Myanmar: An Unfound Door and All the Forgotten Faces
Insight Myanmar
Chalida Tajaroensuk, chairperson and founder of the Thailand-based People Empowerment Foundation, argues that responses to Myanmar’s post-coup crisis must be grounded in the experiences of refugees, displaced communities, migrant workers, and local civil society organizations rather than shaped primarily through elite diplomacy and state-centered policymaking. This is her second appearance on the platform. In her initial talk, Chalida reflected on a lifetime of Thai human rights work shaped by Buddhism, student struggle, and Myanmar solidarity, insisting that lasting change begins with small acts of dignity, realism, and care across borders. Her work focuses on bringing information from border communities and refugee camps into conversations with Thai authorities and regional actors because she believes policies designed without sustained contact with affected communities often fail to address how people actually live and survive along the Thai-Myanmar border.
Thai policy toward Myanmar, Chalida explains, is shaped by competing pressures that frequently pull the government in different directions. Security institutions focus on border stability and armed conflict, the military has its priorities, business interests emphasize economic relations, humanitarian organizations push for refugee protections, and politicians respond to domestic political pressures and nationalist sentiment. Different governments and foreign ministers therefore prioritize different approaches, causing policy to shift between economic engagement, diplomatic caution, and border-security management depending on who holds power. Moreover, she argues that Thailand’s policy is constrained by corruption, nationalist hostility toward refugees and migrant workers, and political interests that often outweigh humanitarian concerns.
In spite of all this, however, dialog between the two countries does continue, which Chalida supports. She says that while many critics interpret Thailand’s engagement with Myanmar’s post-coup regime as indirect support for its military rule, she sees it as a strategy intended to preserve channels through which humanitarian concerns and border realities can still be raised. She argues that Thai diplomats who maintain contact with Myanmar’s military leaders are not necessarily endorsing the junta’s actions, but attempting to navigate a political situation in which direct confrontation may accomplish little. She also believes that domestic political concerns and the weakness of ASEAN encourage regional governments to rely on cautious diplomacy rather than more decisive intervention.
And amid this complex web of factors, Chalida’s own organization—People Empowerment Foundation—has created a bottom-up advocacy model centered on direct engagement with affected communities. She explains that it conducts fact-finding missions, organizes consultations with refugee communities and ethnic organizations, and gathers information directly from people living in conflict zones and camps. She says that rather than treating government authorities as permanent enemies, she believes civil society organizations must build working relationships with local officials and frontline military officers in order to influence policy implementation.
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