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. 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.

That is what I think is what federalism is 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? 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.