Tony Waters

Leuphana University of Lüneburg

Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2024 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 offic...

Book review of Hans-Bernd Zöllner's new literary biography of Burma's first Prime Minister U Nu.

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 T...

This chapter describes how Aung San, U Nu, and Ne Win, the founding Prime Ministers of Burma (1946–1962), set about creating a new narrative of Burmese history which justified the emergence of the newly independent nation. They traced Burmese military exceptionalism to the age of ancient Burmese kings. And placed what became Bamar Buddhist culture...

This chapter describes how Ne Win’s policies of Burmanization persisted after he stepped down from formal power in 1988, and after his death in 2002. Indeed, the Burmanization ethics had gripped the nation so tightly that the mass expulsion of Rohingya was a popular and logical result of how deeply Burmanization was embedded in the culture, even in...

I grew up in the Yangon River Delta under the Burmese Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) of General Ne Win, and became politically aware during the military’s State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) regime in the 1990s.

The habitus of Burmanization is deep within Burmese society. Only when the consequences of over sixty years of cultural conditioning are addressed, will the basis for peace be established. This will require the de-Burmanization, de-Militarization, and de-Centralization of Burmese society so that the multi-ethnic nature of Myanmar can be accommodate...

This last chapter highlights what Tony Waters learned from writing and working with his student Saw Eh Htoo, as well as his PhD students from Myanmar. Among the things learned are first that Buddhist political societies are not completely analogous to Greek Demos, Israeli Tribes, or Canadian Federalism; Myanmar needs to be evaluated on its own term...

This chapter summarizes Ne Win’s political ideology, which might be called “Ne Winism,” and describes how the ideology came to permeate Burma/Myanmar institutions. Ne Win’s philosophy emerged out of an understanding of Buddhist leadership, and Marxist doctrine, which in the hands of the army resulted in the violent Four Cuts campaigns in which the...

This chapter describes two types of history developed in colonial Burma and after. The first is the official modern history that government historians who write mass-produced schoolbooks emphasize. This history logically leads to the conclusion that Burmanized military rule is the best type of government today. Second, there is a more critical hist...

This chapter describes Ne Win’s how Burmanization ideology led to the oddly titled “Burmese Way to Socialism.” The goal of the ideology was to exclude Communists and capitalists and put the Burmese army at the center. To do this, Buddhism was put at the heart of the “Blue Book” which was an ideological statement describing the Burmese Way to Social...

This chapter describes the thesis of the book regarding the long-term impact of Ne Win’s Burmanization policies, which began after the 1962 coup. The policies emerged when the Burmese army sought to create a country unified around what they saw as a unified race, which they defined as the Burmese people. The multi-ethnic “indigenous” population was...

This book focuses on how Burmanization created and reinforced ethnic divides since the 1962 coup d’etat. when General Ne Win concentrated all authority in the Burmese speaking army. Background research for the book includes Burmese language materials from the Burmese Socialist Party (BSP) and others that describe with what the BSP believed in their...

International humanitarian policy (UNCHR) regarding the Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

This is my book review of Jill Rosenthal's book "From Migrants to Refugees."

Letter to the Editor defending Sociology, and questioning the lack of intellectual diversity in Business Departmens.

Op-ed about the war in Myanmar.

This book focuses on how Burmanization created and reinforced ethnic divides since the 1962 coup d’etat. when General Ne Win concentrated all authority in the Burmese speaking army. Background research for the book includes Burmese language materials from the Burmese Socialist Party (BSP) and others that describe with what the BSP believed in their...

Proposes detente between the US and China over Myanmar policies

International policy in Myanmar. Op-ed in The Irrawaddy.

Book review of a book about London. Good book!

Book Review of "The Opium Queen," a book about the opium trade in Burma in the 1940s and after. The focus is on Olive Yang.

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...

Population growth in Rohingya Refugee Camps

This is an article by Thai university lecturers describing what it is like to work with Chinese students.

Promising research from Thailand already highlights women in the sexual entertainment industry as being active participants in both intimate relationships and commercial transactions simultaneously. Notably, they are neither victims nor alienated laborers, as some activist narratives assert. Women working in Thailand’s sex entertainment industry co...

The story of railway, and lack of construction, in northern Burma, 1890-2022. Published in The Irrawaddy Magazine.

This is a book review of Erin Murphy's "Burmese Haze" which is about US foreign policy regarding Myanmar. The review asks why the role of US secret services was not covered more systeamtically.

In 1978, Thai author Rong Wongsavun published a book about his travels in California in general, and San Francisco in particular. The books tells a Thai audience why the Americans seem so strange, and how they see themselves. In this respect, the book is an ethnographic treatment of San Francisco from a Thai perspective. I am the editor and transla...

This article explores technical and socio-political factors that impacted construction of the Gokteik Viaduct railway bridge in Shan State, Burma, and the recurring failure of political powers to complete a continuous railway between Rangoon (Yangon) and Yunnan. Under rather contentious circumstances, the British government awarded an American stee...

This is a review the role American CIA agents played in the development of American foreign policy after World war II.

This is a transcript from a podcast interview about the political history of Myanmar, and the chances for peace in the context of the current violence.

This is a book review of Samson Lim's book "Siam's New Detectives."

M. R. Kukrit Pramoj 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 th...

Why did the Myanmar peace process fail? An op-ed piece ciritiquing the western-led peace process which collapsed on February 1 2021.

The cultural integration of international students in Thai Higher Education (Thai HE) is spurred by a government initiative known as Thailand 4.0, and has raised the educational bar. It is a lucrative move; increased university costs and access to home countries' courses ensure capable international students now seek affordable degree education in...

Thai Higher Education (Thai HE) is changing, due to international reform. This paper presents data collected in a longitudinal study carried out in Thailand during 2017–2018 using the US version of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and qualitative interviews. We offer a case study about the cultures and engagement of three groups of...

Op-ed about the Rohingya refugees stuck in Cox's Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Bringing together scholars and educators based in Myanmar, the USA, the UK, Denmark, and Thailand, this book presents new perspectives and research on the struggle for social justice and peace in Myanmar at this critical juncture. It shows how actors from diverse backgrounds and regions of Myanmar are drawing from their identities, evoking their ag...

I am one of the editors on this collection of essays regarding migration to, from, and within Myanmar. I was also co-author with Ashley South of the Introductory essay.

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 "self-forming 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...

Op-ed about the problems of nation-building in Myanmar and Afghanistan.

This is a book review of Peter Reid's book "Every Hill a Burial Place." The book is about a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania who was prosecuted for murdering his wife in the 1960s.

Commentary on American foreign policy in Myanmar after the February 1, 2021 coup.

This is a book review of a well-done ethnography of trans-national famliies in a northeastern Thailand in the early 2000s.

This is a commentary on the role of history in the Myanmar/Burma peace negotiations.

A nice story about a Shan teenager in the 1950s, how he became "Shan" during the bad times in Burma, and what this might mean for peace in Myanmar today.

This is a provocative article about the sociology of law, and the evolution of laws against genocide. The thesis is that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's presentation at the Hague in defense of Myanmar played a positive role in making such law more broadly applicable.

Book Review of Charmaine Craig's novel "Miss Burma."

Batman's Butler philosophizes about British colonialism.....

This column is about the effects that foreign aid in Myanmar has on the capacity of the Burmese people to "practice politics." It is an op-ed in The Irrawaddy.

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 spen...

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 fr...

This report is about our research regarding the integration of international students at Payap University. We used standard survey instruments with Chinese, International and Thai students to evaluate international interactions between students, and reactions to the Thai system from International and Chinese students.

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...

The article is about refugee repatriation policies of the UNHCR.

This is about the thoughts of the social theorist Kukrit Pramoj regarding democracy in Thailand and England, as published in his book Farang Sakdina in 1957/1958. https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/searching-for-classical-social-theory-in-thailand/

Yangon's INGOs are full of consultancy reports which offer "professional" opinions about conditions in Myanmar. NGOs, INGOS, and UN agencies investigate transitions regarding democracy, environment, federalism, ethnicity and, of course, gender. These are the subjects that donors are interested in-and thus willing to pay consultant companies tens of...

Critique of INGO workers in Yangon. Published in Irrawaddy of Yangon.

Book review of a biography of first President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

This is Chapter 2 in my book "Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline." Please also read Chapter 1!

Chapter 4 from my book "Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline."

CHapter 3 from my book "Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline." This chapter uses modern Myanmar and Congo as examples of how discpline works (and does not work) to order modern society. Chapters 1 and 2 are also on my Academia.edu and Researchgate.net sites. Please ask your library to order a copy of the real thing!

This is chapter 5 of my book Max Weber and the Modern Problem of Discipline. It is the chapter wihere the sociological looks at the consequences of the psychological conditioning that our society shapes us with. Please urge your library to purchase the book!

This book is specifically about sociologist Max Weber's (1863-1920) ideas regarding discipline. 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 institu...

Thai Philosopher Prawase Wasi has proposed a model of society which includes a Base, Stupa, and "Taam." The Base is the "self-forming groups" that are the basic building blocks of society. This creates a "Taam" which are the values, etc., that hold the self-forming groups together. The relationship between the Base and Taam is held in place by soci...

An opinion piece written for the Irrawaddy Times about the problems associated with refugee repatriation from Bangladesh to Myanmar.

Book review of a very interesting and creative book. Published in Indonesia!

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.

This is a book review of Rodney Stark's book "The Triumph of Faith"

This is a book review about Shane Strate's book about how Thailand lost territory to the French and British in the late nineteeth and early twentieth century, and the narrative the emerged to "explain" what happened. The book does a particularly good job describing how Siam/Thailand dealt with its border with French Indochina, in particular.

This paper summarizes the career of Thai writer 'Rong Wongsuwan. A translated portion of his book "Astride the Iron Dog" is included here in the form of a oral reading. The subjects dealt with include 'Rong's views of generational strife in America, poverty, the art of drinking whiskey, and Buddhist understandings of sin and merit in the context of...

The Mla Bri of northern Thailand are a small group of hunter-gatherers who settled into settlements in the late twentieth century. One of the four places they settled was Ban Bunyuen. In 2013, a demographic survey of the settlement was undertaken. This was combined with mortality data from the last 15 years to describe the changing demgraphics, and...

‘Rong Wongsuwaan (young man!) is a major Thai writer from the second half of the twentieth century. His published work began in the 1950s with a photo-essay of the people living in Bangkok’s dump, and continued until his death in 2009. And through it all, he signed his name as “young man!” in the belief that he had stopped aging at age 28. As with...

This is book review of the reports of the Special Rapporteur for Religious and Belief at the United Nations.

Gaes (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between prison-based education programs and post-release outcomes. His analysis assesses if, how, and why adult-basic education, GED programs, and vocational training programs affect post-release recidivism and employment rates. Gaes’ analysis showed that inmates who participated in any type...

“ Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft societies” refers to definitions established by the German sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, who described “community and society.” Both theorists drew contrasts between a modern society dominated by rational calculations in Gesellschaft (roughly, “market society”) and the traditional, affectual values of...

Book Review of an interesting historical novel about Ho Chi Minh's stay in Thailand in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was in Thailand for about 1.5 year.

A classic definition of social inequality comes from the sociologist Max Weber, who wrote that there are three fundamental types of inequality. The first is based in the marketplace and is “social class”. The second, and more important distinction, is based in estimations of honour that Weber called in German Stand, which traditionally is translate...

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are important distinctions made by classical sociologists including Max Weber and Ferdinand Toennies. Gemeinschaft refers to the most elemental type of society, founded on feelings of group identity. Gesellschaft societies are mediated by the impersonal rational marketplace. All societies have a mix of Gemeinschaft and...

Prisons are far from my life. My wife and I selected a place of immense natural beauty in Northern California to raise our family with many mountains, streams, and lakes that afford hiking, camping, canoeing, fishing, and skiing; all healthy and active things to do with children. I saw my children in a place of beauty every day. Their small town sc...

This book reflects a favorite teaching strategy Bill learned from reading Richard Elmore (2011). At the end of a course, Bill likes to ask students to respond to the following prompt, “I used to think … and now I think ….” This kind of reflection becomes even more interesting when students reframe their current understanding of problems and issues...

AB 900 had a strange mix of goals—those from the prison system and from the educational establishment. Central though is the dream of “evidence-based research” that dominated discussions in public administration in the 2000s.

The first decade of the twenty-first century was challenging for corrections in California as prisons were caught in a paradox of using overcrowded facilities designed to punish criminal misdeeds, while at the same time they were charged to rehabilitate inmates in a fashion that reduces future law-breaking. Vocational education courses offered in p...

Supervision of our research at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was assigned to a consultant from the Research Division, even though our project was under the Correctional Education Division. This, in effect, gave us two bosses at the CDCR, as well as a nominal third boss at UC Davis who handled the accounting betw...

I am proud of my experience and abilities as an interviewer as I began this project. I have spent 9 years as a human resources (HR) director and Assistant Superintendent in a school district where my most important responsibility was developing processes for the selection and development of new teachers and support staff. To accomplish this goal, I...

The passivity of the education administrators was at first striking, but I came to understand it as a normal response to a 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.

Based on this thorough evaluation of the 12 vocational education courses and 19 classes, several recommendations are offered. The recommendations come not only from the researchers’ observations but also from the interviewees who were asked to offer suggestions that would make vocational education more efficient and effective.

The purpose of this evaluation was to determine whether the 12 vocational education courses in the study help to reduce recidivism among students. This occurs in the context of a recidivism rate that currently stands at 67.5 % over a 3-year period after release according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CDCR (2010). T...

This book is about an evaluation rooted in evidence-based research that failed. Not only did the evaluation fail, but the findings it was supposed to highlight never materialized, and the program we evaluated disappeared in the flurry of budget cuts that occurred following the recession of 2008–2009. However, one of the highlights of the 3-year eva...

We were brought to the prison by our guide, a former vocational education instructor who had been promoted to be a system-wide vice principal (VP) at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) headquarters in Sacramento. On the drive down, it became apparent that he despised inmates and saw them as always conniving, plotting...

Chapter 10 is the “Results” section of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) report and contains extensive quotation from inmates, teachers, and CDCR administrators about vocational education in California prisons. The Results section is focused to responses to the CDCR’s 12 research questions. Of these questions, the m...

One of the office services classes we observed was taught by an experienced instructor who combined excellent management skills and modeled the kind of professional relationship inmate students would find from a supervisor in a contemporary office setting. She had designed the classroom to take advantage of office technology as a key facet of curri...

This essay begins in February 2009 and picks up again in November 2011. In both months, I met and talked with prisoners in California who had been sent to prison with a sentence of “Life Without Parole” or LWOP in the acronym-plagued prison culture of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). LWOP is the most severe penalt...

At the first prison we visited for this study, we came upon a greenhouse. We were visiting the landscaping class to see what kinds of inmates were enrolled, how the teacher managed class, and what materials she had on hand. The teacher mentioned that a greenhouse was at the prison but could not be used yet because it was not assembled. I asked the...

This evaluation of vocational education in California’s prisons necessarily required multiple methods to answer the research questions posed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the general limitations inherent to collecting data in a prison environment, and limitations posed by the type of data the CDCR could prov...

We went into this evaluation with the hope of doing a good job and providing the evidence “decision makers” need in order to make sound evidence-based decisions about curricula and vocational education. This, in turn, would be focused by the “criminogenic” needs detailed in the Expert Panel’s (2007) report (see Chap. 6, p. XX). During the evaluatio...