[3/26/2024] Myanmar in Crisis: Human Rights, Regional Impacts, and Future Prospects

Wai Wai Nu is the founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Peace Network (WPN) and a counselor at the National Unity Consultative Council in Myanmar. She spent seven years as a political prisoner in Burma. Since her release from prison in 2012, she has devoted herself to promoting democracy and human rights. Through WPN, Wai Wai works to build peace and mutual understanding between Myanmar’s ethnic communities and aims to empower and advocate for the rights of marginalized women throughout Myanmar. To engage youth in the peacebuilding process and promote democracy education, Wai Wai founded the Yangon Youth Center, where young people from diverse backgrounds can come together to learn, share, and explore their ideas and promote leadership in social justice, political movements, and peace-building. She organized the My Friend Campaign, which involved hundreds of youth from different communities, that aimed to promote tolerance and reduce discrimination among diverse groups.

 

Wai Wai has been recognized as a Champion of Prevention by the United Nations Office of the Prevention of Genocide and Responsibility to Protect. She is an Obama Foundation Scholar at Columbia University and a Bush Institute Liberty Leadership Scholar. Wai Wai is the recipient of various awards, including the N-Peace Awards (2014), Democracy Courage Tributes, World Movement for Democracy (2015), Hillary Rodham Clinton Award (2018), City of Athens Democracy Award (2021), and International DVF Award (2021). She was also named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum; among “100 Top Women,” by BBC (2014); among 100 World Thinkers, by Foreign Policy Magazine (2015); Next Generation Leader, by Time Magazine (2017); Women of the Year, Financial Times (2018).

 

Wai Wai obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of Yangon in Myanmar and her Master’s degree in Law (LLM) from UC Berkeley’s School of Law. In recent years, she was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.

Christina Fink joined the Elliott School in 2011 as an associate professor in the International Development Studies Program. Since 2022, she has also been serving as the Director of the BA and BS in International Affairs Program.

She received her B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.

She has combined research, teaching, and international development work throughout her career. Primarily based in mainland Southeast Asia from 1995-2010, her full-time positions and program evaluation consultancies addressed civil society capacity building in Myanmar with particular attention to gender and social inclusion, and political, economic, and social reforms. During this time, she also wrote Living Silence in Burma: Surviving Under Military Rule (Zed Books: 1st edition 2001, 2nd edition 2009) and served as a lecturer and program associate at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute in Thailand.

In recent years she has contributed to the development of the GenderPro capacity-building and credentialing program run by GW’s Global Women’s Institute in partnership with UNICEF. She also served on the United States Institute of Peace senior study group on Myanmar which produced two reports: China’s Role in Burma’s Internal Conflicts (2018) and Anatomy of the Military Coup and Recommendations for the US Response (2022).Her latest publications have addressed the position of religious and ethnic minorities in Myanmar, anti-Muslim violence and the role of Facebook, and the many facets of civil society engagement in development in Myanmar.