if they forego income by not logging and mining, this protects the environment that helps to mitigate climate change, it produces a global public good. So in exchange, they need some way of plugging the gap in their own finances. And there are global climate finance initiatives out there. There is money out there for supporting climate change mitigation. So bringing the different strands together, I think that one way we can try to support the sustainability of this new political landscape in post sac in Myanmar, which is a much more fragmented and even you could say balkanized landscape. I think that climate change, as well as driving the fragmentation of Myanmar, also the mitigation of climate change can contribute towards supporting some of the states that emerge in the post Myanmar environment.

Host 1:47:27

Wow, that's a lot to take in. That's an enormous amount to take in, and I appreciate you laying that out so succinctly. And I'm also trying to square away with your as you talk about the mitigation possibilities and the rather more optimistic nature of what that could mean, along with, with, with how I would describe more optimistic nature of the way you see the potentials of the groundwork of federal democracy being laid out using the Kni example, Even the Korean example going forward.

Ashley South 1:48:01

I mean, the state of Myanmar as a coherent, centralized entity, was based on violence and the forcible assimilation of ethnic nations that really had little say in being incorporated into the country, first by the Kanban dynasty, and then that was taken over and sort of reified and essentialized by the British. So I think there's a justice issue there. I think it's an unpopular narrative, and some of my friends network among ethnic Aung organizations and other political leaders, they often caution me about using the language of balkanization, so I won't, but we could maybe talk about fragmentation, and I think for regional powers, but also for global powers, there is a reluctance to acknowledge that the fragmentation of Myanmar is already well underway. I think for Thailand, it makes sense that there would be an interest in dealing with one government that used to be in Yangon now in naked or, of course, we know that time Myanmar policy, there are many private, economic and political agendas in play. I probably shouldn't say too much about that, but I think many people listening will know what I mean, but also for India, for other neighboring countries, for China, for that matter, the idea of Myanmar as a single country that helps. And I think there is a fear that the fragmentation of Myanmar will unleash waves of refugees and disease across the region. So there's a strong interest in maintaining Myanmar as a single entity, but I don't think that's realistic, and I've already sketched out the reasons why I don't think it's realistic. So honestly, it's already underway, and I think at some point politics has to be based on empirical facts. And I think an empirical. Called assessment of the situation in Myanmar would show that the central state is failing. And then when we take into account the other factors on climate change that I mentioned, I think that's only going to be exacerbated. But then also thinking of this assumption that the collapse the fragmentation of Myanmar will inevitably lead to waves of refugees and disease. I just don't see that that assumption is well grounded. I mean, if we fail to provide basic support, humanitarian and other services in Kovil, in Khin land, in mun land, in the Arakan land, etc, then, yeah, you're going to have people who are susceptible to disease and, you know, don't have the opportunities of education. But I think we know that there are very well established CSO networks operating in all these areas that are capable of providing much more assistance and relief than currently is going in, and the main constraints are partly neighboring countries restricting cross border humanitarian aid, but also just donors not providing significant assistance. And when donors do put money in, they mostly give that money to the same tired old international organizations that have failed Myanmar in the past. So I don't think I'm the only person calling for a localization of the aid response. Absolutely. Also, there are a million children more or less attending schools under the authority of ethnic armed organizations. I think before the coup, it was less than half a million, but now it's coming on for a million kids. That's a pretty substantial proportion. That's more than 15% of Myanmar school aged children are going to schools in eao controlled areas just between the KNU and the new one state party, they have more than 120 clinics and hospitals in their areas of control, including at least two teaching hospitals. So with the right support, actually, it should be possible to to use your word to stabilize the situation in these areas, which would, I think, significantly reduce the risk of conflict in Myanmar spilling over into neighboring countries, and if it does spill over into neighboring countries, there's less of a risk of disease, and that any refugees who cross the border are likely to be better educated and more likely to contribute constructively to hopefully, The temporary nature of the asylum that they're seeking in neighboring countries. So I think we have to recognize the reality of the fragmentation of Myanmar and see that. I think it's understandable why this is a concern, but at the same time, I think it's it's happening, and to deny that, I think, is just to delay a reckoning with what's really inevitable, and given the really important role played by local self help networks, neutral aid, the CSOs, that provide relief in Many conflict affected areas, which I touched on earlier. I mean, really that I think needs to be seen as a model and a pilot for many other parts of the country. I don't think Myanmar is going to be the only country that collapses under the combined weight of climate change and many other stresses which face human society in the 21st century. So if we can find ways of working with local political actors who are committed to inclusive forms of governance, not necessarily democratic in the full sense of like Western elections, etc, because that's not always appropriate, I think, in the context of war in very different political cultures in this part of the world. But certainly if we can identify local power holders who are committed to a rights based an inclusive approach. If we can identify local humanitarian networks and development actors, education providers that are locally based, they're going to be much more sustainable. They're much more they're much less expensive than the international aid bureaucracy, and much more likely to still be there after most of the NGOs, and you end pack up and go home. And given the rise of populism in many northern countries, and how that is likely to be exacerbated as climate change really begins to kick in, I don't think we can be too confident about large scale future aid flows to a country like Myanmar. So what we really need to do, I think, is to work to support those local actors, and it's their of course, it's their reality, it's their lives, it's their work. I'm talking about us foreigners. Have very limited roles to play, but I think we need as much as possible to be providing support to these networks so that aid can be localized now, while there's still some money in the pipeline to establish these structures, as much as possible, because that is the future of resilience, I think.

Host 1:54:42

And that is where the concern of fragmentation comes along, that the more that you're giving this is not my argument. This is an argument, and I don't necessarily agree with it, but to quote the argument that's out there, the more that you're recognizing any kind of authority or legitimacy, not in the standardized, uh, official ways, formal channels, which in this case, means military. Then non state actors, then your then that localized aid is is increasing the fragmentation, as opposed to your argument that it's already taking place. We can accept it or not. But my question for you is leading off of that, some would say that fragmentation and the dream of a federal democracy are on two ends of the spectrum that these are these, these are opposing states of going forward. So I'm wondering for you, in what sense do you would you refute that and see where fragmentation, where some sense of fragmentation and some sense of federal democracy are actually on a path together going forward?

Ashley South 1:55:39

Yes, I think in certain respects, they are opposed. Of course, it's all. It all depends on how we define these terms, right? So it seems to me, I've written quite a bit about this, that most previous attempts to define and promote self determination in Myanmar have been framed around devising the right set of rules, usually in terms of a constitution. And I think what I'm getting into now, and I guess you could say it's an ideal type, but also it's a bit of a caricature. So the reality, of course, is more nuanced and complicated, but I think most efforts so far have been quite top down, and there seems to be an inherent contradiction there. So devising a Federal Constitution and then implementing it seems to be a very top down way of achieving a bottom up result. Um, so I know that I sometimes annoy friends and colleagues who are more well informed about federalism than me. It seems to me that a constitutional slash legal solution to a social and political problem is never going to work. So I do acknowledge that there is a need for some kind of broad constitutional settlement in Myanmar. Clearly that has to go way beyond the failed 2008 constitution. And I guess part of what I'm saying there is I personally, although as a white foreign I really don't think my views are that important, but I do personally think there is a need for some kind of Union level government. I think it needs to be very light touch. And I think the problem is that so far, most attempts have consisted of defining that government and its constitution and then seeking to implement from the bottom, from the top down, sure, whereas the model that I've been talking about today, and trying to sort of think through in my writing, in my conversations, is a more bottom up approach. So I would say it's an emergent approach to federalism. I'm not going to get into complexity theory here, because it's yet another area where I'm not really an expert, and I've been talking far too long already, but I think we can see the kind of federalism that is actually emerging, and I've sort of talked about different aspects of that today is it's messy and it's asymmetrical, coming right back to How we started the conversation, I think that partly reflects the real geographic and social differences among different parts of the country. So unsurprisingly, a political settlement that actually reflects that diversity is going to be quite messy. It is going to be quite asymmetrical, and I think it has to emerge from the bottom up. So it seems to me that a better way of approaching these issues, rather than defining in advance a blueprint of what federalism should look like, seeking to impose it, what we should rather do is to look at what actually emerges. Some of these adaptations are more preferable than others. So I you know, I think that there is a room here for norms and values. So as I said earlier, I think that we should be trying to identify those actors, those networks, that are committed to inclusive approach to politics, that are committed to a rights based approach, not necessarily sort of full blown Western liberal democracy, because I think that's a Western liberal thing that's maybe not appropriate in the present context, but we need to look at the different adaptations that are emerging in Myanmar and try to support those which are in line with basic values of inclusion, human rights, decency and democracy. And then I think, in a way, our job is to sit back to see what works, and then to support more of that and bringing it back with apologies to dear friends in the kscc, who I know sometimes would prefer not to be identified always as the sort of the champions of federalism in Myanmar, but they are because it's a really unique indigenous. A local set of arrangements that have coalesced into the kscc IEC, not something that's been sort of imposed from above through some sort of pre designed constitutional settlement or some Donor Conference or etc, etc. It's really indigenous, and it's going to look different in every different part of the country. And so I guess the challenge then is to have a Union level federal framework that is robust enough, but also simple enough to accommodate quite a range of locally emergent adaptations. So people talk about bottom up federalism, and I think that's what they mean, is new political dispensations based on the governance authority of particularly eaos, but also state based bodies, and then places like siguang and McGuire. Of course, we're talking about sort of apart and various sort of other local governance arrangements. And if we're serious about such an approach, I think we shouldn't be too prescriptive about what it looks like, but rather, as I said, to identify adaptations which look like they're going to be successful and which are broadly aligned with our values. Because I think politics is always about values, ultimately, and do more of that. So I think in some ways this is not so different to what people in the ag world talk about adaptive program management. You have some basic ideas of the kind of thing you want to do, but then you try a number of different approaches, and the ones which work, you do more of that. So in a way, I think that's why I would want to talk about the kind of federalism I see, and I guess I support as emergent federalism, but that's pretty much, I think, what other people mean by bottom up federalism. The one more point I really did want to make today, and I'm glad in the way that we left it to the end, is the importance of direct military support and anti junta forces. I think this is sometimes a bit of a taboo that many people prefer not to talk about it, but I think it's actually essential, and so I base these comments on Well, I follow the news pretty closely, and I don't want to get myself into too much trouble by getting into more recent travel history, but I do have fairly recent experience of conditions in the war zones of Myanmar. The risks I have taken are really quite minimal compared to the realities of the people who lived there, but it really brought home to me a key difference between the current situation and before the coup. So before the coup, particularly before the ceasefire. Ceasefires, the biggest risk traveling in rural ethnic nationality, conflict affected areas would be running into the Myanmar army. I mean land mines, yes. Malaria, yes. But ground assaults by the Myanmar army, who have a very well documented record of widespread and systematic human rights abuses. And of course, that's still an issue. Of course it is, but actually much less so. I think, since the coup, because of the collapse of the Myanmar army in many areas and the successful campaigns of ethnic armed organizations, huge amounts of territory have been taken over by eaos and people's defense forces. I feel I probably haven't said enough about the important Moe played by PDFs, often working in close collaboration with eaos. And in these newly liberated areas, the establishment of new uh, relief networks, but also providing services, health, education, etc. I've touched on all of that, and I've mentioned how I see this as sort of the RE emergence of of state building from the bottom up. The biggest constraint on this is not ground attacks by the Myanmar army, although that's also still an issue, but I think, as everyone can appreciate, where I'm going with this, I would expect is air strikes, yes, so this is air strikes from jet bombers, but also artillery and howitzers, mortar and other artillery attacks and drone strikes. Drones are particularly dangerous. The Myanmar army is increasing its capacity in drone warfare quite rapidly. They bought large numbers of agricultural drones on the open market and equipped these with military shells, which are then used as ordnance to attack civilians and insurgents alike, but also drones are used for surveillance as well, and so I've certainly been in situations where we've had drones flying overhead at night, and I think part of the effect is terror, so it's a psychological impact, but also using heat sensors to detect where populations are and.

And this is often used to target artillery and mortar fire and airstrikes. So I would say that this is the biggest threat to the consolidation of successful emergent federalism in Myanmar. Also, I think I want to say that it's the biggest Well, it's not just me saying it. Of course, it's well documented. This is the biggest threat to the basic survival of human beings, to humanitarian This is the biggest risk to humanitarian protection in many parts of the country. And so it seems to me that the most effective way of limiting this threat is to provide the necessary equipment to anti junta forces that they can resist air strikes and drone surveillance. So one way to do that is to provide drone jamming equipment, and I think that's something which should be further explored. I'm not an expert. As I keep saying, there's a lot of things I'm not an expert on, and one of them is drone technology. So I think actually there are some limitations, also in terms of what can be achieved with anti drone equipment, but certainly more hand held portable drone jammers could be very useful to prevent attacks in against civilian populations. But actually more than that, I think what's needed is ground to air defenses, ground to air missiles, that would need to be accompanied by some kind of training. I think there are other people who could talk more about what the technical requirements are, but it seems to me that the single most effective way of ensuring the protection of civilians in Myanmar, but also of reducing attacks on civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals, is to provide air defenses, ground to air missiles. So I feel that this should be something taken much more seriously by those of us advocating for an overthrow of the junta, but also for those of us advocating for basic humanitarian protection to communities in southeast Myanmar. I'm not really so naive to expect that this is going to happen overnight, but I do think it's the role of people like me. Yeah, I guess I want to say my public intellectual. I think that sounds incredibly pretentious, but I suppose, for want of a better word, is to try and influence the range of topics that are considered to be realistic policy options, what sociologists call the Overton window. And I think, I think I feel a responsibility to keep mentioning this subject, which is why I wanted to not forget about it in our conversation today, I think we need to keep talking about it, because the more people talk about it, hopefully people more credible than myself, that we can begin to place this really on the center of the advocacy agenda, and so for political reasons and for humanitarian reasons, I think It's really very important to provide basic air defenses. I There's a geo strategic angle to it, which I think probably I shouldn't say too much about. But of course, there are only certain actors globally who would be in a position to provide that kind of equipment, and some of those actors may have their own regional rivalries, which need to be taken into account and partly explain why. Perhaps this kind of equipment hasn't been provided already. But now I'm getting very sort of cryptic, and that's not much help, so I think I'd like to have that as a concluding point. Is the need to increase assistance. So that's humanitarian aid, to increase advocacy with neighboring countries to allow that aid across the border, but also really to understand that in order to support emergent federalism as a durable political solution in Myanmar and to protect civilians and service providers from attack, it is necessary to provide military assistance to anti junta forces, which should include at least basic grant to our defenses.

Host 2:09:06

Absolutely. And as you say, that which I appreciate you bringing that in on the end and getting that out there as a talking point, I'm wondering if, as we look at what has been provided with the US in particular has provided, not just in the past, but today, with Ukraine and and the types of support that's been provided there, I guess my question goes not to, why are they not doing it? Or why isn't? Why aren't other seemingly friendly countries looking at that kind of support, but more going back a stack, going back a step and unpacking, why is this a taboo subject? Why is it so dangerous and tenuous to even say this is something we should think about, maybe possibly talking about, to to even talk about it as an option, as a policy option, as something that, I mean, just the way you introduced it, and that's the way it's often brought up, is there's this. Very kind of tiptoeing and careful approaching to saying I might want to think about maybe proposing that we consider to talk about this. And I mean, even talking about it brings on these risks, let alone the possibility of what it would actually look like. And so what? And I know that you're being cryptic for very specific reasons. So I don't want to put you on the spot for what you don't feel comfortable in, in answering, but for whatever, however you are able to to answer, in whatever detail you're able to go into. Why is the mere introduction of this topic something that is so taboo, let alone the actual provision of it?

Ashley South 2:10:40

I think there's a few reasons. I think one very legitimate reason is the risk of proliferation. So if we're talking I keep saying it, but I think it's important. I'm not an expert. I have no military background, but I think the kind of kit we're talking about ground to where defenses one could imagine that it is directed against various targets. And so I think there's a risk that if this equipment is provided one way or another, that it could get into the wrong hands, and there could be proliferation that could end up being targeted against maybe other targets, apart from the Myanmar military. I think that's one reason proliferation. I think another part of it comes back to sort of something that's come up in our conversation a few times, and that's where does legitimate sovereignty lie. So we know that the junta actually has been denied a seat in the UN General Assembly that nevertheless most countries, even if they despise and opposed a military coup. Kind of recognize the napidae government as being occupying the space of where a sovereign authority should sit. And my argument of emergent federalism is really to say that we need to see sovereignty as being much more dispersed and consisting in a large number of smaller polities occupying the area which used to be known as Myanmar. Or maybe then we do need some sort of loose union which federates these different states, to bring them together in a new union from the bottom up, either way, that includes implies a lot more sovereignty and legitimate authority on the part of these sub national units, and I think, regional countries, but also globally, there's a real resistance to acknowledge and recognize sub national entities on the part of the nation states who make up the United Nations. So that's part of it. I think another part of the reluctance probably is more related to the geopolitics that when I bring this up, because I do consider this part of my advocacy role. When I bring this up with occasionally having the chance to meet visiting diplomats, etc, I'm often told that this would exacerbate the internationalization of conflict in Myanmar. I mean, my response to that is that conflict in Myanmar is already internationalized, but it's mostly the bad guys who are getting international help. So it's China and particularly, of course, Russia, that's providing already this assistance. So in some ways, I think actually providing military support to anti junta forces more levels the playing field. But I think part of the reluctance is maybe an unwillingness, particularly given everything that's going on in the rest of the world, to see an internationalization of the conflict in Myanmar, a bit like the balkanization in Myanmar. I kind of do feel that that that ship has already sailed, and so it's a bit late to have such worries, but I think that's part of the reason why such assistance is not more readily available.

Host 2:14:00

Well, there has been so much here that you've given so generously with your time, and it has just flown by. It I feel like we could go another two hours and be over in the blink of an eye again. So I but I thank you so much for being so generous with your time, with the many years, decades that you've spent being close to this country, these people, for your work and for sharing that with us on here.

Ashley South 2:14:22

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. It's quite a new experience for me. Only once or twice before have I done such long form interviews, and yeah, it's been a very interesting experience and a real pleasure. So thank you.

Host 2:14:42

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