Tony Waters

This short study explores detective stories by Crown Prince Vajiravudh, later King Rama VI, in early 20th-century Siam. Compiled in Nithan Thong-in, these tales provide insights into Siamese society, culture, and history. Despite multiple reprints, an English translation is currently unavailable. This notice introduces the cultural richness of Mr Thong-in's adventures, along with brief summaries of each story.

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Schooling, Identity, and Nationhood: Karen Mother-Tongue-Based Education in the Thai–Burmese Border Region
by Hayso Thako 1,2,* andTony Waters 3,*ORCID
1
Department of Peace Studies, Payap University, Chiangmai 60000, Thailand
2
Karen Education and Culture Department, Mae Sot 63110, Thailand
3
Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organization, Leuphana University, 21335 Lüneburg, Germany
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Soc. Sci. 2023, 12(3), 163; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030163 (registering DOI)
Received: 28 January 2023 / Revised: 22 February 2023 / Accepted: 27 February 2023 / Published: 9 March 2023
(This article belongs to the Section International Migration)
Download Review Reports Versions Notes
Abstract
Modern Karen education began in the early 1800s when introduced by British and American missionaries at roughly the time the British colonial powers arrived from India. After independence from Great Britain in 1948, Burma faced revolt from ethnic groups including the Karen, in large part, over issues of language and cultural self-rule. This led to the forcible closing of Karen-language schools by the military junta beginning in the 1960s and the re-establishment of Karen schooling by the Karen National Union (KNU) in independent self-rule territories, often near the Thai border. In this context, beginning in the 1980s, Karen-medium language spread into the highlands of Burma and into Thai refugee camps where Karen had been living for nearly four decades. Karen medium education is an important element establishing what Benedict Anderson called the “imagined community”. With mass Karen literacy, a national consciousness emerged, particularly in areas where schools were sustained. This separate consciousness is at the heart of the Karen of Kawthoolei. The Karen Education and Culture Department (KECD) was established in 1947 by the KNU. Karen schools provide mother-tongue-based education. Much of the development of the Karen medium curricula was undertaken by the KECD, and it is significantly different from that of the Burmese government’s curriculum, particularly in terms of language medium, literature, and history. Karen schooling reflects the Karen political consciousness, which will be at the heart of any peace agreements negotiated in the still-ongoing Burmese Civil War.

Keywords: schooling; identity; nationhood; Karen ethnicity; Burma; Myanmar; mother-tongue-based education; Thai–Burmese border; imagined communities; school administration

Promising research from Thailand already highlights women in the sexual entertainmentindustry as being active participants in both intimate relationships and commercial transactionssimultaneously. Notably, they are neither victims nor alienated laborers, as some activist narratives
assert. Women working in Thailand’s sex entertainment industry consistently adapt working cultures to modernity’s demand to reduce sex to a commercial transaction while often seeking emotional engagement. One result is that new forms of intimacy emerged, taking on new cultural
meanings. The profoundly felt need to care for and take care of someone else [dulae (Thai: ดูแล)], seen as a form of “intimacy”, is, in fact, deeply rooted in the Thai social context. We reframe the literature about sex work in Thailand by assuming that intimacy is key to understanding how “sex work”
arose and is sustained there. Focusing on intimacy distances research about sex work away from
western assumptions about the commodification and alienation of labor. This gives a more holistic
understanding of the complexity of overlapping and intersecting dimensions of the work women
perform in sex entertainment. “Intimacy” ties together the issues of money, labor, and a need to
care for someone and be taken care of. This thread links women with their customers, families, and
themselves.
Keywords: Thailand; sex entertainment; intimacy; emotional labor; care
1. Introduction
Women working in the Thai sexual entertainment industry are typically stigmatized
through ideologies of religion, cultural values, and economic interests. Such women in
the sexual entertainment industry are often subjected to shunning and forced into marginal areas of society where they are more likely to be victimized by violence, addiction,
and mental illness and labeled with dysphemistic terms like “prostitute.” Because sexual
entertainment is stigmatized and sometimes even illegal, women are less likely to seek
assistance from police, social workers, and other professional services. In countries where
prostitution is criminalized, they are subject to arrest, fines, and incarceration. Meanwhile,
their customers, the consumers of sex products, businesses commodifying sex work, and
the larger society served by prostitution and the sexual entertainment industry are often
given a pass. In short, prostitution and sexual entertainment are embedded in patriarchal
norms and laws. To a large extent, this results from the exclusion of voices of marginalized
groups allowing for dominating powers to have “the privileged act of naming” and the
power of framing that emerges from “interpretation, a definition, a description of their
work, actions, etc., that may obscure what is really taking place,” generating a false vision
of reality (Hooks 1991, pp. 3–4).1
Citation: Lemberger, Petra, and Waters, Tony. 2022. Thailand’s Sex Entertainment: Alienated Labor and
the Construction of Intimacy. Social
Sciences 11: x. https://doi.org/
10.3390/xxxxx
Academic Editor(s): Leslie Jeffrey
Received: date 17 September 2022
Accepted: date 09 November 2022
Published: date
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.
Submitted for possible open access
publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
)], seen as a
form of “intimacy”, is, in fact, deeply rooted in the Thai social context. We reframe the literature
about sex work in Thailand by assuming that intimacy is key to understanding how “sex work”
arose and is sustained there. Focusing on intimacy distances research about sex work away from
western assumptions about the commodification and alienation of labor. This gives a more holistic
understanding of the complexity of overlapping and intersecting dimensions of the work women
perform in sex entertainment. “Intimacy” ties together the issues of money, labor, and a need to
care for someone and be taken care of. This thread links women with their customers, families, and
themselves.

wrote Farang Sakdina in 1957-1958 as both a theoretical critique of western development planners, and the Marxist critics of Thai society like Jit Phoumisak. Kukrit's critique was that both used only European examples to prescribe development policies for Thailand. By this he meant that the Americans insisted on modernization theory, and Soviet theoreticians insisted on Marx's historical materialism. Kukrit responded that data developed from Europe is not applicable to Thailand because European feudalism had different attitudes toward land and labor than the ancient Thai "feudalism" known as sakdina. A textual analysis of Kukrit's book Farang Sakdina reveals Kukrit proposes a dialectical theory of historical change in which the "contradictions" within society are continually resolved and reconstituted. Kukrit uses this data to analyze politics and kingship in England, Thailand, and implicitly, other countries.

We re-evaluate Burmese history from the perspective of Thai philosopher Prawase Wasi who asserts that the basis for society is not simply individuals but the "selfforming group. " He discusses the essential nature of a self-forming group which is embodied in the Thai Buddhist concept of taam, which are sacred virtues emerging from self-organizing groups. In between the taam and self-forming groups are institutions of the state, economy, and education, etc. Prawase Wasi's approach has been used in Thailand to guide government policies for the last twenty years. In this article, we apply this model to the history of conflict in Burma. We contrast this approach with the more traditional focus on individualism and utilitarianism in western high modernism which typically shapes development policies.

Rong Wongsawan (1932-2009) was a major Thai writer during the late 20th century. He wrote primarily about social life in his native Thailand, but one of his favorite subjects was California where he lived, wrote, and bartended in the 1960s. The story presented here is about his trip to California in 1976 to show his new wife Malee where he had spent so many happy years. Published in Thai in 1978, On the Back of the Dog is a description of how a Thai writer viewed California of that era. As he points out early in the book, behind his observations are questions: Why are the Americans the way they are? Why are issues such as father-son relationships so rancorous, race relations so poisonous, attitudes toward money so greed-focused, and advertising so preposterous, especially for Thai sensibilities? Thus, in writing about San Francisco in particular, Rong is also writing about Thai culture. This article introduces Rong Wongsawan's writing to an English-speaking audience. Rong spoke idiomatic English and was well versed in American literature. However, Rong's own writing was almost completely in Thai and addressed only a Thai audience. Yet, he highlights issues of American culture and society which are of enduring interest. Presented in this article are extended translations of his writing from On the Back of the Dog, including vignettes involving a chicken executive, the tensions between white and black, actor Peter Fonda, and even Jack London's views of the great San Francisco earthquake. President Kennedy and Linda Lovelace make appearances, too. The issues Rong raises are understood in the context of Thai Buddhism and karma, Thai views of family and race. Rong Wongsawan (young man!) was an important Thai writer from the second half of the 20th century. 1 His published work began in the 1950s, with a photo-essay of the people living in Bangkok's garbage dumps, and continued until his death in 2009. Through it all, he signed his name as "young man!" in the belief that he had stopped aging at age twenty-eight. As with all great writers, Rong's work dealt with the human condition as he 1 There are few English language sources about Rong Wongsawan's life, except for an obituary in The Guardian newspaper in 2009, and an analysis of his early book Soi sanim (Unwilling to Endure) in Janit Feangfu's (2011) PhD dissertation. While Rong used this English spelling for his surname, his family now prefers Wong-Savun.

This paper explores empirically Edward T. Hall's assertion about the role of musical elements, including rhythm recognition and what are called "ear worms" in popular culture. To test Hall's assertion, data were collected from the United States, Germany, Tanzania, and Thailand in 2015-2017 using a 26 brief "song intros." Data were also collected from exchange students from South Korea and Turkey. Survey responses were analyzed using factor analysis in order to identify patterns of recognition. It was found that there were indeed patterns of recognition apparently reflecting national boundaries for some song recognition, but others crossed boundaries. A separate analysis of patterned recognition comparing American youth under thirty, with elders over 60 indicated that there were also boundaries between age groups. Such experiments in music recognition are an e↵ective methodology for Culture Studies given that musical elements are tied to issues of identity, culture, and even politics. Music recognition can be used to measure elements of such subconscious habitus.

This research describes the research undertaken about the three different national groups of students at Payap University.  The three groups were students in the English curriculum International College, Chinese students from PR China, and local Thai students in the Thai curriculum.  They were surveyed in order to understand their demographics, friendship patters, student engagement, Self-assessment of language skills, Long-term Plans, and Culture and Individualism.  Used were a combination of quantitative and qualitative survey instruments.  The data collected was evaluated for both its relevance to broader understandings of students in a multi-cultural/national learning environment, and for policy relevant conclusions.

This is a pre-publication version of an article in the 2nd edition of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd edition.  Discussed is the uage of the words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in both German and English translations of the writings of Ferdinand Toennies, and Max Weber.  Gemeinschaft refers to affective associations rooted in emotions, while Gesellschaft refers to rationalized relationships mediated by the marketplace and other rationalized institutions.

This essay is about how ethics were defined in the context of great empires, and in the modern world.  As such, it is what Polanyi called "The Great Transformation," and has themes adapted from my book The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture, Life Beneath the Level of the Marketplace.

This is our first translation of Max Weber's "Class, Status, Party."  It was published in the Journal of Classical Sociology in 2010.  We are quite proud of the translation, and believe that it is better than earlier versions.  However, we have since modified it and published a better version in our book "Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society" (2015), from Palgrave.

This is an article that I wrote to suggest to biologists that they should take sociology more seriously.  Judging from comments I had back from reviewers, lots of biologists disagree with this--too bad!  It has been published, and is out there for all to read now.  The official abstract is below!

Abstract
Mirror neurons” describe complementary affective neural activity that occurs in the brains of two different primates because they are both doing or observing the same action.  Empathy, sympathy, and other emotional responses involving “taking the role of the other” are inferred to be the consequence of these emotional capacities.  Mirror neurons were first described in the 1980s using the results of brain imaging studies.  But, a similar conclusion about “mirroring capacity” is also reflected in over one hundred years of observational research in sociology.  Early sociologists described how the social order is maintained and reproduced using the concept of the “looking glass self” which they view as an entity that exists between the biological being and a social being.

Two-year colleges play an important role in facilitating transfers to four-year institutions. This has resulted in the demand to assess how well the community college systems train students for successful transfer to four-year bachelor-granting institutions. Existing datasets on two-year college transfer rates provides inconsistent and, sometimes, even contra- dicting answers. In this paper, we examine exactly why and how there are such varied results on two-year college transfer rates. Our findings indicate that there is no valid or universal measure of successful transfer programs. We find that such a measure is hindered by six factors: struc- tural, technological, economic, governmental, and social. These factors make reliable comparisons of national and even statewide transfer success rates problematic. We suggest that policy makers should review existing datasets on two-year college transfer rates with a knowledgeable eye to avoid drawing inferences or making decisions based upon a review of potentially inaccurate comparisons.

This is how things went wrong for me in Germany and Tanazania when I tried to "teach like you do in America."  It just ain't the same.  Students and professors both perceive their roles differently than in America.  Surprisingly, it is Tanzania and Germany that students have more rights.  There are also different assumptions underpinning teaching in Germany and Tanzania.  In Germany, there are assumptions about the mysterious "Bildung."  In Tanzania, it is about the role of the university in the modernization of Africa.

This article is written about Shunga Village where my Sister-in-Law lived.  The village is in rural Tanzania, and in 1997 was still quite remote, and very much embedded in a subsistence lifestyle.  Because of this, the IMF and World Bank had little impact on the local economy, despite a decade of trying. For what it is worth, I first drafted this while staying in Shunga while recovering from hepatitis.

This is a social history of 19th century Rukwa based on archival, secondary, and oral sources.  I am particularly pleased with the analysis which emphasizes what Max Weber called "status groups" (Stände in German) rather than conventional distinctions based on ethnicity, tribal, and religious distinctions.

The circumstances of the flight of four ethnic groups from Laos are described and cornpared. It is found that different ethnic groups defined the fall of the Laotian government in 1975 differently. This affected why, how and when they fled. It is stressed that any explanation of refugee behavior must be in terms not only of individual motivation but also of group behavior. Conclusions are drawn about the role that social networks, sanctuary opportunities, perceptions of family unity, class, clanship, patron-client relationships and traditions of mobility can play in making the decision to flee.

This was written by my student Karla McLaren in 2006 for her Honors Project in 2006. It is a good example of what Chico State's distance students are capable of!  The article also brings back memories of school lunchrooms past, and brings into question how closely the rhetoric of school nutrition is tied to actual budget priorities.

This paper is a philosophical approach to the question of why rural African peasants were able to successfully operate grain mills, even as donor-provided water systems were broken and inoperative.  It was based on a more whimsical paper I published in 1989.  The question is evaluated from Jurgen Habermas "lifeworld and system" approach, with emphasis on the lifeworld part.  I continue to think that research which assumes a "lifeworld" and "communicative systems" approach has a great deal of promise, whether it comes from the flavor of Habermas, or Luhmann.

I also continue to like reasoning from a paradox, which in this case is the fact that grain mills worked, in the same village that water systems were broken."

This article was written after I returned from Tanzania in 1988, an before I had a lot of social scientific theoretical background.  Thus, "practical notes" part of the title.  Really, it is just a story.  A nice story though, about why people "lied" to me when it was in their material interest to tell the truth.  Such brief stories are a good way to make a single point and get out.  For what it is worth, they are also good ways to tease out and illustrate the limits to much theoretical reasoning.  In these case of this example, it is a tweak to the nose of the rational-choice types!

"This paper was written and published in 1996 before the mass repatriation of Rwandan refugees from Tanzania and Congo.  DR Congo was still called Zaire, and there was still about 2 million Rwandan refugees in Tanzania and Congo.  They were subsequently repatriated forcibly to Rwanda in late 1996 and early 1997. 

This article as posted by the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs in the early days of the internet.  Later the journal was reorganized, and all of the papers published earlier received the 1997 publication date."

This paper is about why my Social Science students think there are two types of US history taught--on in the K-12 school system, and a different more critical one in the university system. The paper uses the approach of classical sociologist Max Weber to understand how such social stratification develops in the context of textbook writing, commemoration of holidays, and reproduction of the status quo.  Examples developed to illustrate this point include the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

""Large encampments to receive fleeing refugees facilitate reception, and save lives. Yet the long-term effects of camp life may themselves create the potential for further conflict.

Refugee camps are a way of controlling the technical, political and social problems inherent to conflict. They permit easy access to vulnerable, needy people in difficult and dangerous environments, meeting immediate needs for food, shelter and healthcare and helping to overcome the typical reluctance of host countries to receive foreigners. They also provide a convenient short-term holding place for refugees able to return after a short period. Yet is doubtful whether they are of long-term benefit, particularly when compared to the successes of some second- and third-country resettlement programmes. This is not because immediate physical needs are not met; rather, the segregation, inequality and social isolation of the refugee camp can fuel political resentments which prolong the refugee situation, and create the potential for further conflict.

The modern refugee camp

Typically, refugee camps are established in the early days of an emergency. They are sited within walking distance of a border (most refugees flee on foot), there are water sources that can be developed quickly, and there are few local people around to create political problems for the host country. Often, the host country’s military has asserted some level of control in the confined area of the camp. Confinement is usually combined with regulations restricting economic activities like farming or foraging, and social activities such as school attendance. This limits contact between refugees and the host population. Settled camp conditions are conducive to the control of mortality and morbidity rates in vulnerable refugee populations otherwise at great risk. At the same time, however, camp conditions can generate their own, less obvious problems.

Refugee populations are typically isolated and made idle by the circumstances in which they find themselves. As a result, a ‘refugee culture’ can emerge, often among young people. This culture develops its own definitions of who is part of the group, and who is not. A caste-like inequality between refugees, locals and expatriate camp staff becomes normal, and a hierarchy emerges in which refugees are defined as the recipients of international largesse, host-country nationals provide the services refugees are banned from providing for themselves, and a small group of expatriates brings in what money there is. Meanwhile, life in the home country continues, and another social stratification emerges: between the people in the camp, and the people who stayed behind. Unable to visit, refugees create mental images of what the home country is about socially and politically, interpreting what snippets of information come their way to confirm their fears, hopes and suspicions about when they might return.

The regularisation of assistance

The emergency period can pass quickly, often within weeks or months. However, by default the dependent camp situations assisted by UNHCR, and fed by WFP, are maintained because the easiest thing to do is simply to continue. Thus, humanitarian agencies typically focus on the establishment of a ‘maintenance’ policy for the continuation of the camp situation, in the hope that a quick repatriation will be organised. For the international humanitarian community, maintenance is viewed as the completion of the ‘emergency’. After all, under difficult circumstances infrastructure has been built, political relationships have been established with the host country, food pipelines set up and major purchases made with donor money. In essence, maintenance for the agencies means the regularisation of their aid programmes. The problem is that maintenance policies rigidify the principles established during the initial flight. And these maintenance policies kick in at the same time that refugee culture is being established in the context of crowded camp conditions, norms for food distribution from international supplies are established, and the other tools used to receive and sustain fleeing refugee masses developed. This is fertile ground for the legitimisation of refugee nostalgia for a vanished past.

Dreams of return

Refugee ideologies quickly emerge with the establishment of camp routines, which typically suit the more powerful actors, including the humanitarian community, the host country and ethnic nationalists whose ideology feeds on nostalgia for the homeland. In particular, an ideology is established that voluntary repatriation, sometime, eventually, sooner rather than later, is the only solution. Not coincidentally, this is a convenient policy for humanitarian actors, the host country and refugee leaders alike: humanitarian actors because they have the infrastructure, routines and resources to maintain camps to control the situation, host countries because they do not want to deal with the issues of integrating foreigners, offending local constituencies in the process, and refugee leaders because they nurture dreams of leading a liberation force back to the home country.

Promises of eventual return can become very attractive to refugees faced with frequent reminders that they are ‘different’, both from host-country nationals and from the people back home. In this kind of environment, extremism can flourish, and refugee populations, tantalised by promises of return to a mythologised ‘homeland’, can be mobilised for political purposes. Refugee camps for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza provide some of the most fertile recruiting-grounds for suicide bombers. Closed camps for Rwandans in Zaire in the late 1990s provided first a cover for the toppled, genocidal government, then a military target for the new regime. In both cases, the hundreds of thousands of refugees suffered.

Repatriation or resettlement?

Repatriation is usually seen as the best long-term solution to a refugee crisis. In certain circumstances, Mozambique in the early 1990s for instance, it can work well, but the experience of the last 30 to 40 years suggests that this is the exception. Resettlement – which often permits refugees to re-establish self-sufficiency as quickly as possible – is in fact at least as common, irrespective of the typically hostile political winds that oppose it. Resettlement also has the advantage of redirecting attention away from dreams of return, and towards lives elsewhere. Not every country wants or needs ‘their’ refugees back; this is why many refugee crises are resolved not just by mass voluntary repatriation, but by permanent relocation elsewhere.

The flight from the Indochinese countries in the 1970s and 1980s is an example of how diverting refugee attention away from camps leads to other alternatives. Whether legally or illegally, most Indochinese refugees ended up resettled in countries as varied as the US, China, Australia and Thailand. One of the unsung successes of the Indochinese refugee resettlement programmes is that there are no teeming refugee camps in the region. Similarly, Iranians after the fall of the Shah, Burundians in Tanzania, Central Americans in Mexico and the US, Russians in Israel and Eastern Europeans in Germany found new lives not dominated by food distribution lines, head counts and the dreary segregated life of the modern refugee camp.

Stumbling-blocks

The capacity to manage refugee camps effectively allows potential hosts to avoid difficult political questions about resettlement, while persisting in the illusion that the refugee camp itself is there only ‘temporarily’. Camps provide the veneer of respectability: people do not starve because they are there; and due to the skilled delivery of medical care, refugees often have low mortality and morbidity rates, particularly in the short run. This is of course a good thing; but in the big picture is it the most important? Predictably, the provision of high-quality health care results in high birth rates and low infant mortality. But just as predictably, refugee camps isolated from the rest of the world will produce large numbers of angry young men focused on violently righting the perceived wrongs of the past.

Tony Watersis Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, California State University, Chico, CA. Previously, he worked for the Lutheran World Federation in Tanzania and the International Rescue Committee in Thailand. He is the author of Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan: The Limitations to Humanitarian Relief Operations (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); and Crime and Immigrant Youth (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999). He has written widely on humanitarian relief, development and migration.

Further reading

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Karen Jacobsen, ‘The Forgotten Solution: Local Integration of Refugees in Developing Countries’, in New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper 45 (Geneva: UNHCR, Huly 2001), www.unhcr.ch.

Lynelyn Long, Ban Vinai: The Refugee Camp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
""

“What is culture?” is asked at the beginning of every beginning social anthropology student.  And it is a good question because culture is as elemental as anything that makes us human. Culture it is explained, are the assumptions about life, hierarchy, language, and as Boas pointed out, even how color is seen.  Thus they are things that people as individuals are only sub-consciously aware of, but shapes what is called “world view.” It is the social life in which every human “swims” without noticing. All very broad definitions which do not I think get to the heart of the question.
      The problem is that by definition culture is taken for granted and typically subconscious, culture is difficult to notice.  Proxies are often introduced in the form of artifacts, which is one reason why ancient “cultures” are named after marks on the pottery left behind.  Other artifacts typically cited are things like architectural style, dress, food likes, musical tastes, writing systems, language use, etc. etc.  The list could be endless.
  But these the products of culture, are not culture itself.  In this paper, I would like to talk about two ways I have been trying to answer the “what is culture?” question for some years, by returning to two very different phenomena. The first will be the subconscious musical rhythms to which groups of people (cultures?) are attuned and will rely on the Edward T. Hall’s studies of rhythms and time.  To do this I will describe an experiment I did in four different countries about “attunement” (see Waters and Philhour 2019). 
Then I am going to switch gears, and try something different, which is to describe how neural networks, which are biological structures in the brain, are created by cultural environments (Waters 2014).  The stretch is broad, and I appreciate 15 minutes of your attention to explain how these two very different things might be reflecting an underlying substrate that is “culture.”

This paper is about how it is difficult to seek the Myanmar perspective about Myanmar issues due to the structures of the international aid regime.  This occurs in the context of an "Anti-Politics Machine" created by the aid regime which makes independent scholarship more difficult.

This is a reading from the book "Sattahip" by Rong Wongsawan, translated by Siamrad Maher, and arranged by Tony Waters.  The story is about US airmen who were based in Thailand in 1972, and the bars they habituated  The story is told from the perspective of Rong who was a Thai journalist trying to describe to a Thai audience life in the bars that popped up around the airbases.  He emphasizes the role that war played in creating the lives of the Thai "rental-wives" and the American airmen who were bombing North Vietnam.

Payap University is a Thai university responding to globalization by expanding programs to International students in English since 2004.  More recently Payap University began admitting Chinese-speaking students to a new major in Thai language called “Thai for Communication,” and other courses. Requirements for Thai students from the Thai part of the university study English are also being strengthened. In short there is a complicated linguistic environment at Payap University.
     
      In order to evaluate the linguistic resources, 179 students at Payap university were asked to do a Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which is an international standard for evaluating language abilities. This survey tool was translated from English into both Chinese and Thai. English-speaking, Chinese, and Thai students evaluated themselves across five oral and written categories.  This paper is a preliminary report on what we are learning about the varied language skills that Payap students bring to the Thai, International, and Chinese language programs. 

    The preliminary results described here indicate varied competencies in a variety of “spoken production” skills in various languages.  This data will be used to evaluate Payap University’s own programs, as well as make comparisons with other Thai universities, and globally.

Some Personal Thoughts I have been thinking about what to say at this forum since last May. Last May I did a International Forum about the decline in language study at Chico State over the last few years. This followed a disappointing vote in an Academic Senate committee in which a one semester language requirement was defeated by one vote. The status of the language requirement is that it may become part of a larger reform of the curriculum this year which will then take place over the next year or two. In the meantime, I suspect language study at Chico State will continue to weaken, even as a multilingual student body grows at Chico State and in California. My own impression is that about half of my Sociology students have heritage skills in Spanish and probably five or six other languages. I think though that the defeat of the language requirement is actually indicative of a broader problem, which is the decline in internationalization efforts not just at Chico State, but across the United States. The statistics regarding language study, narrowing of the study abroad offerings, and declining numbers of students coming from abroad are national trends, which are accentuated in Chico, though certainly not unique to Chico. In that context, the following polemic focuses while focusing on Chico, could probably be given at something like half of the comprehensive public universities in the United States. Chico's Internationalization Problem Chico is a wonderful town. The campaign to develop a sense of place for Chico on its face is a good one—most of us do agree about that. But, I wonder if the glamorization of Chico has cost diverted us from broader interests? To a certain extent, we have a " Chico First " focus, or " North State First " which is nice, but can also be provincial. Indeed, only about 29% of our students come from the " service area " of northeastern California and fewer will spend their careers in this part of the state where jobs for college grads are clustered in almonds, beer production, Enloe Hospital, and social services. For the 71% from elsewhere, and even the 29% from around here, there is a statewide, national, and international job market. The backwash from this local focus is perhaps part of the reason that so many internationalization efforts have come to naught over the last ten years or so. Some things that have happened:

This research analyzes how the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) of 2015 in Myanmar was constructed and implemented. The conclusion focuses on the Challenges and Opportunities for permanent peacebuilding in the Republic Union of Myanmar. The conclusions are the result of two qualitative sources: 1)

This describes how and why we came to translate Thai author "Rong Wongsuwan's book "On the Back of the Greyhound Dog: Travels in the Golden State."  This book turns a Thai eye on 1970s California in an engaging and thoughtful way.  This paper was presented at the 13th Thai Studies Conference in Chiangmai in 2017.

This paper was delivered to the Northern Thai Informal Discussion group, and reflects an "updating" of my 2001 book Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan.  It has been posted to the NTIDG web site at http://www.intgcm.thehostserver.com/pdf/intg_403.pdf

Prepared for the Northern Thailand Informal Discussion Group, April 19, 2016.  This is a further mulling on my book "Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan" which was published in 2001.  I think that the argument continues to hold.  And I look forward to returning to the subject of refugees and refugee relief in coming years.

College is not just about learning, it is about status and hierarchy, too.  So what do the fine nineteen year-olds at UC Berkeley think about us at low ranked Chico State?  And how do we think about the snobs at UC Berkeley?  Dismissiveness, preening, and sour grapes are part of the ranking game.

Clare Hammond's new book On the Shadow Tracks is a creative exploration of authoritarianism in Myanmar. She did this riding the railways of Myanmar in 2016, during a brief time when this was possible if you were patient, stubborn, and willing to compromise with confused officials. You also needed to realize that official maps and what is on the ground are two different things. Railway travel in Myanmar is never as simple as showing up in the train station, buying a ticket, and then settling into your seat at the assigned time.

U Nu (left) and the cover of 'Burma's Rough Road to Independence' by Hans-Bernd Zöllner. Sadly, much of Myanmar's history is shaped by leaders who were jailed under harsh conditions at Insein Prison. The British built Insein Prison in 1887, as part of a prison gulag, and criminalized the practice of democratic politics. Among their prisoners was U Nu, the man who would become Burma's first prime minister, who was jailed from 1940 to 1942 for sedition. This tradition of imprisoning politicians was of course continued by the Ne Win regime that came to power in the 1962 coup, and intensified following the 1988 demonstrations when thousands who survived the soldiers' bullets were imprisoned in Insein and elsewhere, including the nation's elected leader, Daw Aung

Queer Premises is about the post-1980 emergence of the queer scene in London as an emotionally charged social movement among stigmatized sexuality and gender communities. The title itself is a play on wordspremises refers to both the premises, that is, assumptions underlying queer life, while also pointing to how the geographical locales are designed socially, economically, and architecturally. The book begins as a story about coming out in newly public places-the clubs, venues, bars, community centers, and nighttime venues. Campkin starts the book very clearly with a question which is seemingly bland, but in fact quite provocative: "How have London's queer populations embedded themselves into urban space governing and planning?" Another way to put it, is to ask how have populations deeply rooted in issues of stigma, ideals of intimacy, and sexuality fared in a conservative world of urban planning, business, and politics? But Queer Premises is not only a book about stigma, gender, and sexuality; Campkin also discusses the most rational of subjects, such as business and economics, building codes, zoning, business hours, and architecture. How did planning considerations managed by town councils, and professional planners, fit in with the cultural change precipitated by a queer community seeking to publicly establish itself as a subculture? How does a political establishment, often uneasy with the nature of queerness, but greedy enough to encourage the establishment of a lucrative economic sector, manage the laws, zoning decisions, and governance of a culture that by its very nature is "outside the box?" Campkin's story begins in the 1980s as communities moved out of the clandestine closeted zones of the private clubs, and into identifiable public spaces in London. Physically, they clustered around the Soho and Islington/King's Cross neighborhoods, and as importantly, temporally colonized the night. They created the clubs, music, community, and culture. The queer culture that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s reflected musicians, flamboyant performance artists, and club culture shaped by shifting gay, lesbian, and queer communities seeking unstigmatized companionship, intimacy, community, and love. Some of the best writing is in Chapter 3 (p. 100), where the uses of the different venues are described, for the aesthetics they sought to generate. For example, describing one bar: The Bell points to a shift in the standards of aesthetics that were happening throughout this period, where refurbishment aesthetics were bound into the politics of visibility. The Fallen Angel was a pioneer. It influenced the 'swish', 'dean' aesthetics of later bars …. The emotionally charged liberation movement also focused on identities. This happened against a backdrop of planning decisions shaped by economic demands for profitability. Much of the story is about sites DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society

This book review was published about "Rwanda Means the Universe" by Louise Mushikwabo.  After publishing the book, she went on to become Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Secretary-General of the International Association of Francophone States.  In light of the author's current prominence, it is interesting to re-read my book review today, and also realize I had not posted it to Academia.edu before.

Siam's New Detectives describes how Thailand's police forces emerged as a modern institution since the 1890s. Samson Lim's cultural history focuses on how policing became the profession it is in Thailand. He notes that it has roots both in Thai cultural concepts of hierarchy and royal legitimacy on the one hand, while borrowing legal administrative and technical techniques for crime solving from Europe, and later the United States. This borrowing began in the early 20th century from Europe (especially the UK and Denmark), and continued from America after the Second World War. In this way, the book is like others about Thailandit is about the tension between an inwardlooking nation preserving independence and an outward-looking nation seeking to engage with the modern world. As with nations everywhere, Thailand seeks to maintain order by projecting the authority of the sovereign, which in Thailand is the Chakri dynasty and its bureaucracies. Until premodern times, this authority came from the feudal relations between the king and provincial vassals, justified by an assertion of hierarchical theories rooted in Buddhism and a deep respect for spiritual powers. In the late 19th century though, Bangkok grew rapidly, acquiring the problems of modern cities, including a reputation for gambling, drugs, drunkenness, robbery, and murder. In Bangkok this problem was viewed through the lens of Chinese immigration, which was blamed for the urban disorder. By 1904 well over half the city's population was Chinese. Major sections of Bangkok were controlled by Chinese gangs; trade and commerce were dominated by Chinese corporations; and even tax collection was contracted to Chinese entrepreneurs. There were an estimate 184,000 Chinese migrants, mostly males speaking various dialects. To routinize control, King Rama V established professional courts, public prosecutors, and ultimately a salaried, full-time police force. As elsewhere, the duty of the police was to present to prosecutors and the courts convincing proof that arrested miscreants actually committed a particular crime. In practice though, it became a force to control the Chinese section of the city. Rama V's government hired British police officials to establish Bangkok's constabulary in the early 1890s. As Lim writes, policing with its emphasis on case resolution and punishment of the guilty was viewed as a modern replacement for

on pp. 629-631 is my review of a novel set in Thailand when future Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh hid out there in the early part of the twentieth century, organizing opposition to the French government in Vietnam.  It is a well-done historical novel, which I recommend highly to anyone interested in Southeast Asian history, or novels in general!

Gustafson makes a good case for why the Modern Global Economy is a new "religion," with its own rituals, myths, theologies, etc.  I highly recommend the book.  It is a refreshing look at capitalism as religion.  Published in the Indonesian Journal Gema Teologika, 2018 3(1):97-99.

A Review of Shane Strate's book "The Lost Territories" which is about both how Thailand lost its territories to the French and British in the nineteenth and early twentieth encury, and how this loss shaped the narrative about Thai nationhood into the 21st century.

Download a branded Cambridge Journals Online toolbar (for IE 7 only). What is this? ... Add Cambridge Journals Online as a search option in your browser toolbar. What is this? ... The Rwanda Crisis, 1959–1994: history of a genocide by Gérard Prunier London, Hurst; New ...

In the event of a humanitarian crisis leading to an influx of refugees, what are the economic, social, and political changes that take place in the host communities? How do global processes and actors interact with local agents and existing political configurations to generate new ...

When you write something provocative, you might get some nasty book reviews.  I got one from Howard Adelman at the International Migration Review regarding my book Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan which, in places, is critical of how the UNHCR operates.  The International Migration Review kindly allowed me to respond to Adelman's review--this article is that response.

If you want to read Adelman's review (all 19 pages!) it is generally available from university libraries, and on-line sources.

This is my translation from Thai to English of Thai author Rong Wongsawvu's book, "Bon Lang Ma/On the Back of the Dog."  It is published by White Lotus Books of Thailand.  It is about Rong Wongsavun's trip to California.  It is very good ethnography, and reflects a Thai view on America and the Americas, with all their peculiarities.  Currently available at https://www.whitelotusbooks.com/books/man-from-bangkok-the

This is the typescript of Chapter 4/5 of my book Max Weber and the Modern Problem of Discipline (2018 Hamilton/Rowman and Littlefield).  Please cite the published book—please ask your library to get copy and/or buy one yourself from Academia.com!  Also, the first three chapters are up on my Academia.edu account, and can be accessed.  I will be posting the final chapter in June, 2019.

Typescript of Chapter 3 of my book Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline.  Chapters 1 and 2 are also posted here.  This chapter is about the absence of discipline in these countries, and its consequence for finding peace agreements.  Please ask your library to order a copy!

Weber defines discipline as the intrinsic justification people use to submit to authority. Weber makes the case that modernity is equated with the internalization of discipline in which the people shape themselves to the authority of rationalized institutions, particularly that of the bureaucracy. The more tuned into the inhuman demands of bureaucracy a population becomes, the more likely the population will generate the enduring structures that we think of as the modern rationalized systems of market and state. I find Weber's ideas about discipline powerful. For me, it explains the three-part paradox I saw between Thai and Tanzanian peasant farmers I knew in the early 1980s, and the well-paid Western experts who were trying to bring them " development. " The development experts were " disciplined " in Weber's sense of the word, while the self-sufficient subsistence farmers that I knew were not. The first part of the paradox is that subsistence farmers who rely on the weather for their lives show up for " work " whenever the weather and season calls. They are among the world's greatest risk takers. They work very hard at any time to make sure their crop is successful. In doing this, they focus on preserving the resilient kin-based networks that gives their lives meaning. Physically, many are strong and agile from decades of weeding, plowing, hoeing, harvesting, and the many other tasks associated with subsistence farming.

This is Chapter 2 from our new (2016) book, Prison Vocational Education Policy in the United States. Boring title, with a lot o interesting times learning a lot about life behind the wall in California's prisons.  The book is first about prison vocational education, but as importantly about what it is like to do research in a prison environment.  In any program implentented in prison the big story is safety and security, not education or research  How do these things interact?  What does it feel like to be a naive professor in what is one of the world's largest prison systems which, at its heyday during the time of this study, was bulging with 170,000 prisoners?

Note also, this book is a critique of "evidence based research," a popular subject not just in prisons, but throughout public administration.

https://www.amazon.com/Prison-Vocational-Education-Policy-United/dp/1137564687/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1470925188&sr=8-1&keywords=Vocational+Education+in++Prisons

This is a vignette from our book Prison Vocational Education in the United States which describes a slice of prison life.  We hope you enjoy it.  Please also encourage your library to order our book, which is available from Palgrave MacMillan.

We were brought to the prison by our guide, a former painting instructor who was since promoted to be a system-wide vice principal (VP) at CDCR headquarters in Sacramento. On the drive down, he it became apparent that he despised inmates, and saw them always as conniving, plotting to cheat, overpower, or commit some act of manipulation or violence. He mouthed the words of rehabilitation yet instantly shifted to the mistrusting lifer employee assigned to work with prisoners he considered simply sociopaths. Our guide and more than a few teachers or educational administrators across the entire system, repeated the joke, " How do you know when an inmate is lying? When he opens his mouth. " When we first arrived, we were met as outside guests, objects of both suspicion and official respect. The site VP took us to the classes we were to observe in a modern shop building. He was a person who helped us understand what we confidentially named, " the retirement culture " of CDCR. This VP exemplified what appeared to be the raison d'être for many employees in corrections: waiting for retirement. Given the opportunity, such individuals always talked about what they would do upon retirement at age 50, while pointing to the legend that life expectancy for CDCR employees is only about 56. The shops we were to observe were large and contained functional if not up-to-date equipment. Inmates entered the shop through the doublewide, slide up doors that clattered open to receive them from their cells at the appointed time after a complete strip search. The building was shaped as a rectangle with two complete shops. A shared classroom stood at the center of the building with access from both shops. Likewise, the teacher offices also met in

This is a Vignette in our book "Prison Vocational Education and Policy in the United States: A Acritical Perspective on Evidence Based Reform."  It is Chapter 7 in the book.  The VIgnette is a great story about what happens when Andy's Sunglasses are stolen when we were doing interviews in a prison classroom.  Read it.  It is short, quick, and interesting!  Better yet, also go out and get the book!

This Chapter One in our new book of Max Weber translations.  The translations include "Class, Status, Party;" "Charisma and Discipline;" "Bureaucracy;" and "Politics as Vocation."  This chapter is about the relationship of Weber's writing to World War I.  The chapter explains why Weber's writing is so relevant to the 21st century.
  Our point in translating these essays was to use 21st century English, while highlighting Weber's wisdom, wit, insight, and humor.  The book is available from Palgrave MacMillan http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/webers-rationalism-and-modern-society-tony-waters/?K=9781137365866  The book is edited and translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters.

This is the typescript version of Chapter 4 from out book Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society (Palgrave 2015).  It is the most up-to-date translation of Weber's classic essay "Class, Status, Party," which was first translated by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills.

This is Chapter 5 from our book "Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society," which we encourage you to read and cite.  This chapter is a translation of what we think is one of Weber's more important essays, i.e. one about the nature of disciplined population, and why that discipline population is so important for modern institutions.  It has a dramatic and gloomy ending--if you want to skip there you can!  However we do urge you to read the whole thing.

This is Chapter 7 of our book "Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society."  It is a translation from German to English of Weber's classic essay "Politics as a Vocation."  In my view, it is one of the most important essays about the nature of politics ever written.  Included are Weber's defition of the state as a monopoloy over the use of coercive power in a given territory, different types of authority, the ethics of politicians, etc.  It is indeed a classic, which is why we went to so much trouble to translate it.

This is a pre-publication version which is not under copyright protection.  So as a result, the page numbers are different from the published version, which is distributed by Palgrave MacMillan.  If you are going to cite this essay, please go to the library and get a copy.  If your library does not have a copy, please ask them to order one!

"Review from Choice:
Waters, Tony. Schooling, childhood, and bureaucracy: bureaucratizing the child. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 255p bibl index ISBN 9781137269713, S90.00

Waters (California State Univ., Chico) is by education and profession a sociologist, and it shows on every page of this work. If readers are not familiar with the term "habitus," they will be by the end of the book. The term "habitus" means a certain behavior or belief that has become part of a society's structure and ingrained into individuals and sociological systems of that culture when the original purpose of that belief can no longer be recalled. In short, people continue to do things because that is the way they were taught, giving little thought as to why they do them. The word appears on nearly every page of this book, and is used to illustrate various sociological perspectives on the field of education. What this means is that, in the author's view, schools in the US exist the way they do because most of the people in the US are parts of larger bureaucracies, and schools reflect the needs of those bureaucracies by preparing children to fulfill bureaucratic roles once they become adults. It is an interesting book that explains why schools are the way they are today. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Graduate, research, and professional collections.--J. D. Neal, University of Central Missouri

Neal, J.D.

Source Citation  (MLA 7th Edition)
Neal, J.D. "Waters, Tony. Schooling, childhood, and bureaucracy: bureaucratizing the child." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries June 2013: 1895. Academic OneFile. Web. 29 Dec. 2013.

"When is Killing a Crime, and when is it just killing?  Well, where there is no rule of law and a state, is one answer.  But there are other answers too.  For example when  whether a killing is noticed (or not), or when situations are created where violence becomes more likely.  The criminalization of killing occurs in all of these contexts. 

Of my books, this is the best one for understanding how sociology as a discipline can be used to understand a seemingly obvious question. 

In terms of methodology, this is all about historical and comparative sociology.""

This paper is about the problems associated with counting refugees in refugee camps. The case study is from Tanzanian camps for Rwandans and Burundians in 1994-1996.  It was published in my book Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (Westview 2001).

This is a brief description of "camp management" in Cabalisa 2 refugee camp in 1994-1996.  Camp management involves planning, food distribution, and other day-to-day activities.  This article describes how Chabalisa 2 camp for approximately 40,000 Rwandan refugees was managed.  This paper is an Appendix my book "Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan."

This paper is an Appendix in my book Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan.  It was originally written to tell donors to the Lutheran World Federation (for whom I worked at the time) about what was involved with establishing the norms and rules needed to create a marketplace.  There is a heavy emphasis on refugee participation.

The UNHCR and foreign donors had programs in Ngara to urge refugees to return to Rwanda. This created a difficult conundrum. While the UNHCR wanted to protect the right of the refugees to return to Rwanda voluntarily, they were also under pressure from Western donors to close the expensive camps.  In this context, programs to "encourage" the refugees to return were developed.  This brief article from my book "Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan" is about the difficulties one of these programs encountered.

This book is about why gangs form in some immigrant cultures and not others.  There is an emphasis on demographics (see Chapter 4 uploaded here) and the ideology of both the host country, and the immigrants themselves.

The phenomenon of youthful crime itself is though tied most closely to the "second generation" of impoverished immigrant groups which live in modern urban areas.  There is a strain between immigrant parents born in rural areas of poor countries, and their children born in the cities of the new.  The process leads to the emergence of both the "model immigrant" and the alienated youth likely to join a gang.  This is part of the "process" of immigration in modernizing urban areas.

This is Chapter 8 in my book Schooling, Childhood, and Bureaucracy: Bureaucratizing the Child."  It is focused by James Scott of "Seeing Like a State,"  and George Ritzer's ideas about "The McDonaldization of Society.," as this is the reason why and how schools are able to process masses of young children in order to create adults in a predictable and efficient fashion.

This is a story about a court case in Willows, California, in which a Laotian refugee shot a small bird, a bushtit, in a public park with his new pellet gun.  He received a ticket from the park ranger.  I was the translator on the case--in which the man pleaded "not guilty."  The case hinged on the question of whether the bushtit was a native of California, or not!  This essay was published as an appendix to my book Crime and Immigrant Youth.

The passivity of the education administrators was at first striking, but I came to understand it as a normal response to this system where the concept of safety as defined by custody officials always holds sway. Custody was in charge and they held all information confidential. Lives could be at stake, they dramatically whispered. This perspective at first appeared melodramatic. To make matters worse, correctional custody officers in green uniforms are closely watched by internal affairs custody officers in black uniforms. The black uniforms make sure the green uniforms are not involved with smuggling cell phones, drugs, and other contraband, which can be a very lucrative side business. The dangers custody feared became more apparent when a librarian was stabbed in one of the prisons we visited. The incident emphasized to all that inmates are locked up because they are criminals, not simply the victims of poverty, poor education, alienating foster care, neglect, childhood abuse, and violence. They could hurt other people, and the librarian was just one victim of that convoluted world. A gang contract had been put out on a prison employee and an elaborate plan developed to carry out the contract. The outcome placed the librarian as a player in another Kafka scene, because she was not the target of the contract. But the inmates were intent on stabbing the person identified by the gang arrived at the appointed location but went through the wrong door to the library. The intended victim was not there. Left on their own to figure out what to do next, they decided they should stab someone, even if it was the wrong person. So the librarian was stabbed and killed. The entire prison went on lockdown since the incident because it was feared that more gang

Myanmar junta troops take part in the Armed Forces Day parade in Naypyitaw in March 2021. Under the neon lights of bars and coffee houses of Chiang Mai, Mae Sot and Bangkok, people, with pitchers of beer or coffee, are popping off in English or Burmese about how "key stakeholders" and other civil society or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are doing wrong. They excitedly assert narratives about how to fix Myanmar by developing short and long-term projects through potential entry points. The drinkers of course are the CSO (civil society organization) and NGO elites, who dream of a modern Myanmar, and creating a civil society based on "global best practices." They would use "good governance" principles developed by the world's greatest institutions in Geneva, New

Olive Yang is legendary in Myanmar history. Now she has an actual English-language biography written about her life, and her role in the chaotic wars in the north of the country in the 1940s and after. The Opium Queen: The Untold Story of the Rebel who Ruled the Golden Triangle by Gabrielle Paluch tells Olive's story, acknowledging the hyperbole, but backing up what she says with copious footnotes to archival sources in English and Mandarin Chinese, and interviews conducted in Chinese dialects, Burmese and English. The book supplements the press stories, novels, legends, and general gossip about Yang that still circulates in Myanmar's myriad communities as well.

Karen language education is still strong in the Thai-Myanmar border regions. There are currently over 130,000 children being educated in Karen schools operated in Myanmar by the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Karen Refugee Council (KRC) in Thailand. These schools are taking advantage of mother tongue-based principles of literacy, which emphasize that literacy starts with the home language. Since the 1980s at least a million people have completed the basic Karen curriculum focused on Karen literacy, with many of those continuing to secondary and post-secondary education where programs are taught in Karen and English. Karen language education continues despite the marginalization of Karen schools in Myanmar since Ne Win's 1962 coup. At that time, Karen schools in the Delta Region were replaced with Burmese language schools from the Burmese Ministry of Education. Since then Karen systems of education have remained strong in border areas outside control of the government. Indeed, Karen programs may have even strengthened after many government-funded schools were shuttered following the emergence of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) in 2021. Karen education is strong because, in part, it moved into Thailand, where schools continue both in refugee camps, and in migrant schools. The Karen language instruction in Thailand is typically organized by the KRC, which also provides support to schools still operated by the KNU inside Myanmar. The Karen schools in both places reflect Karen education traditions inherited from the Karen schools in Burma, which began in the 19th century. They do this while using teaching techniques and pedagogy adapted from the West, which train students to be "critical thinkers" for a Karen democracy. Development since the 1840s Karen education actually began in the 1840s with the development of modern Karen literacy, the establishment of a printing press, and the emergence of schooling. The earliest efforts were in the Irrawaddy River Delta and Rangoon (now Yangon). This led to a rapid expansion of the Karen school systems over the following decades. Karen and English language programs flourished around the large Christian mission compound in Bassein (Pathein, the capital of Ayeyarwady Region) in the Irrawaddy River Delta, as well as in Rangoon. Baptist Mission primary schools among Karen were first opened by American Baptist missionaries in 1852 at Bassein. A Karen secondary school was opened in Koesue in 1854. The Karen Baptist Theological Seminary was already established in 1845 in Rangoon to train pastors literate in Karen and English.

This is a transcript of an interview and Stein Toeneson I did about Myanmar peace initiatives in June, 2022.  Lots of provocative thoughts to kick around.  Rodion Ebbighausen, himself an authority on Myanmar, was the interviewer.  https://myanmar-podcast.com/img/10%20Myanmar%20in%20a%20PodShell.pdf

www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/guest-column/the-long-strange-story-of-thedisappearing-railway-from-myanmar-to-southern-china.html Guest Column The Long Strange Story of the (Disappearing) Railway from Myanmar to Southern China The Gokteik Viaduct after the end of World War II (c. 1947), showing damage from aerial bombings sustained during the Burma Campaign. / The author's collection

PUblished at hte following Link https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/book-review-how-americas-consular-service-gets-smart-review-quiet-good-and-ugly-americans

Both of these earlier books anticipated the catastrophes emerging from America's diplomaticmilitary complex, first in first Vietnam (1975), and later in Afghanistan (2021). Both 1950s novels are savage satires of American naivete. The basic critique of both older books is that the flawed assumptions of American exceptionalism is doomed to fail wherever it is tried. The two new books are different. They do not find satire, but instead find tragedy at the heart of America's foreign policy misadventures. The tragedy being that the five wise protagonists, four from the CIA, and one from the State Department, were ignored by official Washington. The protagonists feature in the two books are not creatures of Washington, but from the field, and they are presented as the best that an exceptional America offer. If only the political bosses in Washington had listened to the politically savvy CIA agents Anderson

As recently as 2020 one of the most prominent logos on Yangon billboards, vehicles, and signs was the woven fibers of the Joint Peace Fund (JPF). The JPF arrived in Yangon in 2016, loudly proclaiming that it had pledges from nine western donors who would fund US$100 million in peacebuilding activities between 2016 and 2021.

's peoples have looked inward, focused on the coup, the battles on the streets of Yangon and Mandalay, economic collapse, and the resumption of highland wars. Left to fester is another looming catastrophe on the western border of Myanmar with Bangladesh, where about 1 million Rohingya refugees forced out of their homes by the Tatmadaw (Myanmar's military) in 2012 and 2017, wait for a cyclone to drown their camps. Meanwhile, the Bangladeshi government rattles its sabers in The Diplomat, insisting that the burden on Bangladesh is unjust, and must be resolved by the refugees returning to Rakhine State. International actors often agree, pointing out that such "return" policies are consistent with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) policies asserting that return to the home country is preferable to resettlement in a "second country" like Bangladesh, or a plausible third country further afield. But in fact, Voluntary Repatriation Doctrine for refugees is too simplistic, and does not reflect complexities inherent to refugee situations. The result is long-term "temporary" situations like the refugee camps at Cox's Bazar, which have been opening, shutting and opening since 1978.

This is a story about when I went to California's prisons with my colleagues, and was talked to lifers, including one of whom was in Administrative Segregation.  He was a cheerful lad, whose favorite observation was that things "Could be Worse!"  This is a fun essay about the nature of the human spirit even in the worst of places. It was published in a German policing journal, Polizei Wissen.

Politics is about a people coming together to organize power for the benefit of a larger group around shared values. Since the British arrived in Myanmar in 1825, the right to practice politics was monopolized first by the British colonial powers and later by military dictatorship. Politics were illegal and activists arrested, parties banned and villages attacked. People feared politics. Following the British, politics was later reserved for men in the Burmese military. Rules were handed down from the center of power to the trained technocrats accountable to colonial and military powers who dangled riches and promotions. Technocratically trained police, lawyers, tax collectors and soldiers squelched the learned art of democratic politics by invoking fear of arrest and the hangman's noose. Outsiders from Britain and India filled these positions, issuing orders on behalf of the British Raj without the messy democratic business of listening to others, or seeking consensus and compromise. Burma's military rulers after 1962 replicated this system. Colonialism and later military rule were "anti-politics machines," ruling through fear without an appeal to compromise, consensus, or local values. "Transition" is a favorite word Myanmar's donor community highlights for development planning, particularly since 2015. The transition, presumably, is about the shift from dictatorship to a "more peaceful, stable, democratic and pluralistic society" as the British government asserts on its website. Or as USAID explains: "USAID supports [only] credible, inclusive, and informed elections and is providing technical assistance in preparation for the 2020 election." These outsiders are skilled, well trained and well educated, just like the people reporting to the British colonial government were. They are also outsiders seeking promotion and riches in a world focused on hierarchies in New York, Brussels, Tokyo, London, Geneva and Beijing, not Yangon. The difference of course is that today's donors don't threaten dissidents with imprisonment or the hangman's noose. But these outsiders create an anti-politics machine that is similar to that of colonial Burma. Only now the donors operate it using

Opinion piece about voluntary repatriation policies of the UNHCR and international NGOs with respect to the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.  https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/guest-column/insistence-on-voluntary-rohingya-repatriation-to-myanmar-lacks-moral-imagination.html