17/08/2026
Professor Chayan Vaddhanaphuti has spent years building academic space for Myanmar students, researchers, journalists, artists, and civil society workers at Chiang Mai University. Through RCSD, he has supported conferences, fellowships, research training, scholar-at-risk programs, and workshops that give displaced Myanmar intellectuals a place to continue thinking while their own universities and public institutions have been shattered by the coup. His work is not based on pity. It is based on the belief that the people most affected by Myanmar’s crisis must also be the ones producing knowledge about it.
Listen: https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2026/5/25/episode-543-through-the-interregnum
In “Through the Interregnum,” Chayan warns that the desire for revolution is not enough on its own. Many young people know what they want to overthrow: military rule, authoritarianism, propaganda, fear, and the suffocation of civic life. But the harder question comes after that. What kind of society should replace it? What kind of economy? What kind of federal democracy? What kind of education system? What kind of relationship between ethnic identity, territory, local knowledge, and national belonging? For Chayan, these questions cannot be answered by slogans, armed struggle, or moral urgency alone. They require research, dialogue, methodology, participation from local communities, and a new generation of Myanmar intellectuals able to think beyond both military ideology and narrow ethnic nationalism.
That is what makes his warning so important. A revolution that only knows what it opposes can still reproduce old patterns once power changes hands. Without knowledge, the future can be captured by the same habits that damaged the past: hierarchy, exclusion, centralization, charismatic leadership, and the failure to listen to those at the margins. Chayan is not telling Myanmar’s young people what to build. He is insisting that they need the space, tools, and intellectual freedom to ask that question seriously before the day after victory arrives.