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OPINION: Myanmar Is Not ‘in Transition’: War by Other Means and the Risks of Policy Drift
- Kim Jolliffe | The Diplomat
- 22 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Rather than focusing on elite-level political maneuvering, foreign governments need to recognize the transformative potential of the country’s resistance movement.
A recent analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, “War by Other Means: the Tatmadaw’s Transition Test,” attempts to make sense of Myanmar’s latest junta‑run “elections” by invoking the wide‑reaching economic and political reforms of the 2010s. It argues that then, as now, the military never intended a genuine transition to democracy or a durable peace. Yet, in the earlier period, the analysis suggests, the generals ultimately lost control of the process and became exposed to “unintended consequences” that opened political space far beyond what they had anticipated. It suggests that all “international” and “opposition” attention should now be on the potential for shifts and tensions within the military to provide new, unexpected political openings.
The essay provides a useful reminder that the junta’s recent electoral performance, cynical allusions to ceasefire talks, and partial prisoner releases are not intended to deliver democratic change or a pathway to peace. It is also true that the dictator, Min Aung Hlaing, is under significant external and internal pressure and might become exposed to new vulnerabilities that should be exploited by those trying to achieve peace and democracy.
The analysis, however, is undermined by unresolved tensions between what it describes empirically and what its language can be read to imply. Terms such as “transition,” “hybrid system,” and “political space,” and the comparison to the 2010s more broadly, sit uneasily alongside the article’s own evidence that there are no signs of an actual liberalization underway and that all signals point to the successful accumulation of power around Min Aung Hlaing. The article identifies no willingness within the military to compromise with democratic forces, no credible exit or retirement strategy for senior leaders, and no internal counterweight capable of constraining Min Aung Hlaing’s power. It stresses that the appointment of the relatively inexperienced loyalist Ye Win Oo as commander-in-chief has already “dampened hopes” within military circles that parliamentary politics might “dilute Min Aung Hlaing’s power”.
In other words, the article alludes to engagement with the junta’s political process while making clear that no meaningful entry points exist. This leaves readers from the foreign policy community suspended in a familiar but self-defeating position: waiting to see whether something might shift within the regime itself, while failing to pay attention to the much more important social forces that have the potential to transform the country. The article suggests, incorrectly, that direct pressure on the military doesn’t work, without offering an alternative, implying that the sensible posture is one of patient observation and hoping internal fissures may one day open a system that the analysis confirms to be firmly closed.
Most problematically, this elite‑centric framing intentionally sidelines the much more consequential dynamics of organized resistance that are really shaping Myanmar today, and which foreign democracies need to continue supporting. Anti-military revolutionary forces, including a new federal democratic alliance that collectively controls around a third of the country’s territory, are not even mentioned. The analysis perpetuates a false sense of inevitability around military rule, while underestimating the power of social forces that have defined Myanmar politics decade after decade and remain the primary drivers of change today.
Equivocating analysis of this kind has real diplomatic consequences. It feeds drift and promotes a form of quiet, nonstrategic engagement with the generals, as if that is the only option. In today’s geostrategic environment, and while the dictator is as vulnerable as the article points out, foreign democracies need a patient and long-term agenda to support Myanmar’s resistance to defeat the military and build a peaceful federal democratic system. This is the only path back to stability and economic integration, not to mention the Myanmar public’s deserved aspirations for democracy, justice and peace.
Misreading the 2010s
The limits of this framing are first exposed by how the analysis invokes the 2010s, when Myanmar experienced a period of far-reaching economic and political reform. That period is treated as a case of elite‑managed transition, shaped primarily by tensions within the military, rivalry between generals, and friction between the armed forces and the military’s political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party. These dynamics were real, but they were not the main drivers of political change, nor did they explain why the opening expanded beyond what the military intended.
The decisive forces of the 2010s were social and political actors who were not invited into the process: civil society, journalists, labor organizers, rival political parties, ethnic revolutionaries and politicians, women’s networks, youth and student activists and, of course, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD). These actors pushed their way into the political arena, widening cracks the military had sought to manage and contain. Institutional reform did not generate social mobilization; social mobilization forced institutional adaptation. Indeed, progress faltered most dramatically after Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD took office in 2016, largely because she became tied up in a constricted game of elite maneuvering, rather than continuing to mobilize and channel popular demands for transformative change.
Foreign engagement was most effective during this period precisely where it recognized and reinforced social agitation and mobilization. Much support from international democracies rightfully empowered anti‑authoritarian actors to organize, communicate and insert themselves into the political equation – often in ways the military neither anticipated nor welcomed. Contrastingly, where aid and diplomacy focused narrowly on elite bargains and institutional process, they had little influence on the trajectory of change, contributing to the hypertrophication and scleroticization of ineffective institutions, like those of the post-2016 peace architecture.
The lesson of the 2010s is not that the military should be given space to manage “transitions,” but that meaningful change in Myanmar has consistently been driven from outside the structures the military seeks to control.
Forces for Good
That same analytical bias explains IISS’s repeated disregard for Myanmar’s enduring culture of revolutionary politics and the significance of resistance alliances today. The post-2021 Spring Revolution is the latest manifestation of a deeply rooted tradition of organized politics linking student movements, ethnic revolutionaries, political parties, civil society and the diaspora, all firmly opposed to what they call chauvinism and dictatorship. This is a political culture that has re-emerged at every major turning point since independence, and despite being repeatedly crushed, dispersed, or co-opted, has repeatedly returned larger and more organized than before.
This political culture and its proponents have also received essential, often highly effective, aid and diplomatic backing from foreign democracies, but have been repeatedly abandoned or sidelined at key moments. Foreign assistance was pivotal to empowering civilian political actors in the 2010s, only to be paused or quietly withdrawn when the so-called “transition” reached the inevitable point of a reactionary backlash from the military in 2021 and, later, its international authoritarian allies. Would-be international partners of the anti-coup uprising were stunned and became risk-averse, just when the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism was reaching a climax.
Today, Myanmar’s leading federal democratic alliance controls the majority of resistance territory in the country, covering around a third of the country’s landmass and significant portions of the Chinese, Indian, and Thai borders (see map). That bloc is now organized through the Steering Committee for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF), which was formed in March 2026. The SCEF includes the majority of parliamentarians elected in the 2020 election before the military coup, the Chin National Front, Kachin Independence Organization, Karen National Union, Karenni National Progressive Party, and the National Unity Government. An array of newer, youth-led anti-junta forces allied with SCEF are organized under the Spring Revolution Alliance (SRA), whose leaders have met regularly to coordinate with those of the NUG and major ethnic revolutionary organizations (EROs).
The SCEF forms the territorial and symbolic core of Myanmar’s most successful ever wave of resistance against authoritarian rule. The most inclusive, democratic, and rights-focused bloc of Myanmar’s armed resistance is also the largest, most organized, and most practically consequential bloc. These realities are completely ignored by commentators and analysts, who misunderstand the revolutionary culture and social forces behind it, and instead frame resistance as a chaotic mass of agitation, interests, and grievances, amounting to background pressure on regime politics rather than a driver of systemic change.
The strategic importance of this alliance is most clearly demonstrated in Sagaing and Magwe. The denial of military sanctuary in those regions has been the single most decisive shift in the balance of the war since 2021. Sustained pressure by hundreds of small People’s Defense Force (PDF) militias with significant training and command from EROs has degraded the military’s manpower, logistics, and freedom of movement in ways no amount of border‑area activity could. Without this pressure, major offensives such as the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s Operation 1027 would not have been thinkable. Indeed, all the Three Brotherhood Alliance members have relied on mobilization and support of multi-ethnic, Bamar-dominant anti-coup forces and coordination with SCEF and SRA members, in order to project power inland. This approach has allowed the Arakan Army and a small local alliance to begin circling a number of the junta’s critical defense factories. Deliberate alliance politics have steadily eroded the military’s strategic depth and remain its biggest threat.
A less visible but equally significant development has been the sustained investment by revolutionary actors in local governance as part of a deliberate bottom‑up federal strategy. Localized but connected governance initiatives have seen organizations in liberated areas move beyond armed mobilization to the strengthening of administrative, judicial, and service‑delivery systems rooted in local practices and resources. This approach of building the foundations first draws on decades of learning within EROs and civil society about the failures of top‑down state‑building. The effort is providing essential services today and represents the basis for a future federated political system.
Much external analysis treats diversity within the resistance as evidence of weakness, measured against an implicit expectation of rapid unity and vertical command. This misreads both Myanmar’s history and the nature of federal politics. Far from fragmenting, the resistance is painstakingly coordinating forces that are, by their nature, socially diverse and politically plural. Indeed, difference is the default condition of a multiethnic country like Myanmar, for which federal democratic governance is being designed to manage. The alternative approach – enforcing a semblance of order through patronage and hierarchy – has, throughout Myanmar’s history, relied on extensive state violence, while failing to bring stability.
Preparing for the Long Game
Despite its gains, the federal democratic resistance faces challenges. Since 2025, concerted Chinese support for the junta has restricted resistance access to ammunition, enhanced the junta’s drone capabilities, and brought on ceasefires with two powerful EROs. After four years of a one-way trajectory, momentum is, momentarily at least, swinging back in favor of the junta. The posture of SCEF and SRA forces has necessarily shifted from rapid expansion to holding ground, strengthening governing systems, consolidating command structures, and negotiating political alignment among allies.
At the same time, we are entering a period of particularly dangerous equilibrium. Regional actors appear increasingly comfortable with a Myanmar in which the regime survives without governing effectively, bunkered in core cities and along major transport nodes, protected by money and grubby business relations, while relying on air power and terror to punish populations beyond its reach. As Myanmar and regional civil society recently declared, March 2026 was “the deadliest month for civilians” since the 2021 coup, with 518 civilians and non-combatants killed by the junta. The regional goal is no longer “stability” in any meaningful sense, but regime survival and containment of the democratic political forces. The result is a blueprint for never‑ending war from the center.
For as long as the regime survives, there is no pathway from here back to the relative stability of the pre‑coup order. The state’s civilian systems have been gutted by strikes; coercion has replaced administration; and the regime is increasingly a personality cult of the dictator, running on an internal logic of loyalty, purges, and survival. Treating this as another version of the 2010s – something that might “open” again through process – is a recipe for humanitarian disaster and foreign policy drift.
Meanwhile, all major social and political actors outside the military’s patronage network remain firmly focused on its complete defeat. Unlike the 2010s, there is no new wave of “inside” civil society waiting to be empowered and no meaningful third force beyond a handful of advisors and those on their payroll. Myanmar remains in the midst of a grand reckoning between the closed, coercion‑based system of the so‑called Tatmadaw and a far larger, if more diffuse, network of anti-authoritarians, which is more aligned and resolute than at any point in recent history.
Once that is accepted, the choice for foreign democracies is not between supporting war or transition, but between a patient commitment to the imperfect federal democratic alliance and its millions of supporters, or an equivocating posture that does nothing but enable the consolidation of a brutal dictatorship. The former requires the continuation of moderate aid to governance and humanitarian efforts in resistance‑held areas. Most importantly, it would benefit from a more deliberate and sustained effort to diplomatically engage and platform SCEF and its allies regionally and internationally. Crucially, it also requires a steadfast refusal to normalize relations with Min Aung Hlaing’s dictatorship, as doing so would amount simply to siding with authoritarianism and violence against democracy and justice.
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