This commentary was originally published by Nikkei Asia.

As Myanmar's national uprising against its military's Feb. 1, 2021 takeover enters its third year with no resolution in sight, the international community remains without a viable strategy to help end the crisis.

In April 2021, Association of Southeast Asian Nations leaders sought to lead the international response by proposing a five-point consensus plan to end the violence and start a dialogue to forge a compromise solution.

The consensus, however, was stillborn, both due to the regime's refusal to budge from its hard-line stance and widespread skepticism that any dialogue could lead to a compromise deal in what is fundamentally a zero-sum battle.

This month, ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Jakarta expressed disappointment at the lack of progress, even as they continued to promote the five-point consensus as the best way forward for Myanmar.

These are smart people. They know the consensus is leading nowhere but they continue to tout it as the path forward because member states are divided and cannot reach consensus on a better approach.

This impasse has left the U.S. in a bind. In the 2000s, ASEAN's engagement with Myanmar's then-military regime while the U.S. pursued a policy of sanctions and isolation was a constant irritant in Washington's relations with the bloc. Each side was disappointed and often frustrated with the other's stance.

In the current crisis, Washington has been more deferential to ASEAN, expressing support for its five-point plan despite the lack of progress.

This approach might have made sense initially, as it reinforced U.S. support for ASEAN centrality and hid the fact that Washington had no better ideas. But ASEAN's failure to move beyond its moribund consensus should be an overdue wake-up call for the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden.

Vows to continue to "stand with the Burmese people" ring increasingly hollow in light of continued U.S. support for ASEAN's failed approach and Washington's insistence on a peaceful resolution to a crisis for which there is no peaceful answer. The longer the U.S. follows this approach, the more its credibility will suffer, as will its ability to influence events in Myanmar.

The cautious U.S. approach to date is likely due to the reluctance of administration officials to take the risk of adopting a bolder policy of fully supporting the resistance. Perhaps they fear that doing so will only lead to more violence, or they question the ability of the disparate elements within the resistance to defeat the military or to hold the country together if they win.

American officials may also be concerned about prompting China to increase its support for the military regime, or may be so preoccupied with Ukraine that they cannot muster the energy to go all in on a strategically less important conflict.

Whatever the reason, Washington's approach has the U.S. notionally on the side of the resistance but without the commitment and resources to help it win.

Policymakers should recognize that the only potentially positive way out of this crisis is for the resistance to successfully oust Myanmar's military regime. As long as the military holds power, there is no hope for the country.

Supporting the resistance more fully carries risks. But staying on the current path all but guarantees years of continued violence, instability and suffering.

What, then, should the U.S. do? First, it should not go back to the previous era of badgering ASEAN to be tougher. That would be counterproductive. It should, however, stop pretending that the five-point consensus offers a path forward, or that there is a peaceful solution to the crisis.

To the extent that Indonesia, ASEAN's chair for 2023, offers a more ambitious approach, Washington should support Jakarta. The U.S. does not need to jettison ASEAN, but it should not tie itself to the bloc's lowest-common denominator.

Absent a viable ASEAN strategy, the Biden administration should assert leadership by offering much more support to the resistance campaign to force the military out of power, or at least to weaken it sufficiently that it looks for a way out.

This should include stepped-up engagement with the parallel National Unity Government and other resistance elements. NUG Foreign Minister Zin Mar Aung's high-level reception in Washington last week marked a positive step and should be followed by more regular meetings, including at the secretary of state level. The State Department should also appoint a career diplomat to serve as special envoy for Myanmar, engaging with the resistance and coordinating sanctions with key partners.

Washington should bite the bullet and provide substantial funding to the NUG and its partners, as envisioned in the recently passed Burma Unified through Rigorous Military Accountability Act.

This aid should not be conditioned on progress toward building a fully united resistance, for the simple reason that this process cannot be artificially forced. To the extent that Washington worries about the resistance's ability to account for the money, U.S. agencies should provide training rather than use the concern as an excuse not to offer aid.

Provision of substantial arms directly to the resistance is both unlikely to happen and would be difficult logistically, but channeling funds would free up resources that the NUG could use to purchase weapons.

The U.S. also should consider providing equipment to help the resistance improve communications and build on nascent efforts to supply internet access to the public. Washington can also gather military experts to consider ways to help the resistance counter the regime's air power, mindful of concerns about supplying sophisticated anti-aircraft systems.

The U.S. has been supporting democracy and civilian rule in Myanmar for decades but has punched far below its weight in the current crisis. It can and should provide much-needed leadership now, while continuing to partner with those elements in ASEAN that recognize that the current trajectory is not a viable option.

The United States can do much more to build closer partnerships with Southeast Asian countries, according to Scot Marciel, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at APARC, whose previous long career in the U.S. foreign service focused on Southeast Asia and included the roles of U.S. ambassador to Myanmar and Indonesia. He notes, however, that a deeper, more consistent engagement with Southeast Asian nations requires the United States to adopt a more systematic strategic approach to the region, one that draws on a positive agenda that transcends the U.S.-China great power competition.

Marciel recently joined APARC Visiting Scholar Gita Wirjawan, host of the popular Endgame video podcast, to discuss the geopolitical evolution of the Southeast Asian countries and how their relationships with the United States have been unfolding

Marciel is the author of the forthcoming book Imperfect Partners, which provides his on-the-ground witness account of the ups and downs of critical U.S. relationships in Southeast Asia. In his conversation with Wirjawan, he urges U.S. policymakers to design a positive agenda for engaging Southeast Asian countries in areas like health, climate change, and economic development.

The wide-ranging discussion addresses multiple other issues, including the unlucky history of Myanmar and how the international community can help Myanmar’s resistance prevail; the relevance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the dynamics between ASEAN and the Quad, the minilateral grouping comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States; and more.

This conversation with Marciel is part of an Endgame interview series Wirjawan is recording with Stanford experts during his residency at APARC.

Each year, Stanford Ph.D. candidates specializing in contemporary Asia join APARC as predoctoral fellows to advance their work in a collaborative research environment. This academic year, Ph.D. candidate in Economics Sally Zhang is using her time at APARC to form professional connections with a network of interdisciplinary scholars and finalize her dissertation. In it, she provides the first direct empirical evidence that working household members hide employment income from one another. Using a nationally representative dataset in Indonesia and field survey data collected in Kenya, she shows that workers hide up to 20% of their income from other household members.

In this post, Zhang describes her predoctoral fellowship experience at APARC and discusses her research on intrahousehold allocations in developing countries. APARC's predoctoral fellowship is now accepting applications for the 2023-24 academic year.

Most people do not live alone but rather in households where they can care for one another. Households make many important economic decisions that affect the welfare of their members, such as where to live, what to purchase, and how much to invest in children's nutrition and education. However, not all members of the household benefit equally from its decisions. Indeed, previous literature has found that women and children are more likely to live in poverty than men, even within the same household. So, understanding how households make decisions can help us create policies that reduce poverty and promote gender equality.

In my fieldwork, I learned that household members often do not share information about their income with one another, and many hide income from others in the household. I took an interest in studying this topic because without accurate knowledge of household income, households may be unable to make the best decisions, especially when resources are already limited. For example, if households underinvest in children's human capital due to income hiding, this can lead to worse development outcomes for the children and perpetuate the cycle of poverty. However, not much economic literature has been devoted to this topic.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive analysis from our experts.

In my paper, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Asymmetric Information and Hidden Income within the Household," I provide the first direct empirical evidence that working household members hide employment income from one another. Using a nationally representative dataset in Indonesia and field survey data collected in Kenya, I find that workers hide up to 20% of their income from other household members. Income hiding has real implications for household consumption and child development. Children who grow up in households where income is hidden from wives are more likely to be underweight for their age and less likely to be employed in adulthood.

A novel contribution of my paper is that I develop a unique survey-based method of measuring income hiding. Hidden income, by its nature, is difficult to measure. In my paper, I measure hiding by eliciting the same person's income multiple times, varying who answers the question and whether they answer it privately. For example, I compare how much a husband says he earns to how much his wife says he earns. I also compare how much a husband says he earns in private to how much he says he earns when his wife is around. If reported income differs systematically depending on who is doing the reporting and whether other household members are physically present, this suggests that there may be income hiding in the household (In the paper, I rule out alternative explanations such as measurement error or misreporting to the surveyor driving the results). Similarly, I can use the same methodology to measure hidden consumption, hidden savings, and hidden transfers.

I use two datasets in my paper: a nationally representative survey in Indonesia and a field survey that I conducted in western Kenya. Indonesia and Kenya are both lower-middle-income countries with high labor force participation rates. Most workers in these countries are self-employed or work in informal positions, suggesting that their income is easily hidden from others. For example, observing your spouse's income would be challenging if they are a street vendor or a motorbike taxi driver whose income fluctuates daily. By examining hidden income in both Indonesia and Kenya, I show that hidden income is a prevalent phenomenon in the developing world and that my methodology is useful in different contexts.

In both Indonesia and Kenya, I find that working household members hide employment income from other household members. The average magnitude of hiding is between 9% and 20%. In Indonesia, income hiding is correlated with more household spending on tobacco and more transfers to extended families, and less spending on protein-rich food. This is concerning because most low- and middle-income households in Indonesia do not have adequate protein intake, and inadequate protein is a major cause of child malnutrition. Indeed, I find that income hiding is correlated with worse child nutrition, but only when income is hidden from women. Households with measured income hiding from wives are 16% more likely to have underweight children compared to similar households where income is not hidden from wives. As adults, these children still fare worse than their counterparts who grew up in households without measured hidden income: girls are 22% more likely to be underweight, and boys are 7% less likely to be employed. In contrast, income hidden from men is not correlated with worse child outcomes. Such gender differences suggest that people may hide income for different reasons, and understanding why they hide is important for understanding the welfare impact of hidden income. In my ongoing research, I continue to study the causal mechanisms and consequences of intrahousehold hidden income.

I am honored to be a predoctoral fellow at APARC during the 2022-2023 academic year. With a group of interdisciplinary researchers, the center provides me with a unique opportunity to discuss my research with area experts outside my field. In addition, I had the opportunity to form personal connections with other fellows and learn about their diverse research interests and life experiences. Being located in Encina Hall has also encouraged me to attend events and meet scholars from different institutes across the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, such as young researcher workshops at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions.

As a sixth-year graduate student, I am primarily focused on completing my dissertation and exploring potential opportunities on the job market. I am deeply grateful for the relationships and opportunities that I have gained through APARC, as they will undoubtedly be invaluable to me in my future professional development.

In 2021, a military coup in Myanmar brought an end to the prospects for democratic reform that the country had sought to establish following the 2011 general election. Any constructive dialogue between ruling junta and ethnic minorities dissipated, and the country fell back into civil war. Meanwhile, in ostensibly democratic Indonesia and the Philippines, rebellions by the Moros and Acehnese were resolved. These developments bring several questions to the fore: Does democracy necessarily foster peaceful outcomes? What is the interactive process between the state and its opponents? And how might democratic institutions be used to manipulate and undermine insurgent ethnic minority groups?

These are some of the questions Dr. Jacques Bertrand has sought to answer in his research. Bertrand, a professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Political Science, is the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at APARC for the 2022 fall quarter. The fellowship, which is hosted jointly by APARC’s Southeast Asia Program (SeAP) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore, raises the visibility, extent, and quality of scholarship on contemporary Southeast Asia. The fellowship is now accepting applications for the 2023-24 cycle.

For Bertrand, the fellowship afforded the opportunity to advance his research into civil wars and war-to-peace transitions. He recently presented his work in a SeAP seminar entitled “Can Democracy Handle Ethnic War? Evidence from Southeast Asia.”

In his talk, Bertrand discusses how democracy helps to create credibility,  set terrain for negotiated agreements, and establish a framework for settling grievances. There is, however, an unresolved debate about the overall merits of democracy in  addressing secessionist or nationalist conflicts. According to Bertrand, the question of whether democracy can handle ethnic war needs more attention, as do less visible dimensions of peace agreements, negotiating forums, and post-legislative regulations.

We caught up with Dr. Bertrand to discuss his research and experience at Stanford this quarter. The conversation has been slightly edited for length and clarity.

How has your time at APARC as the Lee Kong Chian Stanford-NUS Fellow aided your research?

My time at APARC allowed a relatively short but rewarding experience to discover a new community of scholars working on Asia, finalize some writing commitments, and move ahead on a new project on War-to-peace transitions. After several years of heavy administrative load, it was nice to have the time and space to step away from my regular duties and teaching at the University of Toronto. The events and informal gatherings at APARC allowed me to exchange perspectives with a new set of scholars and engage a community deeply embedded in the academic and policy issues in Asia today. My webinar presentation also allowed me to draw from two of my recently published books, Winning by Process on Myanmar and Democracy and Nationalism in Southeast Asia,' to tease out some broader themes relating to democracy and ethnically based conflicts in the region.

I had the time and space to finalize a writing commitment on Nationalism in Southeast Asia as part of an Elements Series with Cambridge University Press. But I was also able to devote much of my time to further develop and work on my exciting new, large project on war-to-peace transitions, with a strong focus on Southeast Asia. After publishing two books on ethnic and secessionist movements in the region, this new project is concerned more with understanding the strategic decisions that non-state armed groups make to adhere to peace or return to war. The project has many components, including a large-N data analysis of our themes across regions over the last three decades, which is primarily led by my colleague Noel Anderson. I have been focused on the qualitative component of the project, primarily analyzing these strategic dimensions in Myanmar, the Philippines, and Indonesia. 

Another writing project I have been working on is a conceptual paper that draws understudied dimensions of why some groups choose to return to war while others preserve ceasefire and peace agreements. We examine closely armed group structures, their relationships to communities, and their paths in relative peace settings. I have been analyzing interviews that I conducted with team members on the Thai-Myanmar border in June, and planning our next phase of research to understand the evolution of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), especially since the passage of the Bangsamoro Basic Law in 2018.

What other aspects of your time at APARC have you benefited from? 

I enjoyed the engagement with the scholar community at APARC. SeAP Director Don Emmerson has been a great host of the LKC fellowship, and I certainly appreciated his comments and those of Oksenberg-Rholen Fellow Scot Marciel on democracy and ethnic conflicts in the region. I had the opportunity to discuss closely the work of APARC postdoctoral fellows and several other visitors, and to engage some of the fascinating members of this year’s cohort of the Global Affiliates Program . 

While I am very grateful for time at APARC to remove myself from my usual busy environment, and have time to reflect more deeply on this project, there are still some positive by-products of our increasingly online and connected lives that platforms like Zoom intensified during the pandemic. In my case, I was able to continue regular contact with team members to coordinate and advance on these various aspects of the project, including to regularly meet with team members conducting fieldwork. 

What are your plans for the second part of your fellowship in Singapore? Are there any special collections at NUS you look forward to accessing?

During my time at NUS, I will continue to work intensively on the war-to-peace transitions project. The project will be moving rapidly into fieldwork in the Philippines. I will spend much of the time at NUS evaluating and assessing the fieldwork data that we’ve obtained so far in Myanmar, planning and adapting interview instruments for the context of the Philippines, working with secondary literature, and coordinating research assistants’ work that will help to bolster our understanding of the evolution of the MILF during the last two decades. I will be joining one of my doctoral students and team members for two weeks to conduct interviews and calibrate our approach.

An important aspect of our project is policy-oriented. With funding from the United States Institute of Peace, I am also looking at how multilateral interventions can be better targeted to enhance non-state armed groups’ adherence to ceasefires and peace, based on our close analysis of these dimensions in Southeast Asia and more broadly. I will be writing a draft paper with one of my PhD students who is taking the lead on this particular aspect of the project.

NUS has a very large number of colleagues who work on similar issues in Southeast Asia., I look forward to benefiting from their insights, with a view of enriching our mutual understanding of complex conflict issues in the region.

What is on the horizon for you? What's next?

After this rich year, I will be returning to regular teaching at the University of Toronto in Fall 2023.  I will continue to coordinate and develop the collaborative work that I have been pursuing this year, and new work that we are also fostering through my Post-Conflict Reintegration Lab (Postcor Lab).

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) is pleased to announce that Ambassador Scot Marciel has been appointed the Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow, working within the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). Mr. Marciel has more than 35 years of experience in diplomacy and public policy, much of it focused on Southeast Asia. Most recently, he was a visiting scholar and practitioner fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC.

“Scot brings a deep understanding of Southeast Asian nations and unique expertise on the policy dynamics that have shaped the course of U.S.-Southeast Asia relations,” said Gi-Wook Shin, director of Shorenstein APARC. “We are fortunate to have him with us at APARC as we continue working together to bridge the worlds of scholarship and practice to foster intellectual exchange and policy dialogue on Southeast Asia and U.S. interests in the region.”

During his foreign service career, Marciel served as U.S. ambassador to Myanmar from March 2016 through May 2020, leading a mission of 500 employees during the difficult Rohingya crisis and spearheading U.S. efforts to normalize the bilateral relationship with Myanmar during its democratic transition. He also served as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia from 2010 to 2013 and the first U.S. ambassador for ASEAN affairs from 2008 to 2010. He twice served as the senior U.S. official responsible for relations with Southeast Asia in the State Department, first as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific and later as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific.

Early in his career, Marciel opened and led the U.S. State Department’s first post-war office in Hanoi, Vietnam, and worked in the U.S. embassies in the Philippines and Hong Kong. His other assignments included posts in Turkey, Brazil, and in the State Department’s Office of Monetary Affairs.

Marciel is the author of the forthcoming book Imperfect Partners: The United States and Southeast Asia, which will be published by Shorenstein APARC in fall 2022. Drawing on his extensive experience as a former senior U.S. diplomat and his direct involvement in some of the most pivotal turning points in America’s relationships with Southeast Asian nations, the book analyzes important domestic developments in the region, examines the interplay between them and U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia, and considers the way forward in U.S. engagement with the region.

“I'm looking forward to continuing to write and speak about critical, current policy issues in Southeast Asia, ranging from the Myanmar crisis to U.S. efforts to bolster its economic diplomacy," said Marciel.

Marciel earned a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Davis.