We often picture peace like a signed paper, a big event with handshakes and cheering. We think of it happening in meeting rooms and official places. But real peace, the kind that truly helps and heals, doesn't start with signatures. It starts with regular people who choose to live together even when things are broken. And most often, this happens right where we live, in our communities.

Our communities aren't perfect. They carry old hurts, memories, disagreements, and problems. But they are also the places where we learn to get along. It's where a child first understands what is fair, where neighbors begin to feel safe with each other, where hurt people can talk and be heard – not just as an idea, but looking each other in the eye.

What gives communities their quiet strength in building peace isn't big ideas or popular leaders. It's something much simpler: the steady, determined act of building connections that don't give up.

When there's conflict, who we are – our background, our faith, even how we talk – can be used to push people apart. But communities, when cared for, can become places where we see each other as human again. They remind us that the "other side" isn't just some scary thing, but could be a teacher, someone's grandma, or the person running the corner store. In these places, stories can do what politics often can't: they can soften hearts made hard by fear.

Communities can handle complicated feelings and different viewpoints. Everyone doesn't need to agree; they just need to show up and be part of things. Sharing a meal, doing local traditions, or helping fix something together – these are ways people remember what it feels like to belong. This kind of belonging isn't about being the same. It's about being involved.

One smart thing about communities is they can change. They aren't stuck. They grow and adapt with what people need, what they've been through, and how relationships change. When times are tough, they can step up – helping people understand each other, taking care of those in need, or being the first to offer kindness. Even a community that's been hurt can still find its wisdom to stop more violence, to rebuild trust when official systems fail.

But none of this happens by itself. Communities can also be pulled apart, made angry, and broken. That's why building peace in communities has to be done with purpose. It means listening more than judging. It means protecting people who speak uncomfortable truths. It means finding ways to hold each other accountable and offer forgiveness, even in small, everyday ways.

Sometimes, peace looks like a community meeting where people who were once against each other sit together and plan the next harvest. Sometimes, it looks like kids in the same classroom learning new stories about themselves and their neighbors. Sometimes, it's a group of young people cleaning up the streets after a protest. These aren't small things; they are powerful signs of strength and togetherness in our towns and neighborhoods.

Putting energy into communities isn't ignoring bigger politics. It's making politics real by connecting it to how people actually live. It's saying: if we want peace that lasts, we must practice it not just in government buildings, but also in shared kitchens, local meetings, and neighborhood gardens.

Communities show us that justice needs to be felt to feel real. They show us that being treated with respect is built not just through rules, but through how we relate to each other. And they teach us that peace isn't when everyone agrees – but when the connections between people are strong enough to handle disagreements.

In this way, communities don't just receive peace. They build it. They create peace not by making everyone the same, but by making room for differences – so that these differences can become part of the shared future we are building together.

It is a strange and almost embarrassing fact that most of us will live and die without ever having had a proper conversation with the majority of people who shape our lives.

The grocer who quietly keeps us fed. The bus driver who gets us to work. The construction worker who builds our homes and infrastructure.
The nurse's aide who cares for the elderly or sick in our communities. The librarian who curates knowledge and provides a community space. The protester we see in the street, whose cause we never quite took the time to understand. These are not enemies. But nor, for the most part, are they friends. They are something far more mysterious: strangers with whom we share a political destiny.

This is where the idea of political friendship becomes both unsettling and beautiful. For it asks us to reimagine friendship—not as affinity, not as affection, but as a deliberate commitment to strangers, made not out of sentiment, but out of respect for the conditions of peace.
Political friendship is not about liking each other. It is about staying with each other, especially when it would be easier not to.

The philosopher Aristotle, when he spoke of political friendship, did not mean brunch companions or holiday card lists. He meant something sterner, and more demanding: a commitment to the good of the other, because their good is tangled up with our own. He recognized that cities are not made of buildings or borders, but of relationships—fragile webs of trust, loyalty, and the will to keep going, together.

In our modern world, such trust can seem absurd. We are encouraged to find our tribe, to avoid difficult people, to block, unfriend, cancel. We are told that politics is war, and that strangers are threats to be managed, not companions to be befriended.

But peace (I mean the real deal peace) is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of relationship, even among those who disagree. It is what happens when we look at the stranger across the table, not with suspicion, but with the difficult generosity of curiosity.
Political friendship begins when we agree to stay in the room.

Solidarity, then, is the emotional infrastructure that allows this kind of friendship to endure. It is what we practice when we show up for someone whose pain is not our own, but whose dignity matters to us nonetheless. It is what makes us march for the rights of workers we will never meet, or vote to protect refugees we may never see. It is not charity. It is not pity. It is the recognition that none of us can live well when others are abandoned.

In the context of peacebuilding, these ideas are not luxuries. They are the raw material of a different variety of politics that knows that justice cannot be engineered without empathy, and that laws will not hold if they are not also held together by shared feeling. Political friendship among strangers is not a utopia. It is a strategy for survival. It is also a daily choice. It happens when a mother in a war-torn village shares food with a displaced neighbor. When an activist listens—truly listens—to someone who once fought for the other side. When a policymaker writes a law not to please her base, but to prevent the next cycle of violence.

These acts are not dramatic. But they are revolutionary.

And yet we should not be naive. Political friendship will not solve all conflicts. Solidarity will not dissolve all hate. But they will allow us to keep trying, without needing to erase our differences. They give us the courage to coexist without collapsing into silence or revenge.

We often imagine that peace will come from treaties, or reforms, or charismatic leaders. But it is just as likely to come from small, slow commitments: listening more than we speak. Admitting we were wrong. Refusing to humiliate. Defending the rights of those we do not understand. Practicing hospitality in our politics.

In this light, political friendship is not merely an ethical ideal. It is the daily miracle of a society still willing to hold itself together—one thread of solidarity at a time.

And perhaps, in this fractured world, the most radical act of all is to make friends with a stranger not because they are like us, but because they are not like us. And yet, we are willing to stand with them anyway.

Conflict often arrives like an uninvited rude guest—loud, impolite, and entirely indifferent to our wishes for peace. It enters our lives through relationships, communities, ideologies, and nations. Most of us are taught early on that conflict is something to be avoided, suppressed, or defeated. We imagine harmony as the absence of friction, and discord as the sign of something broken.

But perhaps we’ve misunderstood the nature of conflict. Perhaps it’s not a problem to solve, but a tension to navigate. It is like an art to be learned, not a flaw to be erased.

Conflict is not simply the absolute opposite of peace. It is the birthplace of change. It is a forge in which difference rubs against difference, often painfully, sometimes violently, but with the latent potential to generate not destruction, but insight. The crucial question is not whether we will encounter conflict (because we certainly will) but how we will carry ourselves when it appears.

The tendency to flatten people into fixed identities and rigid categories has become not only fashionable but dangerous. Across the globe, groups arm themselves with unbending definitions of who belongs and who doesn’t, who is right and who is beyond redemption. These definitions feel comforting in their simplicity, but they are traps. They create enemies out of those we don’t yet understand. They turn fellow humans into static symbols. And they make conflict not a space for encounter, but a battlefield for annihilation.

But life, in its actual complexity, rarely cooperates with our desire for clear lines. People are contradictory. Cultures are layered. Truths are partial. And history is always unfinished.
Rather than insisting on ultimate answers, we might begin to value honest questioning. Rather than defending the sanctity of one perspective, we might explore what emerges when multiple experiences are placed side by side—not to cancel each other out, but to co-exist in a kind of generous tension. Not all ideas are equally valid, but most are worth listening to, at least long enough to understand where they come from.

A more humane society will not arise from the victory of one idea over another, but from the slow and courageous work of building relationships across difference, even when that work feels like a kind of surrender. It is not.
To step into conflict constructively is not to capitulate—it is to resist the tyranny of certainty. It is to treat others not as representatives of fixed categories, but as people in flux, like ourselves. It is to ask: What do you fear? What do you need? Where does it hurt? These are not soft questions. They are revolutionary ones. Because they make room for change—both in others and in us.
Conflict, then, can be a moral opportunity. A chance to reframe the conversation. It is to be reframed not in terms of domination or purity, but of responsibility and care. We can become architects of understanding, not by pretending all is well, but by acknowledging that tension is inevitable, and choosing nonetheless to shape it, rather than flee from it.

This shift toward what we might call "constructive zones" of conflict is not about agreement. It is about the refusal to let disagreement rot into hatred. It is about building social spaces where trust can grow, where dignity is not contingent upon uniformity, and where even those who have wronged can be re-engaged, not because they are innocent, but because they are human.

To draw conflict into a constructive zone requires immense discipline. It requires slowing down, even when emotions are fast. It requires speaking precisely, even when slogans are easier. It requires a style of leadership that does not confuse loudness with clarity, or righteousness with wisdom.
It also requires, most profoundly, a philosophical humility—a recognition that the world is not static, that identities are not final, and that today’s adversary may become tomorrow’s ally if treated with the patience of someone who understands that people are always becoming.
Peace, then, is not the absence of noise. It is the careful orchestration of competing sounds into something more tolerable, even beautiful. It is not the silence of winners, but the quiet confidence of those willing to stay in the room, to keep listening, and to keep building—even as the floor shifts beneath them.
Let us not fear conflict. Let us fear only the loss of curiosity or loss of wisdom. For as long as we are willing to wonder about one another, there is still hope. This hope is not for perfect harmony, but for something richer: a living peace, born of struggle, shaped by dialogue, and held together not by sameness, but by shared effort.

We’ve seen that peace is a dynamic thing. It’s something we must build all the time in a world that is always changing and is made by us. In this world, violence and feeling weak are not just things that go wrong sometimes. They are always here, part of how things are in the world.

So, fighting back the domination (resistance) and helping others (care) become very important ways to live our lives, both for ourselves and in groups. But we must also be careful not to think about fighting back and helping in simple, storybook ways. Fighting back is not just about romantic heroes who are good fighting against bad monsters. Helping others is not just about strong people being nice to weak people because they feel sorry for them.

Let us examine. Both resistance and helping others are smart actions. They are not forever, they can break easily, and we must always change how we do them because dangers change and people get hurt in new ways.

In old, simple stories, fighting back often looks like heroism. A small number of truly good people fight against many terrible monsters. These stories suggest that they will win because they are simply on the side of Truth. But if we see the world in a more real way, we know that no one side is completely right. And fighting back is never simple or only good. Even a fight for a very good reason can become bad. Even a very cruel power can sometimes do a small good thing, we look hard.

So, resistance is not saying that one side is forever Good and the other is forever Evil.

It is a practical, careful promise to say "no" to being controlled, to being treated as less than human, and to giving up hope. We do this even while knowing that we ourselves can never be perfectly good or clean in the fight.

Smart resistance asks us:

• Where and how can I say "no" to being controlled in the best way, without causing too much unnecessary harm?
• How do I avoid turning into the bad thing I am fighting against?
• What good things am I helping to build for the future, not just reacting to the bad things happening now?

In this way, resistance is not like a play on a stage. It is like careful gardening. It means pulling out the weeds of cruelty. But it also means making the ground ready so that something better might, one day, grow there.

In the same way, helping others – the act of taking care of people who are weak or hurting – must not be just about feeling emotional or being "nice." Helping is a choice you make carefully. It is often hard and has a price. It means deciding to protect lives and connections that can break easily, even when you know you won't always get something good back, and even when the world still has problems you can't fix easily.

In a world that is not fixed and always changing, helping must be smart:

• It must know its limits. We cannot save everyone. We should also not try to carry all the heavy problems alone.
• It must not treat people like babies. Real help makes people stronger; it doesn't trap them by telling stories that they can only be weak.
• It must know that help goes both ways. We do not help others like we are gods looking down; we help with them, knowing that we are all weak sometimes and need help. Besides, by helping others, we develop better habits.

So, mutual helping is important for the whole community, not just a private act.

It builds small groups and ways of being together that respect people through friendships, groups working together, and sense of community. These fight against the cold, cruel power of others with the strong, warm feeling of sticking together.

Perhaps the hardest but also most beautiful thing is that resistance and mutual helping must be done together, at the same time. Fighting back without helping becomes being mean but calling it fair. Helping without fighting back becomes giving up but calling it kindness.

To live in a good way in a world that is not fixed is to become skillful at holding two ideas that seem to not fit together. It is dialectics.

• To fight against the things that make people feel less than human without starting to hate those things or the people who do them.
• To help the people around us without pretending not to see how systems and power hurt them.
• To keep going knowing we will lose some fights, and that we will never have a final, sure win that lasts forever.

This is the good quality of people who choose to be active in the world without pretending things are perfect. They do not hold onto ideas of perfect places that don't exist. They do not give up and think nothing good can happen. Instead, they build, even in groups that don't last forever, with broken hopes, in systems that are not finished – the strong but breakable ways of living where respect, sticking together, and hope can still live.

In this strange, changing world, smart resistance and smart mutual helping are not things we can choose to do or not do. They are what give us our respect and worth as humans. They don't promise there will be no violence, or that we will never feel weak.

They give us something calmer, stronger, more like real people: the ability to live, to act, and to love like our lives are important even when the world doesn't promise that they are important.

And maybe in that "like," in that kind, strong act of pretending that becomes real when we promise to do it, we find the closest thing to being saved that this changing world gives us.

Let me recite the first words of Dhammapada.

Preceded by mind
are phenomena,
led by mind,
formed by mind.

To live is to live with others. From birth, we are not thrown into the void but into relationships — of care, language, memory, and meaning. We do not choose to be born into a culture, into a way of life, into the rhythms of a shared world. This belonging is not an accident. It is our first condition of being.

It is in this sense that living in society is natural — not as a biological law, but as an existential fact. We grow by reflecting others, negotiating norms, finding shelter in shared rituals and stories. There is no self that stands before society; rather, the self is formed through it.

And yet, this truth — that we are communitarian beings — must not be confused with the illusion that our communities or identities are fixed, pure, or eternal. Cultures are not sealed containers. They are not singular essences that define us once and for all. Cultures evolve, split, remix, and interact. People migrate across them, reinterpret them, and sometimes reject them altogether.

To defend the dignity of community life is not to defend closed essentialism. It is to recognize that we inherit social forms, but we also transform them. That we are born into stories, but we can rewrite their endings. We are not condemned to mimic what came before. We are entrusted with shaping what comes next.

A healthy communitarian vision must be open to this tension. It must affirm that society matters — that local belonging, shared languages, mutual responsibilities, and intergenerational care are crucial for human flourishing. But it must also reject the temptation to turn belonging into a prison, or to use community as a weapon against outsiders, dissenters, or the newly different.

What emerges is a relational way of life: one that neither isolates the individual nor freezes the community into an unchanging idol. In this vision, identity is not a cage but a platform — a starting point for deeper dialogue, creativity, and political negotiation. The village matters, but so does the road that leaves it. Tradition matters, but so does the choice to reinterpret or depart from it.

The greatest danger is when power seizes the language of community to enforce conformity or erase difference. When those in charge claim to speak for “the culture” or “the nation” as if they are divine truths, they turn living traditions into tools of control. They suppress complexity, ignore change, and punish autonomy. That is not community. That is command.

True community is not afraid of difference. It adapts. It listens. It makes room for evolution. It understands that authentic belonging is not coerced — it is cultivated. And it honors that while we may not choose where we begin, we must be free to shape where we go.
This is why the task is not to abandon communities, but to humanize them. Not to burn down cultures, but to open them to their own richness. Not to romanticize the past, but to co-create a shared future that respects both roots and wings.

We need a politics that supports this vision — not by imposing a centralized model of society, but by enabling local agency, cultural resilience, and pluralist experimentation. By designing institutions that protect the right to belong without enforcing sameness. By balancing the memory of who we have been with the possibility of who we may become.

To live communally and yet reject fixed identities is not a contradiction. It is a mature politics of freedom — one grounded in the real conditions of human life, but never resigned to their limits. It is to say: we are born into togetherness, and we are responsible for making that togetherness just.

We tend to see maps as innocent things. We think that neutral diagrams that tell us where we are. They’re on our walls, in our pockets, and in our schools. We use them to locate ourselves, to find direction, and to feel a sense of place. But maps, like stories or myths, don’t just describe reality. They decide what counts as real.

Maps shape the world as much as they show it. They are not just tools but are instruments of power. Behind every neat border and labelled region lies a set of choices. They are about who gets to belong, who is left out, and what is considered valuable.

The history of map-making is not a silent one. It has been deeply tied to conquest, colonization, and control. When European empires expanded, they didn’t just invade land—they redrew it. They drew lines on paper that claimed ownership, divided communities, and renamed places that already had names. In doing so, they introduced a way of thinking we might call territorial essentialism—the idea that people naturally belong to the areas marked out for them.

This belief didn’t come from the land itself. It came from the ambitions of those who wanted to manage it.

In many parts of Southeast Asia before colonialism, territory was not a box with clear edges. It was more like a ripple. Power flowed outward from a center—like a sacred city or royal court—but the edges were soft. It is often known as Mandala system. People belonged through relationships, through language, trade, loyalty, and shared stories. The Khmer empire and Malay sultanates didn’t use borders the way colonial states later did. Their maps, if they had any, were maps of connection, not confinement.

Colonialism changed all that. Western cartographers arrived with rulers and grids. They flattened rich local knowledge into square boxes. They ignored how people used land spiritually, seasonally, or communally. Instead, land became property. It became something to tax, to sell, to extract. Indigenous geographies, oral traditions, pilgrimage paths and sacred forests were dismissed as childish or backward.

This wasn’t just a matter of drawing lines. It was a matter of deciding who could draw them. The mapmaker became a kind of silent ruler. The map maker was able to erase a people’s past, define their future, and determine who counted as a nation.

Over time, these foreign lines became internal beliefs. We began to treat them as if they had always been there, as if they were carved into the earth, not scribbled by colonial administrators in distant offices. We started to believe that the state, as drawn on a map, was the highest form of truth. That idea still shapes how governments rule and how people suffer.

After colonialism, things did not return to how they were. The newly independent states not only kept the old maps but also added new myths. They borrowed symbols from the pre-colonial past and attached them to colonial borders. Some countries claimed the shape of its nation as something ancient and sacred, even though it was only recently defined. Some countries celebrated its “unity in diversity” while suppressing dissent from groups like the indigenous peopls who had their own stories and their own maps. Take a look at Myanmar, India, Thailand or Indonesia for Southeast Asian examples.

Nationalism today often takes this form: a dangerous mix of rigid boundaries and selective memory. It uses both colonial tools and ancient empires to justify power. It claims that belonging is fixed—that each people has a rightful place, and everyone else is a stranger. This turns borders into barriers and identities into weapons.

What makes maps powerful is also what makes them dangerous: their simplicity. A line seems clean. A border feels final. But these drawings hide far more than they reveal. They leave out centuries of movement, intermarriage, negotiation, and exchange. They make it seem as if conflict only arises when someone crosses a line, when in fact the line itself may be the cause of the conflict.

Simplifying complexity is not neutral—it is political. When we flatten the world into boxes, we also flatten people. We erase the grey zones of belonging where most real life happens.

The most stubborn myth of all is that borders never change. That what is drawn on the map is timeless. But history constantly redraws the world. From Africa’s colonial frontiers to the breakup of the Soviet Union, borders are often the result of hasty deals and forgotten conversations. Yet we still treat them as sacred. In the South China Sea, China’s “Nine-Dash Line” is a perfect example. It is not a reflection of deep history, but a modern invention disguised as ancient truth. Maps like this aren’t used to understand the past. They are used to control the future. They are tools of power, used by elites to rally support, distract citizens, or assert control.

We do not need to throw away maps. We need to read them differently—with skepticism, empathy, and imagination.
Let us ask better questions: Who drew this map? For whom? Who is missing? What other ways of living together might we imagine?

Some ethnic groups, like the Rohingya or West Papuans, or even internal nations like Navajo, Karen or Shan, may choose to embrace strong identities in order to resist being erased. That is strategic essentialism, which means using the language of identity not because it is true forever and always, but because it is useful now. But even as we assert these "strategic" identities, we must remember that they are human creations, not eternal facts. Otherwise, there is a risk of us becoming who we fight.

The lasting solution lies in imagining new ways of belonging. Ways that allow for shared spaces, layered identities, and flexible governance. Borders can be meeting points, not prisons. Communities can be built on trust, not lines.

Nowhere is this struggle clearer than in Myanmar. The military-dominated state insists on a single characteristic—“Burmaness”—for a country filled with dozens of nations, hundreds languages, and countless histories. The Dobama Movement claimed that from the Himalayas to the sea, everyone must be Burman. It was later used to develop myths and justify control but not to build unity.

But the peoples fought back. The struggles are not just against the army, but against the idea that their identities could be reduced to conform lines on a map. Ethnic groups like the Kachin or Karen did not simply ask for independence. They demanded the right to be seen, to be complex, to belong without being absorbed. Myanmar’s neighbors have not aggressively attacked and assertively claimed the lands or peoples at its borders. It is not outsiders, but insiders, who continue to colonize in the name of national unity.

Maps are not the enemy. But treating them as sacred truth is. When maps are mistaken for moral law, they serve kleptocrats who hoard power, nepotists who inherit it, and plutocrats who buy it. The lines we inherit should not determine who we are. We must see maps for what they are: human tools, shaped by history, and always open to revision.

Only then can we begin to imagine a politics where belonging is not determined by geography alone but by dignity, memory, and mutual respect.

We have grown used to seeing politics as an arena of contests—where rival ideologies duel, interests are negotiated, and victories are often measured by numbers. It is, we assume, a place of strategies and calculations, of speeches and slogans, of power asserted and resisted. But somewhere along the way, we stopped speaking of one quietly radical idea: friendship.

Not the kind formed over dinner or shared music tastes—but a rarer kind, older and deeper. Friendship, in this richer sense, is the capacity to care without counting. It is the instinct to ask not “What can you do for me?” but “How might we live well, together?” It is rooted not in contracts or convenience, but in trust and the belief that the other person’s life—though unknown, unfamiliar—still matters.
What if politics, at its most human, was not about managing enemies, but about cultivating this kind of friendship?

Should we care strangers? There is a quiet moral revolution contained in the phrase political friendship. It doesn’t require sentimentality or shared biographies. It demands something simpler but harder: to carry the wellbeing of people we’ve never met into the decisions we make. To include them—equally and sincerely—in the circle of concern.

In a world increasingly shaped by profit, polarization, and performance, this is not easy. We are trained—by institutions, by markets, even by fear—to calculate, to measure worth, to define others by their usefulness or their alignment with our side.
But friendship, as a political principle, resists this. It is not transactional. It does not dissolve with disagreement. It does not withhold dignity. It asks us to remain loyal to the idea of others—not because they are like us, or because we agree—but because they are human.

Of course, we cannot speak of political friendship without speaking of power. Friendship cannot flourish in a vacuum. It grows—or withers—in the conditions we build around it. In societies marked by inequality, oppression, or historical violence, friendship is not merely a warm feeling; it is an act of justice. It asks difficult questions: Who sets the terms of recognition? Who is heard? Who belongs?
To practice political friendship in such a world is to commit not only to kindness, but to justice. It is to dismantle hierarchies that keep some people perpetually voiceless. It is to offer not just care, but solidarity.

Now, can friendship be a resistance against dominant power? In a time of increasing polarization—where people are reduced to labels, where politics risks becoming a form of civil war with or without guns—friendship may seem anachronistic. But perhaps it is exactly what we need.
Friendship, politically understood, is resistance against the flattening of others into enemies. It is the refusal to cancel complexity. It insists on dialogue, even in disagreement. It protects us from the cynical temptation to believe that politics is nothing more than domination dressed up in policy.

All politics rests on a slender thread: trust. And trust, like friendship, cannot be legislated into being. It is not built by surveillance or slogans. It grows slowly, in the patient work of showing up, listening, acknowledging harm, and not walking away.
When we lose friendship, we reach for control. More rules, harsher punishments, thicker walls. But none of these teach people to care. Only relationships do. And without care—without even the possibility of it—politics ceases to be a space for peace. It becomes a war managed by paperwork.

Let's think about unity. To speak of political friendship is not to demand agreement or sameness. In fact, the best friendships grow in friction—in the honest tension between difference and loyalty. Friends disagree, but they don’t discard each other. They stay, even when it’s uncomfortable. It is diversity in unity, not mere unity in diversity.

Political friendship, then, is not a mere utopia. It’s a discipline. It asks us to keep negotiating shared life across deep differences. To remain committed to each other even when trust is hard-earned. It invites us to reimagine conflict—not as a threat to be erased, but as a space where dignity can still be protected.

We might also ask: Who gets to be a political friend? Too often, our compassion is shaped by habit—by the boundaries we inherit from nation, race, religion, or ideology. But if friendship is to renew politics, it must unsettle those inherited limits.
It must teach us to ask not only “Who do I care about?”, but “How did I learn not to care about others?” And what might it mean to undo that learning?

I argue that Friendship is probably the Most Political Idea of all. Aristotle once called friendship the highest good of human life—not because it was easy, but because it reminded us that we are not solitary creatures. We are beings made to live with and for one another. Politics, if it is to heal rather than harm, must recover this reality. Not as a sentimental decoration, but as a foundation. Friendship might be the most demanding thing politics could ask of us. But it may also be the most liberating.

Because friendship teaches us that justice is not about fixing people, or sorting them into winners and losers. It is about sharing space, negotiating needs, and choosing dignity—together.

And perhaps that—more than power, more than profit—is the most radical political idea of all.

History is not what happened. History is what we say happened. And in that distinction lies a quiet revolution of thought — one that invites us not to take the past as a monument, but as a living argument. To read history, truly read it, is not to memorize dates and kings, but to listen to voices, silences, and the craft of remembering itself.

We live in a world built on historical claims: of ownership, of victory, of loss. Borders exist because of historical events. Flags fly because of historical memory. And yet, curiously, few of us are taught to read history with the same care we might read a poem — with doubt, curiosity, interpretation, and above all, humility.

The comforting myth is that history is a line — neat, chronological, moving from cavemen to smart cities. But history is more like a mosaic that someone keeps rearranging depending on where they're standing. To read history critically is to reject the idea that there is one true, fixed meaning. The past does not lie still. It shifts each time a new storyteller tells it. History is influenced by constant negotiations. Empires once celebrated are now mourned. Revolutions once condemned are now romanticized. The "truth" of yesterday becomes the controversy of today.
This does not mean we abandon history to chaos or lies. It means we approach it as a practice, not a possession. We ask: Who is telling the story? For whom? What is left out? What is the cost of remembering it this way?

Let us talk about identity. States and nations often speak of themselves as if they were born fully formed. “We have always been this people, speaking this language, living on this land.” But such claims, though poetic, are strategic. They use history to harden the fluidity of culture into a shield or a sword. To read history wisely is to recognize that identity is a story we choose to tell about ourselves — sometimes for survival, sometimes for domination, often both. Cultures evolve, blend, borrow. Heroes are constructed to inspire; villains to warn. No one is purely one thing, ever. This doesn't mean we should condemn taking pride in heritage at all times. It means we should wear it lightly — like a robe, not a cage. We might ask: How have others lived here before us? How might our identity include them, too?

Every history book is "full of absences". The servant in the background of the painting. The woman whose name is forgotten. The child who died before records were kept. The fields, once full, now buried under concrete. The communities erased with no monuments to remember them. Reading history, then, is not only about what is said, but about who is missing. A critical reading listens to the margins. It asks, What didn’t make it into the archive? Whose memories were too inconvenient to preserve? Sometimes, we are the ones forgotten. Other times, we are the ones doing the forgetting.

The devil is in the detail and the power is there. There is a curious detail about many historical texts. They are often written to flatter the powerful. Victories are glorious, laws are wise, and the leaders are brave. But in the "footnotes", it seems not much so. In the economic policies, the logistical decisions, the betrayals dressed as diplomacy, the truth hums quietly. To read history well is to notice where power hides. To recognize how cronyism and elitism dresses up as legacy, how domination claims the language of civilization. Not to breed cynicism, but to nurture discernment. Power rarely introduces itself as power. It arrives wrapped in principle and decorated with tradition. To read history critically is to ask: How did power get here? Whom did it serve? And how does it ask to be remembered?

Now, how do we read it? We might also read history not only to analyze, but to compassionate and to learn. There is something intimate in realizing that people in every century struggled with doubt, heartbreak, greed, beauty, and failure. The philosopher in exile, the teenage soldier, the widowed mother of five — they all lived in the same emotional landscapes we do. History, when read very well, is a mirror of our fragility and strengths. It reminds us that the present is not the culmination of progress, but another moment of becoming. And this humbles us. We may even begin to forgive ourselves and each other. We may do so more easily by knowing that none of us were given clean beginnings.

Reading can be an act of ethical imagination. In the end, to read history critically is not to deny the past, but to treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Not as a final word, but as a conversation. Not as an rigid inheritance, but as a responsibility. We do not study history to relive it. We study it to ask what we must now choose, what burdens we carry forward, and what stories we might write differently for those who come after us.

So the next time you open a history book, pause before you dive in. Ask: Whose world is this? What truths were chosen? And how might I, as a reader, do justice not to the facts, but to the human complexity behind them?

The state (usually a nation state) is often imagined as a fixed, bounded, and self-justifying entity as if its authority emerges from some inherent essence, a timeless legitimacy, or a divine mandate. But through a critical lens, such assumptions crumble. The state is not a natural or inevitable structure as it insists. It is a system, constructed over time, contingent on context, shaped by contestation, and maintained by flows of inputs and outputs. It is not what it claims to be, but what it does, and how it is perceived, negotiated, and challenged.

Understanding the state as a system of extraction and distribution allows us to deconstruct its power while demanding accountability. It allows us to look beyond its claims to legality or tradition and ask deeper questions: Who gives to the state? Who benefits from the state? What justifies the exchanges we are asked to accept?

Every state, no matter how democratic or authoritarian, relies on inputs. The resources may be material, symbolic, and emotional. State extracts or receives these  resources from the people and communities within its reach.

• Resources and Taxes: The most visible form of inputs including wealth, land, and labors. They are extracted in the name of development or protection.
  
• Loyalty and Legitimacy: A subtler form of power. People are asked to accept the state's authority, often through rituals, myths, flags, elections, or coercive threats.
• Compliance and Order: The everyday submission to regulations, borders, identification, and bureaucratic routines — often accepted not because they are just, but because resistance is costly.
• Security and Surveillance: People are required to expose themselves to state scrutiny for the promise of protection. This is a trade often made under duress.
  

None of these inputs are morally neutral or naturally owed. They are negotiated claims, often backed by force, fear, or ideological persuasion.

Let's talk about outputs. States justify their existence by pointing to the goods, services, and protections they offer. These are supposed to be the returns for the inputs taken. They include:

• Security: Protection from violence, both external and internal. This is often the state’s strongest claim to legitimacy — the monopoly of force in exchange for peace.
• Infrastructure and Services: Roads, education, health, communication — sometimes delivered efficiently, often unevenly or selectively.
• Legal Recognition: Citizenship, rights, documentation — the tools to participate in formal life.
• Symbolic Unity: A sense of belonging, nationhood, identity — often excluding those who do not fit dominant narratives.

Yet in practice, these outputs are not distributed equally. Entire regions or communities may give inputs without receiving remarkable benefits. Marginalized groups often find themselves systematically excluded — over-policed but under-protected, taxed but under-served, loyal but unrecognized.

This imbalance is the heart of political discontent. When the inputs extracted from people do not translate into dignity, security, rights, or care, the state reveals itself not as a neutral arbiter but as a hierarchical apparatus, serving particular interests while marginalizing others. For the powerful, the state becomes an amplifier of wealth and control. For the vulnerable, it is a gatekeeper, an enforcer, or even an occupier. The asymmetry between input and output is not a design flaw — it is often a reflection of political hierarchies embedded in the state system.

Because the state is a system — and not a rigid essence — it can be contested, reshaped, and resisted. Its inputs can be withheld. Its outputs can be demanded. Its structure can be made more transparent, participatory, and just.

Let us reject the idea that the Nation State is the only possible way. Instead, it asks communities to imagine alternative systems: federations, networks, councils, cooperatives, or more creative ones. The crucial point is the models should make the power more accountable. The input and output are aligned with mutual respect and negotiated legitimacy.

This also means taking seriously the plurality of political heritage. Different peoples may have different roots and various communities might need different relationships to political authority. Uniformity under a centralized nation state may not be the answer. We must design systems of governance that allow local autonomy, cultural dignity, and horizontal coordination, rather than enforcing homogenized rule.

In this way, to see the state as a system is to liberate our imagination. It is to stop worshipping the state and start evaluating it. It is for asking whether it truly serves the people who sustain it. It is to embrace skepticism towards power and to defend the Common Good. The state, in this view, is rather a machine than destiny. It is a system that is powerful, complex, often extractive — but ultimately, built by human hands. And what is built by humans can be rethought, repurposed, or dismantled in pursuit of common goods that honor human dignity and collective agency.

In a fractured world, marked by domination, marginalization, and layers of structural violence, the solidarity of the oppressed is not merely a slogan but a lifeline, a political strategy, and a moral necessity. When those who suffer under systems of power begin to recognize not only their shared wounds but also their shared capacities, solidarity emerges as both resistance and reconstruction. It is a conscious alignment across different struggles, rooted not in sameness, but in mutual recognition of injustice and the will to transcend it.

To be oppressed is not to be passive. Oppression attempts to reduce people into silence, dependency, or fear. But history shows again and again that even in the most degraded conditions, humans resist. What solidarity enables is the amplification of that resistance — not as isolated uprisings, but as interlinked acts of reclaiming dignity, resources, and meaning. This is a process which we cannot avoid as conscious creatures, even when we know that meaning and stories are constructed socially.

Solidarity does not require identical experiences. It requires an ethical commitment to the freedom and dignity of others, even when their context is not your own. The solidarity of the oppressed must be a relationship of political friendship, where each struggle echoes another, forming a network of care, protection, and shared strategic learning.

A solidarity built on rigid essentialist identities is fragile. It can quickly turn inward, suspicious of difference, or defensive about purity. What is needed is solidarity grounded in critical thinking: one that understands identities — class, ethnicity, gender, religion — as strategic, historical, and constructed, but no less meaningful as "truths".

This solidarity must not be about claiming a universal victimhood. It is about recognizing that all forms of oppression are maintained by hierarchical power, and that liberation in one area is intimately tied to the liberation in others. A feminist revolution that ignores colonial or class oppression cannot succeed. An anti-colonial movement that reproduces patriarchy or silences minorities cannot bring justice.

For a critical thinker, power always demands scrutiny. Even in movements for justice, the seeds of domination can take root if not vigilantly checked. That is why solidarity must remain horizontal, dialogical, and pluralistic. No one group or identity actually owns the truth. No leader is above accountability. Solidarity of the oppressed thrives when it builds structures of participation, not veneration.

Yet, strategic unity is vital. Oppressed groups must sometimes speak with a collective voice to negotiate, bargain, or demand rights. This is not to deny their internal diversity, but to confront power with coordinated strength. Strategic essentialism here becomes a political tool — but one always subject to critique from within.

Solidarity of the oppressed is held not by ideology alone, but by relationships: trust built through shared risks, mutual support, and a willingness to learn from each other’s mistakes. It is forged in protest, in underground organizing, in community care, in refusing to be divided by the tools of the powerful — fear, scarcity, suspicion, and envy.

In the face of absurdity, we must hold onto this moral foundation: No one is free until all are free. Not as a poetic ideal, but as a structural reality. Oppression anywhere reinforces the system of oppression everywhere. The long-term survival of any struggle depends on cultivating a culture of solidarity — across borders, identities, and generations.

In the face of rising authoritarianism, extractive capitalism, nationalist populism, and digital surveillance, the oppressed cannot afford to remain fragmented. Neither can they afford shallow calls for unity that erase real grievances. We must not stop just by hashtags or speeches. What we need is a deep, critical, principled solidarity— grounded in shared commitments to dignity, justice, autonomy, and collective flourishing.

This is the solidarity that builds movements, rebuilds broken societies and creates the conditions for new ways of living. It is not charity, nor pity. It is mutual obligation — and mutual liberation.

The call for self-determination has long echoed across oppressed peoples, silenced nations, and marginalized communities. It is a cry for dignity, for voice, for the power to shape one’s own path. And rightly so. No one should be ruled from above without consent, nor be folded into a system that denies their story, their memory, or their future.

But what exactly is the "self" that seeks determination?.

If we are honest, that self is not a pure, timeless entity. It is not a sealed ethnic essence or a static tradition. It is a shifting, contested, living fabric — made of culture, resistance, pain, aspiration, and invention. It evolves. It disagrees with itself. It negotiates.

To favor self-determination, then, is not to pretend that identities are fixed but to affirm that communities must have the power to participate in shaping their own definitions. The right to self-determination is not the right to freeze identity, but to navigate it with freedom and care.

This is where the idea matures. Self-determination, at its most ethical, is not about enclosing people into permanent categories or ancient flags. It is about creating the space to revise, to reimagine, to choose — together and repeatedly. It is a practice of becoming, not a return to some essential past.

Especially in contexts where central power dominates, where uniformity is enforced, and where cultural differences are flattened into legal sameness, the claim of self-determination becomes a strategic affirmation of agency. It is a refusal to be told who one is, or must be.
That refusal is not essentialist. It is emancipatory.

It is entirely possible to defend self-determination while remaining deeply skeptical of fixed identities and grand claims of origin. The key is to understand that determining the self does not mean discovering a pure essence. It means having the political power and cultural space to explore who we are, together, without coercion.

And that process requires institutions that protect dissent, pluralism within communities, and the ongoing revision of the collective will. It demands that self-determination not be claimed only by those in power within a community, but shared across its margins.

The question, then, is not whether self-determination is valid — it is. The question is how we ensure it stays open, dialogical, and human, rather than rigid, exclusionary, or manipulated by elites.

In this light, self-determination is not a contradiction to liberty. It is its partner. It is the means by which communities escape externally imposed identities and claim the right to define themselves without pretending that definition is ever final.

Let us protect that right. And let us also protect the humility and fluidity that make it worth defending.

What does it mean to live together freely? To govern not through power, but through trust? These are the quiet, profound questions at the heart of Democratic Confederalism, a philosophy that invites us to rethink democracy not as a system imposed from above, but as a way of life grown from below—among neighbors, in the streets and villages.

Let us explore this vision, its practices, its possibilities, and the challenges it faces, with a spirit of curiosity.

A Democracy Rooted in Neighbors
Democratic Confederalism, as initially envisioned by Abdullah Öcalan, begins with a simple yet radical idea: democracy should start not with the state, but with the people who share a place and a life. It imagines a world where power flows upward from local communities—neighborhoods, villages, towns—rather than downward from distant institutions. This is a “democracy of neighbors,” where ordinary people shape their shared future through dialogue and care.
At its core, this philosophy values:

• Self-governance: Communities make decisions together, organizing around their own needs, from healthcare to education to resolving disputes.
• Gender equality: Women are equal partners in decision-making, challenging traditions of dominance.
• Ecological awareness: Living in harmony with the earth is a guiding principle.
• Pluralism: Diverse voices and cultures are welcomed, not silenced.

This is not a rigid blueprint but a way of thinking—a call to build relationships of trust and responsibility, where freedom means not just having a vote, but having a voice in a community that listens.

The Practice of Shared Responsibility
In Rojava, the autonomous region of North and East Syria, this philosophy has been tested amid the chaos of war. Here, people have dared to build something new: a society where democracy begins in small, local assemblies and neighborhood communes. These are not grand parliaments but humble gatherings—families meeting over tea, neighbors discussing their shared challenges.
In these assemblies, decisions are made not by majority rule but through consent—a process that asks, “Is this good enough for now, and safe enough to try?” This question invites humility, making space for dissent not as a threat, but as a way to strengthen ideas. Leadership is not about control but about service, often rotated to ensure accountability. Even children and youth are invited into this experiment, with youth parliaments mirroring adult assemblies. This is democracy as education: learning what it means to belong, to be responsible, to shape a shared future.
The approach draws from many traditions—sociocracy, the Indian concept of neighborocracy, and the wisdom of communities who know that trust is earned through dialogue, not decreed from above. It also builds on Asset-Based Community Development, where people start not by listing their problems, but by celebrating their strengths—the skills, passions, and relationships already present.

The Power of Trust in Crisis
Rojava’s experiment shows that democracy, in its deepest sense, is not a luxury but a lifeline. In the face of displacement, military threats, and skepticism, communities have found strength in acting together. This suggests a profound lesson. Every community, no matter how broken, holds the seeds of its own renewal. By weaving together their strengths, neighbors become co-creators of a common life.
The lesson from Rojava is not about perfect systems but about relationships. Politics, at its best, is the patient work of listening, responding, and building trust. Democratic Confederalism offers an invitation to hope, not through grand promises but through the quiet courage of neighbors trusting to govern together.

Theoretical Challenges: Living Without a State
Yet, this vision raises difficult questions. Democratic Confederalism rejects the nation-state, with its centralized power and tendency toward uniformity. But in a world dominated by states, how can a network of communes engage with the global order? How would it negotiate treaties, defend against aggression, or coordinate large-scale needs like infrastructure or environmental protection without creating centralized structures that might resemble a state? How decentralized communities can act collectively on a large scale while preserving local autonomy? For example, managing a pandemic or building a railway requires coordination across regions. Without clear mechanisms, there’s a risk that new forms of bureaucracy or power could emerge, undermining the very freedom the system seeks to protect.

Ideology and Leadership
Another question arises again. What holds a confederation together? If communities are autonomous, how are the boundaries of the larger confederation decided? Is it based on geography, shared values, or something else? Without a central authority, how does the system resolve disputes between communes or prevent fragmentation?
Democratic Confederalism champions leaderless, horizontal assemblies, yet it is deeply tied to Öcalan. But this is perhaps more relevant to the Kurds. The question is how does the philosophy prevent his influence—or any ideology—from becoming a form of centralized authority? A system that values open dialogue must guard against its founding ideas stifling dissent or limiting pluralism. It needs ways to encourage ongoing critique and evolution of its own principles.
There are other questions about transition. How does a world of nation-states transform into a confederation of communities? Does the philosophy rely on rare conditions, like state collapse or conflict, to create space for new structures? Or can it offer a universal model for change?

Critiques of Practice: Compromising Ideals
In practice, critics argue that Rojava’s application of Democratic Confederalism reveals tensions. One major critique is that the philosophy’s anti-imperialist roots are compromised by alliances with powers like the United States, seen as imperial forces. Some argue that the philosophy’s logic—treating all global actors as equivalent in a “third world war”—justifies these alliances as pragmatic. On February 2025, Ocalan made a historic call from prison for the party to lay down its arms, dissolve itself and end its decades-long conflict with the Turkish state. This risks betraying the goal of a post-colonial world free from imperial dominance, creating a gap between the philosophy’s ideals and its actions. External critics, like the Communist Party of Turkiye, argue that Democratic Confederalism has merged with liberalism, aligning with Western powers and losing its revolutionary edge. This suggests that the philosophy, in practice, may dilute its radical vision, adopting ideas or alliances that clash with its anti-imperialist origins.
Another critique questions whether the philosophy adequately prevents power from concentrating, especially in crisis. In Rojava, some see an “autocracy” under military leaders, despite the theory of assembly-based governance. This suggests a potential weakness: in militarized or unstable contexts, can the philosophy ensure that civilian, decentralized assemblies hold power over military or political structures? The design may need stronger safeguards to maintain its democratic core.

The Promise and the Challenge
Democratic Confederalism offers a beautiful, challenging vision: a world where democracy is not a distant institution but a living practice, rooted in trust and shared responsibility. Its experiments in Rojava show what’s possible when people dare to govern together, even in crisis. Yet, it faces deep questions—about surviving in a state-dominated world, balancing local and collective needs, ensuring ideological openness, and staying true to its liberationist roots.

Perhaps the true power of this philosophy lies not in providing all the answers, but in asking us to consider this. What kind of relationships must we build to live freely? And can we trust one another enough to try?

Revolutions are often portrayed as moral peaks of history—moments of rupture where the oppressed rise to shatter the old world and usher in a new dawn. Resistance, too, is romanticized: the brave few who speak truth to power, who confront injustice, who burn for freedom. These narratives have shaped generations. And yet, they are dangerous when unexamined. Not because resistance and revolution are unnecessary—but because their meaning is too often hijacked by those who crave power in new forms.

At their best, resistance and revolution are about reclamation: of dignity, of autonomy, of the right to shape one’s own life in concert with others. They emerge not from theory, but from lived injustice. People do not resist abstractions; they resist hunger, humiliation, violence, and voicelessness. They revolt not for perfection, but because the status quo suffocates the possibility of breathing freely.

But the danger begins when resistance forgets its roots and revolutions believe they are ends in themselves. The struggle becomes a ladder, and those who climb it quickly forget the ground from which they rose. Here, power reappears, not as a system to be transformed but as a throne to be seized. Resistance morphs into domination with a new flag, and revolutions become regimes with new rules but old logics.

This is not simply a matter of bad actors or betrayal. It is a structural risk: when revolution is anchored in fixed ideas of “the people,” “the enemy,” or “the future,” it risks becoming what it opposed. When resistance is defined by rigid identities and sacred binaries, it opens itself to dogma, purges, and purist moralism.

The alternative is to understand resistance as a continuous and adaptive practice, not a single heroic event. It is not about replacing one ruler with another, but about redistributing the very conditions that enable voice, participation, and co-existence. Resistance is not pure; it is messy, contradictory, and local. It doesn’t demand perfect ideologies, but reflexive communities that can challenge themselves as much as they challenge power.

Revolution, then, must not be worshipped as final liberation, but engaged as a strategic rupture, an opening that enables new political forms to emerge. But those forms must remain open to scrutiny, revision, and rebalancing. The most successful revolutions are not those that impose new truths, but those that multiply the spaces where truth can be negotiated together.

This demands a deep skepticism of hierarchy, even in resistance movements. Who speaks for the revolution? Who decides what counts as betrayal? Who claims to represent the people? Often, the loudest voices in movements are those most capable of mimicking the language of legitimacy—whether through ideology, martyrdom, or charisma. But legitimacy cannot be inherited or performed; it must be earned, distributed, and constantly questioned.

Revolutionary leaders must never see themselves as saviors. They must see themselves as facilitators of a shared struggle—a struggle not just against a regime, but against the deeper logics of domination, erasure, and monopoly of voice. They must organize not just for protest, but for plural futures, where difference is not merely tolerated but structured into the very architecture of power.

In this light, resistance is not simply against a state or system, but against the conditions that prevent people from building alternative lives together. It is not just a “no” to oppression, but also acceptance to complexity, negotiation, and shared becoming. It is, at its core, a long labor of co-creation, not a sudden seizure of control.

And this is perhaps the hardest truth: that resistance and revolution, if they are to be worthy of their names, must resist the temptation to become unquestionable themselves. They must resist the seduction of certainty, of closure, of declaring the struggle over. They must remain unfinished, vigilant, and humble.

In the end, resistance is not about pure ideals or perfect blueprints. It is about a commitment to human dignity in a world where power is always being built and rebuilt. And revolutions? They are not the end of history. They are only the beginning of the work to make power bearable, sharable, and accountable for everyone.

Power is not inherently evil, but its pursuit often corrupts. In a world where political legitimacy is frequently confused with dominance, and where access is mistaken for authority, the quest for power has devolved into a machinery of exclusion. Elitism and cronyism are not accidental distortions of political systems; they are symptoms of a deeper decay in how we understand community, merit, and legitimacy.

Modern political landscapes—especially in transitional, post-colonial, or conflict-ridden states—often suffer from the inherited scars of centralized rule. These are places where the state has long functioned not as a servant of the people, but as an apparatus of control. In such settings, power does not flow from collective deliberation, but from proximity to decision-making hubs. This centralization breeds a distorted culture: one where networks override principles, loyalty trumps capability, and influence is recycled among the well-positioned.

Elitism emerges as a justification. It cloaks itself in meritocratic language—education, experience, vision—but its function is to protect the few from the demands of the many. It turns leadership into pedigree and governance into inheritance. Elites often present themselves as “essential” to stability, progress, or statenhood. They claim to be the necessary brains behind the body politic. But this is a strategic narrative, not a truth. These identities of political necessity are constructed, maintained, and reinforced through institutions, media, and historical revisions.

A post-essentialist view sees through this: there is no natural class of leaders. No one is born more legitimate to rule than others. Governance is not a fixed trait. it is a skill, a responsibility, and most importantly, a relationship of trust. When leadership becomes a self-affirming identity rather than a collective trust-based process, society shifts from representation to manipulation.

Cronyism is the practical expression of elitism’s ideology. It is where strategy overtakes integrity. In systems where trust is low and institutions are weak, loyalty becomes currency. Cronyism is not always emotional favoritism. It is often a calculated method of risk management in uncertain power games. But this risk-averse behavior strangles moral imagination. The circle of influence tightens. Innovation is stifled. Participation is narrowed.

And the people? They are asked to believe that the system is too complex for them, that they must wait their turn, that their dissent is naïve. Cronyism and elitism together form a political machine where access is gatekept, dissent is punished, and public service is rebranded as elite privilege.

But strategic essentialism teaches us that identity—be it of leadership, class, or “expertise”—can be wielded for resistance as well. Marginalized communities, under-represented groups, or sidelined political actors can temporarily claim collective identities (like ethnic, regional, or class-based leadership) not because they believe in fixed essences, but because these identities offer footholds in asymmetric terrains of power. This is not surrender to essentialism, but a strategic navigation of its dominance.

Yet the trap lies in forgetting the strategy. Many who rise by mobilizing collective identity fall prey to the same elitist games once they ascend. They imitate the power structures they once opposed, now justified as “our turn.” The oppressed become the new gatekeepers. The cycles of exclusion replicate under new names.

The deeper issue, then, is not just who holds power, but how we understand it. A society that confuses control with legitimacy will keep reproducing elitism and cronyism, even with new faces. What we need is not just redistribution of power, but a redefinition of it: power as facilitation, not dominance; leadership as responsibility, not entitlement.

To confront elitism and cronyism, we must decentralize not only institutions but also imaginations. We must redesign political cultures where access is not a privilege, but a shared right. This means rethinking education, public participation, and political narrative-building. It means embedding transparency, rotational leadership, and accountability into the DNA of our institutions.

Above all, it means rooting political legitimacy not in prestige, but in relational trust. In political friendship, not proximity to the throne. A society grounded in mutual recognition and layered deliberation cannot be captured so easily by cliques and circles.

The quest for power does not need to be abandoned—but it must be reframed. Not as a race for dominance, but as a shared project of governance. Not as control over others, but as co-creation of the terms of life together. We must be skeptical against entrenched power. Let us not imagine to get perfect permanent solutions. We need to think of perpetual responsibilities.

Elitism and cronyism may seem inevitable, especially in societies with deep inequalities. But they are not eternal. They are human constructions. What is constructed can be dismantled. The challenge is not simply political. It is moral, cultural, and epistemic. It is about what kind of society we believe is possible—and what kind of people we must become to build it.

There is a quiet fiction that many modern societies live by: that the nation state is the supreme guardian of order, the necessary container of human life, the final arbiter of justice. Law, under this logic, becomes sacred; and power, when institutionalized, becomes natural. But this fiction unravels when examined through a more grounded lens. It is revealed that what actually sustains human beings is not the machinery of the state, but the meaning-making depth of society.

Let's talk about what we mean by the word "culture" first.

Anthropological philosophy, exemplified by Clifford Geertz, paints culture as a dense web of shared meanings and symbols. Understanding a culture, therefore, demands a deep dive into the intricate interpretations that its members weave into their practices and beliefs. For Marxists, culture is a superstructural element, ultimately determined by the underlying economic base. It serves to perpetuate the dominant ideology and maintain existing social hierarchies. Critical theorists, particularly those of the Frankfurt School, focus on the manipulative potential of mass culture in capitalist societies, arguing that it homogenizes thought and suppresses genuine human experience.

Poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard offer a more fragmented and fluid understanding. Power operates through cultural discourses, and meaning is not singular but multiple, varying across perspectives and contexts. Pragmatism, with thinkers like John Dewey, takes a more functional approach.

For Williams, it is the word “culture” that brings together and helps him understand the transitions in the other key words. Culture, in other words, is the filter or lens through which art, industry, class and democracy must be understood.

Here in this piece, I refer culture as the following. Culture is a dynamic and evolving system of socially constructed meanings, practices, and symbols shared diversely by a group. It's not a fixed entity but a pragmatic tool for social organization, communication, and problem-solving. While internally diverse and fluid, these shared frameworks have real-world consequences in shaping behavior, fostering collective identity, and enabling strategic action like safety, recognition and collective agency.

To be human is to grow into a world of stories, gestures, rhythms, and customs—not through edicts and decrees, but through the intimate texture of culture. Culture is not merely an accessory to life; it is life’s first teacher. Before we speak the language of politics, we inherit the language of the people around us. Culture is our first skin, our first logic, our first way of seeing the world.

And yet, culture is not fixed. It is not an essential container, nor a cage. It breathes. It adapts. It folds in on itself and opens outward. A critical thinker view of culture practically allows us to embrace its presence without worshipping its permanence. It teaches us that cultural belonging does not mean surrendering to unchangeable traditions, but participating in a dynamic, communal project—one that can evolve, resist, and reimagine.

But while culture is formative, the state too often pretends to be foundational. It demands obedience through force, cloaked in legality. Where culture persuades and nurtures, the state compels and punishes. It may offer security, but too often at the cost of consent. And in its quest for uniformity, the state suppresses the very cultural plurality it claims to protect.

This is where the problem begins. When the state elevates itself as the primary authority over life, it marginalizes the more organic, decentralized, and often more ethical sources of social order: families, languages, neighborhoods, rituals, and the everyday ethics of co-existence. Law becomes abstracted from life. Justice becomes a bureaucracy. And citizens are reduced to subjects of enforcement, rather than participants in community.

Cultural ascendancy over politics in this context is not about replacing the state with ethnic supremacy or romanticized tradition. It is about re-centering the sources of meaning, identity, and moral guidance within communities—allowing people to live through the richness of shared values rather than the imposition of distant commands. It means recognizing that human beings thrive not under centralized control, but within plural, evolving cultural spaces that nourish both autonomy and belonging.

This does not mean we should do away with all forms of coordination or collective protection. But it means we must be deeply skeptical of concentrated power, especially when it becomes impersonal, unresponsive, and coercive. The state should not be a god. It should be a tool—limited, revisable, and accountable to the moral ecology of the people it claims to serve.

A good society does not demand uniformity; it enables dialogue. It does not enforce order through fear, but cultivates harmony through mutual recognition. And this is the promise of cultural ascendancy: a vision where communities are not passive recipients of policy but active curators of their own values, stories, and paths of development.

Of course, this path is not without danger. Culture can be weaponized. It can be used to exclude, to fossilize, to dominate. That is why we need strategic essentialism: the mindful, conscious use of cultural identity not as destiny, but as a provisional tool of resistance and solidarity. And that is why we also need cultural humility—an openness to re-interpret, to critique, to evolve.

In this light, our task is not to abolish all institutions, but to reimagine them. Institutions should not be monoliths towering above culture, but vessels formed within it—flexible, plural, and shaped by those they touch. The state, if it must exist, must learn to become smaller than the cultures it serves.

Let us then refuse the false choice between chaos and command. Let us build a world where law listens before it dictates, where power is always checked by participation, and where the true source of social legitimacy is not the state’s monopoly on violence, but the community’s capacity for meaning, care, and deliberation.

Culture, in this vision, becomes not a static relic but a living, evolving commons. A space where ethics are nurtured, where identity is shaped, and where freedom is understood not as atomized independence but as the shared right to co-create the terms of our life together.
This is not utopia. It is a politics of presence—where power is always in question, and culture is always in motion.

In a world where nothing possesses a fixed essence, where identities are strategies rather than intrinsic truths, and where permanence is an illusion we cling to for comfort, peace cannot be understood in the traditional sense — as the stable, natural, or final state of society. Instead, peace must be seen as an ongoing, fragile, and strategic construction: an imperfect achievement that must constantly be remade, not an endpoint we can finally and fully arrive at.

Peace, in the post-essentialist view, is not an essence to be uncovered.

It is not the "natural" state of humanity, buried under layers of corruption and just waiting to be restored. There is no original "Eden" state to return to. Human beings, with all our conflicting desires, fears, and interpretations, have never known a time of pure peace. What we call peace has always been a constructed, negotiated, and contingent arrangement — a kind of ceasefire between endless contests of will, meaning, and power.

Thus, peace is an agreement to resist the worst possibilities of ourselves, even when those possibilities can never be fully eliminated.

In an impermanent world, peace is an impermanent project.

We cannot expect peace to "stay" once achieved. In fact, it has no foundation of permanence to stand on. It is always under threat from new fears, new grievances, new misunderstandings. This doesn't mean the struggle for peace is meaningless; it means peace is precious precisely because it is fragile. You may even think like a sand mandala, it must be built lovingly even as we know it will one day dissolve.

In this sense, the real commitment to peace is not a commitment to a static outcome, but a commitment to the repeated work of repairing, rebuilding, renegotiating, and reconciling.

In an absurd world, peace is a heroic absurdity.
If the universe has no intrinsic meaning, then creating peace is itself an act of existential defiance. To forge solidarity among beings condemned to loneliness; to offer goodwill in a cosmos indifferent to suffering — these are absurd acts, yet they are acts of immense dignity.

Peace is not justified because it fulfills a cosmic plan. It is justified because, even amidst absurdity, it is better to build fragile bridges than to revel in destruction.

Strategically, peace must be understood as a common good that requires construction and curation.
Since identities, interests, and even "the good" are not fixed, peace cannot rely on essential unity. It relies on strategic solidarity — a conscious, critical choice to cooperate, coexist, and forgive, despite recognizing that differences and conflicts will never completely disappear.

Strategic Essentialism helps here: we temporarily and knowingly treat certain things as common for the sake of building peace — shared rights, shared rules, shared spaces — even though we know no identity, no belief, no state of affairs is ultimate.

In other words, we "pretend" certain truths for peace, not out of delusion, but out of wisdom. We agree, for example, that "human dignity" matters — not because dignity is written into the fabric of the universe, but because acting as if it is sacred makes possible a better, less cruel life together.

Therefore, peace in this context is:

• Constructed, not discovered.
  
• Maintained, not guaranteed.
  
• Strategically chosen, not naturally emerging.
  
• Grounded in goodwill, humility, and vigilance, not in any fixed order of things.
  
• An absurd yet noble endeavor that dignifies human existence.

We live in a noisy world, don’t we? Our days are filled with personal dreams, endless to-do lists, and the constant buzz of screens promising connection but often leaving us feeling alone. Amid this rush, the idea of the "Common Good" might sound old-fashioned, like a faded postcard from a simpler time. We hear it in speeches or read it in hopeful articles, and part of us wonders: Is this just a nice phrase, empty of meaning? Yet, when we pause and look at our shared struggles—inequality, division, a warming planet, trust that frays like old fabric—we feel a quiet longing. We yearn for a way to live together, not just as strangers sharing space, but as neighbors building a good life side by side.
The Common Good is not a new idea, nor is it a vague dream. It’s a practical, living hope—a way to balance our individual desires with the truth that we need each other. (We also discussed this here.)

For centuries, people have asked: How do we live well together? In ancient Greece, thinkers like Aristotle didn’t focus on individual rights as we do now. Instead, they imagined cities thriving through what Aristotle called "Political Friendship"—not warm fuzzies, but a practical trust among citizens. It was the idea that even people who disagree can cooperate for the sake of their shared home. Later, Roman and Christian thinkers like Cicero and Aquinas wove this into visions of peace and justice, tying the Common Good to fairness and the dignity of all.

The Enlightenment brought a shift. Philosophers like Locke and Bentham saw society as a collection of individuals chasing their own goals. The Common Good, they thought, would emerge naturally from everyone’s self-interest. This idea sparked progress but also planted seeds of disconnection, leaving us with a world where personal gain often overshadows shared purpose.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Catholic Church revived the Common Good as a counterpoint to unchecked individualism. Popes like Leo XIII spoke of workers’ rights and social justice, while later thinkers like John Rawls offered modern tools—ideas like fairness and cooperation across differences—to build just societies. The Common Good, they all agreed, is not a fixed answer but a living project. It asks us to negotiate, to balance our freedom with our responsibility to each other.
These ideas are not relics. They are a map for navigating our messy, interconnected world—a reminder that our happiness depends on the happiness of others.

Now, imagine a place where this map has been torn apart, where the Common Good is not just neglected but actively crushed. This is Myanmar today, a failed Nation-State project whose story reveals what happens when trust, fairness, and cooperation are replaced by control and division.

For decades, Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, has held a tight grip on power, starting with a coup in 1962. Instead of building a place for all its peoples, internal nations and ethnic groups, the military chased a narrow vision of control. However, here is nuance. Even before the military came to have full blown power, the Burmese politicians tried to centralize power and created problems among its people. Myanmar has never been an accountable normative state since then. The military favored its own survival and a Bamar-centric idea of unity, sidelining minorities and their dreams of equality. This wasn’t Political Friendship; it was domination. The result was not a Common Good but a fractured society, marked by poverty, distrust, and endless civil wars.

The military’s rule created a system where resources flowed to the elite and their allies, leaving millions behind. Ethnic groups, promised a federal union at independence, faced marginalization or violence instead. The economy served the state, not the people, deepening inequality. Trust eroded, not just between citizens and the state, but among communities pitted against each other by a system that thrived on division.

A brief hope flickered in 2011, when Myanmar began a fragile liberalization. For a moment, it seemed the country might pursue a broader Common Good—fairer elections, open dialogue, a chance to heal old wounds. But the military never fully let go, and deep grievances, like the persecution of the Kachin, Karen, Shan, Rohingya, and others, remained unresolved. The dream of inclusivity and cooperation stayed out of reach. The civilian leaders (mainly statists) tried to reached negotiation with the military but in the process the ethnic institutions were largely marginalized.

Then came the 2021 coup, a brutal turning point. The military seized power again, shattering any pretense of working for the common good. Since then, Myanmar has plunged into a crisis that feels like a betrayal of everything the Common Good stands for.

• No Benefit for All: The military’s focus is control, not care. It has killed over thousands and thousands civilians, bombed villages, and destroyed schools and hospitals. Nearly half the population now lives in intense poverty, a stark reversal of earlier progress.
• No Fairness: Power and wealth are hoarded by the military and its cronies. Since the last coup, estimated over 20,000 political prisoners languish in jails, punished for speaking out. Resources are weaponized, not shared.
• No Inclusivity: The military silences dissent with bullets and arrests. Ethnic minorities, from the Karen to the Chin, face renewed violence, while the Rohingya remain stateless, their suffering is largely ignored and even weaponized. Even Bamar civilians protesting the coup are now targets. No one is invited to the table.
• No Sustainability: The economy is collapsing, with millions food insecure. Conflict scars the land, from deforested hills to polluted rivers. The future is being stolen from generations not even yet born.
• No Cooperation: Trust is impossible when fear rules. The military’s terror—torture, airstrikes, mass arrests—destroys any chance of Political Friendship. Even in the recent devastating earthquake, military was continuing bombing civilians. Communities, under pressure, struggle to unite, though many resist bravely, but still far away from success. The international community is not helping effectively.

The numbers tell a grim story. 2.5 to 3 million people displaced, millions hungry, countless lives lost or caged. But beyond the statistics is a deeper loss. It is the loss of hope that Myanmar could be a place where all its people matter. The military is even frankly bombing schools, hospitals, markets and places of worship. The military’s actions are not just a failure to pursue the Common Good; they are an attack on its very possibility. Every bomb dropped, every voice silenced, is a choice to prioritize power over people, division over trust.

Remember Myanmar is not a normative state that is accountable. The military has never listened to anyone and never empathized minorities in good faith. The central problem lies in its narrative of guardian ruler of the Nation State - the institutional narcissism and grandiosity.

What makes Myanmar’s tragedy so severe is not just this active destruction but the long, stubborn refusal to commit to the Common Good in the first place. For decades, the military could have chosen dialogue, federalism, or justice. It could have built schools instead of barracks, listened to ethnic voices instead of suppressing them. Even after 2011, it (and statist politicians) could have embraced democracy’s fragile promise. Instead, it chose control, sowing seeds of distrust that now bear bitter fruit. This lack of commitment—rooted in a refusal to see all Myanmar’s people as equally worthy—has left a nation not just divided, but broken.

Yet, even in this darkness, there are communities of resistance. Across Myanmar, ordinary people, like students, farmers, monks, ethnic fighters, defy the military, forming local councils, sharing food, protecting each other. These acts, small as they seem, echo the Common Good’s spirit: a belief that no one should be left behind. They remind us that the Common Good is not dead in Myanmar, only buried alive, waiting for a time when trust can grow again.

The Common Good is not a grand solution or a perfect utopia. It’s a humble invitation—to remember that our lives are woven together, that our joys and sorrows are shared. In a world that celebrates individual triumphs, it asks us to pause and consider what we owe each other. Myanmar’s pain shows us the cost of forgetting this: a society torn apart, a future dimmed. But the Common Good also offers hope. It reminds us that we can choose differently—to build trust, to share fairly, to listen to every voice. It’s a project we undertake together, not with certainty, but with care. Perhaps, we can build a future with a commitment to live not just for ourselves, but for each other.

We often think of hierarchy as either something we must accept or something we must fight. But the truth is less dramatic. Hierarchies are not carved into the nature of things. They don’t fall from the sky or rise up from the earth. They are made by people, for reasons that often seem sensible at the time: to bring order, to divide work, to avoid chaos. Of course, they may sometimes be created by of certain people for certain tasks resulting inclusions and exclusions.

To think clearly in a world like ours is to grow comfortable with the idea that many things we treat as permanent are, in fact, temporary. Hierarchies included. They are not natural laws but human decisions, built on customs, symbols, habits, and shared expectations. Some peoples need to construct them for their struggles. And if we built them, we can question them too—not always to destroy, but to understand, to improve, and sometimes to let go. They may be "tools", but not "truths".

Being skeptical of hierarchy doesn’t mean we must rebel against every system. It means we develop a calm and honest curiosity. We ask: What is this structure doing? Who is it helping? Who is being left out?

Sometimes, hierarchies help. They offer clarity and organization in complex situations. But they can also become rigid. Titles can replace understanding. Traditions can be mistaken for truth. And when that happens, a gentle kind of questioning becomes necessary. We might ask: What story is this hierarchy telling us? Who gets to speak and be heard? Who is invisible in this arrangement?

A thoughtful skeptic doesn’t blindly say all hierarchies are good or bad. Nor do they rush to replace one system with another, equally fixed. Instead, they stay close to the messiness of human life. They understand that power is always shifting, always partial, and always needs to be examined with care. This kind of questioning is not a political slogan or a moral rulebook. It is a habit of attention. A way of noticing when authority starts to feel untouchable, when confidence turns into arrogance, or when leadership forgets to serve.

In this way, skepticism is not chaos. It is a form of care. A way of protecting the complexity of human experience from being flattened into one single version of the truth. It reminds us that good leadership listens. That rules are only as good as the dignity they preserve. Still, we do not need to despair. Power doesn’t have to mean control when properly used. Structures don’t have to be prisons all the times. With reflection and effort, we can shape more open and honest systems—ones that are clear rather than confusing, flexible rather than frozen.

To question hierarchies is to demand accountable flexibility. To question hierarchies is to improve structures that serve evolving needs in designing systems where power is earned through ongoing consent, not inherited as natural law. To question a hierarchy is to show that we care. It is to want something better for everyone, not just those at the top. And it creates space for what might be the most generous kind of relationship: political friendship. Political friendship is built on mutual respect, shared purpose, and room for disagreement. We live in society for our survival, safety and growth. Thus, we must care.

The healthiest societies are not those without leadership, but those where leadership is transparent, accountable, and responsive to real human needs. In these places, power isn’t inherited—it’s earned, again and again, through trust, attentiveness, and fairness. When the old ways stop working and new ones are still forming, it’s tempting to reach for certainty with a quick fix. But perhaps the better path is to listen a little more and ask the quieter but braver questions.

Question everything. Critique hierarchy with care. Build bridges.

Imagine a home. In this home, the rooms are different. One is painted with stories of mountain spirits, another echoes songs from the coast. Some rooms burn incense, others cook with turmeric. The people in these rooms are family, but not the same. They don’t always agree. Sometimes, they fight. But there’s one thing they do agree on: this house should not belong to just one of them. It should belong to all of them.

That, at its heart, is the spirit of federalism. Or at least, it should be.
But let’s slow down. What is federalism—not as a textbook definition, but as a living political idea?

Federalism is NOT a Map. It’s a Conversation. Many people in countries like Myanmar talk about federalism as if it’s a kind of jigsaw puzzle. How many states? How should we draw the lines? Who gets what resources? These are important questions, but they are not foundational questions. They ask how federalism works, not why it exists.

From my point of view, federalism is not about fixed destination or ancient divisions. It is not about drawing borders around "pure" ethnic groups or enforcing neat, eternal truths about who belongs where. That’s essentialist thinking—imagining that there are timeless, unchanging groups with permanent entitlements. But human groups are not static. Cultures mix. Languages evolve. Power shifts. What we call “ethnic identity” is often a strategy—sometimes for survival, sometimes for resistance, often for recognition.

Federalism, then, must be a tool, not a truth. A flexible structure, not a sacred formula. A conversation, not a command.

Let’s return to the house. Imagine one room insisting that its furniture, music, and customs are best—and demand the others to just copy them. That’s not harmony; that’s domination. For a people, it’s colonization.

Let me invites you to ask: Whose values are being universalized? When a majority claims neutrality, they often hide power. When one cultural group is called “national” and others with similar characteristics are called “ethnic tribes,” the language itself creates hierarchy. And that is the problem with many centralized states—especially those built through conquest or colonization.

Federalism matters not because people are essentially different, but because people have historically been treated differently. The choice is strategic. The point is not that communities must govern themselves in isolation, but that they should have the right to do so—especially after generations of being told they could not. Besides, it is the original spirit of international order that every people must have the right to self-determination, isn't it?

So, federalism is not just administrative—it’s historical. It is an invitation to heal from forced assimilation, cultural erasure, and imposed uniformity. It is a chance to say: “We are different, and that’s okay. But we still choose to share a future.”

Let us draw our attention to a country like Myanmar, where different internal nations—yes, nations, not just ethnic groups—exist, the most just path forward is not one single mold for all. It is a plural mold, one that allows people to shape their political future while still being part of a shared country. We must respect their differences in political heritage.

This is what multinational federalism offers. Not one identity, but many. Not one center, but many centers working in coordination. It resists the pressure to blend everyone into one "nation-state mythology". It instead offers a framework of co-existence, with room for autonomy, heritage, and solidarity.

Some may ask: “But won’t this break us apart?”
Indigenous peoples will reply: “Pretending sameness has already broken you.”

The real strength of a country lies not in how similar its people are, but in how well it manages their differences with justice and dignity.

Let me also reflect a few points on what Federalism Is NOT.

• It’s not just decentralization.
• It’s not about giving power from above (or below so to say).
• It’s not a technical fix to appease rebels.
• It’s not about freezing identities into rigid boxes.
• It’s not about carving up the land for political games.

Federalism is not something “granted” by a central authority—it is negotiated by peoples who refuse to be "ruled" without consent. It is not a gift. It is a contract.

Of course, federalism is hard. There are risks. Power struggles don’t vanish just because we redraw boundaries. And yes, identities can become rigid, competitive, even exclusionary. That’s why we need vigilance—to keep asking: Are we using federalism to empower people, or to entrench new forms of domination? We must be watch out for the signals if our new system is entrenching the different forms of inequality.

We must remember that identities are constructed. That doesn’t make them fake. It is like what Buddhists call "Sammuti Sacca"- conventional  realities. These identities are political. So we, for building a peaceful society, must build systems that treat them with care, not with negligence. We must design a future that sees federalism not as a final answer nor product of rigid essences, but a living pragmatic strategy for solving the crisis of shared dignity at this point.

In a intellectually free world, federalism is less about fixed truths and more about shared agreements. Less about who you are and more about how you want to live together. It exists because the alternative (aka forced assimilation for sameness) is violence in slow motion. Federalism is a strategic compromise. It is not necessarily a recognition of innate differences but a pragmatic response to historical oppression. So let us teach the next generation not to ask, “Who is the real owner of this land?” but instead, “How can we all be stewards of this future?” Let us move away from fear of difference and toward a politics of negotiated coexistence.

The type of federalism Myanmar need is, thus, in some aspect, the quiet courage to live with many truths in negotiation, in one fragile, shared world.

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Human society has always been a project of value-making. From the earliest rituals around fire to the algorithmic regulation of digital life, we have never lived outside of meaning. We construct it, negotiate it, and fight over it. Meaning is not optional; it is inevitable. In this sense, society is a system of negotiated meanings that give rise to moral orders, identities, roles, and ultimately, hierarchies.

But this meaning-making comes with consequences. As soon as a society begins to name values—what is sacred, who is respectable, which labor is dignified—it also begins to create gradients of worth. Hierarchies originally arise not from evil intent, but from the natural drive to coordinate, organize, and sustain collective life. However, once a hierarchy is formed, power becomes sedimented. The inevitable temptation follows: to exploit, to preserve advantage, and to rationalize that advantage as natural, deserved, or even divine.

In ancient societies, hierarchy was often justified cosmologically. Kings ruled by divine right, castes by spiritual purity, and men by virtue of "rational superiority." These essentialist claims were narratives, not facts. But they were effective. They rooted oppression in the soil of myth and transmitted it through generations as tradition.

Oppression, in this classical form, was visible. It was formal, brutal, and often physical. People were chained, silenced, exiled, enslaved. Social orders made no attempt to hide domination; they justified it.

In modern societies, however, this mode of domination has undergone a transformation. Elite may not oppress through ugly violence, but they seduce.

Where once power ruled through visible chains, today it operates through invisible scripts. We are not beaten into submission—we are persuaded into desire. The modern citizen is not told “you must serve,” but rather, “you must succeed.” The chains are now internal, in the form of self-optimization, brand-building, and emotional labor. Exploitation wears the perfume of freedom.

Having said that, it is also important to note that oppression is not completely gone. Not all societies are linearly moving from brutality to seduction. Myanmar is one of these examples of violent oppression. The transformation is not necessarily a complete replacement but rather a layering of control mechanisms, where subtle "seduction" often coexists with more traditional forms of domination, sometimes even reinforcing them. Burmanization is still exist as coerced assimilation of indigenous people but it is more and more legitimized by the power of seduction for instance. Our focus here, however, is the manufacturing of desires, fabrication of consent and internalization of oppression.

We know it is bad to be exploited by stimulating anger, sadness, guilt or fear. However, we don't necessarily feel bad for being exploited by stimulating "happiness" or "pleasures". The pursuit of Dopamine is affecting everyone. After all, these all emotions are not good, not bad or not neutral. They are natural. We should not be taken advantage of them, should we?

Let us look at marketing or a fashion trend. It is not simply a neutral economic act; it is an act of desire-production. It exploits not just values or labor but attention, affection, identity, and aspiration. Capitalism itself is a value creation mechanism that created our "progress" but hierarchy created by unlimited accumulation of non-expiring wealth (or money) can be used in many ways to go beyond "just personal freedom". People may be more happy and more miserable at the same time. As Amitai Etzioni once asked: "Is happiness the wrong metric?"

In a post-industrial society, we are not just workers—we are consumers, influencers, dreamers, and brands. We are not commanded to obey; we are seduced to participate. Social media, advertising, careerism, and romantic ideals all converge to create a logic of self-exploitation. We curate our suffering for visibility. We grind not because we are told to, but because we believe we must. This is the genius of seduction—it does not oppose your will; it co-opts it.

In classical oppression, there were rulers and the ruled. Today, the system is more diffused. As Byung-Chul Han puts it “exploit themselves in the belief that they are realizing themselves.”

We have become our own taskmasters. The boundary between the external power and the internal “self” is blurred, if not broken. You no longer need to be silenced; you voluntarily curate your expression. You no longer need to be marginalized; you can be commodified. You no longer need to be denied freedom; you can be sold the fantasy of it.

This form of seduction is not benign. It erodes emotional freedom and disorients agency. When the rules are invisible, you cannot rebel against them. When the master speaks in the voice of your dreams, you cannot disobey. In this world, “freedom” becomes a strategy of control.

To be emotionally free is not merely to escape physical violence but to discern the subtle pressures that shape your desires. Human agency in such a context is not about declaring independence from society because no such exit exists within the realm of narrative animals. It is about navigating the social field with strategic awareness, resisting seduction where it erodes agency and reshaping meaning without being trapped by it. It is not to renounce worldly desires and become a monk. It is about intellectual independence.

Every society needs meaning and to create values. But meaning breeds order, and order not only breeds security, it also breeds power. Power itself can be a force of progress and provide foundations of human agency itself but its hierarchy creates exclusions. Let us have skepticism and critical awareness towards hierarchies. Let us first check against oppression, then against seduction. The challenge of emotional freedom and human agency, then, is not to destroy society but to unmask its scripts, to refuse essentialized hierarchies, and to live with strategic awareness. Individuals can cultivate critical awareness, self-reflection, and engagement with diverse perspectives. Practices like critical media literacy and conscious consumption can help individuals identify and resist the temptations so that we don't loose our focus on creating a society of freedom, political friendship with our fellow humans and the construction of Common Good.

Society will always attempt to name what is right, beautiful, worthy, and desirable. But we do not have to blindly accept those names. We can reclaim our right to redefine them. In that act of redefinition—not as a final truth but as a living negotiation—emotional freedom becomes possible again.

Many interpretations of "democracy" exist today, and its practical challenges are often overlooked. Instead of romanticizing the word "democracy" and relying solely on the outcome of votes, imagine a political system where thoughtful dialogue and debate among community members drive decisions. This is the core of deliberative democracy. Let's imagine a model that prioritizes collective reasoning and informed consent over simple majority rule. Let us expand our democracy beyond voting to include debates, dialogues and discussions among the people.

When citizens gather as equals to exchange reasons, weigh evidence and navigate disagreement, they engage in something profoundly different from mere preference aggregation. This deliberation process must honors the complexity of public issues by cultivating spaces where diverse perspectives can be articulated, challenged, and refined.

Think of Rousseau's concept of the General Will. Rousseau distinguished between the mere "will of all"—the sum of individual preferences—and the General Will that emerges when citizens deliberate with the common good in mind. "The General Will alone," Rousseau argued, "can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted." In this interpretation, deliberative democracy might be understood as offering practical mechanisms for discovering this elusive General Will through structured, inclusive dialogue.

Similarly, John Rawls argued that "public reason" provides theoretical underpinning for deliberative approaches. Rawls envisioned citizens engaging in public dialogue by offering reasons that others could reasonably accept, rather than simply advancing claims grounded in their particular comprehensive doctrines. His famous "veil of ignorance" thought experiment—asking us to design principles of justice without knowing our future social position—represents a deliberative ideal that pushes beyond narrow self-interest toward more impartial reasoning.

Our contemporary democratic systems, however, suffer from a troubling short-sightedness. Polarizing electoral mechanisms, with their predictable cycles and emphasis on immediate results, systematically privilege short-term thinking for many people. This "democratic myopia" often renders our governance structures peculiarly flawed to address long-horizon challenges like climate change or intergenerational justice. The majoritarianism also left out the consent of the lost. The political discourses polarize the people and create a soft war within.

When elected officials operate with one focus perpetually on the next election, how can they adequately represent those whose voices remain unheard. Future generations, distant populations, or even non-human species affected by our decisions are left out as well. Deliberative processes offer a potential remedy by creating spaces where participants can temporarily step back from immediate interests to consider more expansive timeframes and communities.

The process of deliberation typically unfolds through several interconnected phases. Communities first identify and frame the issues warranting collective attention—a process that itself benefits from inclusive participation. Information sharing follows, drawing on diverse knowledge sources from expert testimony to lived experience. The heart of the process lies in the ensuing discussion, where participants articulate perspectives, challenge assumptions, and collectively reason toward decisions that reflect their deepened understanding.

Consider how this may play out in citizens' assemblies, where random community members convene over extended periods to deliberate on complex issues. In Ireland, a citizens' assembly helped break decades of political deadlock on abortion rights by creating space for nuanced discussion outside the polarized rhetoric of electoral politics. The recommendations were later endorsed by national referendum. It may be seen as a promising example of how deliberative forums can sometimes navigate contentious terrain more successfully than traditional political institutions. There are other examples, but I think that we got the point.

The deliberative approach fundamentally reimagines citizens' role in governance. Rather than occasional voters or passive recipients of policy, community members become active co-creators of public decisions. This transformation asks more of citizens—requiring time, engagement, and openness to changing views—but also offers more: a deeper form of political agency and connection to one's community.

This vision of active citizenship recalls Rousseau's assertion that freedom comes not from the absence of constraint but from living under laws one has helped author. "The people being subject to the laws," he wrote, "ought to be their author: the conditions of society ought to be regulated solely by those who come together to form it." Deliberative processes embody this principle by making citizens genuine authors of collective decisions, not merely their subjects.

We would be remiss, however, to present deliberative democracy as a panacea without acknowledging its considerable challenges. The deliberative struggle of equal participation collides with stubborn realities of power imbalance, resource constraints, and social inequality. Even in carefully designed forums, certain voices may dominate while others remain marginalized, reproducing rather than remedying existing power disparities.

Reaching meaningful consensus presents another formidable challenge. As societies grow more diverse in values and worldviews, finding common ground becomes increasingly difficult. Here, Rawls's notion of "overlapping consensus" offers a promising direction—suggesting that citizens with different comprehensive doctrines might nonetheless converge on political principles they can affirm for different reasons.

The resource-intensive nature of deliberation raises questions of scale and sustainability. How might deliberative approaches, which typically flourish in smaller settings, address issues requiring national or global coordination? Digital technologies offer intriguing possibilities for expanding deliberative reach, though they bring their own complications regarding access, authenticity, and the quality of exchange.

Despite these challenges, deliberative democracy offers something our political systems desperately need. I mean spaces for collective reflection amidst the noise of modern politics. By reasoned decision-making and creating structured opportunities for listening and learning, deliberative processes can help restore the declining capacity to reason together about our common future. Deliberative democracy doesn't claim perfect outcomes or uncontested truths. Rather, it suggests that decisions improved through inclusive dialogue, while still fallible, carry a legitimacy and wisdom that undeliberated decisions typically lack.

But there is a nuance. Think of deliberation as a lively space where we find ways to cooperate even with different opinions. It is not a place of sermons or producing truths. We don't need everyone to become the same; it's about different groups strategically agreeing on shared goals and ways to communicate so we can all move forward without losing our unique aspirations and our identities. This approach, although seeking to gather people as equals, must also recognize that we are all different and that power isn't always equal. So, when we discuss, we should always ask ourselves the following questions. Who is really being heard? How are we making decisions? And are we making things fairer for everyone? Whom was left out? Deliberative democracy must actively disrupt dominance e.g. active inclusion of marginalized voices. Otherwise, it risks replicating the hierarchies it seeks to replace. Only by being this thoughtful can talking things out help us create a community that respects everyone's differences and is fairer for all.

Might deliberative approaches offer not just a theoretical ideal but a practical necessity? Perhaps the path toward more responsive governance lies not in abandoning our democratic commitments but in reimagining how those commitments are realized through creating spaces where citizens can practice the art of thinking together about the world they share, apply their agency and promise together to create.

In the wake of the devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck last week, Myanmar faces an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The disaster has claimed over 3000 lives and injured thousands more, with the death toll expected to rise as rescue operations continue. The disaster's impact extended even to nearby countries like Thailand.

The earthquake majorly hit the Mandalay and Sagaing Regions and nearby areas where people are already tragically struggling with the ongoing conflict. For months, people there have been caught in the crossfire and bombardments. This existing turmoil is now making it incredibly difficult to get help to the people who need it most. Imagine being injured or losing your home, and then facing even more obstacles to getting food, water, or medical attention.

Just when things couldn't seem any worse, there are horrifying situations that the military has continued launching airstrikes in the very areas hit by the earthquake. Imagine the fear and despair of survivors, already repeatedly traumatized and vulnerable, as they hear the sound of more explosions. Human rights groups are rightly condemning these actions, pleading for an immediate stop to the violence so that aid can finally reach those who are suffering. But who can actually hold the junta military accountable?

Under intense pressure from around the world, the military regime has announced a temporary ceasefire, saying it's to allow for recovery efforts. But many are understandably skeptical. How can people trust this promise when there are still reports of military attacks? They are obstructing aid groups. They are even documenting young men who are helping on the ground, so that they can conscript these good people later.

Right now, people are desperate for the most basic things: clean water to drink, food to eat, a safe place to sleep, and urgent medical care. Aid organizations on the ground are painting a grim picture of widespread destruction and a healthcare system on the brink of collapse, with hospitals overwhelmed and supplies running out.

Time is running out. The monsoon season is just around the corner, threatening to bring even more hardship. If we don't act quickly and work together, the combined impact of this terrible earthquake and the ongoing conflict will lead to even more lives lost and unimaginable suffering for the people of Myanmar.

As the world watches, we dare ask this. Who can even take a responsibility to step in and make sure help reaches those in desperate need, without any barriers?

The Myanmar military is cruel, unaccountable and not serving the people at all. They must go anyway.

Humanity's desire to capture the essence of society in a single document manifests in constitutions. These texts are crafted with noble aspirations, genuine hopes, and faith that words can bind the future to our present conception of justice.

A constitution represents humanity's most curious invention—a document designed to outlive its authors, to speak with authority to unborn generations, and to constrain the very power it establishes. Created in moments of crisis or clarity, we hope these words may prove wiser than we ourselves could be.

Consider America's founding experiment beginning with those seductive words: "We the People." Three words performing conceptual alchemy—making the dead speak for the living and conjuring unity from discord. What faith this requires in language itself!

Constitutionalism carries quasi-religious undertones—a belief in principles transcending ordinary politics. Constitutions metaphorically create what the Greeks called a temenos: sacred space demarcated from daily affairs. In our secular age, they become secular scripture. Yet constitutional drafting contains inherent melancholy. The need for such documents acknowledges humanity's darker nature—that power intoxicates, majorities tyrannize, and today's justice may become tomorrow's oppression. Thus constitutions embody profound pessimism about human nature.

Different traditions manifest this tension differently. American constitutionalism embraces the paradox of using state power to limit state power through checks and balances. The British tradition trusts unwritten customs over codified text. Post-colonial constitutions struggle to reconcile Western frameworks with indigenous legal traditions. What unites these approaches is recognizing the need to distinguish ordinary law from fundamental principles. Constitutionalism answers Plato's enduring question: How might we be governed by reason rather than human caprice?

Yet constitutions don't interpret themselves. They require human actors to breathe life into clauses—to define "equal protection" or "due process" in contexts their authors never imagined. Herein lies the irony: documents meant to constrain human judgment ultimately depend entirely upon it.

Debates between "originalism" and "living constitutionalism" mirror theological disputes—arguments about how to read sacred texts, the relationship between dead and living, whether wisdom resides more in past or present. Nonetheless, there are more or less features of adjusting things to our lives. Take a look again to famous US Constitution. "We the People", at that time, was actually for a number of people but it today try to be inclusive.

Constitutionalism fascinates as our boldest attempt to solve time's problem in politics—creating institutions that bend without breaking, principles that endure yet adapt. Constitutions represent messages in bottles to descendants: "Here's what we learned about justice and governance. We hope it helps."

Let me be clear. The effectiveness of a constitution goes beyond its written words, depending heavily on the practical mechanisms established for its enforcement. While judicial review, citizen oversight, and independent commissions are designed to uphold constitutional principles, their success varies significantly across different political landscapes. In established democracies like Germany, judicial review has proven effective, but in less stable nations, it's often undermined by authoritarianism or corruption. Citizen oversight and independent commissions can be ineffective due to apathy or resource scarcity. Legislative manipulation, like in Myanmar, also disgustingly weakens constitutions. Cultural, historical, and political factors hinder constitutional success. Achieving tangible governance from constitutional principles requires constant vigilance, strong institutions, and active citizens, recognizing the inherent difficulty of humans enforcing rules on themselves.

At our most honest, we recognize constitutions as acts of faith—in language, reason, and principles that might transcend history's vicissitudes. They embody our highest aspirations while acknowledging our deepest fears. In a changing world, they offer the comforting illusion of constancy—fixed points from which to build just societies.

The concept of "135 ethnic group" is said to aim to demonstrate multi-ethnic and multi-cultural coexistence and unity, but in reality, it is a political concept intended to deconstruct indigenous nations and assimilate them under a single national identity, that of the Bamar/Myanmar. It is a concept that reduces political heritage to cultural groups.

In his book, "The Conditions of Diversity in Multinational Democracies," political scientist McRoberts states that many countries tend to reduce their internal nations to "ethnic groups" rather than recognizing them as national communities. In Myanmar, successive authoritarian regimes have used similar strategies. For example, in Myanmar, large ethnic groups that were previously ruled by monarchies were given the name "major ethnic groups," but this term was never clearly defined. General Aung San himself attempted to define this term in conjunction with "Nation," but stated that a proper Burmese dictionary was needed for a satisfactory definition.

The list of 135 ethnic groups has many problems. For example:

1. The detailed division of Karens into White Karen, Sgaw, Mon Karen, etc., means that it can no longer be called a list of national communities (Nations).
2. The Chin ethnic groups are counted up to 53 types, conflating languages and parental lineages.
3. Some ethnic groups have overlapping names with two different designations.
4. The forced counting of the Bamar ethnicity as 9 types, is considered a matter of astrology, as 1+3+5=9. (to align Burmese astrology The Holy Number of 9)
5. This list is neither a list of national communities, nor a list of ethnic groups, nor a list of languages, and cannot be clearly defined.

The political existence of this concept has led to several consequences:

1. To fragment indigenous groups formations/to aid in "divide and rule."
2. To make national communities with their own political formations loyal only to the Union of Myanmar.
3. To create narrative stories for central government legitimacy.
4. To reduce the self-determination and historical rights of indigenous peoples under the name of "Bamar also being an indigenous ethnicity."
5. To assimilate the distinct characteristics and cultures of indigenous peoples.

Professor James C. Scott states that indigenous peoples, not only in Myanmar but elsewhere, have devised various methods to resist the dominance of mainstream culture and central governments since ancient times. They have developed their own writing systems. This action enables:

1. The preservation of their culture and language.
2. Freedom from state control.
3. Strengthening of distinct characteristics.
4. Becoming a symbol of resistance against the state's standardized writing system.
5. The ability to resist state centralization and information gathering.

Indigenous peoples' writing systems play a more important role than just a simple communication tool. It becomes a unique form of political resistance. Literature serves social purposes:

1. Cultural purposes:
   • Recording and preserving the history and traditions of the ethnicity.
   • Passing on traditional culture and arts to future generations.
   • Enabling systematic teaching and learning of the mother tongue.
   • Preserving unique identities and symbols.
2. Political purposes:
   • Resisting the cultural assimilation of the central government.
   • Symbolizing self-determination and freedom.
   • Promoting unity within the ethnicity.
   • Freeing from state information control.
3. Social purposes:
   • Building a communication network within the ethnicity.
   • Exchanging knowledge and ideas.
   • Educating future generations.
   • Strengthening the unity of the social community.

The concept of "135 ethnic groups" is a political weapon intended to weaken indigenous peoples by fragmenting them and reducing their political rights. This is not a personal problem but an institutional problem.

The main points here are:

1. Attempts to assimilate the unique identities and political heritage of ethnic groups often encounter resistance.
2. This resistance is not only the right thing to do but also a moral choice.
3. Indigenous peoples tend to find innovative ways to protect their rights.
4. Literary culture can be an important weapon for political liberation.
5. Mechanisms that strengthen ethnonational unity and identity play an important role in their political struggle and are key parts of moral resistance.
   

The indigenous resistance will continue to preserve their unique identities continue to strive while building a modern and developed federal democratic system. Their cultures and literature will continue to play an important role in this journey.

(Infographic courtesy from "The Art of Not Being Legible" by Piers Kelly.)