Myanmar’s military marked Armed Forces Day today with a parade in Naypyitaw and a message that was much more politically important than the ceremony itself.
Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who led the military coup in February 2021, said the armed forces would not negotiate with opposition groups it describes as terrorists and would continue fighting them. The country’s shadow National Unity Government responded by promising continued resistance.
That exchange tells us something uncomfortable about where Myanmar now stands.
The political conflict that began with a coup against an elected government has increasingly become an armed struggle in which both sides believe the other lacks legitimate authority. The military says it is restoring order against violent groups. The opposition says the military destroyed constitutional government and left citizens with fewer peaceful ways to resist.
Both cannot be understood without remembering the sequence.
In November 2020, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won another large electoral victory. The military alleged widespread electoral fraud, although independent observers did not produce evidence supporting fraud on a scale sufficient to overturn the result. On 1 February 2021, the military arrested Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders, declared a state of emergency and took power.
Mass protests followed.
The security forces responded with lethal force.
The protest movement then changed.
Some opponents of the coup concluded that peaceful demonstrations alone would not remove the junta. Armed People’s Defence Forces began forming across the country. In some regions, they developed relationships with ethnic armed organisations that had already been fighting Myanmar’s central government for decades.
So by March 2022, the political landscape looks very different from February 2021.
The military can now point towards armed opposition and say: we are fighting terrorism.
That claim is politically powerful because once a conflict is described as terrorism rather than political opposition, negotiation begins to look illegitimate and coercion begins to look necessary.
But there is a causal problem.
The existence of armed opposition does not erase the events that produced it.
This is where governments often reverse the order of explanation. Repression creates resistance. Resistance becomes violent. The state then cites the violence as proof that repression was necessary from the beginning.
The argument becomes circular.
We used force because they were dangerous.
They became more dangerous because we used force.
Therefore we were right to use force.
That cycle can sustain conflict indefinitely.
This does not mean every action carried out by anti-junta forces is therefore justified. Armed opposition groups can commit abuses too. Civilians can be killed. Political assassination and indiscriminate violence remain wrong regardless of which side claims to represent democracy.
But condemning abuses by resistance groups does not require accepting the military’s claim that the conflict began because violent extremists suddenly appeared.
The political order preceding the violence matters.
This distinction between cause and justification is becoming increasingly important to me. An actor can help explain why another actor behaved in a certain way without morally excusing the response.
The coup helps explain why armed resistance emerged.
It does not automatically justify every act committed by the resistance.
Armed attacks by opposition groups help explain why the military claims a security threat exists.
They do not automatically legitimise military rule.
Analysis becomes much clearer when those propositions are kept separate.
Myanmar also demonstrates why governments should be extremely careful before eliminating peaceful political channels.
In a functioning democracy, political defeat does not have to become existential. A party loses an election and organises for the next one. Citizens protest. Courts review disputes. Journalists investigate. Legislatures provide opposition with a public platform.
Those institutions create alternatives to violence.
They do not eliminate political anger.
They give anger somewhere to go.
When those alternatives are removed, the incentive structure changes.
Imagine you believe a government has acted unjustly. If you expect a court can overturn the decision, you have a reason to use the court. If you expect an election can remove the government, you have a reason to campaign. If protests are permitted, you have a reason to demonstrate peacefully.
Now imagine the courts are controlled, the election result has been annulled, opposition politicians are imprisoned and peaceful demonstrations are met with lethal force.
The expected return to peaceful action falls.
The relative attractiveness of other strategies rises.
This does not make violence inevitable.
It makes it more rational for some actors.
That is one reason repression can create the threat it claims to solve.
The government gains short-term control while destroying long-term mechanisms for peaceful opposition.
This is a political version of pushing pressure out of a visible channel and then discovering it somewhere less controllable.
Myanmar’s military has historically seen itself as more than an ordinary armed force. The Tatmadaw has presented itself as the institution responsible for preserving national unity in a country containing numerous ethnic groups and long-running separatist conflicts.
From the military’s perspective, civilian politicians can be temporary and divided while the armed forces represent the permanent state.
That worldview matters because it helps explain why generals may genuinely believe intervention in politics is legitimate.
If the military sees itself as guardian of the nation rather than subordinate to elected authority, a coup can be framed internally not as destroying constitutional order but as rescuing the country from politicians who have mismanaged it.
This is the same problem we encountered in Sudan.
The military becomes both participant and referee.
It competes for political influence while also claiming the authority to decide when civilian politics has failed.
No democracy can consolidate under that arrangement because every elected government’s authority remains conditional on military acceptance.
Myanmar’s pre-coup constitution already institutionalised much of this imbalance. The military was guaranteed 25% of parliamentary seats and retained control over several important security-related ministries. That meant Myanmar’s transition before 2021 was never a fully consolidated liberal democracy.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s government itself also deserves serious criticism, particularly over the treatment of the Rohingya and broader questions of minority rights.
That context matters because democratic legitimacy should not be romanticised.
An elected government can govern badly.
It can violate rights.
It can fail minorities.
But the appropriate response to flawed democracy is not automatically military rule.
If anything, Myanmar shows why democratic institutions need to become stronger enough to correct abuses without suspending democracy itself.
There is a dangerous tendency in political argument to treat legitimacy as zero-sum. If Aung San Suu Kyi’s government was flawed, perhaps the military becomes legitimate. If the military is illegitimate, perhaps every opposition actor becomes virtuous.
Reality does not work that way.
Several actors can behave badly simultaneously.
The important question is what institutional arrangement creates the best mechanism for correcting bad behaviour over time.
Competitive elections, independent courts, free media and civilian control of the military are imperfect mechanisms.
Military rule offers far fewer mechanisms through which citizens can peacefully correct those holding power.
That difference matters more than whether every elected leader behaves admirably.
The regional response has also exposed the limits of international pressure. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, developed a five-point consensus last year intended to reduce violence and encourage dialogue. Progress has been minimal, and Myanmar’s military leadership has been excluded from some high-level ASEAN meetings because of the junta’s failure to implement the plan.
Yet ASEAN has limited coercive capacity.
Its political culture emphasises non-interference and consensus among member states. Those principles help countries with very different political systems cooperate without constantly challenging one another’s domestic legitimacy.
They also make decisive action extremely difficult when one member experiences severe internal repression.
This is an institutional trade-off.
ASEAN’s reluctance to interfere in domestic politics may help hold the organisation together.
The same norm can make it weak when intervention might actually be useful.
International organisations inherit the incentives designed into them.
If members joined partly because they were promised that neighbours would not interfere in domestic political affairs, transforming the organisation into an enforcer of democracy later becomes difficult.
The United Nations faces its own limitations. Sanctions can isolate individuals and military-linked companies. Diplomatic recognition can be withheld. Humanitarian assistance can continue.
But Myanmar’s military controls substantial coercive power inside the country and has important international relationships.
China and Russia, in particular, complicate efforts to construct a unified global response. Both have strategic and economic interests in Myanmar and generally resist external pressure framed as intervention in domestic political affairs.
That does not mean Beijing or Moscow approve every military action.
It means their interests differ from those of Western governments seeking stronger pressure.
Once again, international politics prevents morality from translating automatically into collective action.
Everyone does not assign the same value to the same outcome.
The humanitarian consequences are therefore increasingly severe. More people are being displaced by fighting. Economic conditions have deteriorated. Armed conflict is spreading across regions that had not historically experienced the same intensity of insurgency.
The danger is that Myanmar transitions from a political crisis into a durable civil war.
Civil wars become extraordinarily difficult to end because violence creates new interests.
Commanders gain authority.
Armed organisations develop financing networks.
Local communities form defence groups.
People suffer losses that make compromise emotionally harder.
Every atrocity produces another constituency demanding justice or revenge.
The original political dispute becomes layered beneath newer disputes created by the war itself.
This is why early political settlement matters so much.
Conflict is path-dependent.
The longer it continues, the less the bargaining problem resembles the one that existed at the beginning.
In February 2021, one imaginable settlement involved restoring elected civilian institutions and negotiating the military’s future political role.
By March 2022, thousands of people have been killed or detained, armed groups have emerged across the country and distrust has deepened dramatically.
Returning to the starting point becomes harder because there is no longer only one grievance to resolve.
This helps explain why Min Aung Hlaing’s rejection of negotiations today is concerning beyond the rhetoric.
A government does not have to admire or recognise an opponent’s legitimacy to negotiate with them.
States negotiate with armed adversaries constantly.
Negotiation is not a moral award.
It is a mechanism for discovering whether both sides prefer some agreement to continued conflict.
Refusing negotiation entirely can therefore communicate one of two things: either the government believes compromise is impossible, or it believes military victory will be cheaper than compromise.
Both are dangerous assumptions in a conflict where resistance appears widespread.
The military may possess greater conventional firepower, aircraft, artillery and institutional resources.
That does not automatically make victory easy.
An armed state fighting decentralised resistance faces the same asymmetry discussed in Afghanistan. The government has to restore stable control across territory. The resistance often has to make stable control too expensive.
The stronger side can therefore win most conventional engagements and still fail politically.
Again, military superiority and political control are different variables.
The more civilians experience the military principally through air strikes, arrests and coercion, the harder political reconciliation becomes even if armed resistance is suppressed.
Coercion can change behaviour more quickly than belief.
That is perhaps the central weakness of military solutions to political legitimacy problems.
A government can force people to stop demonstrating.
It cannot force them to believe the government deserves obedience.
Legitimacy ultimately reduces the amount of coercion required to govern.
Without it, every act of rule becomes more expensive.
This is why the junta’s language about restoring stability deserves scrutiny. Stability achieved through overwhelming repression can look impressive temporarily because visible opposition declines.
But as Kazakhstan demonstrated in January, silence is ambiguous.
The absence of protest can mean consent.
It can also mean that dissent has moved underground.
Myanmar’s situation is more extreme because some dissent has moved literally into armed resistance.
That is not evidence that the political problem disappeared.
It is evidence that the channel through which the problem is expressed changed.
The most dangerous argument a government can make is therefore that opposition violence proves political dialogue is no longer necessary.
It may prove exactly the opposite.
Dialogue is most useful when the alternatives are becoming worse.
Myanmar’s military says it will not negotiate with terrorists.
Its opponents say the military itself destroyed constitutional government and committed violence against civilians.
Each side’s description makes continued conflict sound unavoidable.
That is how wars sustain themselves.
If your opponent is not simply wrong but illegitimate, criminal and impossible to negotiate with, compromise becomes morally suspicious.
Then every battlefield loss creates demand for greater force rather than reassessment.
Eventually both sides can become trapped in a war neither knows how to end.
A year ago, Myanmar’s crisis was still primarily a question of whether an elected government would be restored after a military coup.
Today, it is becoming a question of whether the country can avoid a much deeper civil conflict.
The military claims it intervened to preserve order.
The political system is now substantially more violent and unstable than before the intervention.
That does not by itself tell us what happens next.
It does tell us something about the original justification.
If a government suspends democracy because it says only stronger authority can provide stability, then produces conditions requiring ever greater violence to maintain control, perhaps the problem was never that the country possessed too much political competition.
Perhaps it was that one institution believed it had the right to decide when political competition should stop.
