The Social Contract

Insight Myanmar · May 7, 2026 · 2h 15m

Episode #532: “Constitutions need power,” says Henning Glaser, a Bangkok-based lawyer working on constitutional politics in Asia. In his second appearance on the podcast, he argues that Myanmar’s constitutional problem is less about drafting the perfect text than about whether any text can bind the actors who hold force, and whether there is enough unity to sustain a shared political community.

He describes the early post-independence settlement as broken at its origin, saying the promised autonomy that predated the first constitution “was never really done so from the beginning,” leaving…