Burden of Rule

Insight Myanmar · Jun 11, 2026 · 2h 26m

Episode #552: Mon Mon Myat, a journalist, filmmaker, and peace scholar, frames Myanmar’s political struggle as a long contest over power, moral discipline, and the possibility of change without domination. Her account begins with U Hpo Hlaing, the nineteenth-century thinker she calls “a kind of very early political theorist in Myanmar,” and moves toward Aung San Suu Kyi, whose politics she sees as part of the same search for accountable authority.

For Mon Mon Myat, U Hpo Hlaing matters because he complicates the idea that democracy arrived in Myanmar only through Western influence. He studied…