Myanmar: The Fire Next Door
- Jun 22
- 2 min read
Insight Myanmar
“I never feel that war is this close to me,” Bencharat Chua, a Thai human rights professor and activist explains to the Insight Myanmar Podcast as she reflects on how years of engagement with Myanmar have reshaped her understanding of conflict, democracy, and responsibility across borders. Her core argument is that without democracy and a lived culture of human rights in Myanmar and the region, Thailand will continue to be affected by instability, displacement, and violence from across the border. She emphasizes throughout the discussion that while human rights language matters, it must become political practice and public will.
Her involvement with Myanmar began in 1999, when she worked for a small, nongovernmental organization called Friends Without Borders, created to raise awareness among the Thai people about displaced communities from Myanmar. For two years, she visited refugee camps and spoke with Burmese communities and ethnic groups along the border, learning about conflict, repression, and displacement directly from those who had fled the violence. She then joined the Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies at Mahidol University in Bangkok, working with displaced students and long-time activists, including members of the 1988 generation who had been living in Thailand for decades.
During Myanmar’s political transition in the 2010s, she became more directly engaged with universities inside the country. In 2018, she and her colleagues worked with partners in Myanmar to train and mentor law lecturers after a national policy made international human rights law compulsory in law faculties across the country. She describes this transition period as an opening that fundamentally changed what she thought was possible in society that had known repression and censorship for so long. Bencharat would never have imagined she could travel to so many different universities across Myanmar to support human rights education.
Initially, many lecturers struggled with the cousrework, relying heavily on reading and translating texts rather than engaging critically with the material. Over time, however, she watched their confidence and fluency grow. Even after the 2021 coup disrupted the formal education system, she continued to see evidence that this earlier work mattered, because lecturers retained the conceptual language and political awareness they had developed during the transition period.
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