Category: Opinion
The latest opinion from those committed to making our region fair, just and democratic.
The Philippines: FORSEA Dialogue on Attacks on Lawyers in the Philippines
In a damning report, the Commission on Human Rights found that the “grim reality” of being a human rights defender in the Philippines was that “they faced constant undermining and delegitimization of their work which lead to systematic attacks that place their ‘life, liberty, and security…at great risk”.
Patterns in the Killing of Lawyers: The Case of Attorney Rex Fernandez
I have been monitoring the attacks on lawyers in the Philippines for over a decade. For many years the Philippines has been one of the most dangerous countries in the world for lawyers. Since 2001 there have been at least 219 violent attacks in which 197 lawyers were killed and 22 survived.
Who speaks for Myanmar at the United Nations? Why it matters and other issues
Prof. John Packer said, “ ... Britain is wilfully blind to the duplicity of trying to recognize the genocidal regime through the farcical separation of a state from a regime.” He called sanctions against military leaders while embracing their regime “Bad Apple-ism”. That is, there are some bad guys in the Myanmar military, but as in the entire military as a national institution, not every rank and file member is...
Rohingyas: Auto-Ethnographic Photo-exhibit, Oxford Human Rights Festival
The Rohingya photographers gathered here offer a revisioning of sorts, a counternarrative to existing tropes of their community as uber-victims. Instead, we get glimpses of what it means to ‘live with’ such infrastructures of statelessness, to see what we might otherwise miss.
Media Continues to Orientalize “Buddhist Myanmar”
Add “Buddhist Terror” to the standard duo of Sex/Scandal and War/Violence as the media angle that sells. Yet unlike these, “Buddhist Terror” is rooted in the distorted invention of Buddhism and Buddhists as peaceful (vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims as violent). This is so deeply troubling with mainstream media picking up the old trend – Orientalizing hatred and racism in non-Europe, non-Christian spaces, in Wirathu’s case, “Buddhist” Myanmar.
States and state-controlled Universities in Southeast Asia
FORSEA Dialogue calls for cross-border cooperation among concerned scholars to foster "counter-spaces" for intellectual freedom which is a pillar of an autonomous civil society.
The Closing of the Young Minds of Southeast Asia: Post-colonial Universities in the Service of Autocratic States
Two leading scholars of Southeast Asia – Thongchai Winichakul, Emeritus Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michael W. Charney, Professor of Military History and Southeast Asian Histories at SOAS University of London – will share their professional perspectives on the ways in which higher education in the region has been misused and manipulated to promote what Michael W. Charney calls “State-Think”.
U.S. & Brazilian Religious Rights: Their Political Impact, Worldviews, Connections, and Love for Dictatorships
Staffers of the largest freethinking group in the United States have interviewed the author of a new book comparing the evangelical movements in the United States and Brazil.
US and UK Usurp Rohingya Voices while (mis-)framing Myanmar Genocide as “Ethnic Cleansing” Slobodan Milošević Euphemism
it’s one thing for the United States and its British poodle to abandon dissidents worldwide during their hours of needs, yet it is a moral low for the British and American officials and leaders to coordinate acts of genocidal denial as they have done with their official statements on the 4th anniversary of “Ethnic Cleansing” in Rakhine State.
Transnational Activism vs White Saviourism in Myanmar Affairs
As a Burmese who has been angry – very angry – for decades over numerous forms and countless instances of oppression and injustices in Myanmar, and emphatically, around the world, I am less concerned about the morally corrupt desire of revenge and vengeance of the oppressed towards their oppressor or the System than the enveloping White Saviourism with its corrupting coloniality.