Month: October 2023

I’ve been keeping an eye on Myanmar’s re-escalated civil war as the anti-regime insurgency/ies seem to be gaining steam. Anthony Davis has a new Asia Times piece arguing that the balance is shifting toward the opposition:

“There is no denying these baseline facts. However, the now widespread interpretation of a stalemated conflict that they have encouraged remains conceptually facile, analytically lazy and, in terms of encouraging shoulder-shrugging inaction on the part of regional governments, dangerously flawed. 

It confuses a purported military stasis with what attention to ground detail and historical precedent indicates is something entirely different and far more complex: an inevitably protracted but dynamic conflict in which the current imbalance in armaments imposes – unsurprisingly  – a temporary military stand-off around major urban centers.

Such stand-offs litter the histories of guerrilla conflicts in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and other old Cold War theaters.

Serious analysis indicates that in Myanmar today, as in those struggles, rural-based insurgency involves a wider and constantly shifting interplay of military, political, economic and ultimately psychological factors. That fluid mix translates into an overarching trajectory of conflict in which one side is gaining advantage, however incremental, over the other.

In this sense, the war’s trajectory through 2023 has become clear in a manner that was not apparent in the first two years of the conflict, but which should now serve to dispel any analytical fog. In most key respects, it is a trajectory that favors forces opposed to the Naypyidaw regime. . . . .

Myanmar’s neighbors and the international community more generally would be well-advised to prepare diplomatic, humanitarian and judicial responses for a morning-after in which a smooth transition to a new federal-democratic order would hardly be guaranteed.”

In The Diplomat, Ksaw Hsan Hlaing and Naing Lin provide a detailed overview of the current battlelines:

““Operation 1027” has limited objectives and a regional scale, and its outcome is still too early to determine conclusively. However, it is undeniable that this military operation could have nationwide consequences. Since the military coup in early 2021, Myanmar has found itself in a precarious political situation, with the general population consistently demanding significant and critical change in the country.

Currently, neither the junta nor the pro-democracy forces appear poised to achieve their objectives in the short term, resulting in the sort of military and political deadlock that Francis Fukuyama once described as “dysfunctional equilibrium.” As a result, “Operation 1027” could potentially break the current stalemate in Myanmar’s military and political landscape. There are three key aspects to consider when observing the unfolding ongoing military operation in northern Myanmar.

First, the outcomes of the 3BHA operation will serve as a litmus test for the real military capability of the post-coup military junta. In recent months, many different arguments have been presented concerning the strength of the junta’s military. Some underestimate its strength and capability, while others overstate it. However, it seems the military events unfolding in northern Shan State will offer a real assessment of the junta’s military strength. A loss for the junta could bolster the confidence of opposition resistance forces, potentially leading to the further weakening or even the downfall of the current regime. Conversely, if the junta can save the situation, it could also signal that the end of the military dictatorship in Myanmar remains a distant dream.

Second, the current intensive armed clashes could also have further ramifications on other regions of the country, especially in Rakhine State in western Myanmar. Since the last de facto ceasefire between the AA and the Myanmar military in November 2022, there has been relative stability in the area, with the arrival of Cyclone Mocha on May 14 further lessening the possibility of armed clashes between the two-armed groups.

Given the involvement of the AA in the current military operation, it remains to be seen how the junta leadership will respond to the AA forces within Rakhine State. It is likely that neither the junta nor the AA will want to open another front at this point in time. However, recent weapon and artillery tests by the military in Rakhine have increased tensions and this could lead to unintended consequences. It is also interesting to see how other revolutionary groups might capitalize on the outbreak of fighting in Shan State to advance their own agendas.

Finally, the current campaign will reveal a lot about a possible change in China’s role in Myanmar’s armed politics and conflicts. The current military operations are primarily taking place in areas close to the border with China, and the fact that road blockages by the 3BHA forces will have negative impacts on the trade between the two countries. While China traditionally prefers stability along its borders, it has expressed frustration with the online gambling and fraud operations, which enjoy the protection of the junta’s militias and Border Guard Forces, including the group that controls the Kokang Self-Administered Zone.”

The Israel-Hamas conflict, and its possible turn toward direct urban warfare, reminded me of an old article I published in 2010 (link to ungated PDF) in Comparative Political Studies on urban insurgency. I’m honestly not sure how relevant it is to what is currently happening, but it may provide a useful framework and set of possible comparison cases for understanding conflict dynamics in an urbanized setting.

The argument highlights a balance between the social network/mobilization capacity of the insurgent movement and the political constraints (or lack thereof) of the counterinsurgent. When urban rebels lack a meaningful social base, urban COIN tends to be effective (and often policing preempts any real insurgency). When states are largely unconstrained in their use of violence, even comparatively robust insurgents can be defeated by brute military force (think Grozny, Mosul, etc). The latter is what Israeli security elites have signaled is coming in Gaza (already the air campaign has highlighted “damage” rather than “accuracy”) but it remains to be seen whether that kind of intense, comprehensive ground invasion will occur, much less how it will play out.

It’s at the intersection of a robust insurgent movement with some degree of political constraint on state violence that enduring urban insurgency can emerge and persist. This tends to be rare compared to classical rural insurgencies or to “militia-ized”/conventional-esque urban conflicts (i.e. 1980s Beirut), or rapid urban revolutions, but when it happens it can be quite politically important. It seems pretty easy to imagine a political-military world in which Israeli forces conquer some/much/all of Gaza but are not able to fully defeat Hamas and then face ongoing insurgency short of Israel’s declared war aims.

A fundamental political difference is that Israel – unlike states trying to control Karachi or Belfast or for that matter the West Bank – does not seem to want to govern Gaza, which complicates the comparison to most other cases. The main constraints on state violence here seem – to the extent they exist – largely to be external/international, as well as perhaps to some extent domestic risk assessments (i.e. Netanyahu has always been relatively cautious about large-scale warfare). This recent Good Authority roundtable is very useful for trying to articulate what exactly this form of rule is and isn’t, as well as the logics of violence at play.

Excerpts from the 2010 article for whatever it may or may not be worth:

“Some urban areas are marked by robust, resilient ethnic and religious networks that link ethno-religious groups to cities and provide the underpinning for high-risk violent collective action. These communities and networks can both motivate and facilitate violence. In some cases it is certainly true that “in the city, anonymous denunciation is easier to get away with, giving the government an advantage in its counterinsurgent efforts” (Fearon & Laitin, 2003, p. 80), but it is unclear that this can be justified as a blanket assertion. . . .

There is a simple, grim way to decisively shatter an urban rebellion that has escalated into an insurgent challenge—using conventional firepower to annihilate the city or cities in which it is based. Cities present easier targets to conventional military forces than the pacification of vast swathes of rural terrain, regardless of their social characteristics . . .

I argue that political considerations can lead a militarily capable government to avoid the massive application of violence in its response to urban mobilization. Even when a state has high capacity for organized violence, it can choose to avoid embracing this option. Although urban community structure determines where rebellion is possible, state policy determines when it occurs . . .

These types of political constraints may be particularly severe in semidemocratic political systems, which some scholars argue are more likely to face civil wars (Hegre, Ellingsen, Gates, & Gleditsch, 2001; Snyder, 2000), or in peripheral regions of democracies where these conditions hold.3 These regimes often have politicized local security forces, both rely on and are threatened by mass contention, and lack reliable institutions of governance . . .

Political constraints can thus force even militarily capable governments to engage in coercive governance—a mix of large-scale military or police activity with continued governance of the affected area. The government has powerful incentives to maintain control of major population centers and is unwilling to abandon them to armed, mobilized insurgents, yet its elites calculate that they cannot afford to decisively destroy them. The need to both fight and govern makes state security forces vulnerable to attack and harassment because they cannot deploy the levels of firepower and force protection that bring victory in conventional battle. This results in a long sequence of urban warfare encounters rather than a quick and clean law enforcement operation or conventional assault”

Israel, Gaza, Fanon (fully understood), etc:

“The ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders, are indeed perverse. As the Palestinian writer Karim Kattan wrote in a moving essay for Le Monde, it seems to have become impossible for some of Palestine’s self-styled friends to ‘say: massacres like those that took place at the Tribe of Nova festival are an outrageous horror, and Israel is a ferocious colonial power.’ In an age of defeat and demobilisation, in which the most extreme voices have been amplified by social media, a cult of force appears to have overtaken parts of the left, and short-circuited any empathy for Israeli civilians.  . . . .

Does Netanyahu imagine, then, that he can force Palestinians to give up their weapons, or their demands for statehood, by bombing them into submission? That has been tried, over and again; the invariable result has been a new and even more embittered generation of Palestinian militants. Israel is not a paper tiger, as Hamas’s leaders concluded after 7 October, still exulting from the experience of killing Israeli soldiers asleep in their beds. But it is increasingly incapable of changing course, because its political class lacks the imagination and creativity – not to mention the sense of justice, of other people’s dignity – required to pursue a lasting agreement.”

2 examples from a single edition of the New York Times in which contemporary major power competition is filtering into the domestic politics of smaller states:

1. Maldives
2. Niger

Have totally crated (though may be ticking back up recently), per this Morning Consult data:

“Net favorability toward Canada among Indian adults is hovering near a tracking low amid a bilateral spat over India’s alleged assassination of a Canadian citizen on domestic soil. The nadir was reached shortly after the Trudeau government’s airing of the incident on Sept. 18, with net favorability falling over 40 percentage points (from 64% on that date to 22% on Sept. 29). “

I was assigned Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation, Science as a Vocation” my first quarter in college back in 2000. It has stuck with me vividly ever since, especially its discussion of how politicians must balance the ethic of conviction with the ethic of responsibility. That seems as important and pressing now as ever. Read it all, but here are a few excerpts:

This is a very interesting report on changing patterns of control and governance in southeast Burma/Myanmar by the Karen Peace Support Network (shared with all appropriate caveats about how hard this stuff is to measure).