In a very different sphere of education from full university programmes is the NanoDegree. This is an initiative recently launched by AT&T and Udacity, an online education company founded by Stanford professor and former top Google engineer Sebastian Thrun. Enrolment requires competence in high-school mathematics, and costs $200 per month. In return, students can access online training in specific computer science skills, such as programming. Each course is narrowly defined with clear application to an immediate work environment. Each can be completed within a reasonable span of student time, interest and motivation. The NanoDegree has none of the transformative ambition of, say, a liberal arts programme. But for societies like Myanmar that face real and damaging skills shortages, it can certainly play an important educational role.

I’m intrigued by an announcement made at the start of last week that Starbucks is teaming up with Arizona State University to provide free online education to its 135,000 US employees. The opportunity is open to any individual who works at least 20 hours a week, and has the grades and test scores necessary to gain admission to ASU. For employees with at least two years of college credit, full tuition is offered. For others, partial tuition can be claimed. At ASU, students can access one of the largest online degree programmes in the US, with 11,000 students spread across 40 majors. The ultimate target is to teach 100,000 students online.

Criticism of the initiative soon surfaced. On inspection, it turns out that Starbucks will only start to refund tuition costs after at least seven online courses have been completed. Many students may never reach that point, and therefore gain no free education at all. Those who do will have to spend more than $10,000 on course enrolments before they begin to get any money back. Issues of fairness, access and sheer affordability therefore need to be sorted out as the programme beds down. More generally, there are suspicions throughout higher education that online learning is inferior to traditional classroom teaching. For sure it will take time to build confidence in the new methods.

Nevertheless, there is obviously great potential in this pioneering work/study model – a kind of Starbucks University. It goes beyond most corporate programmes by opening access to all employees, and indeed to ex-employees who can continue to claim financial support even after quitting their jobs. It capitalizes on the very great flexibility offered by online learning. It blazes a trail for productive partnerships between global corporations and innovative universities. It must contain lessons for Myanmar.

Last Tuesday the Asia Foundation released an important report – Kim Jolliffe’s Ethnic Conflict and Social Services in Myanmar’s Contested Regions. Noting that international aid agencies typically with work and through host state institutions, Jolliffe examines ways forward for Myanmar, where in many areas social services have long been provided by ethnic armed organizations and associated networks. He argues that getting policy right in this domain will boost not only development, but also peace.

Jolliffe opens by explaining that in contested parts of Myanmar’s eastern border country social services are often delivered by actors engaged in a larger struggle: the fight for the right to govern. Particularly for EAOs, social service provision is a central plank of overarching governance strategies. Moreover, going forward ethnic minorities have a clear desire to exercise real control over all programmes. This simple wish is expressed by a Karen teacher cited on page 8 of the report: “Everyone wants to lead their own development.” Aid agencies therefore need to tread very carefully, for the decisions they take will have shaping effects on broader political issues found in the peace process.

To frame policy analysis, Jolliffe therefore maps the complex territorial claims made by groups operating up and down the border, placing them in a typology of six main forms. He then shows how some aid interventions have increased local tension and spread grassroots fear of state expansion. He also profiles cases of meaningful collaboration and coordination in Mon national education and Karen healthcare. He uses these contrasting examples to argue for conflict sensitivity on the part of aid agencies, short-term enhancement of support for service provision linked to EAOs, and efforts to boost links within the intricate mosaic of social service providers.

As established aid donors close down their border operations and move inside Myanmar, and new players open Yangon offices and ramp up service provision, this careful analysis of the special challenges generated by ethnic areas needs to be widely read.

Alan Paton’s acclaimed novel Cry, the Beloved Country depicts South Africa on the brink of its descent into full-blown apartheid – the Afrikaans term, as Wikipedia notes, for “apart-hood” or the state of being apart. In 1948, the year of the book’s publication, the National Party began to introduce a stream of legislation that codified racial segregation and formally divided the land and its people. Not until 1994, nearly half a century later, would multiparty, multiracial elections be held, raising Nelson Mandela to the presidency and signaling an end to the system of institutionalized discrimination.

Paton’s book is an act of witness and protest. Against a backdrop of stunning natural beauty, it dissects the ugliness of South African politics. Its central theme is one with which Aung San Suu Kyi has long been associated – the corrosive effects of political fear. “Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.” (This famous passage appears in Book One, chapter 12.) The novel manages, nevertheless, to convey a degree of hope – its subtitle is “a story of comfort in desolation”.

For two reasons I thought of Paton while scrolling through Myanmar news this week. One was the depressing decision of Yangon’s Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival to cancel screenings of a recent documentary, The Open Sky, after social media lit up with criticism of its exploration of anti-Muslim violence inside the country. The other was grim testimony from UN Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Kyung-Wha Kang about the conditions in which displaced Rohingya Muslims are presently held. “In Rakhine, I witnessed a level of human suffering in IDP camps that I have personally never seen before, with men, women, and children living in appalling conditions with severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, both in camps and isolated villages. Many people have wholly inadequate access to basic services including health, education, water and sanitation.”

Sensitive, loaded words such as apartheid can never be used lightly. But Nicholas Kristof was right to employ this term to describe the current situation in Rakhine State. Institutionalized “apart-hood” is exactly what’s going on there. Others are also right to use documentary film, the official structures of the UN and any additional means available to them to engage in acts of witness and protest.

Myanmar is portrayed all too rarely in films with genuine global reach – so rarely, in fact, that it scarcely ever happens at all. When a major movie does come along, then, it’s worth paying attention. On these grounds alone, Luc Besson’s The Lady, from 2011, very nearly demands examination. I saw it for the third or fourth time a few months ago, and am posting about it today to mark Aung San Suu Kyi’s sixty-ninth birthday.

The main negatives of this film are now well established. The history of 1988 and beyond is mangled to such an extent that it’s often impossible to work out quite where in time we’ve got to. Michelle Yeoh’s language skills, though very good for Aung San Suu Kyi English, are laughably bad for Aung San Suu Kyi Burmese. The ruling generals are so caricatured as to become, at times, cartoonish. Beyond these major flaws are minor ones that could so easily have been corrected. Aung San Suu Kyi’s return home in 1988 is signaled through a “Welcome to Yangon” arch on the road into a city still known in English as Rangoon. Yeoh has ludicrously elaborate flower arrangements flapping about in her hair. Virtually none of the extras employed as saffron uprising monks in the final reel has a shaved head.

All that said, I think this remains a valuable movie. It takes a real global icon, one of our most revered secular saints, and humanizes her. In a remarkable life, it focuses on the core tension between family and country and explores it in some detail. In an intriguing state, it homes in on the critical standoff between forces of tyranny and forces of democracy and again examines it at some length. Above all, though, The Lady is to be celebrated for the reason given at the outset. Quite simply, it does what few other films have ever tried to do – carve out a meaningful niche for Myanmar in mainstream public culture and discourse. The more often that happens, the better.

It’ll take a while for the internet to become a mainstream educational resource in Myanmar. Already, though, millions of children and young adults are active online, and throughout the country the number is increasing daily. As I’ve argued before, it’s thus high time for reformers in government departments, UN agencies and INGOs to embrace the digital revolution and harness its enormous potential for teaching and learning.

One important way to do that is by making basic computer science central to the curriculum from kindergarten all the way up to university. A sentence that leapt off the page of the New York Times at me a few weeks ago was this: “At Stanford, about 90 percent of undergraduates take at least one computer programming class, compared with about half at Harvard.” Those are stunningly high figures, and they point the way to what is sure to become standard practice in higher education no more than a few years from now.

Where, then, to look? Well, for starters to Code.org. Launched in January 2013, this US non-profit believes that “every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming”, and that “computer science should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra”. Its list of corporate and billionaire donors is a Silicon Valley dream team, and its educational partners are at the cutting edge of online learning. Beyond that, the statistics are truly impressive. In less than 18 months, nearly 40 million people have accessed Code.org’s free “hour of code” computer science course, and nearly 2 billion lines of code have been written by students. A brief launch video, featuring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many others, is a huge YouTube hit with nearly 12 million views.

Even in a context of spectacular success, there are still issues that need to be tackled. In particular there is in the US a marked gender disparity, with boys much more likely to get into coding than girls. Slowly this is being addressed, though, through organizations such as Girls Who Code. Disparities across other demographic groups have spawned similar initiatives, and at least in America there is reason to believe that the not too distant future will see coding taught as a fundamental life skill alongside the traditional 3Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic.

Faced with all this, the policy advice for educational planners and funders in Myanmar is surely straightforward – link with Code.org, build local language platforms, and allow spreading internet usage to work its magic there as it is doing elsewhere.

On the topic of transitional justice, my friend Ania Zongollowicz recently brought to my attention the Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory website. Hosted by Columbia University’s Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights in New York, the site is jointly managed by the Historical Justice and Memory Research Network housed at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. The Dialogues forum “brings together scholars and practitioners concerned with issues of historical dialogue, historical and transitional justice, and public and social memory”. It’s a great resource for anyone interested in issues of transitional justice in Myanmar.

Phil Clark had an interesting op-ed in last week’s New York Times holding that all transitional justice must be local. For democratizing societies seeking to confront an abusive past, international tribunals are not the way forward. Rather, justice has to be sought close to home. He looked particularly at the case of Rwanda following the 1994 genocide.

The negative case is powerful. International tribunals are always enormously expensive, and to date their outcomes have been meagre. Moreover, as Clark argues, they are based on a model created at Nuremberg and Tokyo immediately after the Second World War, when the key task was bringing to justice individuals ultimately responsible for mass crimes committed by disciplined military machines. Today, however, conflict is increasingly complex, and criminal responsibility is properly examined all the way up and down military hierarchies, and indeed beyond them. Also, conflict is now increasingly intimate, and securing reconciliation in divided societies is a key requirement.

The positive case is much more contentious. Clark notes that in a decade from 2002 to 2012 Rwanda’s gacaca courts, modernized versions of traditional arbitration hearings, prosecuted 400,000 genocide suspects in 11,000 communities. This was, he writes, “the most extensive attempt at judging mass crimes anywhere to date”. In his telling, it succeeded in making everyday perpetrators central to the transitional justice process, encouraged direct face-to-face communication between perpetrators and survivors, and helped deliver both justice and reconciliation.

There is, however, much criticism of these community courts. As Clark writes, they did invite perpetrators to confess, and victims to ask questions and express anger. However, judges elected by local communities had limited expertise, and the processes over which they presided were frequently corrupt, typically falling far below international human rights standards. Beyond the courtroom, there was violence, intimidation and widespread fear of participating in often traumatizing proceedings. Some concede that gacaca courts were the best that could be hoped for in very difficult circumstances. Others argue that they generated neither justice nor reconciliation.

Perhaps the core lesson to take from post-conflict procedures in Rwanda is that there is a limit to what criminal trials can deliver. Justice – maybe, and the more grounded in local context the better. Reconciliation – that could be a step too far, and needs to be sought by other means.

At the start of last week, I cited Nicholas Kristof’s analysis of “apartheid” in Myanmar. In a 1987 essay entitled “Political Theory and the Rule of Law”, Professor Judith Shklar from Harvard University made a parallel point, arguing (on page 22 of the collected works in which the essay appears) that in some instances the modern state is effectively binary. “Such a state … is a ‘dual state’ because some of its population is simply declared to be subhuman, and a public danger, and as such excluded from the legal order entirely. They are part of a second state, run usually by different agents of the government, but with the full approval of those who staff the ‘first’ of the two states. Such was the government of the United States until the Civil War and in some ways thereafter. Such also was Nazi Germany and such is South Africa today.” Soon after the essay was published, South Africa dismantled its dual state. Contemporary Myanmar has yet to do that.

Alongside diplomacy and humanitarian action, both of which are in constant use throughout the global South, two further tools are employed more sparingly by the international community to shape the political trajectories of developing states: sanctions and humanitarian intervention. Here the notion of managing falls away, and the stronger conception of disciplining comes into play. Again in the Myanmar case, how might these tools be deployed?

While arms embargoes are still in place, most economic sanctions have now been lifted. The EU took this step in April 2013, having announced a suspension one year earlier. In the US, President Obama in mid-May renewed limited investment sanctions. Broadly, though, the major western powers have allowed Myanmar to come in from the cold. At a time when people in Rakhine State and elsewhere have already had ample global censure, there appears to be no good reason to reimpose economic sanctions.

In every case military intervention is a last resort, and may look to be a distant prospect in Myanmar. Nevertheless, the situation in Rakhine State requires that options for peacekeeping be placed on the agenda. Once or twice a year (most recently on April 17), the UN Security Council is briefed by Vijay Nambiar, the Secretary-General’s Special Adviser for Myanmar. The next session needs to give serious consideration to a future peacekeeping force, and could profitably draw on the deep well of expertise amassed by China as a key player in UN peacekeeping over the past decade.