The generals seized power in 2021 expecting a short crackdown. Instead they got a nationwide war, a government in exile, and a country fragmenting into armed pieces.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
On the morning of 1 February 2021, Myanmar's military, the Tatmadaw, seized power hours before the newly elected parliament was due to sit. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate who had led the country's elected government, was detained, along with the president and senior figures of her National League for Democracy. The generals announced a one-year state of emergency and promised fresh elections. Five years later, there have been no credible elections, no settlement, and no return to the decade of partial opening that began in 2011. Instead, Myanmar has slid into the most widespread armed conflict in its modern history, a war that now touches nearly every region of the country.
The coup's first act was familiar: mass arrests, a curfew, internet shutdowns, soldiers on the streets. The response was less familiar. Millions of people joined a civil disobedience movement, refusing to work for the military's ministries, schools and hospitals. When the security forces answered peaceful protest with live ammunition, the movement armed itself. By the end of 2021, a National Unity Government, formed by deposed lawmakers and activists in exile, claimed legitimacy as the country's real government. Across the country, locally organised People's Defence Forces took up weapons, often with little more than hunting rifles and homemade explosives, and sought training and shelter from ethnic armed organisations that had fought the central state for decades.
That is what makes this war different from Myanmar's long history of insurgency. For generations, the country's conflicts were peripheral: ethnic armies in the borderlands fighting for autonomy while the Bamar-majority centre remained quiet. The post-coup war is national. Resistance forces operate in the central dry zone, in Sagaing and Magway, regions that were once the military's heartland. The Tatmadaw, which built its entire identity on being the one institution that holds a diverse country together, now faces the prospect of a country coming apart in every direction at once.
The balance of the war has shifted several times, but its basic shape has held: the military holds the cities and the main roads, the resistance holds much of the countryside, and neither side can finish the other. The military has the heavy weapons, the air force and the backing of a state, however hollowed out. It has used them brutally, with air strikes, artillery and village burnings documented by the United Nations and human rights groups. The resistance has numbers, local knowledge, morale and a growing ability to coordinate. What it lacks is heavy weapons, a unified command and a single political programme beyond removing the military from power.
The turning point on the battlefield came in October 2023, when the Three Brotherhood Alliance, a coalition of ethnic armed groups in the north, launched Operation 1027, a coordinated offensive that overran military positions across northern Shan State and along the Chinese border. The operation seized border crossings and trade routes, humiliated the military, and inspired resistance forces elsewhere to launch their own offensives. The military's response was to escalate from the air, and to intensify conscription, including a mandatory service law that drove thousands of young people to flee the country or join the resistance. The war, in other words, has been feeding itself.
The humanitarian cost is immense and undercounted. The United Nations estimates more than 3.5 million people have been displaced inside Myanmar, with hundreds of thousands more seeking refuge abroad. Access for aid agencies is severely restricted in conflict zones, and the military has repeatedly been accused of blocking humanitarian relief. Health services have collapsed in many areas, schools are closed or militarised, and the economy, already fragile before the coup, has contracted sharply. The kyat has lost much of its value, prices have soared, and the World Bank has described a population sliding into poverty at a pace rarely seen outside wartime.
Myanmar's neighbours have tried, with varying degrees of sincerity, to contain the war. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed a Five-Point Consensus in April 2021, calling for an end to violence, dialogue and humanitarian access. The plan has been almost entirely unimplemented, and ASEAN has since barred the junta's leaders from its high-level meetings, a step that has cost the bloc credibility without changing the war. Thailand, which shares a long border with Myanmar, has dealt with the junta out of necessity while hosting large numbers of displaced people. India, which also shares a border, has balanced its security ties with the military against its concern about instability and refugee flows.
China is the most important external actor, and the most ambiguous. Beijing has long-standing economic interests in Myanmar, including oil and gas pipelines to Yunnan province, ports and mines, and it has been the military's main diplomatic shield. But China has also maintained contacts with ethnic armed groups along its border, and it publicly pressed for stability after Operation 1027 disrupted border trade. When criminal scam compounds in Myanmar's border zones, many run by Chinese gangs, began defrauding Chinese citizens on an industrial scale, Beijing pressed the junta to shut them down, and thousands of suspects were handed over. China's Myanmar policy is best understood as management, not alliance: keep the border quiet, keep the pipelines flowing, and avoid a collapse that would send refugees and chaos into Yunnan.
No account of Myanmar is complete without the Rohingya, the Muslim minority of Rakhine State who were driven into Bangladesh in 2017, when a military crackdown sent about 700,000 people fleeing across the border. The United Nations has described that campaign as having genocidal intent, a charge Myanmar denies, and a case brought by The Gambia is before the International Court of Justice. The Rohingya who remain in Myanmar, and the roughly one million in camps in Bangladesh, have seen little improvement since the coup. In fact, Rakhine State has become a new front in the civil war, with the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine force, fighting the military, and Rohingya civilians caught between the two. Any future Myanmar will have to answer the question the country has avoided for decades: who counts as a citizen, and who belongs.
The National Unity Government has promised a federal democracy and citizenship for the Rohingya, a position that would have been politically impossible before the coup. Whether that promise survives contact with a post-war Myanmar, where Rakhine nationalism and Bamar politics are both potent forces, is one of the war's great unknowns. The Rohingya crisis is a reminder that Myanmar's conflict is not only about democracy against dictatorship. It is about the identity of the state itself: a country of more than 130 recognised ethnic groups, whose borders were drawn by empire, whose army has ruled by force, and whose peoples have never agreed on what Myanmar is.
Western coverage, from Reuters, the Associated Press and the BBC, frames Myanmar as a democracy story and a humanitarian one: a stolen election, a brave resistance, a military committing atrocities with impunity. Sanctions are presented as the available tool, and their limits as a frustration.
Eastern coverage, from Chinese state media and regional outlets, frames Myanmar as a stability and sovereignty story: a neighbour whose chaos threatens borders and trade, best handled by its region without Western interference. China is presented as a responsible manager, pressing all sides toward talks, and the junta as a government to be engaged rather than isolated.
Global South coverage, from ASEAN, Indian and African outlets, reads Myanmar as a test of regional institutions and of the limits of non-interference: ASEAN's flagship plan has failed, the refugee burden falls on poor neighbours, and the world's indifference confirms that some wars count more than others.
