Myanmar’s Endless Turning Points

Published as a Guest Column in The Irrawaddy, Reading Time: 7 mins read

In 1949, the newly independent Burma was said to be on the verge of collapse as Communist Party of Burma (CPB) forces occupied Mandalay, and the Karen Army encircled Yangon. In the early 1960s, Ne Win’s coup was supposed to restore stability but in fact led to a resurgence in highland ethnic armed groups, and in the lowlands, initiated the terror of the secret police with their dank prisons. After the 1988 demonstrations, a new period of democratic “people’s power” was proclaimed, which only led to another crackdown; the secret police became even more powerful.

With great regularity, foreign observers would announce that the country’s democratic hopes were finished “once and for all”—only for the elections of 2012, 2015, and 2020 to be hailed as the beginning of a peaceful democratic era.

Turning point narratives
These euphoric moments reflect how deeply we crave clear narratives of progress or decline, boom or doom. The latest storyline is always framed as the decisive one, the moment when the fog finally clears.

A particularly revealing example comes from a U.S. diplomatic cable written in January 2003 by Consul General Carmen Martinez, who confidently reported to Washington:

Burma has basically won its ethnic wars. While some small-scale operations continue, the situation now is nothing like it was in the late 1980s. Then, 20 separate insurgent groups could put more than 60,000 troops in the field… Now, the five or six groups that remain active can muster at most 5,000 troops. All have been reduced to guerrilla operations; none are any longer capable of holding territory.

Martinez concluded that “the entire 14-year campaign is an excellent example of the political skills the [then-junta] can display when issues of high interest to them are at stake.” She notes too that regional states like China, Thailand and India are relieved at the result, even if the western countries were uneasy due to the poor human rights record of the junta.

In the 3,300 word memo, there was no mention of jailed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, nor the People Power movement of 1988. Rather, congratulations were saved for the political skills of the much-feared Military Intelligence chief, General Khin Nyunt, who would within months of the memo become prime minister, and a few months after that be sent to prison by then dictator Than Shwe. Martinez concluded that “the political skills [the junta] has demonstrated in dealing with these insurgencies belies their image in the West as political buffoons …they have acted with skills that many other states (think of Russia with the Chechens) can only envy.”

Yet Martinez had access to some of the best intelligence available. Satellite imagery as well as the “human intelligence” of CIA spies and reports from Washington’s top analysts were all accessible to her. How could this type of analysis miss so much?

In Martinez’s defense, she was hardly alone. Her cable—leaked courtesy of Wikileaks—was written in the context of countless diplomats’ cables from the United States, China, the UN and the EU to their capitals, or breathless journalists’ dispatches.

Each time the military gains ground or crushes dissent, predictions of a “final victory” follow. Each time an opposition group gains momentum, forecasts of imminent regime collapse follow with equal certainty.

The problem is that much is inevitably left out. The fall of Insein in 1950, the victory of U Nu in the 1960 elections, Ne Win’s 1962 coup, the suppression of the 1988 uprising, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, the Saffron Revolution in 2007, the 2015 ceasefire agreements, and the elections of 2015 and 2020—all were heralded as decisive moments after which victory or reconciliation was supposedly assured.

Negative peace, positive peace
The real problem is not that the prognosticators are naïve but that they cannot hear the sullen silence of oppressed societies. But while overt violence undoubtedly declined in the 1990s, as Martinez reported, the silent violence of the police state, with its prisons and torture facilities, was quietly doing its work. The problem, then, is that these turning point narratives are built on what might be called “negative peace”—the mere absence of fighting. But that is very different from “positive peace” rooted in democratic values and norms, which Myanmar glimpsed briefly in the 1950s and again between 2012 and 2021.

In 2003, for instance, Martinez was technically right that few battles were being fought. But that quiet was the result of repression, not reconciliation. The junta’s control was rooted in fear: fear of a midnight arrest, fear of neighbors who might be informants, fear of disappearing without explanation.

The problem is that such fear is expressed through silence and rarely registers on the radar of Western analysts who measure stability by the number of bullets fired in open warfare. Myanmar’s people saw instead the silently wielded but loaded weapons of trigger-ready soldiers.

Thus “peace” in Myanmar has too often reflected terror and exhaustion, not resolution. The country drifted from one uneasy standoff to another, each declared by outside observers either a victory for stability, a collapse into chaos, or whatever policy they wished for Myanmar.

The illusion of prediction
The cycle of misplaced predictions shows that military dominance and political legitimacy are not the same thing. The real question, then, is not who is winning, but who endures—and in what form.

Myanmar’s opposition factions are notorious for recombining and rebranding. The Border Guard Forces and various Shan militias have shifted loyalties repeatedly since 1949. Even the Brotherhood Alliance, only recently hailed for its unity, now faces internal strains. But through it all, both the military and its opponents have displayed extraordinary resilience.

This is why diplomatic forecasts for Myanmar often fail. They are written as though Myanmar was a chessboard with fixed pieces, like the Cold War between the Great Powers. But in Myanmar, the pieces and rules keep changing.

The military’s ability to manipulate rival groups—through patronage, coercion, and promises of autonomy—can create the illusion of stability, and it was this that misled Martinez into praising its political skill.

Fragmented battlefields
On Myanmar’s fractured battlefields, the meaning of victory is equally fragmented. Control of a town, road, hilltop, or railway may shift rapidly, often within months. Neither side can claim more than a temporary advantage.

Ultimately the military’s problem is structural: it can capture territory and impose a negative peace through fear. Its violence ensures compliance perhaps, but not legitimacy. Every act of coercion deepens resentments that later re-emerge as resistance.

The opposition faces the inverse dilemma. It commands legitimacy in the peripheries but struggles to consolidate authority outside the area defined by ethnic loyalties. Each side’s strength is mirrored by its weakness.

The result is an elastic equilibrium—one that bends but rarely breaks. To complete the chess metaphor, no king is ever toppled, even as the pawns are continually, but only temporarily, turned into powerful queens.

The elastic nature of power
The military’s resilience has long confounded its critics. Despite battlefield losses, defections, poor morale and economic decline, it endures through what might be called elastic authoritarianism.

The junta expands and contracts but never breaks. It maintains international recognition, natural resource revenues, and patronage networks linking officers, businessmen, and militias. When pressure mounts, it retreats to defensible geographical or political terrain—before reasserting control elsewhere. It does not need to be loved; it merely needs to survive.

Its adversaries exhibit a different sort of elasticity. Ethnic armies and the parallel National Unity Government (NUG) cannot defeat the military outright, but neither can they be eradicated militarily. Their resilience lies in local legitimacy, community support, weak alliances, some international support, and networks of trade and taxes that sustain them. In this context, groups change colors like chameleons, old alliances dissipate, and new ones emerge in sometimes surprising combinations.

All seem to endure not through decisive victories but through adaptation. Myanmar’s wars are not contests of conquest—they are contests of stamina.

Living with uncertainty
Every generation in Myanmar has been told that the wars were about to end—after 1950, after 1962, after 1988, after 2010, after 2015, after 2021, and as recently as Operation 1027 in 2023. Each time peace, whether negative or positive, seemed just within reach. Each time, it slipped away.

The illusion of any “prediction science” lies in the belief that peace will arrive through a single event: a coup, a ceasefire, an election, or a diplomatic breakthrough. But Myanmar’s political order is too elastic for such linear endings.

A durable peace requires not a decisive moment but a gradual reconciliation between forces whose capacity for endurance seems boundless, and differences intractable. It would mean acknowledging that peace cannot be imposed from above or charted on Western think-tank diagrams of federalism and governance. It must instead arise from the lived experiences and shared exhaustion of Myanmar’s peoples.

Cautious optimism
Myanmar is often portrayed as exceptional—its wars too long, its divisions too deep. Yet history offers reminders that even the most entrenched conflicts can end.

Europe’s great powers—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—waged catastrophic wars for centuries before becoming neighbors in peace. The nations of the former Yugoslavia, the people of Sri Lanka and South Africa, and some Central American countries have, in recent decades, found ways to cultivate a positive peace after brutal civil war.

Myanmar’s path will be its own, but history’s lesson is clear: even the longest wars eventually run out of breath.

The question is not whether Myanmar can change, but how long it must continue to endure before shared endurance itself becomes the foundation for a positive democratic peace that is legitimate because it reflects the will of the governed.

One thing that decades of experience tell the world is that a positive peace is unlikely to emerge from the “political skills” of the junta.

Tony Waters is a visiting professor at Leuphana University, Germany. Previously he was a Professor of Sociology at Payap University, Chiangmai and California State University, Chico. His most recent book about Myanmar is General Ne Win’s Legacy of Burmanization in Myanmar, with Saw Eh Htoo.