Myanmar Aa Rohingya

Misunderstanding Myanmar
through the lens of democracy
DAVID BRENNER *
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South-east Asia is home to some of the world’s most protracted armed conflicts.
But Conflict and Peace Studies (CAPS), as an academic discipline, has paid little
attention to the region. While specialist literature on south-east Asian conflicts
exists, it rarely informs conceptual debates on conflict and peace. These have mostly
been developed from empirical studies on selected armed conflicts elsewhere in
the world.1 This seems problematic, given that conceptual understandings shape
policy responses to conflicts worldwide, including in south-east Asia. How then
do we (mis)understand armed conflicts in south-east Asia? Where do our frames
of reference come from? And how can we develop more applicable understand-
ings of conflict?
To address these questions, this article focuses on south-east Asia’s most violent
armed conflict: the one in Myanmar (Burma). Despite being home to one of the
oldest civil wars worldwide, Myanmar has rarely informed conceptual debates on
conflict, peace and security. But while Myanmar is home to a ‘forgotten conflict’,
it is not a ‘forgotten place’. The troubled fate of Myanmar has long been associ-
ated with the supposedly global struggle for democracy and human rights. This
frame of reference also guides commonplace interpretations of the current crisis:
the military coup in February 2021 and its violent aftermath, which has already
displaced more than 1.5 million people in what the United Nations characterizes
as a ‘seemingly endless spiral of military violence’.2 For Gregory W. Meeks—a
former chair (2021–23) of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United
* I want to thank the editor and the three peer-reviewers for their constructive engagement. I am specifically
indebted to William A. Callahan for his helpful feedback. I am also grateful to Sanjay Seth and Kazuya
Nakamizo for our conversations in Kyoto and London, which have shaped the ideas underpinning this arti-
cle. Moreover, I want to thank Gurminder Bhambra for pointing me to the ‘Asia as method’ debate and
Dominique Dillabough-Lefebvre for our early discussions on this project. Most importantly, I could not
have developed the perspective that informs this article without learning from numerous people in and from
Myanmar, especially ethnic nationality analysts, activists, and revolutionaries. Unfortunately, I cannot name
them for security reasons.
1
David Brenner and Enze Han, ‘Forgotten conflicts: producing knowledge and ignorance in security studies’,
Journal of Global Security Studies 7: 1, 2022, ogab022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogab022; Brian J. Phillips
and Kevin T. Greene, ‘Where is conflict research? Western bias in the literature on armed violence’, Interna-
tional Studies Review 24: 3, 2022, viac038, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viac038.
2
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘Situation of human rights in Myanmar’, 19 Sept.
2023, https://bangkok.ohchr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/a-hrc-54-59-auv.pdf, p. 2. (Unless otherwise
noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 15 Dec. 2023.)
International Affairs 100: 2 (2024) 751–769; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiae015

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. This is
an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://
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David Brenner
States Congress—as for many other western observers, the ‘tragedy underway
in Myanmar epitomizes the battle between democracy and authoritarianism’.3
And surely, tens of thousands of young revolutionaries fighting in Myanmar are
motivated by a genuine desire to live in a democratic society, while the authori-
tarian junta tries to cling to power by terrorizing its restive population into
submission with atrocious violence.
Nevertheless, this article argues that understanding the war in Myanmar
primarily as a fight for democracy is reductionist to the point that it risks misun-
derstanding its drivers, dynamics and potential solutions. Privileging questions of
the political system over questions of postcolonial state formation fails to suffi-

ciently explain political processes and conflict dynamics in Myanmar. Nor can
it offer satisfactory solutions to persistent military power, authoritarianism and
violence, which have tormented Myanmar since independence in 1948, including
in the past decade of ‘democratization’. Instead, it risks sanitizing Myanmar’s
politics of nationalism, ethnic conflict and genocide, which have underpinned—
and arguably driven—much of the country’s past and present experience. This
deep dive into the case of Myanmar shows how the selectivity bias in CAPS is
not only a function of general western interest (or lack thereof ). It is also linked
to the frames that govern our interest in and understanding of countries and
regions worldwide. Studying ‘forgotten conflicts’ in the global South, then, not
only necessitates a turn to specialist literature, but also demands moving beyond
Eurocentric frames of reference.
To explore these arguments, the article starts by reflecting on the study of
‘forgotten conflicts’ from a postcolonial perspective on knowledge production,
thinking of Asia and Myanmar not primarily as objects of study but as methods
to critique existing Eurocentric frameworks. It then mobilizes this perspective
to analyse the lens of democracy through which Myanmar is commonly under-
stood and to move beyond the focus on political systems to an interrogation of
the modern nation-state itself. Besides improving our understanding of one of
the longest-running and most violent—but least researched—wars in the world,
this analysis contributes to contemporary debates about the production of knowl-
edge in CAPS through exploring the interaction of theory, history and practice.4
Specifically, it contributes to understanding how politics in the global South
are routinely misunderstood through allegedly universal but actually Eurocen-
tric paradigms,5 and the problems that this creates for scholarship and policy on
3
Gregory W. Meeks, ‘Why Congress must pass the BURMA Act’, Foreign Policy, 1 Feb. 2022, https://foreign-
policy.com/2022/02/01/myanmar-coup-burma-act-meeks.
4
For example, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara and Roland Kostić, ‘Knowledge production in/about conflict
and intervention: finding “facts”, telling “truth”’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 11: 1, 2017, pp. 1–20,
https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2017.1287635; Isabel Bramsen and Anine Hagemann, ‘How research trav-
els to policy: the case of Nordic peace research’, International Affairs 99: 5, 2023, pp. 1953–72, https://doi.
org/10.1093/ia/iiad175; Sara Hellmüller, Laurent Goetschel and Kristoffer Lidén, ‘Knowledge production
on peace: actors, hierarchies and policy relevance’, International Affairs 99: 5, 2023, pp. 1839–46, https://doi.
org/10.1093/ia/iiad187.
5
For example, Tarak Barkawi, ‘On the pedagogy of “small wars”’, International Affairs 80: 1, 2004, pp. 19–37,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2004.00363.x; Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘Globalization, deglobalization
and knowledge production’, International Affairs 97: 5, 2021, pp. 1579–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab119;
752
International Affairs 100: 2, 2024

Misunderstanding Myanmar through the lens of democracy
conflict and peace.6 Doing so through the focus of a single case-study allows for
tracing how specific knowledge frames emerge, considering what effects they have
on scholarship and policy, and suggesting alternative ways of interpreting the
same phenomenon.
Myanmar as ‘method’
Conflict and Peace Studies privileges some conflicts over others. Recent studies
have shown that certain conflicts, such as those in Bosnia, Lebanon, Northern
Ireland or Sierra Leone, frequently serve as paradigm cases for developing general

concepts and theories. Conflicts in Chad, Ethiopia, Tajikistan and Myanmar, on
the other hand, have received limited attention for building theory in disciplinary
conflict and peace research.7 This bias reflects how western foreign policy interests
shape scholarly choices in an inherently state-centric field that has a particular aim
to inform policy and practice.8 Indeed, CAPS has become increasingly concerned
with the contexts of western interventions, and large parts of the field focus on
such interventions, rather than on conflict dynamics in and of themselves.9 Yet,
specialist literature on ‘forgotten conflicts’ exists in Area Studies. Bringing such
regional expertise into the mainstream of CAPS can contribute to better under-
standing conflict dynamics in large parts of the world. Doing so might also create
opportunities for rethinking general concepts and theoretical approaches for
understanding conflict and violence.10
A useful context for reflecting on this is Myanmar. Like other south-east Asian
conflicts, the decades-old civil war in Myanmar has rarely featured in disciplinary
studies on armed conflict. Brian Phillips and Kevin Greene found that only one
single-country case-study was published on Myanmar across five of the leading
CAPS journals between 1990 and 2015.11 Specialist literature on conflict in Myan-
mar can be found in Asian Studies, but has rarely made it into the disciplinary
mainstream.12 David Mathieson called this ‘the “Burma gap” in Conflict Studies’.13
But while Myanmar is home to a ‘forgotten conflict’, it is not a ‘forgotten coun-
David C. Kang, ‘Getting Asia wrong: the need for new analytical frameworks’, International Security 27: 4,
2003, pp. 57–85, https://doi.org/10.1162/016228803321951090; Sanjay Seth, Beyond reason: postcolonial theory and
the social sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall, ‘The impact
of colonialism on policy and knowledge production in International Relations’, International Affairs 98: 1,
2022, pp. 5–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab226.
6
For example, Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘The “subaltern speak”: can we, the experts, listen?’, International
Affairs 99: 5, 2023, pp. 1903–27, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad181; Brenner and Han, ‘Forgotten conflicts’;
Meera Sabaratnam, ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, Security Dialogue 44: 3, 2013,
pp. 259–78, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010613485870.
7
Brenner and Han, ‘Forgotten conflicts’; Phillips and Greene, ‘Where is conflict research?’.
8
Behera, ‘The “subaltern speak”’; Isabel Bramsen and Anine Hagemann, ‘How research travels to policy’.
9
Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić, ‘Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention’; Sabaratnam,
‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, p. 271.
10
Brenner and Han, ‘Forgotten conflicts’.
11
Phillips and Greene, ‘Where is conflict research?’, p. 20.
12
Andrew Ong, ‘Peace studies in Myanmar: interweaving regional geopolitics and local dynamics’, Asian Journal
of Peacebuilding 11: 1, 2023, pp. 119–44, https://doi.org/10.18588/202305.00a339.
13
David Scott Mathieson, ‘Bridging the “Burma gap” in Conflict Studies’, Tea Circle, 7 May 2018, https://teacir-
cleoxford.com/2018/05/07/bridging-the-burma-gap-in-conflict-studies.
753

David Brenner
try’—that is, one that has completely fallen off the international radar. Compared
to Chad or Tajikistan, Myanmar inhabits a rather stable and even relatively promi-
nent position in terms of international attention. After all, Myanmar has long been
associated with a supposedly global struggle for democracy and human rights.
And while most people are unaware of the decades-long ethnonational civil war
and the many armed groups that govern significant parts of the country, the pro-
democracy opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has
become a household name. A quick search in the journal Democratization suggests
that Myanmar is indeed a more prominent place for scholars of democracy and
authoritarianism than it is for scholars of conflict and peace.14

Focusing on this interaction of visibility and invisibility is useful for reflecting
on knowledge production on armed conflicts beyond how it is shaped by a
general interest (or lack thereof ) in some places over others. Instead, Myanmar
provides an opportunity for exploring how armed conflicts can be rendered
invisible, not because of general disinterest but because of the frames that make
contexts relevant and intelligible to a western audience in the first place. Visibility
and invisibility can go hand in hand. This article sheds light on such epistemic
processes by analysing the frame of reference with which Myanmar is commonly
understood—democracy, or the problem of the political system—and by offering
an alternative reading of the country’s politics: ethnonational conflict, or the
problem of the postcolonial nation-state. To do so, it follows postcolonial schol-
arship in International Relations (IR) in its concern about applying concepts that
have been developed from western experiences to the global South. Consequently,
the article focuses on the long legacies of global imperialism and postcolonial
state formation for analysing conflicts that are misunderstood when pressed into
ahistoric frameworks.
As per David C. Kang, we might simply be ‘getting Asia wrong’ if we maintain
allegedly universal but actually Eurocentric categories of analysis.15 To produce
more adequate understandings of conflict in Asia, Kang suggests taking heed of
findings from Asian Studies and how these have informed scholarship in Compar-
ative Politics in contextualizing political systems and institutions in Asia.16 And
surely, looking to specialist knowledge from Asian Studies seems imperative for
researching conflicts in Asia, even more so for conflicts in which IR and CAPS
have taken little interest. Yet, neither Asian Studies nor Comparative Politics,
nor their combination, are sufficient for moving beyond Eurocentric under-
standings of Asian conflicts. This is because Asian Studies itself has not emerged
14
Alexander Dukalskis and Christopher D. Raymond, ‘Failure of authoritarian learning: explaining Burma/
Myanmar’s electoral system’, Democratization 25: 3, 2018, pp. 545–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2017.13
91794; Jeremy Martin Ladd, ‘Party strength and party weakness in transitional elections: Myanmar’s National
League for Democracy in 2015’, Democratization 29: 2, 2022, pp. 360–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.202
1.1960313; Lee Jones, ‘Explaining Myanmar’s regime transition: the periphery is central’, Democratization 21: 5,
2014, pp. 780–802, https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2013.863878; Tamas Wells, ‘Narrative and elucidating the
concept of democracy: the case of Myanmar’s activists and democratic leaders’, Democratization 26: 2, 2019,
pp. 190–207, https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2018.1509850.
15
Kang, ‘Getting Asia wrong’.
16
Kang, ‘Getting Asia wrong’, pp. 83–4.
754

and operated in a political vacuum. On the contrary, much of today’s South-
east Asian Studies, for instance, emanated from foreign affairs training schools in
the United States—especially the universities of Yale and Cornell—as a direct
response to US interests in the Cold War.17 After all, south-east Asia was the
world’s most fiercely contested region between the global forces of communism
and capitalism. Arguably, these politics contributed to the epistemic demarcation
of south-east Asia as a place that is to be studied separately from south, east and
central Asia.18 Unsurprisingly, then, the centre of gravity for South-east Asian
Studies has not been the study of cultures and societies per se, but rather their
relevance for the comparative study of political systems, specifically autocracies

and democracies.19
The analytical categories of such Comparative Politics scholarship, as in Polit-
ical Science more widely, are intrinsically linked to western liberal thought. They
are guided by the normative concerns of Political Theory, which—as Sanjay Seth
diagnosed—is ‘inherently a liberal enterprise’ not because every political theorist
is necessarily liberal but because ‘the condition for existence of political theory
is … a liberal society’ that enables debate of different political positions.20 Liberal
categories such as civil society or public sphere have thus become naturalized
across all subfields of Political Science and are readily deployed for understanding
the world (despite their origins as normative categories in the West).21 This seems
to be the reason why core categories of liberal theory—first and foremost democ-
racy itself—have gained such predominance in the study of politics worldwide
even though they are severely limited in understanding large parts of this world,
especially outside the West.
Scholars of non-western politics often appreciate the limitation of these liberal
categories for the world they seek to describe.22 Nevertheless, the constitutive
nature of these categories in the discipline of Political Science makes it incred-
ibly difficult, perhaps even impossible, to shed them entirely. To move beyond
interpreting Asian societies through western frameworks, Asian Cultural Studies
scholars have advocated to think of ‘Asia as method’ rather than as merely an
area or object that is to be studied under a specific methodological framework.23
Carlos Rojas notes that utilizing method in this way ‘treats analysis as a type of
praxis that produces knowledge through a dialectical engagement with its object
rather than assuming that knowledge is either intrinsic to the object itself or is
generated solely by the corresponding theoretical framework’.24 This exercise,
17
Benedict Anderson, The spectre of comparisons: nationalism, southeast Asia, and the world (London and New York:
Verso, 1998), pp. 8–12.
18
Willem Van Schendel, ‘Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in southeast Asia’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 6, 2002, pp. 647–68, https://doi.org/10.1068/d16s.
19
Anderson, The spectre of comparisons, pp. 8–12.
20
Seth, Beyond reason, pp. 189, 200–201.
21
Seth, Beyond reason, pp. 200–201.
22
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘The imperialism of categories: situating knowledge in a globalizing world’,
Perspectives on Politics 3: 1, 2005, pp. 5–14, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592705050024.
23
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as method: toward deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
24
Carlos Rojas, ‘Method as method’, Prism: theory and modern Chinese literature 16: 2, 2019, pp. 211–20, https://
doi.org/10.1215/25783491-7978475.
755

David Brenner
Kuan-Hsing Chen suggests, demands the deconstruction of existing frames of
reference that centre on comparisons with western experiences, and a reorien-
tation towards a ‘multiplication of reference points’ in other Asian contexts.25
When turning to Asian Studies literature for analysing conflict dynamics in
Asia, it then seems important to identify and move beyond frames that emerge
from studying Asia through the concerns of the West. The prism of religious
extremism, for instance, has become prevalent in western analysis of Muslim
insurgents after the 9/11 attacks on the US, including in south-east Asia.26 But it
tells us little about the nature of conflict in the southern Philippines, one of the
many peripheral theatres of the ‘war on terror’. To understand how global jihad

interacts with local politics in places such as Mindanao, we need to account for
long histories of empire, post-independence statebuilding during the Cold War
and the ethnonational, often secessionist, conflicts that these processes produced.27
Similarly, pacification policies in Sri Lanka, Thailand or Myanmar have often been
viewed through the lens of ‘illiberal peacebuilding’ to stress their authoritarian
nature in comparison to the allegedly liberal nature of western-led peacebuilding
programmes.28 Such differences exist. But it is to be doubted that the liberal/
illiberal binary captures all or even the most important dynamics of state–society
relations in postcolonial contexts. It might indeed be more fruitful to think of
‘Asian peacebuilding’ as the continuation of postcolonial statebuilding.29
Importantly, postcolonial studies urge us to focus on such questions of the
postcolonial nation-state. Scrutinizing the Westphalian nation-state as a natural
unit of organizing seems specifically important for CAPS as a subfield of IR, a
discipline which, as Seth argues, ‘obscures, rather than illuminates, international
politics’ precisely because the naturalization of the nation-state ‘is built into the
discipline’s construction of its object’.30 Mainstream and critical CAPS have,
indeed, long been held back by precisely this lack of focus on the postcolonial
condition of the nation-state in the global South.31 As Navnita Chadha Behera
succinctly summarized her critique of contemporary bottom-up analyses in the
field:
25
Chen, Asia as method, p. 227.
26
Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in southeast Asia: crucible of terror (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 2003); Andrew T. H. Tan, ‘Terrorism, insurgency and religious fundamentalism in southeast Asia’,
Defence Studies 8: 3, 2008, pp. 311–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/14702430802252636.
27
Barkawi, ‘On the pedagogy of “small wars”’.
28
For example, Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, ‘Dialogue without negotiation: illiberal peace-building in
Southern Thailand’, Conflict, Security & Development 20: 1, 2020, pp. 71–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802
.2019.1705069; Kristine Höglund and Camilla Orjuela, ‘Hybrid peace governance and illiberal peacebuilding
in Sri Lanka’, Global Governance 18: 1, 2012, pp. 89–104, https://doi.org/10.1163/19426720-01801008; Claire Q.
Smith et al., ‘Illiberal peace-building in Asia: a comparative overview’, Conflict, Security & Development 20: 1,
2020, pp. 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2019.1705066.
29
David Brenner, ‘Pacification in Asia since the end of the Cold War: illiberal peacebuilding?’, in Charles F.
Howlett, Christian Phillip Peterson, Deborah D. Buffton and David L. Hostetter, eds, The Oxford handbook of
peace history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
30
Seth, Beyond reason, p. 17.
31
Behera, ‘The “subaltern speak”’; Sabaratnam, ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’;
Suthaharan Nadarajah and David Rampton, ‘The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace’, Review of
International Studies 41: 1, 2015, pp. 49–72, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210514000060.
756

while state-centricity continues to predominate in mainstream peace and conflict analyses,
the epistemic understandings of state in critical theories have also largely remained
tethered to Europe. These understandings fail to adequately analyse how colonial moder-
nity radically altered the trajectories of state-making in large parts of the world, resulting
in fundamentally different ‘kinds’ of states across the globe.32
To understand the fundamentally different kinds of states in south-east Asia,

it is important to appreciate how colonial modernity has imprinted questions of
ethnicity into the trajectory of state-making in the region. On the one hand,
post-independence statebuilders viewed the modern nation-state as a vehicle
for liberation from colonial rule. On the other hand, they faced deep societal

divisions between populations that colonial divide-and-rule had created, mostly
along ethnic lines. This made it difficult to bring the state and the (ethnically
defined) nation into congruence. Instead, postcolonial statebuilding frequently
gave rise to competing ethnic nationalisms, demanding self-rule or independence.
As a result, the region saw the emergence of what can often best be conceptual-
ized as ethnocratic states that organize access to power along lines of ethnic kinship
while seeking to pacify ethnic minorities through a mix of counter-insurgency
campaigns and development policies.33 The rest of this article will follow this
postcolonial perspective and reflect on Myanmar as ‘method’ rather than merely
an object or case of study. This enables us to analyse the frame of democracy
through which Myanmar is commonly understood, and how it effectively works
to render invisible the world’s longest ongoing civil war. It also allows us to
mobilize specialist literature from Burma Studies to provide an alternative reading
of Myanmar’s history and presence, one which goes beyond the focus on political
systems and interrogates the postcolonial nation-state itself.
The invisibilizing lens of democracy

In the wake of Myanmar’s 2021 coup, the High Representative of the European
Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, urged the junta to
‘ensure a return to democracy’ in Myanmar. In his perspective, this was not only
important because the transition that Myanmar underwent from 2011 to 2021 led
to democracy. For Borrell, democratization also led to peace with the country’s
powerful ethnic rebel movements, many of whom have fought the government for
decades and prefer to be called Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs). The military
coup brought this seemingly natural process to a sudden and unexpected end. On
his European External Action Service blog A window on the world, Borrell explains
in a post titled ‘The battle for democracy in Myanmar’: ‘Just like the introduction
of democracy favoured ethnic peace, its abolishment now risks re-creating ethnic
violence’.34 The same blog post asserts:
32
Behera, ‘The “subaltern speak”’, p. 1907.
33
David Brown, The state and ethnic politics in southeast Asia [1994], 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge,
2005); Christopher R. Duncan, ed., Civilizing the margins: southeast Asian government policies for the development of
minorities (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008).
34
Josep Borrell, ‘The battle for democracy in Myanmar’, European Union External Action Service, 11 April
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David Brenner
After 2010, a gradual process of democratisation led to free elections in 2015, won by the
[National League for Democracy] of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The democratic transition was
accompanied in the same year by ethnic peace. After decades of armed conflict, a Nationwide
Ceasefire Agreement was signed in October 2015 between the government and the armed
ethnic groups. This was a milestone and demonstrated the strong political will to address
long-standing grievances through dialogue and co-operation rather than violence.35
Borrell’s representation of events illustrates how the lens of democracy through

which Myanmar’s politics is commonly narrated can render war, violence and
genocide invisible. To begin with, the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA)—
which Borrell presumably equates with ‘ethnic peace’—was far from nationwide.

In fact, only a minority of EAOs signed up to the NCA. The most powerful
EAOs did not.36 More importantly, Borrell’s commentary conceals the fact that
Myanmar has witnessed a significant escalation of ethnic conflict since the military
enacted reforms in 2011.37 Contrary to his portrayal, Myanmar’s transition was not
accompanied by peace, but by a steep increase in armed conflict. During Myanmar’s
decade of ‘democratization’, fighting in Kachin, Shan and Rakhine states has been
more severe than at any time since the 1980s.38 In addition, Myanmar’s decade
of transition was also accompanied by the escalation of sectarian violence driven
by ultranationalist Buddhist forces and military elites, which unleashed pogroms
against the country’s Muslim communities in 2012 and culminated in the genocide
against the Rohingya in 2017.39
This is not to say that all international diplomats working in and on Myanmar
were ignorant of ethnic conflict and genocide. To be sure, the Rohingya genocide
raised significant international concern about Myanmar’s transition process. And
international experts on atrocity prevention sharply criticized western donors
for their overarching concern with democratization that superseded the need for
atrocity prevention in Rakhine.40 Eglantine Staunton and Jason Ralph found
that linking atrocity prevention to the overarching concern with democratiza-
tion ‘without any acknowledgement that these norms—which appear aligned
in theory—can clash in practice’ indeed had a detrimental effect on EU atrocity
prevention in Myanmar.41 Nevertheless, Borrell’s remarks demonstrate that the
lens of democratization has remained the main narrative of EU engagement with
Myanmar, and how it can render ethnic conflict and mass atrocities invisible. This
utopian version of reality was arguably convenient for western diplomats, donors
2021, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/battle-democracy-myanmar_en.
35
Borrell, ‘The battle for democracy in Myanmar’.
36
Martin Smith and Jason Gelbort, The nationwide ceasefire agreement in Myanmar: promoting ethnic peace or strengthen-
ing state control? (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2023), https://www.tni.org/en/publication/the-nation-
wide-ceasefire-agreement-in-myanmar.
37
Mandy Sadan, ‘Introduction’, in Mandy Sadan, ed., War and peace in the borderlands of Myanmar: the Kachin
ceasefire, 1994–2011 (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2016), pp. 1–26.
38
Mandy Sadan, ‘Introduction’; Smith and Gelbort, The nationwide ceasefire agreement in Myanmar.
39
Carlos Sardiña Galache, The Burmese labyrinth: a history of the Rohingya tragedy (London: Verso Books, 2020).
40
Eglantine Staunton and Jason Ralph, ‘The Responsibility to Protect norm cluster and the challenge of atrocity
prevention: an analysis of the European Union’s strategy in Myanmar’, European Journal of International Relations
26: 3, 2020, pp. 660–86, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119883001.
41
Staunton and Ralph, ‘The Responsibility to Protect norm cluster and the challenge of atrocity prevention’,
p. 662.
758

and peacebuilders who entered Myanmar after the 2011 reforms, eager to engage
with transitioning state institutions. In fact, framing the politics in Myanmar as
democratization was instrumental for allowing western peacebuilders to engage
in a deeply flawed peace process, including with interventions that supported a
militarized and ethnocratic state bureaucracy and its territorialization of contested
spaces.42 The same lens also allowed development donors and economic investors
to fund the expansion of infrastructure projects and private sector industries into
resource-rich and strategically located but conflict-ridden border areas.43 Instances
of continued conflict and escalating violence were often brushed aside as irritant
outliers compared to the alleged wider trend of democratization, development

and peacebuilding.44
But understanding Myanmar through the lens of democracy is not only a
strategic narrative frame that enables specific political engagement and interven-
tions. It also works as a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense of the word: a shared model
understanding of the likely causes and potential solutions to a problem, which
is so deeply ingrained in mainstream debates that it becomes difficult to think
outside of it.45 The effect of this paradigm can also be seen in academic research,
specifically when Myanmar is pressed into action as a case for understanding
phenomena of wider international concern for scholars and practitioners alike.
Take, for instance, the special issue of the IDS Bulletin on ‘Accountability amidst
fragility, conflict, and violence: learning from recent cases’, published in 2019 as
part of a wider project (Action for Empowerment and Accountability—A4EA)
funded by the then UK Department for International Development. The special
issue compares five conflict-affected countries, in which the project identified a
greater move to accountability in the preceding years. One of the contributions is
a case-study on civil society in Myanmar. The article calls for a move beyond the
democratization paradigm for understanding Myanmar’s transition and its effects
on state and society. From the outset, the authors write ‘that viewing transition
in Myanmar through the lens of democratisation has always been misleading and
problematic’ and that ‘rethinking the nature of transition is pivotal for preventing
inadvertently aiding authoritarianism and conflict’.46 Nevertheless, the introduc-
tion to the same special issue insists that the article analyses the ‘transition to
democracy in Myanmar’.47 For scholars and practitioners alike, it is evidently diffi-
cult to conceive of Myanmar beyond the lens of democracy.
42
David Brenner and Sarah Schulman, ‘Myanmar’s top-down transition: challenges for civil society’, IDS Bulle-
tin 50: 3, 2019, pp. 17–36, https://doi.org/10.19088/1968-2019.128; Smith and Gelbort, The nationwide ceasefire
agreement in Myanmar.
43
Lina A. Alexandra and Marc Lanteigne, ‘New actors and innovative approaches to peacebuilding: the case
of Myanmar’, in Charles T. Call and Cedric de Coning, eds, Rising powers and peacebuilding: breaking the mold?
(Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 223–26; Donald M. Seekins, ‘Japan’s development ambi-
tions for Myanmar: the problem of “economics before politics”’, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 34: 2,
2015, pp. 113–38, https://doi.org/10.1177/186810341503400205.
44
Sadan, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
45
Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions [1962] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
46
Brenner and Schulman, ‘Myanmar’s top-down transition’, p. 17.
47
Anuradha Joshi, ‘Introduction: accountability amidst fragility, conflict, and violence: learning from recent
cases’, IDS Bulletin 50: 3, 2019, pp. 1–16 at p. 8, https://doi.org/10.19088/1968-2019.127.
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David Brenner
Co-producing Myanmar as an object of democratization

How did this paradigm of democratization emerge as the main lens for inter-
preting Myanmar’s politics? Two main developments have co-produced this
frame: 1) politically, Myanmar has been produced as a normative object of democ-
ratization in liberal international discourse since the end of the Cold War; and
2) academically, Myanmar has mostly been studied as part of South-east Asian
Studies, a field that is intrinsically tied to comparative questions of democracy
and authoritarianism.

Politics: making Myanmar relevant
During most of the Cold War, Myanmar—then called Burma—did not feature
significantly in international debates. Since then, however, the country has become
a relatively prominent object in the liberal discourse that took hold of interna-
tional politics in the 1990s. Myanmar’s popular uprisings against military dicta-
torship in 1988, the decisive electoral victory for the opposition National League
for Democracy (NLD) in 1990, and the brutal military crackdown that followed
were not only of national importance. At a time when western-dominated inter-
national discourse interpreted the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the end of
history’, Burma’s struggle for democracy appeared emblematic of what was seen
as a universal human desire for liberal democracy.48 The prominence that Burma’s
democracy movement gained worldwide was also helped by the personal charisma
of its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. In fact, the country’s popular uprising against
military dictatorship in 1988, and its aftermath, not only propelled Suu Kyi to
national prominence; it also won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, making her
one of the most recognizable icons of democracy and human rights worldwide (at
least until she presided over the Rohingya genocide).
Arguably, Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement made Burma relevant for a
western-dominated international community precisely because at the time the
country’s story seemed to fit the wider liberal narrative about world politics. This
proximity to western audience interests and identities made it possible for inter-
national media to fit Myanmar within the limited attention span of the 24-hour
news cycle, at least when reported from a lens of pro-democratic struggle.49 It also
enabled the growth of an international Burma lobby, comprising exiled Burmese
and expatriate, mostly western, democracy advocates and human rights activists,
who made sure that Myanmar remained on the international radar.50 For many
expatriate Burma advocates, the democracy struggle of 1988 indeed became the
initial point of contact with the country, and thus a natural lens through which to
48
See Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1992); David I. Steinberg,
‘Myanmar in 1991: the miasma in Burma’, Asian Survey 32: 2, 1992, pp. 146–53, https://doi.org/10.2307/2645212.
49
For a discussion of perceived newsworthiness of some crises over others, see Virgil Hawkins, ‘Media selectiv-
ity and the other side of the CNN effect: the consequences of not paying attention to conflict’, Media, War &
Conflict 4: 1, 2011, pp. 55–68, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635210396126.
50
Andrew Selth, ‘Modern Burma studies: a survey of the field’, Modern Asian Studies 44: 2, 2010, pp. 401–40,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X08003508.
760

interpret its politics. One such advocate, for instance, reflected how she reached
the Thai-Myanmar border in 1990 to ‘help the winds of change’ (in direct reference
to The Scorpions’ 1989 ‘hymn’ to perestroika in the Soviet Union).51 This is not to
say that many Burma advocates were unaware of or silent about the ongoing ethnic
conflict. Many Burmese activists have long stressed the intertwined nature of the
struggles for democracy and for peace between ethnic populations.52 Expatriate
Burma advocates have also been based on the Thai border, where hundreds of
thousands of refugees from ethnic nationality communities had fled since the
1980s. But the strategic framing of Myanmar within the language of democ-
ratization—and thus the subsuming of ethnic nationality concerns within that

presumed wider struggle—was central to maintaining the focus—or at least some
of the focus—of policy-makers in Washington, London, Brussels and Canberra.53
Scholarship: making Myanmar intelligible

The events of 1988 also reinstituted Burma Studies as a small and specialized
academic field of inquiry, after Myanmar had received extremely limited inter-
national scholarly attention.54 In Burma Studies questions of ethnicity, religion,
nationalism and their relations to conflict and violence in the country, including
civil war and rebel movements, are commonly discussed topics. Foundational
work in Burma Studies highlights the crucial importance of ethnic nationalism and
conflict for understanding Myanmar’s state and society.55 But here also, the study
of democratization, authoritarianism and civil–military relations has become a
particularly dominant frame of analysis.56 This is partly due to real-world events.
Undoubtedly, Myanmar’s democracy movement is important, and the country’s
authoritarian system warrants academic investigation. But like foreign Burma
advocates, many foreign Burma Studies researchers have also first ‘been intro-
duced to Burma through the democracy movement’ and some conceive of their
scholarship as anti-authoritarian activism.57 The prominent place of democratiza-
tion within Burma Studies is, moreover, the legacy of the field’s formation as part
51
Paula Green, ‘On the Burma border: how to help’, Fellowship Magazine 57: 6, 1991, p. 17, https://www.
proquest.com/openview/6edae9cbfe548597b6f0f7bc67444473.
52
For example, Win Sein, ‘Sustaining Burma’s hopes for freedom’, Journal of Democracy 5: 2, 1994, pp. 144–9,
https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1994.0025.
53
Selth, ‘Modern Burma studies’; Zaw Oo, ‘Exit, voice and loyalty in Burma: the role of overseas Burmese in
democratising their homeland’, in Trevor Wilson, ed., Myanmar’s long road to national reconciliation (Singapore:
ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2006).
54
Selth, ‘Modern Burma studies’.
55
Mary Patricia Callahan, Making enemies: war and state building in Burma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005); Martin Smith, Burma: insurgency and the politics of ethnic conflict (London: Zed Books, 1999); Ardeth Maung
Thawnghmung, The Karen revolution in Burma: diverse voices, uncertain ends (Singapore: East–West Center, 2008).
56
See e.g., Robert Taylor, ‘Myanmar: military politics and the prospects for democratisation’, Asian Affairs 29: 1,
1998, pp. 3–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/714041341; Nehginpao Kipgen, Democratisation of Myanmar (Abing-
don and New York: Routledge, 2016); Roman David and Ian Holliday, Liberalism and democracy in Myanmar
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For a good criticism of this knowledge frame in the present context
also see Shona Loong, ‘In Myanmar, Generation Z goes to war’, Current History 122: 843, 2023, pp. 137–42,
https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2023.122.843.137.
57
Rosalie Metro, ‘The divided discipline of Burma/Myanmar studies: writing a dissertation during the 2010
election’, Southeast Asia Program Bulletin, 2011, pp. 8–13 at p. 12, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/
bbf58dd9-0e1c-428c-a2b8-741b323b43d2.
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David Brenner
of South-east Asian Studies, where comparative questions of democratization and
authoritarianism have played a constitutive role.58
Centring questions of the political system had consequences for the way that
Myanmar’s history and presence is understood in academia and beyond. Not only
have the 1988 uprisings and the transition of 2011 become standard reference-
points in mainstream historiographies of the country: more generally, Myanmar’s
post-independence history is commonly narrated as a series of periods reflecting
the make-up of and change in political systems. In this narration, the country’s
independence from British colonial rule was followed by a brief experiment with
parliamentary democracy between 1948 and 1962, which was interrupted by a

military coup that heralded decades of self-isolation and dictatorship. This lasted
until the pro-democratic uprisings of 1988, which led to multiparty elections in
1990 and the violent reversal of a decisive NLD victory by the military. The next
period is commonly defined as the period between 1990 and 2011, which was again
characterized by military dictatorship. Interrupted by democratic protests, such as
in 1996, 1998 and 2007, this period ended with the initiation of political reforms
in 2011, bringing about the decade of democratization that was violently reversed
with the coup of 2021, which then sparked the Spring Revolution against the
military dictatorship.
None of this is necessarily wrong. And periodization both helps to organize
complex histories and creates common reference-points. Yet the ready-made
historiography of Myanmar, narrated in a set of distinctive periods related to
the country’s central political system, simplifies historical processes in sometimes
unhelpful ways.59 It renders alternative experiences and important historical events
invisible, for instance, as seen by the country’s ethnic nationality communities.60
From the perspective of many ethnic nationalities in the country’s north, the
pro-democratic uprisings of 1988 and their violent aftermath happened at a time
when war gave way to relative local stability due to the negotiation of multiple
ceasefires between the military and major ethnic armed groups.61 As we will see,
the much-celebrated decade of democracy between 2011 and 2021 brought an
increase in war and violence to many of the same communities. This is crucial for
making sense of Myanmar’s post-coup politics today.
Myanmar beyond democracy

How do we understand Myanmar’s past and presence when we foreground the
continuation of violence in the country’s borderlands? Put differently, what
58
Anderson, The spectre of comparisons.
59
For an excellent discussion of the problem of categorizing Myanmar’s history in distinct periods which often
only reflect a singular vantage point, see Elizabeth L. Rhoads and Courtney T. Wittekind, ‘Rethinking land
and property in a “transitioning” Myanmar: representations of isolation, neglect, and natural decline’, Journal
of Burma Studies 22: 2, 2018, pp. 171–213, https://doi.org/10.1353/jbs.2018.0011.
60
See Jenny Hedström and Elisabeth Olivius, ‘Tracing temporal conflicts in transitional Myanmar: life history
diagrams as methodological tool’, Conflict, Security & Development 22: 5, 2022, pp. 495–515, https://doi.org/10
.1080/14678802.2022.2124847.
61
Sadan, ‘Introduction’.
762

happens when we move beyond the predominant concern about the political
system and focus on the problem of the postcolonial nation-state instead? The
following section will explore these questions through a postcolonial reading
of Myanmar’s reform period and the crisis following the military coup of 2021.
Doing so is not meant to reinscribe historiography based on changing political
systems, but to unsettle political certainties about these periods and to highlight
continuities rather than inflection-points.
Reform period: top-down transition and ethnonational conflict

Myanmar’s reforms in 2011 caught the world by surprise. The military junta
released long-term political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, inaugurated a
semi-civilian government, and initiated wide-reaching reforms including unprec-
edented civil liberty rights in a country that had been under military dictatorship
for decades. To some, this appeared to be the outcome of the pro-democracy
forces’ staying power and the pressure exerted by their international supporters.62
The Obama administration in the US portrayed the unexpected turn of events as
a success of US democracy promotion.63 Scholars in Burma Studies were more
sceptical, and pointed to the fact that the main driving force behind transition
was the ruling generals themselves, arguing that reforms were neither the result of
domestic pro-democracy forces nor the outcome of international pressure, such as
economic sanctions.64 The generals initiated reforms from a position of strength,
after years of planning for ‘a discipline-flourishing democracy’ within the confines
of Myanmar’s 2008 constitution, which grants the military dominance over key
government portfolios, state institutions and legislative powers.65 Importantly,
the generals implemented reforms at a time when they believed that they had
neutralized the threat of ethnic rebellion and state disintegration with a strategy
of co-optation through ceasefires.66
Ethnonational conflict has defined Myanmar’s state since independence.
Postcolonial state-making itself cannot be viewed outside of this logic, the roots
of which date back to the divide-and-rule strategy of British colonialism and the
proxy dynamics of the Second World War, both of which fortified previously
62
e.g., Larry Diamond, ‘Why east Asia—including China—will turn democratic within a generation’, The
Atlantic, 24 Jan. 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/why-east-asia-includ-
ing-china-will-turn-democratic-within-a-generation/251824.
63
Jordan Fabian, ‘Obama to lift sanctions on Myanmar’, The Hill, 14 Sept. 2016, https://thehill.com/homenews/
administration/295921-obama-to-lift-sanctions-on-myanmar.
64
Brenner and Schulman, ‘Myanmar’s top-down transition’; Lee Jones, ‘The political economy of Myanmar’s
transition’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 44: 1, 2014, pp. 144–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2013.764143;
Maung Aung Myoe, ‘The soldier and the state: the Tatmadaw and political liberalization in Myanmar since
2011’, South East Asia Research 22: 2, 2014, pp. 233–49, https://doi.org/10.5367/sear.2014.0205; Stefano Ruzza,
Giuseppe Gabusi and Davide Pellegrino, ‘Authoritarian resilience through top-down transformation: making
sense of Myanmar’s incomplete transition’, Italian Political Science Review 49: 2, 2019, pp. 193–209, https://doi.
org/10.1017/ipo.2019.8.
65
Myoe, ‘The soldier and the state’; Kristian Stokke and Soe Myint Aung, ‘Transition to democracy or hybrid
regime? The dynamics and outcomes of democratization in Myanmar’, The European Journal of Development
Research 32: 2, 2020, pp. 274–93, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-019-00247-x.
66
Jones, ‘Explaining Myanmar’s regime transition’.
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David Brenner
fluid ethnic lines, positioned ethnic groups against each other, and gave birth to
competing ethnic nationalisms that have since staked overlapping claims to their
respective homelands.67 While Burma’s post-independence government initially
tried to accommodate such demands, it failed to uphold a power-sharing accord that
was signed by leaders of major ethnic groups in February 1947, about a year before
independence. Known as the Panglong Agreement, the settlement promised equal
treatment of all ethnic groups and a system of power sharing, including regional
autonomy in a federal union. Instead of the latter, leaders of the Bamar ethnic
majority have ingrained hierarchies based on ethnicity into the laws, institutions
and practices of the postcolonial state, marginalizing ethnic minority communi-

ties, who prefer to be called ethnic nationalities to highlight the fact that they
make up roughly 40 per cent of Myanmar’s overall population.68 And ethnon-
ational conflict has since given rise to Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs), which
comprise numerous powerful rebel movements. These EAOs have contested the
Myanmar state, by demanding either independence or the remaking of a central-
ized ethnocracy into a federal state with significant provisions for autonomy for
ethnic nationalities. Importantly, ethnonational conflict has also become the key
driver of persistent military authoritarianism. In fact, it has constituted the raison
d’être of military supremacy since the generals first took power in 1962 and started
to portray themselves as the guardians of a state that would disintegrate without
them.69
While ceasefires provided an inroad for unprecedented state territorialization
in Myanmar’s borderlands in the 1990s and 2000s, they ultimately failed to pacify
this conflict.70 This is why war, violence and marginalization—not democracy—
continued to define the experience of many people in Myanmar despite political
reforms that undoubtedly brought enormous transformations and improve-
ments for most of the country. Many ethnic nationalities and religious minorities
specifically experienced an increase in violence after the 2011 reforms. The most
prominent example—the Rohingya genocide—made international headlines as
more than 700,000 people fled from military-led atrocities and ethnic cleansing
in 2017.71 But this was only the culmination of decades-long persecution that
intensified with Myanmar’s transition. In times of tense competition over changes
in political power and economic assets, targeting Rohingya Muslims became a
means of political mobilization for elites, including Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD,
in a country where deep-rooted anti-Muslim sentiments are shared among large
parts of society. But rather than an aberration to an otherwise peaceful transition,
67
Callahan, Making enemies; Smith, Burma: insurgency and the politics of ethnic conflict.
68
Nick Cheesman, ‘How in Myanmar “national races” came to surpass citizenship and exclude Rohingya’, Jour-
nal of Contemporary Asia 47: 3, 2017, pp. 461–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2017.1297476; Matthew J.
Walton, ‘The “wages of Burman-ness:” ethnicity and Burman privilege in contemporary Myanmar’, Journal
of Contemporary Asia 43: 1, 2013, pp. 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2012.730892.
69
Callahan, Making enemies.
70
David Brenner, Rebel politics: a political sociology of armed struggle in Myanmar’s borderlands (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2019); Sadan, ‘Introduction’.
71
Hannah Beech, ‘Desperate Rohingya flee Myanmar on trail of suffering: “it is all gone”’, New York Times,
2 Sept. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/world/asia/rohingya-myanmar-bangladesh-refugees-
massacre.html.
764

the Rohingya genocide was only the starkest episode of violence that went hand
in hand with Myanmar’s decade of transition.72
Parallel to democratization, fighting between the military and the EAOs also
escalated to an extent that had not been seen since the 1980s, especially in what
had previously been relatively stable ceasefire territories on the Chinese border.
The overarching factor that underpinned the widespread escalation of conflict
was the ceasefire politics of the 1990s themselves.73 While ceasefires brought a
much-needed respite from fighting, many communities experienced continuous
displacement and marginalization due to extractive ceasefire economies and ethno-
cratic development policies.74 Importantly, the ceasefires did nothing to address

the political demands of ethnic nationalities for more autonomy and equality in a
federal state.75 But even in places where reforms were accompanied by new cease-
fires, violence, militarization and marginalization remained a defining feature
of many people’s lives during the reform period.76 The ceasefire experience of
people in south-east Myanmar in the 2010s largely mirrored the experiences in
northern Myanmar in the 1990s and 2000s. Militarized infrastructure construc-
tion and extractive economies entered previously off-limit territories and threat-
ened people’s livelihoods, while the state did not concede to political demands for
ethnic autonomy and equality rights.77 Neglecting how such conflict and violence
continued to define Myanmar’s reform period does not only do injustice to the
country’s ethnic nationalities. It also fails to account for important dynamics of
resistance against the military coup.
Fighting the junta: ethnic resistance and revolutionary war

After Myanmar’s military coup on 1 February 2021, western observers, from US
President Joe Biden to the International Crisis Group, swiftly demanded ‘the
restoration of democracy’.78 By contrast, Rakhine analyst Kyaw Hsan Hlaing
summed up the sentiment of many ethnic nationalities. He demanded that
‘Myanmar politics must be re-made, not restored’ because if politicians—whether
democratically elected or not—continued to ‘privilege the interests of the [ethnic]
majority, our country will continue to suffer militarisation, violence and civilian
72
Cheesman, ‘How in Myanmar “national races” came to surpass citizenship and exclude Rohingya’; Moham-
mad Pizuar Hossain, ‘Stages of the Rohingya genocide: a theoretical and empirical study’, Holocaust and Geno-
cide Studies 35: 2, 2021, pp. 211–34, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcab033.
73
Brenner, Rebel politics; Sadan, ‘Introduction’.
74
Tom Kramer, ‘“Neither war nor peace”: failed ceasefires and dispossession in Myanmar’s ethnic borderlands’,
The Journal of Peasant Studies 48: 3, 2021, pp. 476–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1834386.
75
Smith and Gelbort, The nationwide ceasefire agreement in Myanmar.
76
Brenner, Rebel politics, pp. 75–96; Jenny Hedström and Elisabeth Olivius, ‘Insecurity, dispossession, depletion:
women’s experiences of post-war development in Myanmar’, The European Journal of Development Research
32: 2, 2020, pp. 379–403, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-020-00255-2.
77
Brenner, Rebel politics, pp. 75–96; Kramer, ‘“Neither war nor peace”’; Sadan, ed., War and peace in the borderlands
of Myanmar.
78
The White House, ‘Statement by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on the situation in Burma’, 1 Feb. 2021,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/02/01/statement-by-president-
joseph-r-biden-jr-on-the-situation-in-burma; International Crisis Group, ‘Myanmar’s military should reverse
its coup’, 1 Feb. 2021, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/myanmars-military-
should-reverse-its-coup.
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David Brenner
displacement’.79 This perspective underpins and drives much of ethnic nation-
alities’ resistance to the coup, including in the case of EAOs who are central for
understanding the dynamics of revolutionary war against the junta.80 In fact, the
survival of the opposition National Unity Government (NUG) and the mobiliza-
tion of the guerrilla People’s Defence Forces (PDFs) would have been impossible
without EAO support. Karen, Kachin, Karenni and Chin EAOs have sheltered
activists and politicians from central Myanmar, provided military training to
revolutionaries and conducted joint operations with the newly founded PDFs,
many of whom fight under direct EAO command.81 But even EAOs that have not
officially aligned with the NUG have proven instrumental in forming, sustaining

and escalating the war against the junta to an extent that outside observers barely
deemed possible in 2021.82 At the time of writing in November 2023, the Three
Brotherhood Alliance, consisting of three EAOs that have kept the NUG at arm’s
length, had just captured an area equivalent in size to Belgium in northern Shan
State, including urban centres and key trade routes to China.83 This unprec-
edented campaign has sparked significant offensives by revolutionary forces in
different parts of the country and might constitute a turning point in their war
against the increasingly besieged junta.84 But EAOs—NUG-aligned or not—are
not primarily motivated by a change in the political system. The fight for democ-
racy is secondary to their concerns. Instead, their struggle is focused on ending
Myanmar’s ethnocratic postcolonial state and building a federal union with signifi-
cant autonomy provisions for ethnic nationality territories instead.85
Importantly, centring democracy is insufficient for understanding the motiva-
tion of many of the new resistance fighters who have mobilized beyond the estab-
lished EAOs since the 2021 coup. To be sure, the struggle for democracy is a main
driver for many of the newly formed PDFs. Indeed, one of the distinct features of
the revolutionary war is the way it has taken hold in what are commonly referred
to as the Bamar heartlands—the ‘dry zone’ of central Myanmar’s Sagaing and
Magway regions that used to be removed from the conflicts in ethnic border areas.
But two of the largest and most successful new revolutionary movements have
79
Kyaw Hsan Hlaing, ‘Myanmar politics must be re-made, not restored’, Frontier Myanmar, 24 Feb. 2021, https://
www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/myanmar-politics-must-be-re-made-not-restored.
80
Multiple interviews with ethnic nationality activists and resistance fighters, including EAO members, Thai-
Myanmar border, Dec. 2021, Oct. and Nov. 2023. See also Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung and Khun Noah,
‘Myanmar’s military coup and the elevation of the minority agenda?’, Critical Asian Studies 53: 2, 2021,
pp. 297–309, https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2021.1912620.
81
Paul Vrieze, ‘Joining the Spring Revolution or charting their own path? Ethnic minority strategies following
the 2021 Myanmar coup’, Asian Survey 63: 1, 2023, pp. 90–120, https://doi.org/10.1525/as.2022.1717596.
82
For example, Anthony Davis, ‘Why Myanmar’s military will win in the end’, Asia Times, 18 Feb. 2021, http://
asiatimes.com/2021/02/why-myanmars-military-will-win-in-the-end.
83
Nay Thit and Nora, ‘Myanmar junta continues to suffer defeats a month into operation 1027’, The Irrawaddy,
27 Nov. 2023, https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/war-against-the-junta/myanmar-junta-continues-to-
suffer-defeats-a-month-into-operation-1027.html.
84
Avinash Paliwal, ‘Could Myanmar come apart? As the rebels gain ground and the junta reels, the country’s
future is in doubt’, Foreign Affairs, 24 Jan. 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/burma-myanmar/could-
myanmar-come-apart.
85
Multiple interviews with EAO members and insiders from three EAOs: the Karen National Union (KNU),
the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), Thai-
Myanmar border, Oct. and Nov. 2023. See also Vrieze, ‘Joining the Spring Revolution or charting their own
path?’.
766

formed in ethnic nationality communities. The Chinland Defence Force (CDF)
and the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) have both mobilized upon
decades of ethnic marginalization in Chin State and Kayah State respectively. Here
also, ceasefires with established EAOs did not end dispossession and violence in the
2010s.86 Hence the reason why young Chin and Karenni revolutionaries are not
only fighting for a change of political system, but for the remaking of Myanmar’s
nation-state itself.87 After all, they are acutely aware that democracy within the
ethnocratic structures of the existing state will not address their structural margin-
alization notwithstanding who is in power. Karenni revolutionaries, for instance,
remember well that it was the NLD government which cracked down violently

on young protesters who took issue with the erection of a statue of Aung San Suu
Kyi’s father in the Kayah capital of Loikaw in 2019.88 These experiences are crucial
for explaining the effective mobilization of the KNDF.
More generally, ethnic nationality demands for remaking the ethnocratic state
are not only key for understanding revolutionary war, but also for negotiating the
post-revolutionary state.89 While most opposition forces in Myanmar are aware
of this, western donors should support the NUG and ethnic resistance forces in
realizing this endeavour. This means shedding the limiting lens of democracy
and engaging more directly with ethnic resistance forces and their governance
structures. These ‘rebel’ administrations have long governed significant parts of
populations in Myanmar’s borderlands.90 They have done so in direct resistance to
the ethnocratic structures of the postcolonial state. Donors need to engage with
them to support building a federal state that works for all ethnic populations in
Myanmar. Only then can democracy flourish, too.
Conclusion
This article took Myanmar’s 2021 military coup and its violent aftermath as a
starting-point for scrutinizing the dominant paradigm through which the
country’s past and presence are usually narrated: a battle between authoritarian
generals and a popular pro-democracy movement. This framing is insufficient for
explaining the drivers of and potential solutions to the crisis in Myanmar. Rather
than just being inconclusive, however, the paradigm of democracy has worked to
effectively render alternative explanations and realities invisible. This is problem-
86
Rainer Einzenberger, ‘Frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in Myanmar: the case of the Mwetaung
(Gullu Mual) nickel mine in Chin State’, Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies 11: 1, 2018, pp. 13–34,
https://doi.org/10.14764/10.ASEAS-2018.1-2; Tom Kramer, Oliver Russell and Martin Smith, From war to
peace in Kayah (Karenni) State: a land at the crossroads in Myanmar (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2018),
https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/tni-2018_karenni_eng_web_def.pdf.
87
Interviews with KNDF members, 18 Dec. 2021 and 30 Sept. 2023. See also Emily Fishbein, ‘Chin nationalism
“blossoms” on northwestern front against junta’, Frontier Myanmar, 9 Jan. 2023, https://www.frontiermyan-
mar.net/en/chin-nationalism-blossoms-on-northwestern-front-against-junta.
88
Interview with young Karenni revolutionaries, Thai-Myanmar border, 22 Sept. 2023.
89
Analysing Myanmar’s fragmented battlefield is necessarily schematic in the scope of this article. For a more
detailed analysis, see Shona Loong, ‘Post-coup Myanmar in six warscapes’, International Institute for Strategic
Studies, 2022, https://myanmar.iiss.org/analysis?s=warscapes.
90
Brenner, Rebel politics.
767

David Brenner
atic in a country where many ethnic minorities experienced the much-lauded
‘democratic’ transition as an uptick in violence, including dispossession, war and
genocide. It also bodes ill for understanding conflict dynamics after the coup
of 2021, including the pivotal role of established ethnic rebel movements, and
the very motivation of thousands of young people who have taken up arms. For
many of these key actors in Myanmar’s revolutionary war, the fight for democracy
is meaningless without an end to ethnic marginalization that is deeply ingrained
in the institutions of the ethnocratic state. From that perspective, the crisis of
Myanmar is not only or even primarily a crisis of the political system. It is a crisis
of the postcolonial nation-state itself.

Rethinking the basic parameters within which we understand and engage with
Myanmar is also important for finding ways to support genuine democratization
without revisiting the escalation of conflict and violence seen in the past decade.
Indeed, any serious attempt at unravelling military power and pushing for democ-
racy needs to focus on transforming the protracted ethnonational conflict that has
haunted the country since independence. Put differently, ethnonational conflict
cannot be viewed as a second-order reality that will eventually be resolved by the
forces of democratization. On the contrary, the military coup of 2021 demonstrates
that democratization without transforming ethnic conflict not only produces
more violence, but also begets further authoritarianism. This is because ethnon-
ational conflict has long been at the heart of persistent military authoritarianism
in Myanmar. In fact, it constitutes the raison d’être of military supremacy since the
generals first seized power in 1962, and is ingrained in the ethnocratic nature of the
state that the military has built ever since. At the same time, ethnonational conflict
presents a serious obstacle for building sustainable and unified resistance against
military power. The revolution must not wait to address such matters until after
its eventual victory. The revolution can only be victorious by dismantling the
ethnocratic nature of state and society as part of the revolutionary process itself.
Besides generating a better understanding of one of the deadliest but least
researched conflicts in the world, this article contributes to wider scholarship on
knowledge production in Conflict and Peace Studies and International Relations
by critiquing the application of western concepts to postcolonial Asia.91 In
reflecting on these issues in the context of armed conflict, the article specifically
contributes to recent debates on the production of knowledge and ignorance in
CAPS.92 It showed that the selective level of attention that conflicts receive in
scholarship, media and policy is not only a function of general western interest
(or lack thereof ) in some countries over others. It is also linked to the frames that
govern our interest in and understanding of countries and regions of the world.
Visibility and invisibility can go hand in hand, especially when the main frame for
analysing non-western politics is derived from the normative concerns of western
political theory. ‘Forgotten conflicts’ might then exist in places that are otherwise
91
See, for example, Barkawi, ‘On the pedagogy of “small wars”’; Behera, ‘Globalization, deglobalization and
knowledge production’; Kang, ‘Getting Asia wrong’; Seth, Beyond reason.
92
Behera, ‘The “subaltern speak”’; Brenner and Han, ‘Forgotten conflicts’; Hellmüller, Goetschel and Lidén,
‘Knowledge production on peace’; Phillips and Greene, ‘Where is conflict research?’.
768

relatively present on the international radar. This does not only apply to Myanmar,
but also to other conflicts in Asia, for instance in north-east India or southern
Thailand. But simply consulting specialist literature is insufficient for effectively
leveraging such ‘forgotten conflicts’ to inform conceptual debates on conflict and
peace. Rather, the article has shown that we need to challenge existing frames of
reference and resituate our reading within postcolonial perspectives.
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Misunderstanding Myanmar

through the lens of democracy

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To understand the fundamentally different kinds of states in south-east Asia,

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The invisibilizing lens of democracy

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Borrell’s representation of events illustrates how the lens of democracy through

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Co-producing Myanmar as an object of democratization

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Scholarship: making Myanmar intelligible

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Myanmar beyond democracy

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Reform period: top-down transition and ethnonational conflict

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Fighting the junta: ethnic resistance and revolutionary war

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