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Scenarios for Understanding Myanmar’s Political and Humanitarian Crises

Nicholas Farrelly

Head of School, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania

Abstract

This chapter explores four interlinked scenarios about Myanmar’s trajectory since the February 2021 military coup, with specific attention to plausible humanitarian conditions in the years ahead. The analysis draws on the erratic imbalance of forces, ideas, politics and strategies that have energised Myanmar’s turbulence since the most recent coup and that, in many respects, influence the range of potential responses to the multiple, ongoing humanitarian crises. The examination of hypotheticals, such as these scenarios, requires attention to history, to current conditions and to foreseeable future outcomes. The scenarios are explored in the hope that, by better understanding recent events, we may be able to better appreciate future trajectories. The analysis highlights the intense challenges for any future Myanmar government and for international partners seeking to influence developments in a more positive direction.

Thinking about the future of Myanmar’s coup

Part of the dark calculation in Naypyidaw for Myanmar’s 2021 coup was that powerful international players, divided by intense geostrategic rivalries and diminished by the response to the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, would struggle to mount any substantial response. Exhausted by almost two decades of active military and humanitarian intervention across the Middle East and Central Asia, the United States and key allies have signalled, for years, increasing reluctance to directly support teetering, or toppled, democratic regimes. Enthusiasm for the process of contested institution-building, especially in places where there are only modest strategic interests at stake, has waned dramatically.

In the Myanmar situation, the generals and their enablers in the civilian bureaucracy have many years of direct experience manipulating Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) diplomacy towards outcomes favourable to the entrenchment of military power. Under these circumstances, the generals would have judged, with some confidence, that the room for external powers to make dramatic pronouncements and then actively build momentum against the re-entrenchment of military power was very limited. Yet, well after the coup, the new military regime has struggled to consolidate its control of territory and remains deeply unpopular across the breadth of Myanmar society. Brazen anti-coup tactics, like silent strikes, reinforce the overwhelming perception that the 2021 coup could still fail, although the trigger for a calamitous breakdown in the military regime has proved elusive. In the past, Myanmar’s military decision-makers have also usually succeeded in avoiding real scrutiny or consequences when called to account for human rights abuses (Shukri 2021, 258). Since the coup, there have been admirably thorough efforts to document the range of distressing allegations that have emerged (A. A. & Gaborit 2021, 56).

In this strategic and historical context, this analysis draws on the erratic imbalance of forces, ideas, politics and strategies that have energised Myanmar’s turbulence since the most recent coup and that, in many respects, influence the range of potential responses to the multiple, ongoing humanitarian crises. With the Myanmar military now fighting a much wider range of opponents, including the People’s Defence Force militias that formed in 2021, the entire Myanmar state system is being tested by those prepared to mount ‘revolutionary responses’ (Prasse‐Freeman & Ko Kabya 2021). Where the previous compact for power sharing in Myanmar, which grew from 2011 onwards, between democratic, militarist, ethnic and chauvinist groups was always uneasy (Renshaw & Lidauer 2021), most parts of the country avoided large-scale humanitarian issues. The key exception—the Rakhine State—saw almost a million people flee across the border to Bangladesh in 2017, generating a substantial international and Bangladeshi humanitarian response (Halim et al. 2021, 199; also Ahmed & Das 2022). That crisis led to the Myanmar government facing accusations of genocide in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Aung San Suu Kyi led the government’s defence of its actions in what was, at the time, a striking signal of the popularity of anti-Rohingya violence and the uneasy working coalition between the military and elected officials from the National League for Democracy (NLD).¹ Aung San Suu Kyi is now, again, detained by the military and faces years of imprisonment on charges laid after the coup.

There remains deep concern internationally about the direction of events in Myanmar and the humanitarian crises that have evolved since the 2021 coup have not been completely ignored. Obviously, any major breakdown of state institutions will further galvanise local, national and regional responses, including more robust attention to the structure of Myanmar’s future political system (for an early contribution, see Kipgen 2021), but it would be bold to predict that Myanmar is ever more than a peripheral concern among great powers, except, of course, for China’s regional ambitions. What is also apparent is that the carefully curated and heavily controlled institutions that allowed for increased popular participation in politics from 2011 to 2021 are gone, with no clear indications of how alternative models of governance will be created (Thant Myint-U 2020). After the coup, the State Administration Council apparently expected that its repudiation of the NLD’s 2020 electoral triumph would only lead to modest and short-lived opposition. That judgement was plainly wrong and, once again, brings into question the strategic acumen of Naypyidaw’s powerbrokers (for helpful and wideranging analysis, see Selth 2020).

With this history and the challenging contexts in mind, this chapter explores how the Myanmar people confront four volatile and heavily contested scenarios. Each scenario has long-term implications for the resolution of the country’s multiple crises across the full spectrum of humanitarian domains. The discussion is, by its nature, somewhat speculative, but I have also sought, where possible, to draw on a wide reading of the strategic, political, cultural and historical conditions that led to the 2021 coup, and that will shape Myanmar’s further development over the next five to 10 years.

State institutions and state fragility

This chapter explores these four interlinked scenarios pertaining to Myanmar’s post-coup trajectory, with specific attention to plausible humanitarian conditions in the years ahead. The examination of hypotheticals, such as these scenarios, requires attention to history, current conditions and foreseeable future outcomes. The scenarios are presented here in the hope that, by better understanding recent events, we may be able to better appreciate future trajectories. The analysis highlights the intense challenges for any future Myanmar government and for international partners seeking to influence developments in a more positive direction.

Coup is consolidated

First, there is a scenario in which the post-coup military regime consolidates its power. This is the baseline scenario, partly due to the country’s history of coup consolidation. Myanmar’s previous military coups, in 1962 and in 1988, both faced resistance, which, in both cases, was only ever partly eliminated. Nonetheless, the most serious opposition, at least in terms of armed response, was eventually pushed to the margins, usually to the mountains along Myanmar’s borders. After 1962, it was the Communist Party of Burma, and various Shan, Karen, Mon and Kachin armed groups, that fought, often over decades, against central government control. From 1988, Myanmar’s battlegrounds were even more fractious, with ceasefires, stalemates and open warfare all coexisting. The conflict situation since February 2021 has challenged the new junta in different ways. The military government has fought hard to maintain its control of state institutions, a posture that has generated sustained opposition both in the Bamar-majority regions and across the ethnic minority–dominated peripheries. In a consolidation scenario, there will still be resistance to the army, other security agencies and the wide range of other representatives of government authority, with continued armed opposition.

In this scenario, the blurred threats of ongoing violence, continued displacement, appalling human rights abuses and economic paralysis would likely create increased pressure on all of Myanmar’s neighbours, with acute outcomes for Thailand, and potentially for Bangladesh and India. Many Myanmar people do not want to live under military rule ever again. Since the coup, over 440,000 people have been displaced by fighting, and some have left the country, most heading to Thailand and Malaysia, with smaller numbers offered rare pandemic-era permission to travel to countries across the democratic West. In this scenario, with the new junta able to consolidate its rule, the Rohingya and other marginalised groups would continue to suffer greatly while the Myanmar Army limits their access to meaningful civil and economic rights.

Where the NLD and Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) governments may have been receptive to some types of advocacy around human rights issues, the coup also gives senior decision-makers the chance to reverse even some of the modest improvements that had occurred. For instance, the National Human Rights Commission, established in 2011, cannot continue with its work, and there is no prospect of its modest functions and influence being transferred to any other body. In late 2021, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing announced that an election would be held in mid-2023, extending an earlier schedule that had implied an election in 2022. The military will seek to manipulate this timetable to its own advantage and, obviously, has much experience using the rules and procedures available through formal mechanisms to develop ‘compromises’ that further its institutional agenda. The USDP, which won an undemocratic election in 2010, and then ruled from 2011 to 2016, is now a greatly diminished vehicle for the presentation of a civilianised group of post-coup military leaders.

There will never again be any confidence that the USDP, or a similar political configuration, could surrender power to genuinely elected representatives, as they did after the 2015 general election victory by the NLD. As such, a scenario in which the coup is consolidated likely draws on many of the organisational, cultural and personal resources built up during the last period of sustained military dominance, which only ended in 2011. Obviously many aspects of military rule were used to define political, economic and strategic direction after the USDP took power. Almost all its senior figures were previously key players in the State Peace and Development Council military regime and those who helped to make up the legislative numbers, at the local and national levels, also tended to have enjoyed long careers within, or adjacent to, the military regime’s bureaucracy. Their subsequent failure in open electoral competition—at the 2012 by-election, the 2015 general election and then again at the 2020 general election—ultimately created the conditions for the coup. For the USDP, and for its sponsors still in army uniforms, the dominance of the NLD as an electoral force undermined their ability to secure the outcomes, in terms of political balance, on which they always insisted.

For this scenario, the ASEAN region offers a number of models, historically and today, for guided, managed and, indeed, authoritarian electoral systems. Some analysts have speculated that the Myanmar generals take inspiration from General Prayuth Chano-ocha in Thailand, whose 2014 coup finally ended the electoral dominance of the Shinawatra family, under prime ministers Thaksin and Yingluck Shinawatra. While Thailand held an election in 2019, its outcome was predetermined by the limits on competition set by the military-drafted constitution. The result kept General Prayuth in charge, his situation improved by the extra legitimacy even a flawed electoral process often eventually delivers. Long-serving regimes in Singapore and Cambodia have similarly utilised multifaceted restrictions on political opponents, alongside regular elections, to ensure the continuity in power of dominant individuals and political parties. In each case, they benefit from a nexus of bureaucratic, cultural and military power, in which, over decades, the national elite has regenerated its capacity to exert control to the exclusion of alternative forces. The problem, in the final judgement, is that Myanmar’s generals will struggle to ever regain the type of support and interest that was generated after the USDP government took power in 2011.

With the consolidated coup scenario, the role of the NLD and other electorally successful forces would be managed closely by military leaders who would remain wary, perhaps on a permanent basis, of those who so strongly and effectively opposed the coup. The prospect of Aung San Suu Kyi’s ongoing incarceration would obviously weigh heavily on any chance of the NLD re-emerging as a political force; she may face decades in gaol. The NLD has been obliterated and would struggle for space for even a compromised role in any new political structure. Indeed, in the consolidation scenario, many anti-coup activists are likely to remain imprisoned, or in exile, or struggling to survive under constant surveillance, marginalised by the military’s ongoing entrenchment of its power. Restrictions on the free flow of information would be a key part of the military regime’s ongoing strategy. We understand Chinese technicians have worked with their Myanmar counterparts since the coup to better monitor, and perhaps in the future fully control, the digital realm (see Lintner 2021).

Such issues obviously highlight some of the differences between circumstances this decade and those during previous periods of military rule. The fact is, after 2011, Myanmar society changed rapidly, with information, education, technology, international travel and exchange, political experimentation and open electoral competition all working to further expand the horizons and possibilities for millions of Myanmar people. The backlash against the coup, which apparently surprised key leaders in Naypyidaw, is a consequence, partly, of the enormous shifts experienced by the Myanmar people. They have enjoyed the benefits of a more liberal, transparent, lively and unpredictable political and economic environment. The nationwide and almost universal opposition to the coup is a strong signal of just how highly the average Myanmar person has valued the changes that occurred from 2011 to 2021. It is on the basis of these changes that the resistance to the coup has organised itself to battle against the dominance of military figures in the country’s political future.

Coup fails

Second, it is important to fully consider the implications of a scenario in which the Myanmar military is forced to surrender its claimed status ruling from Naypyidaw. Since the coup, ASEAN foreign ministers have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the post-coup regime, indicating that, even within orthodox foreign policy circles, there are grave misgivings about the legitimacy of the military’s authoritarian rule. The State Peace and Development Council government that ruled from 1996 to 2011 became skilled, after its inclusion in ASEAN from 1997, at using regional forums, and the legitimacy it could draw from its welcome to the ASEAN family, to manage its engagement with the global system.

In this coup failure scenario, Myanmar’s pre-coup political arrangements may provide some inspiration for the management of the country’s diverse geographies and cultures, and yet there would be a strong incentive for a revolutionary government to dispense with the foundational expectations of previous regimes. In such a scenario there would still be increased state fragility, with the prospect that some conflicts would continue between a new central government and other armed forces. Even in a best case scenario, it is unlikely there would be a sustained consensus about Myanmar’s future political direction (for context, see Sadan 2016). Would the NLD, for instance, remain the key player in a future revolutionary system?

The answer likely depends on the ability of senior NLD figures to position themselves as the legitimate guardians of the revolutionary spirit. During 2021 it became apparent that the elected democratic forces, both Bamar and from ethnic minorities, were only part of the story of resistance to the coup. Some groups and individuals have sought to redefine their struggles beyond the scope of earlier democratic movements. Part of this shift is generational, with young activists often still only in their teens and twenties taking enormous risks. They may be reluctant to empower senior figures who they may judge made the wrong concessions to the military or, perhaps most tellingly, compromised Myanmar’s democratic values on policies of exclusion—even genocide. Working through these types of foundational and existential questions would be a major test for any new, revolutionary regime.

As such, a revolutionary regime would also need to determine, quickly, what it stood for, balancing the interests of the National Unity Government (NUG), NLD and other stakeholders. Even within the NLD, which has over 30 years of political experience and maturity, the space for alternative perspectives has often been limited greatly by the policy authority of a small number of senior decision-makers, led by Aung San Suu Kyi (Farrelly 2016). For instance, members of the 88-Generation, which has a similarly long history of democratic activism and opposition to military rule, found themselves excluded from the NLD’s political vehicle after 2011. Other major political groups, such as the Kachin Independence Organisation, the Arakan National Party, the New Mon State Party and the Kachin State Democracy Party, are wholly defined by the interests of small elites, many of whom have worked together closely for decades. Bringing in new voices, embracing youth-inspired debate and finding mechanisms to generate genuine popular engagement have proved difficult.

Looking closely at a scenario in which the coup fails, it is important to consider, as Su Mon Thant (2021, 10–12) has done, the variety of anti-coup forces that exist. She calls them ‘democrats’, ‘federalists’ and ‘intersectionalists’. From her perspective:

The causes of the democrats are direct and narrow, focusing on the immediate actions they see as needed to put the nation back on track. This group has the advantage of wide public participation, but its limited goals do not satisfy the other two groups, who are actively engaging and leading the resistance movement. While the aim of federalists is to best guarantee a federal state for ethnic minorities, agreeing on federal terms in parallel to the anti-coup movement costs time. While intersectionalists have strong and equitable ideals for a post-revolution society, this requires long-term commitment and devotion. (Su Mon Thant 2021, 11–12)

Her useful summary of the situation is a strong reminder of the significant challenges ahead for this new generation of political actors in a scenario in which they are, for the first time, given the opportunity to more directly influence political outcomes. Their ideals will be tested both by the realities of entrenched conflict and disadvantage, and also by the ongoing battles for influence among senior figures unwilling to surrender their status to more youthful voices.

For the coup to fail, in a comprehensive sense, requires some other type of significant change likely at both the local and global levels. For now, the Myanmar military regime draws on support from Russia and China, which dramatically improves its battlefield options. The fuller mobilisation of external military support, including the proliferation of heavier weaponry among different anti-regime forces, would likely be part of any such coup failure scenario. Where foreign support for Myanmar’s resistance forces exists, it would be fair to assume it is kept as quiet (and deniable) as possible. The style of foreign support made available to Ukraine as it resisted Russian invasion in 2022 is not possible due to the double bind of ASEAN hesitation and Chinese opposition to any hint of military escalation near its border. The stalemate that may appear to exist between the Myanmar Army and its many opponents is, however, made less stable by the prospect of fresh injections of trained and well-equipped fighters on either side, and by the unpredictable use of both new and old technology, both military and civilian, in shaping the rapidly changing battlefield. In this context, openly arming anti-regime forces would introduce other unpredictable dynamics, especially in terms of the response from both China and Russia.

Centrifugal unravelling

Then there is the third scenario, in which Myanmar unravels. Indeed, the further diminution of state control, in either of the first two scenarios, could add weight to the centrifugal forces that pull, on an almost permanent basis, at the unifying agenda emphasised by leaders in Naypyidaw over the past 15 years (Farrelly 2018). Avoiding the fragmentation of Myanmar has been a stated objective of all its post-independence governments, but the current crisis is a new test for the decades-long project of Myanmar nation-building (Walton 2015; also Meehan 2015). The Myanmar Army’s capacity to coopt powerful ethnic minority groups, especially those with their own large fighting forces and economic engines, will remain in question (Brenner 2015; McCarthy & Farrelly 2020).

While any hypothetical declarations of independence from a ‘Kachinland’ or a ‘Kawthoolei’ or, perhaps, a ‘Wa Union’ would need to draw on foreign powers for credibility, in this scenario there could simply be alternative quasi-state institutions that, over time and perhaps incrementally, create alternative identities at the margins of a crumbling Myanmar state. Some are already reasonably well placed to make the transition into more formally constituted state-like entities. In parts of Shan State, for instance, the United Wa State Army controls significant territory, and has, for the past three decades, maintained its strength through a narcotics and weapons-based economy. It is active along both the Chinese and Thai borders, and has been able, through the large army that it fields, to carve out an independent sphere of influence. Analysts speculate that much of its capability is the outcome of support received from Chinese actors. They would be essential, it seems, to any further development of Wa political institutions.

The political economy of these ‘illiberal’ sub-national governance arrangements have been explored in detail elsewhere (including McCarthy & Farrelly 2020). What is still unclear is how any future micro-states would sustain themselves economically. There would be only limited international interest in providing subsidies to the weakest of these new statelets, meaning, in practice, that illicit economies would continue to offer alternative streams of personal and institutional revenue. Some parts of Myanmar, perhaps most notably the Kachin State, are rich in resource wealth, and they could, in theory, build reasonably strong economies on local jade, gold, tin, timber and energy industries. Yet almost all of these resources would still be exported in a relatively unprocessed form. Industrialisation of Kachin State seems implausible. And it would be many years before tourism or other service industries could offer much to the people of even Myanmar’s richest area.

In the unravelling scenario, the poor corners of the country, such as the Chin and Rakhine states, would be in a very difficult position if Myanmar’s central government was to collapse. Local conflicts, such as those along the Muslim–Buddhist faultline, or between different Chin language groups, could quickly overwhelm the modest capabilities of any fragile new micro-state. In a scenario in which centrifugal unravelling occurs, there would be uneven outcomes and different responses from neighbouring governments. In the Rakhine and Chin examples, both Bangladesh and India have sufficient concerns about instability spilling over their borders that there would be the possibility, at least, for some level of foreign military intervention.

Implosion, war, chaos

Fourth, it is possible that the Myanmar system implodes more dramatically, with no clear mandate for a post-coup government, and with sparring between the other significant military factions and other political players in the cities and elsewhere. For this scenario, what could lead to such a dramatic deterioration? There are many possibilities, all of which imply the comprehensive breakdown of faith in the emergence of a stable political situation. Open conflict between military regime forces is the likeliest trigger for such a breakdown, with violent military factionalisation encouraging new coalitions, including the opportunistically multi-ethnic, to strike hard against their opponents. Such an implosion, followed by vendettas, war and chaos, would also be the culmination of other things going wrong. If we seek historical examples for potential triggers, then it is killing of specific types, especially assassinations or mass atrocities, that can lead to such a tragic unravelling. Whatever the trigger, such breakdowns can also often draw their strength from deeper structural and historical conditions.

Such a scenario would likely be predicated on, and then would further encourage, the involvement of neighbouring powers particularly Thailand, China and India, and potentially even Bangladesh. In terms of the hypotheticals considered in this analysis, this is the scenario that would, in the medium term, likely cause the greatest damage to Myanmar’s people, to the economies on which they rely and to the future sovereignty of the political system(s) they have sought to build. The scenario, which is still low likelihood, could have significant and permanent consequences for the entire Asian region. It would imply that other efforts to avoid calamity have failed, and that the cultural, political and strategic restraints on expected action have completely fallen away. The prospect of remnant forces—drawing their fighting strength from the former Myanmar Army, from the People’s Defence Forces and from various ethnic armies—that could reconvene and then regroup in different formations, would make it very difficult to understand the ideological or other basis on which groups were working.

The outcomes would be unpredictable; however, if core strategic interests were believed to be at stake, including the security of China’s pipelines across central Myanmar, then the scenario would be primed for regional armed forces to (perhaps very reluctantly) become more involved (Ahamed, Rahman & Hossain 2020). A push by the People’s Liberation Army into Myanmar territory would make the country, perhaps only temporarily, a global flashpoint, requiring attention at the United Nations and elsewhere. How other countries would respond to a Chinese expeditionary force deep in Myanmar territory is difficult to judge. The United States and its allies like Japan and Australia would also probably have some level of active involvement. Thailand would be the obvious launch-pad for their support, but the Thai government, under former coup commander General Prayuth Chano-ocha would be reluctant to become too heavily involved in a conflict that, ordinarily, it would judge is the responsibility of Myanmar authorities to resolve. But what if Myanmar’s authorities have dissolved?

Factors to consider in all scenarios

Compared to any of Myanmar’s previous crises there are some new factors that make the conditions in 2023 and beyond different. These factors require serious attention because we are all inclined to dwell on historical examples, analogies and interpretative speculation, as it allows us to seek to find a good fit for any judgements about Myanmar’s current and future trajectory. One of the most important issues that differentiates Myanmar’s political situation since the 2021 coup is the proliferation of the internet and internet-enabled devices in Myanmar. Technology for taking photos, video-recording, editing, broadcasting and then engaging is almost universal. The early protests against the coup were remarkable for the speed and clarity with which information about events could circulate within the country and, to a lesser extent, the outside world. On Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, the implication of current footage and information was significant, drawing many people to the Myanmar situation during the early, somewhat upbeat, coverage of popular defiance. The deterioration of conditions since the coup has put extra pressure on internet access, with the military government keen to ensure it can monitor subversive materials and crackdown on resistance activities. Like in so many other parts of life, the effort to put the genie back in the bottle struggles against years of rapid rollout of high-quality and cost-effective technologies supporting economic, cultural and political activity across Myanmar.

The related change is to the expectations of the Myanmar people at large, many of whom have enjoyed greater opportunities for education, enrichment, travel and interaction than ever before. While many parts of the country remain poor, the country’s economic growth has been significant over the past decade. In 2012, gross domestic product per capita, a reasonable proxy in this context for economic activity and also for key aspects of social wellbeing, was USD936—the lowest in Southeast Asia, and one of the world’s lowest outside sub-Saharan Africa. By 2015, this had grown to USD1,144. By 2019, Myanmar had risen even further, to USD1,362. Yet, since the coup, the economy has contracted dramatically, with the World Bank estimating that it is almost 20 per cent smaller than at the start of 2021, after already suffering through the initial pandemic upheavals of 2020 (Robinson 2022). Such a calamitous decline in domestic product is accompanied by deep pockets of poverty and disadvantage. Some parts of the country have seen waves of displacement and depopulation since the coup, with estimates that very large numbers of people, in, for instance, the Kayah State capital, Loikaw, have now left for what they hope is relative safety in the mountains or near the Thai border. Relentless attacks by the military regime make it impossible for ordinary life to continue, and even basic necessities are now hard to come by in many parts of Myanmar.

Further, it now seems very unlikely that Myanmar’s democrats will ever again tolerate the types of concessions that were accepted, and indeed were acceptable, during the decade from 2011 to 2021. Many now look at this period as a strategic blunder, one in which the NLD and other anti-military forces gave up too much of their credibility to legitimise the military’s continued role in politics. While it campaigned hard on the need to change the constitutional arrangements that kept Aung San Suu Kyi out of the presidential palace, and the military’s constitutionally mandated 25 per cent of allocated seats as a handbrake on further changes, the NLD never managed to make the strategic or tactical changes that it sought. And yet, even the small chance that a new NLD government would push harder for the military to surrender its residual vetoes and dominance was enough for the coup to be launched, and for so much further suffering and violence to occur. It is for this reason that the calls for change are nowadays much more forceful: there is a mood for revolution, for the destruction of the Myanmar Army as a political force and, perhaps, even for its final disbanding.

For these reasons, planning around political and humanitarian scenarios requires attention to Myanmar’s specifics, and also a broader imagining of what might be possible under these conditions. What are the meaningful comparisons? The Balkanisation that followed the end of unified Yugoslavia? The end of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and the civil war that followed? The Rwandan genocide? The toppling of the Suharto regime in Indonesia? While there may be some common elements and analytically useful threads, the situation in Myanmar is not so readily comparable in ways that make for the creation of easy models or straightforward comparisons.

How to avoid disaster?

Considering these four scenarios as interlinked versions of Myanmar’s future development after the coup is designed to encourage reflection on the humanitarian, economic and political consequences of the forces unleashed over the past year. Opportunities to build effective political institutions will require careful attention to the range of calculations being made by the Myanmar military itself, within well-established ethnic armed organisations, and across the spectrum of new militia and political organisations. Policymaking and advocacy interests, within ASEAN and beyond, will need to confront the possibility that further deterioration will lead to hard decisions about the resources required to avoid an even more complex humanitarian catastrophe (with examples from recent experience of peace-building still relevant to the discussion, see Roy, Ware & Laoutides 2021; Mathieson 2021).

In any of these scenarios, Myanmar will lag far behind its neighbours for years to come due to the upheavals generated by the coup, and through the parallel health and economic degradation that has occurred (Myo Nyein Aung, Shiu & Chen 2021; also Wunna Tun 2021, 50). With a shrinking economy, even more widespread poverty, the persistent threat of violence, stark limitations on foreign involvement and new political disagreements adding fuel to old enmities, the overall outcome is likely to be bleak for tens of millions of people (for recent analysis of livelihood issues across Myanmar, see Thawnghmung 2019; also Moos, Roberts & Mo Aye 2021). Avoiding the worst hardships and the most damaging violence would mean Myanmar needs to receive much more attention from regional and global players than was available in the first two years after the coup.

In Naypyidaw the expectation remains that exhaustion with Myanmar’s tragic situation, and the related inability of ASEAN governments to build a more proactive policy position, will give the post-coup government sufficient time to eventually consolidate its rule. Yet this perspective is based on a general assessment, with judgements predicated on patterns that existed before the coup, about the effectiveness of resistance forces. Those forces look very different in 2022, and have improved their fighting capabilities in every domain. For instance, urban guerrillas prepared to target junta forces in their moments of vulnerability make the job of securing Myanmar’s vast cities and sprawling hinterlands an almost impossible one. With the economy in such a parlous condition, it is difficult to see how Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and his key strategists can firm up their positions without further alienating the vast majority of Myanmar people, already dissatisfied with the coup and the violence of 2021.

Where Myanmar goes next is, as ever, a question for the Myanmar people, the NUG, the People’s Defence Forces, and the strongest of the ethnic armed groups who are working towards toppling the powers in Naypyidaw once and for all. It is worth reflecting, finally, on what such an outcome might mean in both political and humanitarian terms. To leave behind the rule of the Myanmar Army and its top generals would not imply a future without conflicts or, indeed, violence. Of course, one of the key ideas justifying military rule in Myanmar is that the country would spiral into the abyss without firm management from a central, Bamar-dominated political institution. There is no escaping the same difficulties faced by Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD as they sought to broker the nationwide ceasefire through the Union Peace Conference under the auspices of the 21st Century Panglong framework. Any future government, elected through a free vote after the collapse of the post-coup regime, would need to navigate perilous political terrain, with no guarantee that the country’s many large armed groups would be prepared to accept the range of concessions and compromises required for a genuinely united front.

Final thoughts on the future of the four scenarios

The four scenarios examined in this chapter have been explored side-by-side, and yet, in practice, there are likely to be times when aspects of each of the potential futures are part of a complex set of trajectories. The advantage of looking at the scenarios as distinct future possibilities is that they imply medium-term outcomes that could have significant, perhaps permanent, implications for Myanmar, for its immediate neighbours and, indeed, for the wider Asian region.

In the first scenario—with the coup consolidated, and with a new military regime able to impose its will on Myanmar society and continue to largely define the scope of political action—the country’s democratic activists are likely to face years, even decades, of dismay and punishment. Foreign investors and institutions from the Western democracies, such as the universities that committed resources to Myanmar’s earlier liberalisation, will be unlikely to ever return with substantial investments. The country’s international links will, once again, be defined by ties with ASEAN, and also with countries that pay little or no heed to human rights expectations. Countries with their own antagonistic relations with the West—such as China, Russia and North Korea—have historically proved the most consistent supporters of Myanmar’s military. Yet it is doubtful there will ever be much, if any, enthusiasm for their active involvement in society among the vast mass of Myanmar people. China, as the largest, most powerful and most proximate of these countries, is also the international player that faces the greatest risk of pushback from the Myanmar people. Russia is also preoccupied with other conflicts, most acutely in Ukraine.

In the second scenario, in which the coup fails and a democratic revolution prevails, the efforts to unravel generations of military dominance and to create a viable institutional basis for alternative political cultures would require substantial external support. In this scenario, a wide range of countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Singapore and Australia, are likely to commit significant resources across humanitarian, commercial, educational and political domains. Efforts to influence the next generation of decision-makers, and to help shape the model of national governance, would need to be carefully managed, especially as the debates between Myanmar stakeholders would, like before the coup, rarely lead to consensus. A peace process, truth and justice mechanisms, and the ultimate path towards some type of national reckoning, or hypothetical reconciliation, would take time and test the patience of those seeking immediate and decisive change. Any new government, even one that can draw on all of the country’s policy and political talent, would still need to manage Myanmar’s long history of trauma, poverty, exclusion and distrust. One core requirement would be the creation, training and resourcing of military forces that could help to unite the entire country.

Yet the risks for those who might encourage the coup to fail outright should be contemplated too. There appears to be a sense, among policymakers around the world, that effectively managing the failure of the coup would require an enormous investment of resources and ideas, perhaps well beyond apparent appetites. Recognising the political and military forces opposed to the coup will always need both symbolic and practical components, and the practicalties are expensive, fraught with danger and, perhaps, only justified where other strategic interests are at stake. These assessments point back towards the initial calculations in Naypyidaw about the willingness of democratic powers to actively oppose the coup. The implication is that the United States and its key allies now lack the will, and perhaps the imagination, for the vast nation-building projects that accompanied the early twenty-first-century interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia. Myanmar, treated the wrong way, is a strategic nightmare from which there would be no meaningful retreat.

There is no avoiding the problem. The political conundrum in both the first and second scenarios is the need to find a sustainable set of understandings between Myanmar’s largest ethnic group, the Bamar, and the country’s many ethnic minorities. In the scenarios in which the coup is consolidated or fails, the longer-term prospects of any future government would be determined, to a large extent, by the ability of key decision-makers to effectively manage the political grievances they would face, almost inevitably, along ethnic lines. It is in scenario three that those grievances could prove most destabilising, with centrifugal forces ultimately unravelling Myanmar claims to a single union. A process of unravelling would be uneven, in the sense that some areas and leaders would be better prepared to take advantage of the failure of central authorities to maintain the unified order.

What would happen to the Bamar-majority areas of central Myanmar in such a scenario would be a further test. The possibility of ongoing discontent and conflict would be real, especially given the very mixed population patterns across most areas of Myanmar. There are almost no parts of the country where the Bamar do not currently live, and many other ethnic groups, perhaps most notably the Karen, Mon, Kachin and Shan, all have large populations outside their ethnic states. Any process of partition on ethnic lines would create messy and probably violent upheavals. A process of new nation-state-building would probably create a number of failures along the way.

The fourth scenario implies a much wider failure of Myanmar governance, and one that would, therefore, almost certainly motivate foreign diplomatic, and then military, intervention. Avoiding this scenario, should, on humanitarian grounds alone, be a high priority for national, regional and global leaders. Does that imply accepting the restoration of some political and economic stability under the new military dictatorship if it means avoiding greater calamity and, if only marginally, improving the lives of millions of destitute Myanmar people at the same time? This question matters regionally too, because Myanmar’s implosion would be especially difficult for the near neighbours with the most to lose: Thailand and China. For them, a failed state, whatever form that took, would be a problem with deep strategic and economic implications, especially if millions of Myanmar people sought refuge in their borderlands. Deploying military forces into Myanmar would also not be a smooth process, and would almost inevitably draw in all of the world’s most militarily significant players, especially in the context of the hypothetical leadership of the United Nations. China’s role would obviously be crucial and it would be a profound test of the Communist Party’s willingness to use Chinese power beyond their own borders to secure economic and strategic linkages, and also to avoid further deterioration in the regional security landscape.

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