Social welfare provision offers a lens through which to understand how governments, religious institutions, civil society organisations and local communities respond to people’s needs. In Myanmar, these relationships have long shaped access to education, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Prolonged armed conflict and political instability have added pressure to these arrangements, raising questions about how essential services continue when institutional support becomes uncertain.

Drawing on life-history interviews with educators across four Montessori initiatives, this talk examines how educational provision is sustained through civil society networks, women’s religious congregations and their relationships with existing schools. Montessori, an internationally introduced philosophy centred on children’s independence and self-directed learning, provides a lens for examining how educators reconcile their professional beliefs with the institutional rules, legal requirements and resources that shape their work.

The findings show that keeping an organisation running involves ongoing negotiation between educators’ philosophies, institutional expectations and the formal and informal rules of everyday practice. Educators may retain, adapt and transmit specialist knowledge after organisational support declines. These processes are shaped by how authority, professional recognition and access to resources are distributed. The talk argues that understanding continuity in non-state welfare requires attention not only to whether organisations remain open, but also to who holds authority, whose knowledge is recognised and who carries the work of leading through disruption.

Speaker

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Maw Maw Khaing is a DPhil researcher from Myanmar in Education at the University of Oxford. She is a recipient of the Wai Seng Senior Scholarship at St Antony’s College and the Senesh Fellowship from the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) Foundation.

Her doctoral research focuses on education continuity and education leadership in continuity amidst prolonged crisis. She works across comparative and international education, teacher leadership in crisis, and the movement of educational ideas across borders. In her work, she also investigates how internationally introduced pedagogical approaches adapt within local educational settings and how educators negotiate the cultural, institutional, and material conditions that enable or constrain their practice.

Alongside her research, she is a practitioner who founded a network of schools in Myanmar that promotes bilingual education and project-based learning. She holds a Master of Education from Harvard University.

In recent years, questions have been posed regarding the durability of the current rules-based (liberal) international order and what this means for the practice of international relations. In this talk, Benjamin Ho, an assistant professor from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) argues that Southeast Asia countries are increasingly challenged in their ability to hedge and would have to make some tough choices between US and China (Chimerica) in their foreign relations. To this end, domestic myths will become increasingly important in determining how states exercise their foreign policy choices and preference towards international order. Drawing from his vantage point as a hybrid scholar/thinktank analyst in a key Southeast Asia state and supplemented with fieldwork experience elsewhere in Northeast Asia (Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan), Ho argues that states will view the international order as good or just if the characteristics of such an order support and allow for preservation for domestic myths. On the other hand, states will view the international order unfavourably if the characteristics of this order run up or challenge their ability to preserve domestic myths. As such, how Southeast Asia countries chose would provide clues to the future of the international order and the extent to which hedging remains a (still?) viable strategy moving forward. 

Speaker

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Dr Benjamin Ho is Assistant Professor and Coordinator at the China Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore. He obtained his PhD from the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK under a RSIS PhD scholarship. His research focus includes the study of China’s international relations, with an emphasis on Chinese political worldview and exceptionalism thinking. Other research interests include security multilateralism in the Asia Pacific region with a focus on regional institutions and fora, national security (intelligence), the sociology of religion and public theology (Christianity). He is the author of the book China’s Political Worldview and Chinese Exceptionalism: International Order and Global Leadership (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and is working on his second book project on Political Myths and International Order in Northeast Asia (with a focus on China, Japan and South Korea). He has also published in journals such as China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, East Asia: An International Quarterly, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Asia Policy, and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He was a Fulbright scholar at the Elliot School of International Affairs (George Washington University between 2021-2022), a Taiwan MOFA Fellow at the Institute of Political Science Academia Sinica (Taiwan) in 2022 and a Republic of Korea-ASEAN Scholar at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy in 2025.

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This talk is open to Stanford affiliates.

It is part of the APARC Southeast Asia Program Workshop series. Learn more about the workshop and student presentation opportunities here.

After the 2021 Myanmar military coup, over 40,000 Chin displaced migrants from Myanmar fled across the border into Mizoram, India. Despite India not being a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Refugee Protocol, the Mizoram welcomed the migrants as "refugee brothers and sisters". This talk investigates the informal "refugee" status, or "raltlan" in the Mizo language, which positions migrants as ethnic kin, but also subjects them to legal exclusion and moral judgements. This research offers broader lessons on how colonialism, minoritization within the nation-state order and transborder ethnic ties facilitate, but also complicate informal refugee reception. 

Speaker
 

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Swan Ye Htut (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Stanford's Sociology Department. His dissertation focuses on how Chin displaced migrants from Myanmar navigate informal refugee reception in the Indian northeastern state of Mizoram. He has published research on migration, race/ethnicity, social movements, and Southeast Asia in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Big Data & Society. Swan holds an MA in Sociology from Stanford University and a BA in Sociology and Global Studies at UCLA.

“What’s Your Agenda?”: Attacks Against the Free Press and Democratic Backsliding in Southeast Asia

The 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award Honors Singapore-Based Investigative Journalist Shibani Mahtani

In her 15 years reporting on Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Shibani Mahtani has witnessed the region’s once-vibrant press corps dwindle in size, as journalists are jailed, harassed, and sued by governments. This pressure, along with an industry-wide strain on the business of journalism, has forced many outlets to shutter. In her keynote address, she will discuss how this diminished media environment has had a profound impact on regional democracy at a time of seismic global instability and consider the challenges of navigating this reality.

Join APARC as we recognize Mahtani, winner of the 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award, for her exemplary reporting that has brought critical attention to the erosion of democracy and human rights across Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Mahtani's keynote will be followed by a conversation with two experts: Anna Fifield, a New Zealand journalist, foreign affairs analyst, and winner of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award, and Oren Samet, assistant professor of political science at Rice University. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session.

Panel Chair: James Hamilton, vice provost for undergraduate education, Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program.

Lunch is included for registered attendees.

Speakers   
 

Shibani Mahtani is a Singapore-based investigative journalist. Until February 2026, she was an international investigative correspondent for the Washington Post. She focuses on accountability-driven investigations across the Asia-Pacific region. She joined The Post's foreign desk in 2018 as the Southeast Asia and Hong Kong Bureau Chief, and was honored with awards including a Human Rights Press Award for her reporting on the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Prior to joining The Post, Shibani was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal based in Singapore, Myanmar, and Chicago. She is an author of Among the Braves, a narrative non-fiction history of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement.

Anna Fifield, a New Zealand journalist and foreign affairs analyst, writes a newsletter on New Zealand’s role in global affairs. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, contributing to their work on New Zealand geopolitics and the U.S.-New Zealand partnership. She spent more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post and Financial Times, reporting from Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, and later served as the Washington Post’s Asia-Pacific editor, overseeing coverage of China and the wider region. From 2020 to 2022, she was editor of the Dominion Post in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city. Fifield was a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University, where she studied political change in closed societies, and won Stanford University’s 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award for excellence in reporting on Asia. Her book on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, The Great Successor, has been translated into 24 languages.

Fifield serves on the Shorenstein Journalism Award judging committee.

Oren Samet is an assistant professor of political science at Rice University. His research centers on the international dimensions of authoritarian politics and democratization, with a particular emphasis on how opposition actors engage both at home and abroad. Bridging international relations and comparative politics, his work explores the dynamics of autocratization, how opposition parties compete in unfair elections, and how non-state actors shape foreign policy across borders. Further research examines innovations to confront democratic backsliding and the challenges of external support for democratic governance. Samet’s research draws on extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia, his primary regional focus, complemented by analysis spanning a broad range of autocratic and backsliding contexts. His academic work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Communication, and his other writing has been published in outlets including Foreign Policy, Slate, and World Politics Review. Before entering academia, Samet was based in Bangkok, Thailand, and worked on democracy and human rights initiatives across Southeast Asia, engaging with politicians and civil society. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Panel Chair
 

James Hamilton is the Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program. His most recent book is You Got In! Now What? 100 Insights into Finding Your Best Life in College (Radius Book Group, 2025). His books on media markets and information provision include All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, 2004), Regulation Through Revelation: The Origin, Politics, and Impacts of the Toxics Release Inventory Program (Cambridge, 2005), and Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming (Princeton, 1998). His book Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Harvard, 2016) focuses on the market for investigative reporting. Through research in the field of computational journalism, he is exploring how the costs of story discovery can be lowered through better use of data and algorithms. He is co-founder of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, affiliated faculty at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and member of the JSK Fellowships Board of Visitors.

Hamilton serves on the Shorenstein Journalism Award judging committee.

This talk discusses the Thai monarchy’s strategic response to the 2020 youth-led protests which called for reforms to the royal family’s place in national life. The speaker argues that King Vajiralongkorn did not merely seek to restore the status quo but executed a profound transformation which he terms ‘overt power codification and defensive hyper-personalisation.’ This shift converted informal influence into visible, legally codified, and personally commanded authority, entrenching absolute power within the constitutional framework to neutralise reformist momentum. The speaker documents this pivot across four interconnected institutional axes: financial codification, achieved through the 2017–18 legal restructuring that transferred Crown Property Bureau assets to Vajiralongkorn’s personal ownership; political gatekeeping, which used institutional proxies like the Senate and Constitutional Court to nullify electoral mandates; symbolic control, through a strategy of ‘defensive hyper-personalisation’ that asserts a direct personal command over the state, military, and dynastic narrative; and legal coercion, identifying the systematic weaponisation of the lèse-majesté law as it evolved from a criminal deterrent into a definitive constitutional veto. The speaker concludes that while the 2020 protests established royal reform as the central fault line of Thai politics, the monarchy’s aggressive consolidation has replaced the consensus-based network monarchy with a more confrontational and legally absolute model of rule.

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Pavin Chachavalpongpun is a professor at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, He is the chief editor of the online journal Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, in which all articles are translated from English into Japanese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Vietnamese, Burmese and Khmer. Earning his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Pavin is the author and editor of several books including the upcoming, Kings in the American Mirror: Two Centuries of U.S.-Thai Monarchy Relations (University of Hawai’i Press).

Moderator

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David Cohen is a leading expert in the fields of human rights, international law and transitional justice, as well as one of the world's leading social and legal historians of ancient Greece. Cohen taught at UC Berkeley from 1979-2012 as the Ancker Distinguished Professor for the Humanities, and served as the founding Director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center, which moved to Stanford in 2013 and became the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. He now serves as the Center's faculty co-director. Cohen holds the WSD-HANDA Professorship in Human Rights and International Justice and is appointed in the Classics department at Stanford. He is also appointed as Professor of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems in the Department of Environmental Behavior Sciences at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability.