Myanmar’s military is increasingly losing control of key areas of its borders with Thailand, China, and India while continuing to face ongoing insurgency in “heartland” areas of the country: “the regime has lost its position as the dominant military and political actor in Myanmar. A more multipolar landscape is emerging.” IISS has a valuable map of the shifting, overall escalating violence. We may – or may not – be seeing a defining cascade against the regime, from Operation 1027 to the Arakan Army’s remarkable advances in Rakhine to the fall of Myawaddy to the KNU/PDF to KIA attacks in the north to CNF presence along the Indian border to the endurance of People’s Defense Force units across the country.
I want to use this post to sketch out some possible scenarios for where things go from here using examples from other civil wars, to help identify what policy questions people in and out of Myanmar should be thinking about.
- Regime renewal. This seems quite unlikely to me given the overall balance of forces and trends, but in the late 1940s/early 1950s in Burma and the mid-2010s in Syria, central governments looked to be hugely embattled. But eventually they were able to largely push their opponents back to the periphery and reestablish political control over most of the country. In Syria, this was accomplished with extraordinary bloodshed and Russian and Iranian external backing; in 1950s Burma, a mix of fighting, deal-making, and insurgent fragmentation was used to prevent regime collapse.
- Stalemate- disjointed. The insurgents consolidate control in various areas, and make some further inroads, but the regime remains cohesive, the military does not crack, and armed groups struggle to launch decisive offensives. We see enduring liberated zones that cannot be conquered by the regime, though conflict carries on, and that carry on de facto foreign policy with neighboring states. They are not well-connected to each other politically, and instead very regionalized. This bears some resemblances to Burma’s 1960s-1980s, before the wave of ceasefires and military advances of the 1990s, periods of 1980s and 1990s Afghanistan, and Syria in the mid-2010s.
- Stalemate – consolidated. In this variant, the areas of insurgent control become increasingly politically connected under an umbrella organization that can actually exert some degree of central control. The NUG would be the obvious potential central power here, though many crucial questions remain about when and how armed actors would actually relinquish control to an overarching power. At a stalemate stage, however, deep integration would not be necessary to coordinate across fronts – this is more about cooperation than about full organizational/political merger. This is a fairly rare outcome in 3+-party civil wars because of how difficult it is to integrate on the fly, but maybe the FMLN in El Salvador or some of the Ethiopian conflicts’ coalitions.
- Incremental regime contraction. This is a world that takes the last 7 or so months and continues to extrapolate it forward. The central government does not splinter, but local units are overrun, local defections occur, and the regime’s radius of control increasingly contracts. A new equilibrium may be reached along stable battle lines that represent a more insurgent-favorable version of the stalemate outcomes above, tilting the status quo against NPT. This would be like Laos and Cambodia in the early-1970s, etc – things not going well and territorial losses mounting, but a kind of fighting retreat in hopes of external intervention, rebel factionalization, or some other dramatic form of salvation.
- Bottom-up regime collapse. However, this process of contraction could spiral into a Cambodia 1975/Afghanistan 2021 type of outcome, with cascading local losses and side-switching aggregating into a dramatic shift in the balance of power and regime collapse as local units and mid-level commanders simply stop fighting. The nature of these wars can involve long periods of seeming-stalemate or incremental losses that then suddenly turn into dramatic and rapid collapse. I don’t have any confidence in my personal ability to predict when outcomes 2 and 3 would turn into 4, or when 4 would turn into 5, but we shouldn’t discount any of these possibilities: things can fall apart quickly when tides begin to turn. Given the nature of Myanmar’s war compared to simpler two-party wars, this could turn into a kind of highly decentralized landscape of different governing authorities – possibly turning into conflict or competition among them – if the opposition movement does not have some threshold level of political coordination and unity. The range here varies from “cohesive replacement of the regime and transition into a new political system” to “early/mid-1990s Afghanistan.”
- Top-down regime collapse. A final trajectory occurs via splits and ruptures within the military elite. This could simply shuffle the desk chairs of the military command, but it could also lead to fragmentation or conflict that opens space for the insurgents to make massive gains. In some cases like this, part of the elite cuts a deal with the insurgency to negotiate a transition, which would generate a fascinating and unpredictable bargaining process over a regime-change pact. This elite conflict could instead lead to spiraling state failure as waves of defection and desertion unfurl across the security apparatus, rather than laying the basis for a pacted transition.
If I had to bet money on this in the short-term (i.e. 2024), I think trajectory 4 is currently the most likely (regime continues to lose territory but without dramatic collapses), followed closely by trajectories 2 and 3 in that order. But that’s a very low confidence, short time horizon bet – outcomes 5 and 6 could certainly happen, possibly with surprising speed, and so could, though in my opinion with a very low probability, a return to regime dominance.
Paul Staniland 