Sectarian violence in Rakhine State has isolated Rohingya communities and reduced or even eliminated access to essential services. This much is widely known. But what is the current situation in towns and villages across the state? I talked through this issue with a local aid worker (based in Yangon) who recently surveyed educational provision in Muslim-dominated northern Rakhine close to the border with Bangladesh – townships up above Sittwe such as Rathedaung, Buthidaung and Maungdaw, plus the places in between.

For years, schools in the area have been severely under-resourced. Bamboo classrooms have dirt floors, broken benches, a fading blackboard and maybe no textbooks. In the corner of the teachers’ room might sit a battered typewriter. That’s about it. Today few global aid agencies teach in these schools. Community and Family Services International, Lutheran World Federation and Save the Children all have a presence, as does UNICEF. But the amount they can do at a time of Buddhist hostility and intimidation is limited.

Much provision therefore remains in the hands of the government – the Ministry of Education joining hands with state education officers. For teachers on standard contracts, MoE pays twice the usual salary for work in “difficult and remote” areas. It also brings in additional staff on a daily rate. However, few have the linguistic skills necessary to teach across the Myanmar, Rakhine and Rohingya languages. Moreover, many contracted teachers taking the double salary fail to show up in class. Some are absent now and then. Others are never present. Instead, they reassign themselves to schools in less difficult and less remote areas. By and large, township officials turn a blind eye.

The cumulative result in many Rohingya communities is that parents are often reluctant to send children to school, unless there is the incentive of a food ration. That is the case roughly 10-15 days per month. Even in class, resourcing problems mean that not much learning takes place. Many children leave school altogether after the fourth grade. In these townships, educating Rohingyas is thus something that happens haphazardly, and in some cases not at all.

Thingyan has become virtually unrecognisable from its traditional roots as a cleansing New Year celebration. Amongst all the changes, though, there is one constant feature: it remains the site of new relationships. Where in the past a potential suitor would raise their interest with a gentle pouring of water over their love interest’s shoulder, now the festival is marked by intoxicated young people hooking up under flashing lights and sprinkler systems all to the deafening tune of international and domestic hits.

Thingyan is a time of opportunity for young people looking for love for obvious reasons: partying, wet clothes, excessive alcohol and low inhibitions. In the context of Myanmar’s conservative society it makes even more sense. It is perhaps the only time of the year when almost all single young women and men will be out looking for fun and partners.

Ask a young Burmese person when they started dating their current partner and the answer will be overwhelmingly: last Thingyan. Ask a young Burmese person when they ended their last relationship: just before Thingyan. The promise of long-term love, not to discount the short-term encounter, is enough to jolt discontented partners. It’s a new year, and freshly cleansed of sins young men are ready for a new girlfriend or two.

The event is heavily stratified, with young elites on the mandats (stages), and the wider population on the streets and in the back of trucks. Further, between the mandats are more subtle distinctions, including between the music style preferred – hip hop, rock or pop – the party accoutremounts of choice – alcohol or drugs – and the markers of exclusiveness – financial or cultural cachet. Even on the stages more distinctions are visible – between the general, VIP, and artist areas. The most scantily-clad girls are almost always found in the VIP areas, and, interestingly, these areas tend to be only partially covered in sprinkler systems, allowing attendants the option to remain dry, and seemingly violate the one golden rule of Thingyan. Predictably, the relationships that are formed during the four days in these partitioned spaces are between similarly classed and aligned young people.

In short, while Thingyan is celebrated as a cleansing and socially unifying festival, a closer inspection reveals the gross inequality and youthful behaviour to be expected during such an event in Myanmar. Perhaps you don’t notice it until you try and walk from one mandat to another on the street, only to be almost blasted off your feet by a fire hose cannon, or when you are behind one of the hoses and are urged by your fellow hose wielders to unite and target specific people and cars below. But at some point during the four days the distinct hierarchy of the festival strikes you. Thingyan is an expression of Myanmar’s surprisingly international tendencies and its domestic inequalities.

While looking down Kabaye Paya Road or Pyay Road the scene is overwhelming at first: literally thousands of arcs of water pouring out from the mandats, drenching the welcoming truckloads of people stuck in an almost complete and entirely intentional gridlock, waiting patiently at either end for their turn for a good soaking. Those on the streets remain there, never challenging security on the stages or getting upset by the traffic: life is suspended for four days. Optimistically, this might be put down to fun and tradition. More pessimistically, Thingyan could be viewed as a four-day performance laying bare Myanmar’s inequalities and demonstrating its population’s disciplined aptitude to take a good drenching from its elites.

Jacqueline Menager is a PhD candidate at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

Htein Lin is one of Myanmar’s most challenging contemporary artists. He’s currently engaged in a landmark project to make gypsum plaster (or plaster of paris) casts of the hands and lower arms of former political prisoners. Earlier this month he had a one-man show of recent paintings at Yangon’s River Gallery II. He’s long been a pioneering performance artist.

We started with the arm casts – 300 were stacked in a pile by the window of his home. That’s 300 out of at least 3000 that could be made if the entire population of former political prisoners were covered, and 300 out of around 1000 that probably will be made by the end of this year. Then “A Show of Hands” will go on public display first in Myanmar and later overseas. The main interest of this project may well not be the hands themselves, but rather the videos shot while each cast is being made. Htein Lin explained that the basic process takes 20-30 minutes (and costs about $2). Often, though, a session lasts much longer as stories are told about life in and out of prison. Some emerge only slowly, others more quickly. Some are laced with humour, others with sadness. Some reflect tensions that existed in prison, others move on. Some barely touch on the unfolding reform process, others are filled with political commentary.

Htein Lin was of course a political prisoner himself from 1998 to 2004. Many of the videos therefore capture a dialogue based on shared experience. In one respect, though, he is finding fellow prisoners’ stories quite different from his own. That comes when he makes casts with female prisoners. During the junta years male prisoners of conscience tended to be placed together, and rarely mixed with ordinary criminals. By contrast, their female counterparts usually joined the general prison population, and lived with women from disparate walks of life. Their memories are thus quite distinct. Beyond that, problems of personal hygiene were typically more severe for female prisoners, and also come through in their accounts.

On occasion making the casts turns into a public performance. In Yangon, Htein Lin set up his operation on the site of a 1988 massacre to boost awareness among generations with no direct knowledge of what happened back then. In London, he made casts of former political prisoners in the UK diaspora outside the Tate Modern art gallery. He also does action painting (with his hands) close to shopping malls or in other key locations to claim public space for art and raise public interest. Again, the entire event is captured on video as security guards turn up to question why this display of creativity is taking place on what they regard as their turf. It’s all part of a wider attempt by local people to test the boundaries of freedom of expression in transitional Myanmar.

Finally, Htein Lin engages with the community by opening his warehouse studio in Ahlone for local people to walk in, take a look, and be artistic. Almost a decade ago, in 2005, he was briefly arrested for a street performance in which he set up a roving stall to sell paintings for just a few kyats, and he may do something like that again (preferably without the same consequences). He is also embarking on a photography project to capture modes of Yangon life that will soon be gone – people selling fruit, vegetables and plants on the street, or hawking brooms and other minor household items. His method involves taking one photo of his subject, asking his subject to take one photo of him as that person, and then registering on a map where the encounter took place.

Pansodan Friday Journal is no more. Launched on July 19 last year, it flourished for a brief but exhilarating seven months, and appeared in its final issue on February 28 this year. Still, this was a significant cultural initiative, and it does have an afterlife.

The journal was born into a vibrant artistic and cultural context with no venue for reporting all that was going on. It aimed to capture and monitor the local scene, and to introduce that scene to locals and outsiders with little knowledge of it. On both counts it was a triumphant success.

Now, though, those objectives are being met through different outlets. A dedicated Facebook page provides immediate coverage of the Myanmar art world. A free monthly handout launched in March contains information about major artistic and cultural events. A quarterly journal to be launched in June will bring together much of this material, and also supplement art journalism with longer articles on curatorship.

Pansodan Friday Journal proved that a weekly art magazine could work in Myanmar, and built a platform for the activities now being rolled out. Its work is done.

I was privileged to be the research director of the Irish Constitutional Convention, which met over an 18-month period from late 2012 through to early 2014. Established in the midst of Ireland’s worst economic crisis, the intention behind the 100-member body was to bring “ordinary citizens” into the heart of debates over important questions of constitutional reform. Conventions of this type have been trialed in other countries, but what made this a world first was the combination of three things: the random selection of 66 citizen members (rather than electing them as had happened in Iceland), including politicians as members (the other 33 members), and giving the Convention quite a wide-ranging agenda. Following up on Ian’s posts last week, this is a brief view from inside the process.

At its launch, the Convention was met with a barrage of criticism, not least from prominent members of the media who derided it variously as a waste of money (the entire operation cost less than €1 million, helped by the fact that all the experts provided their services for free) and a waste of time. In the event, the Convention surpassed everyone’s expectations – indeed, to the extent that many of its critics went public in admitting they had been wrong to dismiss it out of hand.

I can’t pretend it was perfect. Mistakes were made as we went along and lessons learned, from mundane matters such as how best to provide sufficient supplies of coffee without eating into the limited schedule through to weightier questions over how best to design the ballot paper at the end of a weekend (when members voted on their recommendations). Also some topics fitted this format better than others: for example, the discussion of parliamentary reform was the most rancorous not least because our political members held strong views on the matter!

For most of us the major highlight was the weekend-long discussion of marriage equality. The debate throughout was measured and respectful, but also full of emotion with some hair-at-the-back-of-the-neck moments such as when adult children of same-sex couples spoke of their loving family relationships.

Will the Convention make a difference? Well, it has produced 38 specific recommendations for reform that are gradually making their way through the parliament. So far the government has agreed to hold three referendums, and more are expected. I think it is safe to say that but for the Convention we would not be voting on marriage equality or on reducing the voting age to 16 – two reforms that if passed will have huge implications for Irish society and politics.

David Farrell is Professor of Politics at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Experts from the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado have spent the past nine months working out which are America’s 50 funniest cities. Really it’s a crazy project. Crazier still is a book recently published by team members Peter McGraw and Joel Warner – The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. Can such a search ever make sense?

To me, born in London and raised close by, sample jokes from leading American cities are all funny. But is it possible for such humour to survive a journey of several thousands of miles? Can it draw laughs as far away as, say, Southeast Asia? Well, here’s a gag from top US city Chicago, where the central business district is known as the Loop: “A man gets on a bus and asks the driver, “Does dis bus go to da Loop?” The driver replies, “No, it goes ‘beep-beep’.”

More jokes are available through the New York Times site, together with a full report. See what you think.

In the wealth of commentary quite properly generated by this month’s twentieth anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide, two brief articles caught my eye. One by Laura Seay was academic: an overview analysis of whether reconciliation by legal means has worked. The other by Susan Dominus was journalistic: a report on one photographer’s portraits of reconciliation, and the stories that lie behind them.

Seay’s analysis was posted on The Monkey Cage (now run by the Washington Post). It looks at the impact of Rwanda’s transitional justice programmes on national reconciliation. Two core legal measures were the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, created specifically to try leaders of the genocide, and gacaca courts, again formed specially but contrastingly based on customary institutions. The ICTR has a mixed record, and even when it finishes its work (perhaps at the end of this year) will not have prosecuted every allegedly culpable figure. If anything, gacaca courts are yet more controversial.

Operating at the community level, these courts sought to strike a balance between global mechanisms and local experience. Their aims were to dispense justice, deliver accountability, and promote national reconciliation. In more than a decade from 2001 to 2012, when they ceased to function, they processed nearly 2 million cases. However, they were constrained by a formal requirement that they focus solely on genocide crimes, and also by government intimidation. Tutsi survivors were sometimes retraumatized by appearing in court, and few gained any real reparations. Hutus discovered that they were subjected to a sense of collective guilt. Observers therefore tend to conclude that gacaca courts generated no meaningful reconciliation, and may even have deepened ethnic division.

Dominus’s report appeared in the New York Times Magazine (and is referenced by Seay). It describes Pieter Hugo’s work in photographing Hutu perpetrators pardoned by Tutsi survivors of their actual crimes. In each case, reconciliation was facilitated by Association Modeste et Innocent, a non-profit group. “In AMI’s program, small groups of Hutus and Tutsis are counseled over many months, culminating in the perpetrator’s formal request for forgiveness. If forgiveness is granted by the survivor, the perpetrator and his family and friends typically bring a basket of offerings, usually food and sorghum or banana beer. The accord is sealed with song and dance.”

Engaging at the individual level, the AMI initiative undertakes reconciliation “one encounter at a time”. It has diverse results that are evident in Hugo’s images. “Some pairs showed up and sat easily together, chatting about village gossip. Others arrived willing to be photographed but unable to go much further.” Nevertheless, there is clear value in AMI’s painstaking efforts.

Commissioned by Creative Court, an arts organization based in The Hague, the full set of Hugo’s photos is currently on display there, and will eventually be shown in churches and at memorials in Rwanda. Eight images of paired perpetrators and victims are also accessible online, together with testimony from each person.

The strong likelihood is that the remarkable general election currently taking place in India will result in victory for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. In itself, this will be significant for Myanmar. Also of rather dismal cross-border interest is the long record of sectarian discord associated with Modi. Basharat Peer’s recent New York Times article examines it in some detail.

In October 2001, Modi was elected chief minister of Gujurat. A few months later, at the end of February 2002, a train fire that claimed the lives of around 60 Hindus triggered rioting across this prosperous western state. More than 1000 people, many of them Muslim, were killed. Allegations of official complicity have never been satisfactorily investigated, and Modi has done little to reach out to those affected by the violence.

Looking back, it is clear that this episode was the culmination of a series of sectarian clashes – 1985, 1992, 2002 – that cumulatively drove Hindus and Muslims apart. What were once mixed communities became divided along religious lines. Today the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad, is an economic success story dominated by a wealthy Hindu core. On its southwestern periphery is, however, Juhapura, a Muslim ghetto of about 400,000 inhabitants known locally as The Border. Peer pays a visit and files this report: “Modi’s engines of growth seem to have stalled on The Border. His acclaimed bus network ends a few miles before Juhapura. The route of a planned metro rail line also stops short of the neighborhood. The same goes for the city’s pipelines.”

Change the names, and there’s all too much chance this could be a Myanmar story written several years from now. It doesn’t have to turn out that way.

One consequence of We the Citizens was that several months later, in July 2012, the two houses of the Irish Parliament passed a resolution to establish a convention on the constitution. A ragbag of tasks drawn from different party platforms was specified for it, including altering the presidential term, reducing the voting age, reviewing the electoral system, considering provisions for same-sex marriage, helping boost female political participation, and removing the offence of blasphemy from the constitution. The convention was formed on December 1, 2012, and had its first full session on January 26-27, 2013. It slightly overran its official 12-month mandate, concluding its work in February this year and being formally wound up on March 31.

The convention built on domestic experience gained during the 2011 We the Citizens pilot. It also learned from citizens’ assemblies on electoral reform in the two Canadian provinces of British Columbia (2004) and Ontario (2007), and from a citizens’ forum in the Netherlands (2006). All of these earlier exercises shared the two key features of We the Citizens: random selection of participants, and discussion by deliberation. The Irish constitutional convention in fact had some nominees from political parties. Its 100 members comprised 66 representative individuals chosen at random from the entire adult Irish population, 33 parliamentarians, and one independent chairperson. Broadly, though, it was aligned with the earlier initiatives.

The convention met roughly one weekend per month throughout its year of operation. Typically, it would convene for the whole of Saturday plus Sunday morning. Its work was aided by an academic and legal support group, and supported by a formal secretariat. In addition to the specified core tasks, it was allowed to address further issues as it saw fit, and duly did so. The government pledged to respond within four months to any recommendations coming out of the convention, and if necessary to schedule constitutional reform referendums.

To liaise with citizens, the convention created a website designed to act as a repository for basic information, and to facilitate input and feedback. All major documents were uploaded, and plenary sessions were made accessible through live streaming. In October-November 2013, a series of regional open meetings was held so that fresh topics could be suggested for consideration. In December 2013, two were chosen for detailed analysis.

In total, the convention made 38 separate constitutional reform recommendations. In turn, the government issued responses and, in several cases, a timeline for action. Early next year, for instance, three referendums will be held in Ireland on reducing the voting age, lowering the minimum age of presidential candidates, and legalizing same-sex marriage. Other issues remain to be considered – it is still less than three weeks since the convention formally concluded its work, and the full process has not yet reached an end.

In Myanmar, key political actors including President Thein Sein, Lower House Speaker Shwe Mann and NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi all agree that the 2008 Constitution requires reform. They disagree on when and how that should be done. Recent Irish experience introduces an option that does not rely solely on contending political parties and elite political bargains. Rather, it finds a way to empower ordinary people. At least some parts of it could be replicated in the Myanmar context.

Alongside listening projects, several other tools are now used by societies around the world to enhance the involvement of ordinary people in political and policy processes. Participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, deliberative polling and citizens’ assemblies are all variations on a core theme – the umbrella term “mini-publics” is often used to describe them. Today I look at the last of these variants by describing a project piloted in Ireland in 2011. My friend and former colleague David Farrell was a prime mover in it. Tomorrow I will examine the next step Ireland took, which was formation of a constitutional convention. Each offers pointers for Myanmar.

We the Citizens, the Irish programme, was an exercise in participatory democracy. Motivated by a sense that people needed new ways to engage in civic life, it sought to test one particular mechanism for delivering on that. The idea of a citizens’ assembly that was chosen had two key features: random selection of participants, and discussion by deliberation. The pilot ran for 12 months, and in December 2011 was summarized in a 100-page report entitled We the Citizens: Speak Up for Ireland. Much more digestible is a two-minute YouTube video.

To establish an agenda for the assembly that was at the heart of its experiment, We the Citizens launched an active website, convened seven regional events, and polled a cross-section of 1242 individuals located throughout Ireland. From among the 1242, it then randomly selected 100 people to participate in the assembly. Issues for debate were generated by the regional events and the national poll.

Discussion at the actual two-day citizens’ assembly held in Dublin in June 2011 was facilitated by experts speaking on both sides of contentious issues. The aim was to place as much objective information on the table as possible. The 100 participants then engaged in deliberation and made informed decisions, often refining their own views during the process. Their final recommendations took the form either of policy proposals for government, or of wordings for national referendums.

The context for this Irish initiative was an established democracy. In Myanmar, democracy is still at a very formative stage, and is required by its military overseers to be discipline-flourishing. However, nothing in either of these specific local conditions conflicts with the underlying principles of a citizens’ assembly. Indeed, many different strands of Myanmar opinion could well agree that this kind of exercise in participatory democracy is a broadly acceptable way to extend the frontiers of political engagement inside the country.