The War to Remake Myanmar

Over the eighty years since Myanmar’s independence from Britain, war between the state and armed rebel groups has been so constant as to seem like the major thread linking otherwise disparate eras of the country’s modern history. Yet the phase of conflict that rages today is of a scale and nature altogether different from any other in recent times. In February 2021, shortly after its party was trounced in elections, the military announced a state of emergency and began detaining opposition lawmakers, including President Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi, head of the then-ruling National League for Democracy (NLD). It had only been ten years since the armed forces agreed to a transitional pact with the civilian government, enabling parliament to sit for the first time in decades. After the coup civilian demonstrations quickly spread; hundreds of thousands of public sector workers joined in strikes, noncooperation campaigns, and boycotts.

Soon those campaigns coalesced under the banner of the Nwe Oo (Spring) Revolution, a mass movement that put an emphasis on mutual aid and pluralism. The protests cut through longstanding ethnic and religious antagonisms: there are 135 ethnicities in Myanmar that the state officially recognizes, including the Bamar majority and minorities such as the Kayin and Rakhine, as well as many more “unofficial” groups. Since independence they have lived in chronic tension with one another, but the coup had a unifying effect: civilians mobilized against the junta in minority areas as well as Bamar regions; minority political leaders quickly came out in support of the emerging resistance; demonstrators held placards demanding justice for all persecuted ethnicities.

That March the military started violently cracking down on protesters, killing over five hundred. Within months exiled ethnic leaders and would-be MPs had come together to form the National Unity Government (NUG), which had a strong Bamar contingent but featured representatives from marginalized communities—including Kachin, Kayin, and Rohingya—in senior positions. In May 2021 the NUG encouraged the formation of civilian armed groups; before long it declared war on the junta.

Infuriated by the theft of a country they felt was becoming theirs to shape, tens of thousands of young men and women took up the call. Many were Bamar, concentrated in the country’s center and historically less inclined toward armed resistance. They travelled to the periphery, where armies aligned with different ethnic minorities have controlled territory for decades, and where they were trained and formed into militias called People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). Then they returned to the center, to strike at targets in the military’s historic heartland: boats carrying reinforcements were ambushed; junta administrators were assassinated.

Never before had such a large cross-section of Myanmar’s society mobilized—and, seemingly, unified—against the military. The prevailing mood was captured by the dissident novelist Nyi Pu Lay: “Theirs was the fight between the dharma and ah-dharma, the tug of war between right and wrong, the arm-wrestling match between fresh imaginative minds and rotten kleptocrats,” he wrote. “More than fifty million people against a band of armed men. A last-ditch fight.”

The junta, helmed by General Min Aung Hlaing, rebranded itself after the coup as the State Administration Council. Its “administration” of the state consisted of terror tactics: torture and public display of mutilated corpses; execution by hanging of beloved political figures; the shooting of funeralgoers. Its conventional military strategy also evolved: airstrikes, once rare, now come daily across the country. Camps for the displaced have been bombed, as have hospitals, schools, churches, and weddings. Villages have been torn open in the still hours of the night. Even the earthquake in March, which killed several thousand people in a region where more than a million have been displaced by fighting, offered no pause: jets bombed a site close to the epicenter hours after it struck; more than 140 bombing campaigns followed over the next month, despite the junta having agreed to a post-quake ceasefire with armed groups.

Three and a half million people, half of them children, are now displaced. More than half the population is in poverty. In May the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, spoke of “an increasingly catastrophic human rights crisis marked by unabated violence and atrocities that have affected every single aspect of life.” To compensate for mounting battlefield deaths and defections (some 15,000 soldiers and police have defected since 2021, according to one NUG estimate), the junta launched a forcible conscription drive in February 2024. It has abducted, among others, children and refugees to do the grunt work of enfeebled battalions or to serve as human shields.

The military is well resourced, with Russian and Chinese fighter jets and drones, advanced missile systems, and several hundred thousand personnel. And yet the resistance has made remarkable gains. PDFs made up of fighters who a few years ago were waiting tables or studying for degrees have overrun well-armed military posts. Resistance forces now hold dozens of townships across the north, east, and west, as well as pockets of the center. In many areas they don’t fully control, they have put up enough of a fight to thwart the junta’s efforts to establish authority. Since the 1940s, when Myanmar’s modern military was founded, it has had overwhelming power to define and direct the state. It has taken just four years of nationwide war to diminish that power significantly.

But for many in Myanmar, defeating the military and installing a civilian government are themselves preludes to a still more ambitious goal: ending the centralized state itself. Efforts by national authorities to force ethnic groups into subordinate positions in a Bamar-dominated political order have been to blame for a great deal of conflict since independence; many of the forces fighting the junta therefore want nothing less than to fundamentally transform the country’s political structure to favor local dominion and autonomy.

As the junta’s control of territory diminishes, new centers of power have emerged across the country in which different forms of governance have taken shape. Some regions, like Karenni (Kayah) State in the east and Sagaing Division in the north, have incubated experiments in bottom-up federal democracy, as armed and non-armed actors work together on principles of solidarity and inclusivity. In others, such as Chin State, resistance groups now compete with one another for authority. In Rakhine State, meanwhile, the Arakan Army has inflicted heavy violence on both junta forces and local communities. In its efforts to move the western region toward sovereignty, the liberating force has used tactics of oppression redolent of the junta. All this fragmentation and localization demonstrates that the conflict is less a unified battle between two sides than a sprawl of many small wars.

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Much of the groundwork for Myanmar’s present-day strife was laid two centuries ago. Prior to Britain’s arrival in the early nineteenth century, the territory had been ruled by a string of monarchical dynasties whose power was concentrated in the geographical center, where Bamar predominated. Beyond that, in upland or littoral regions populated by ethnic Mon or Arakanese (now Rakhine), or Shan or Karen (now Kayin), their authority weakened. It was the campaigns of annexation and assimilation fought in the 1700s and 1800s by the armies of the Konbaung Dynasty, the last monarchy to rule Myanmar, that brought many of these peoples under the suzerainty of the emerging central state.

Beginning with the first Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, the British took Myanmar in three stages, eventually conquering it in 1885. But administering the new state was no easy task. There was, for one thing, no obvious way to categorize the newly incorporated upland communities: “tribes” were not clearly delineated; loyalties changed regularly. The British therefore began grouping people together according to markers that had little salience in precolonial society, effectively engineering boundaries between them. Language was used to signify ethnicity, even if speakers had much more fluid notions of belonging; censuses noted names of groups that had no prior record. Those boundaries hardened as colonial bureaucrats came to see particular ethnicities—like the Karen, who had already been Christianized by missionaries—as loyal and awarded them roles in the police and military above Buddhist Bamar.

In 1886 the British assigned Myanmar—then known as Burma—to a subordinate status as a province of British India. The result was to worsen intercommunal strain. Indians were encouraged to migrate en masse across the subcontinent; more than 600,000 did so. By the 1930s half of the Rangoon (Yangon) population was Indian. Many of these newcomers were chosen for administrative roles over Bamar. Other decisions by the British sharpened a conviction on the part of Bamar and other majority-Buddhist ethnicities that longstanding sacred traditions were being trampled on. The fall of Myanmar’s last king, Thibaw Min, in 1885 ended nearly a thousand years of unbroken monarchical rule. When he went, so too did royal patronage for the monkhood. Buddhism—an age-old social glue for the peoples of the Irrawaddy Valley—was now imperiled. The anticolonial movement that began in the late 1800s and gathered momentum after the turn of the century sought to recover both the religious supremacy of Buddhism and the cultural centrality of Bamar identity. As it grew in strength, it generated anxiety among ethnic minority groups like the Karen, who feared their foreign benefactors would soon be leaving. 

Almost as soon as Britain departed in 1948 and a civilian government took power under Prime Minister U Nu, armed insurrections threatened to tear the new union apart. Factions of the Communist Party of Burma, which had won control of territory to the north of Rangoon earlier that year, began launching attacks on the capital. Then, after it became clear that the new government would fail to make good on the promises of self-determination that independence leaders had made to secure minority support, Karen and other ethnic groups rebelled. Adding to the chaos, Mujahid groups drawn from Muslim communities in western Myanmar, who had been armed and trained by the British to fight against the Japanese in World War II, started waging a series of campaigns for autonomy and secession. In the east, the Kuomintang, which had fled from China to Myanmar in 1950, began taking large areas of territory, further narrowing the government’s radius of control.

Meanwhile an economic crisis was pulling millions into destitution. In 1958, as conflict worsened, U Nu stepped aside for two years, during which the military ruled as a caretaker government. Shortly after his return U Nu decreed that Buddhism would become the state religion, causing the predominantly Christian ethnic Kachin in the north to revolt. Large areas of the periphery were now at war with the government. Unable to contain the spreading conflicts, U Nu was deposed in 1962 by General Ne Win, who went on to rule for twenty-six years.

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The military under Ne Win justified its capture of the governing apparatus and its subsequent counterinsurgency campaigns using the language of union-building. A modern state had emerged out of colonial rule, but as the late historian David Steinberg noted in 2021, the new Myanmar was “not, emotionally, a nation.” Ethnic minorities, who made up a third of the population, opposed the direct authority of any central leadership, let alone a Bamar-dominated military. Fearing that the embryonic union would break apart, Ne Win sought to finally resolve the fraught debate over self-determination for minorities. Under his rule, Myanmar would be of “one blood, one voice, one command”—a mantra borrowed from the independence movement, but now used to justify a violent homogenizing agenda. Bamar would form the cultural core and minorities would orient themselves toward it.

The military had control of most of the lowland center through the 1960s, but it struggled to project power into the border regions, where ethnic armies were growing in number. To that end it deployed battalions made up of soldiers from elsewhere in the country with no kinship ties to the communities they would be attacking. They had been trained in new counterinsurgency techniques: under the Four Cuts strategy, developed in the late 1960s and inspired by British tactics during the Malay Emergency, soldiers targeted insurgents’ supplies of food, funds, information, and recruits, many of which they drew from local communities. Civilians in minority areas were thus viewed as collaborators, their villages raided and razed.

After nationwide protests in 1988 forced Ne Win to resign, a new junta took power that developed supplemental methods of controlling the periphery: business deals were negotiated with various ethnic armed groups, who then fought their onetime allies on behalf of the military; Buddhist Bamar communities were resettled in minority Christian and Muslim regions. As the state ramped up its presence in the borderlands through the 1990s and 2000s, it intensified the use of coerced assimilation as well as more direct means of pacification: outlawing the teaching of minority languages, forcibly converting non-Buddhists, massacring civilians. All the while the military was siphoning billions from the national budget, enriching its upper ranks and impoverishing most of the population.

In 2003 the junta, by then in power in various guises for more than four decades, announced a “roadmap to democracy” that promised a new constitution and offered a path to opening up the economy following years of western sanctions and isolation. It also pledged to hold elections, the first of which took place in 2010—only for the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party to claim some 80 percent of the vote amid widespread allegations of fraud. The junta chairman Thein Sein assumed the presidency; Joint Chief of Staff Min Aung Hlaing, whose staunch advocacy of military supremacy had won him favor among junta hardliners, was appointed commander of the armed forces.

It quickly became clear that liberalization would be a Janus-faced affair. Reforms flowered in the center: restrictions on independent media loosened in 2011, political prisoners walked free, and the military agreed to allow Aung San Suu Kyi to take part in a by-election in 2012. (Her National League for Democracy had boycotted the 2010 elections after the military banned her from running.) Meanwhile yet another era of fighting and mass displacement had begun in the border regions. Under the new constitution, issued in 2008, ethnic armed groups that had agreed to cease-fires were to become military-allied Border Guard Forces. A number refused this arrangement, including the Kachin Independence Army, one of Myanmar’s largest rebel groups, with whom the military had enjoyed a seventeen-year cease-fire. In 2011 Min Aung Hlaing ordered attacks first on the Kachin and later on the Shan State Army-North, another cease-fire signatory that had refused to ally itself with the military.

By 2015 the military appeared willing to let the government further civilianize, largely to encourage greater foreign investment: in elections that year the NLD won a landslide victory, enabling it to choose a president. But Myanmar still would not be a democracy. The military maintained a constitutional right to a quarter of parliamentary seats and held onto crucial ministries, including defense and border affairs. Barred from the presidency, Suu Kyi became the new State Counsellor (her close NLD aide Htin Kyaw was chosen as president). Having pledged to reinvigorate peace talks, she started courting armed groups by promising that if they agreed to cease-fires they would be assured a part in shaping a new federal system. All the while, the military continued to prosecute campaigns against ethnic minorities, and in 2016 and 2017 it launched genocidal attacks in the west against Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority from Rakhine State.

Ever since the start of the liberalization period, when Suu Kyi refused to condemn attacks on the Kachin on the grounds that doing so would only inflame the situation, minority groups had felt that she was doing little to stop the military’s oppression of non-Bamar ethnicities. After the 2017 violence, when her office echoed the military’s claims that testimony from fleeing Rohingya was “fake news,” Rohingya as well as international commentators accused her of sharing the military’s racism. These indications that she was reluctant to pressure the military, if not actively aligned with it against certain communities, only deepened minorities’ distrust of the political establishment and reenergized their fight for self-determination. This recent history of violence and duplicity is the backdrop against which the current phase of war is playing out.

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By one count, Myanmar now hosts a fifth of all non-state armed groups in the world. Since the NUG declared war in 2021, People’s Defense Forces have proliferated, particularly in Bamar-dominated lowland regions. But so too have civilian armed groups that in effect answer only to themselves. In their attempts to establish pockets of autonomy in the center, some of these have loosed a kind of violent anarchy: reports of executions as well as attacks on nominal allies have become frequent. As the political analyst David Scott Mathieson has written, the violence of these groups “has transcended revolution and transitioned to retribution and vengeance between communities.”

Although civilian armed groups now outnumber ethnic armies by some margin, the latter remain the most consequential actors in the conflict. In October 2023 the Three Brotherhood Alliance—which includes the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), both headquartered in eastern Myanmar, as well as the Arakan Army (AA), based in the west of the country—won control of sites of great strategic importance to the military, including trading hubs near the China border and regional command bases. Soon afterwards the AA, which was formed in 2009 by a tour guide and a doctor as a force of just twenty-six people, launched an offensive against the military in Rakhine State. By late last year the group—now with some 30,000 personnel—had gained control of the majority of the state’s territory, including the border with Bangladesh, as well as parts of Chin State to the north, tens of thousands of square kilometers in total. The International Crisis Group has said that the AA is “in the process of carving out a proto-state of over a million people.”

Rakhine harbor a particularly pronounced ethnonationalism, born of historic injuries: the annexation of their kingdom and their subordination to Bamar rule in 1784; Britain’s encouragement of Indian immigration through and to their region; the abuses of the junta, which plundered resources, confiscated land, and used Rakhine for forced labor; and the NLD’s contemptuous rejection of their demands for representation after the 2015 elections. Resentment toward the Bamar—combined with fears that, were the military to win, they might pursue further colonization in Rakhine State—has driven the AA to astonishing battlefield successes but invited fierce retaliation from the military in the process. Sweeping aerial and ground assaults have killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians.

As the AA intensified its offensive in late 2023, the military started blockading aid deliveries to the state. It has not let up since. Two million people are now at risk of starvation; the UN has warned of “total economic collapse” in Rakhine as famine looms. In November 2024 a UN report related that internally displaced people in Buthidaung, in Rakhine’s north, had “resorted to eating rice bran, typically used as animal feed.” None of this has improved the military’s prospects: since the start of the year the AA has moved closer to Sittwe, the state capital and one of the junta’s last strongholds, as well as Kyaukphyu, home to several major China-backed port and pipeline projects.

Despite the enormous costs of fighting, many Rakhine continue to support the AA, seeing it as a vehicle for a long-awaited break with the political center. Even before the coup, the AA’s political wing, the United League of Arakan (ULA), had established services and was training personnel in public administration and policy, as the Rakhine scholar Kyaw Hsan Hlaing has noted. These demonstrations of competence, coupled with more recent military successes, give the group a degree of popular legitimacy that no other party has been able to manage. Rather than seeking inclusion in a federal union, for which the AA/ULA would need to relinquish hard-won powers to an authority it doesn’t trust, like the NUG, Rakhine State appears to be on its way to becoming a statelet—all part of an effort, in the words of the AA leader Twan Mrat Naing, to restore a “lost sovereignty and status.”

Yet the conflict in Rakhine State also reveals just how unevenly distributed the costs and gains of this war will be. Rohingya have experienced a particularly gruesome set of circumstances. Over the past year AA fighters have razed entire quarters of Rohingya-majority towns, shelled Rohingya villages, and bombed fleeing refugees. The violence is explained in part by the long-standing enmity Rakhine hold toward Rohingya: despite evidence of a deep Rohingya lineage in western Myanmar, many Rakhine consider the community a remnant of colonial-era immigration from the subcontinent and dismiss its claim to indigeneity as a mere grab at political and economic power.

But the violence is also a product of a recent and extraordinary shift in the region’s dynamics. Only nine years ago the military’s campaign against the Rohingya sent 65,000 members of the persecuted minority fleeing to Bangladesh; another 700,000 followed the next year. Now, however, some Rohingya armed groups—most notably senior ex-members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), whose attacks on military positions in 2016 and 2017 prompted the scorched-earth campaign—have joined forces with the military in attacks on the AA. Thousands of refugees from camps in Bangladesh have also been drawn in, some of them abducted by Rohingya operatives and delivered to the junta, others voluntarily. The question that Rohingya fighters seem to be weighing is whether they will fare worse under the rule of the AA—whose crimes, Amnesty says, are a “disturbing echo” of the military’s 2017 violence against Rohingya—or of the military itself, which offers citizenship in return for collaboration, continuing a long-standing practice of using the community for divide-and-rule tactics in western Myanmar. Both scenarios spell peril.

The course of conflict in Myanmar’s east has been significantly shaped by the intervention of China, which adjusts its relations with the military and with armed actors along the shared border according to who best serves its interests at any given time. Myanmar is crucial both to China’s Indian Ocean trade and to its Belt and Road Initiative, hosting as it does the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, a major component of the BRI. In exchange for easy access to Myanmar’s economy, Beijing has long given the junta material and political support. But it has also backed ethnic armies like the MNDAA and TNLA in return for their services as security buffers along the border, where state-owned and private businesses do significant trade and have investments in rare earths and other natural resources—in essence, playing what the Myanmar analyst Ye Myo Hein describes as “a double game.”

In late 2023, for instance, the Three Brotherhood Alliance—to which the MNDAA and TNLA belong—swept critical military territories in the northeast, greatly energizing the NUG and other resistance forces. Early in the offensive the Alliance made clear that it would shut down hundreds of cyber-scamming and gambling centers run by criminal networks in the border region, including by junta-allied Border Guard Forces. Beijing has long been unhappy about these enterprises, where trafficked Chinese nationals are often made to work—so although the operation disrupted crucial trading routes and brought heavy fighting to China’s doorstep, Beijing initially let it run its course.

But when the Alliance launched another offensive in the same area the following June, soon taking the town of Lashio close to the border with China, the Chinese state’s position changed. Now the resistance forces were causing too much upheaval; stability was again paramount. By September 2024 China was offering the junta a $3 billion assistance package and pressuring it to hold elections as a means to end the war; by November Min Aung Hlaing was in China on a state visit. China then turned on the armed groups it had been supporting, cutting off supplies of electricity into their territories and arresting the MNDAA’s leader during a visit to Kunming. Its influence over the direction of the conflict came into sharper focus in January, when the TNLA and MNDAA, under growing pressure from Beijing, reached cease-fires with the junta. In April the MNDAA handed back control of Lashio.

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International observers have tended to fix on the brutality of the war; less attention has gone to the complex political dynamics birthed by the coup. Shortly after the military began its putsch, political leaders—as well as representatives of ethnic armies, labor unions, strike committees, and youth and women’s groups—came together to form the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC), the most inclusive political coalition in Myanmar’s modern history. Around the same time, ousted MPs created the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, or People’s Parliament, from which the NUG was born.

In March 2021 these groups issued a draft of a Federal Democracy Charter—a blueprint of sorts for a post-military federal government. Among other things, it proposed granting each of the country’s federal units equal rights, including the right to “self-determination in full”; placing the armed forces under civilian oversight; and enshrining the principle of subsidiarity, whereby the national government would only legislate on issues that local governments were unable to settle. The charter serves as a rebuke to the existing constitution, implemented by the junta in 2008, which grants the military sweeping powers, including license to take over the government at will—in effect rendering the coup constitutional.

The NUG remains the most viable transitional government, and the charter a likely first step toward a post-military constitution, but both have struggled to gain universal support. Many in Myanmar view the NUG as overly influenced by Bamar, and especially by figures from the NLD, which minorities have long seen as a vessel for Bamar dominance. Skepticism is compounded by concerns that it hasn’t done enough to break with the NLD’s top-down centralizing tendencies. The NUG has, to be sure, built a diverse cabinet and forged better relations with minorities than the NLD had (its president is Kachin and its prime minister Karen), but its lack of broad political legitimacy will make implementing a constitution difficult: it can only do so if all groups collaborate. Although federalism has long been popular among minorities, some of the charter’s central points are vague, and different NUCC members have disputed important aspects of the “guiding principles.” “Unofficial” groups fear that even this reform effort will not empower them, particularly if the military’s collapse spurs armed competition between the larger ethnic groups in whose self-declared homelands smaller minorities live.

Yet the limitations of the NUG have not hindered so much as encouraged other political forces in Myanmar to develop alternatives to military rule. Indeed, away from the noise of resistance victories and military losses, the quietly beating heart of the revolution—at least its more pluralistic side—may lie in the new forms of self-governance that have emerged in some liberated areas. In 2023 a cross-section of political groups in eastern Karenni State—striking civil servants, political parties, and armed organizations, as well as women’s, minority, and youth groups—established a provisional government. The eleven departments of the Karenni Interim Executive Council oversee the administration of health, education, justice, security, and other state functions across liberated townships.

The Karenni experiment is echoed in other regions where junta administrators have been driven out, such as parts of Chin State, near the border with India. State-level constitutions have been written, in some cases for the first time. Even Bamar-dominated areas such as Sagaing are designing new models of federalism, in consultation with groups like the Karen, that in some cases seek to avoid any reliance on the NUG.

But these political experiments are delicate. Not only are they threatened by the junta, which sees any alternative state structure as a target; in some regions resistance groups have also begun fighting one another for control of local governance. On several occasions in recent months two factions of the Chin resistance—the Chin National Front and the Chin Brotherhood, each comprising communities with longstanding enmity toward one another—have engaged in clashes following disagreements over the shape and character of a new council intended to unite rival Chin groups.  

If these interim governments do survive, they should enable greater equality for minorities and better social harmony in a country where communal antagonisms have long been used by the military as a tool to split societal cohesion. Such an outcome will be celebrated by many—but perhaps not by all. Factions within the NUG, particularly those from the NLD that hold fast to ideals of centralized leadership, may view these as rival governments with whom they must negotiate positions of power, rather than parallel, complementary ones. After all, under the ancien régime, Suu Kyi’s party hadn’t needed to bargain with minorities—its mandate was guaranteed by the near-unanimous Bamar support. That is no longer the case: ethnic armies have moved from positions outside of the castle walls and become potential kingmakers. The political systems they are co-creating in places like Karenni State suggest how things henceforth need to be done—a sharp reversal of center-periphery dynamics that the NUG’s old guard would do well to adjust to.

Unrecognized or stateless minorities like the Rohingya, Gurka, and Panthay may also start pressing their claims in ways that threaten whatever residual Bamar supremacism there is in the resistance—and it is vital they do. As the scholars of Myanmar’s ethnic politics Aung Ko Ko, Elizabeth Rhoads, and colleagues have written, a deeper reckoning with the ways in which Myanmar’s unrecognized minorities are excluded is “imperative in not only imagining a new political system…but in expanding the revolutionary process itself.”

In the broadest sense, the revolution has allowed people to envision a state unfettered by its origins in imperial conquest and aggressive unitary governance. Do as many in the resistance seek to do—remove the centripetal force of the military, the National League for Democracy, or any other entity under which authority flows outwards from the center—and Myanmar starts to look less like a modern nation-state and more like the patchwork of power centers that made up the territory for centuries prior to its colonization. If the junta is to be believed, this direction of travel augurs fragmentation and state collapse of a sort that precipitates disaster for the population. But as the late political scientist and scholar of Southeast Asia James C. Scott once asked, “why deplore ‘collapse,’ when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments?” The proliferation of new political units in Myanmar suggests that a majority sees this as the only viable way to end conflict there. There is no question that extreme suffering has been inflicted on communities even by some liberating forces. But at least in Karenni State and other regions where populations are moving away from violence and toward democratic governance, we might be witnessing less “a breakdown or failure of political order,” in Scott’s terms, than its “salutary reformulation.”