Four years on from the military coup that deposed the National League for Democracy government elected in Myanmar’s November 2020 elections, the civil conflict that emerged in the coup’s aftermath remains deadlocked.
The brutal State Administrative Council (SAC) military junta has clung to power despite facing a determined but fragmented resistance. This resistance includes civilian militias known as people’s defence forces (PDFs), the so-called ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) that are the de facto governing authorities throughout much of the country’s periphery, and the National Unity Government — a government-in-exile composed of politicians elected in 2020.
That the resistance has endured this long is impressive, and its control of up to half the country’s territory is even more so. Yet, as Nicholas Farrelly writes in this week’s lead article, despite Myanmar’s rolling economic crisis, the junta’s military losses in the periphery and its inability to suppress civilian militias in the ethnic Bamar heartland, ‘[t]he generals in Naypyitaw could hobble on in this fashion, potentially for years. The history of mismanaged military dictatorship in Myanmar suggests that this is a highly plausible scenario.’
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