Papers

• Fighting the evil: Popular culture and traditional knowledge in the resistance movement of Myanmar Marte Nilsen Peace Research Institute Oslo

  For many young people in Myanmar, the resistance against the coup has become an existential struggle. During 10 years of political opening and reform, these young people transformed Myanmar society. While the generals had reformed the state to secure their continued grip on power for the future, young people grabbed the opportunity to democratize society and to push for more freedom. Blinded by their rivalry with Aung San Suu Kyi, the generals failed to notice the democratic revolution that was taking place around them, and they therefor grossly miscalculated the opposition to their military coup.

• Old Conflict, New Phenomenon: The Emergence of Local Defence Forces/People’s Defence Forces after the Myanmar Coup Salai Samuel Cung Za Hmung The Australian National University

  The post-coup conflict dynamics of Myanmar is getting more complex than ever before, and it is also evolving rapidly. The security conditions vary significantly across the country depending on the regions and ethnicities. A central reason for these complex dynamics is because of a new phenomenon known as Local Defense Forces or People Defense forces (LDF/PDFs). Driven by the widespread collective grievance against the military, the country has witnessed a proliferation of hundreds of civilians led armed groups not only in conflict-prone ethnic areas and borderlands but also in many parts of Burma heartland areas which have no history of armed resistance or conflict since the colonial times. In more than a year after the coup, about 300 groups have identified themselves as defense forces on social media and many of them are actively engaged in armed conflict, posting a major threat to the military’s consolidation of its grip after the coup. This paper/presentation will illustrate the dynamism and complexity of Myanmar’s conflict by highlighting this new phenomenon and explains what are these newly emerged non-state actors and how are these groups shaping the positions and responses of the country’s long-established elite political actors in the post-coup era?

• Soldier and Police defections since the military coup d’état Helene Maria Kyed Danish Institute for International Studies

  Since Myanmar’s military leaders staged a coup on 1 February 2021, an estimated 6,000 soldiers and police officers have defected by joining the ‘people’s side’ in opposing military rule. These defectors refuse to be complicit in the violent crackdowns and killings of civilians by the military. Arguably, the number of defectors is low compared to the estimated 300-350,000 strong Myanmar military (Tatmadaw), and so far, there are no signs that the defections have created major splits in the military organization or changed the military leaders’ course of action. Nonetheless, defections constitute a significant symbolic blow to the Tatmadaw’s internal coherence and legitimacy. Also, the degree to which defectors have organised themselves and aligned with the anti-coup, pro-democracy opposition to the military is unprecedented in Myanmar’s long history of military rule. In this context, military defection has emerged as one among other strategies to challenge the military regime, based on the thesis that a disintegration of the Tatmadaw could be decisive in reversing the coup and for bringing Myanmar on a genuinely democratic path. This thesis is supported by comparative literature on civil-military relations, which shows that military defection has been a key factor in facilitating the success of pro-democracy popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes. A key question right now in Myanmar is: What conditions could provoke a large enough scale of defections to make a significant impact on the Tatmadaw’s course of action, its internal coherence, and its operational capacity? Based on online sources, interviews and historical analysis of the Myanmar military, this paper addresses this overall question by discussing the motivations behind as well as the obstacles to defections after the coup.

• Towards a new federal democracy in Myanmar: multilateral political dialogues in the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC) Myat Thet Thitsar Nyan Corridor and Danish Institute for International Studies

  Since the army, led by General Min Aung Hlaing, staged a coup on 1 February 2021 in Myanmar, experiences with new politics have emerged as part of people’s resistance to the military junta. This new politics is being driven and shaped by different new and old actors, who act sometimes together and sometimes separately in various ways. Civil society members, students and laborers have participated in strikes; Civil Disobedience Movements (CDMs); armed revolution; and associational politics like the National Unity Government (NUG) and the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC). These actors, in many instances, are collaborating with EROs from undertaking and providing logistical support to the combatting. Simultaneously, civil society actors and several EROs are now involved the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC), together with political party members, mostly from the National League for Democracy (NLD) who were elected as MPs during the 2020 election. The NUCC formally announced its formation on the 16 November 2021, but the group started to be mobilized already in late March with the purpose of reviewing a new draft Federal Democracy Charter to build a future alternative political system – a federal democratic union - in Myanmar in opposition to military rule. Since November, the NUCC has expanded its work on drafting the federal constitution (now published in Burmese and English) through political dialogues among a variety of civil society actors, students, women, laborers, EROs, and elected political party members. When we consider the “pre-2021 Coup” politics of Myanmar, such a wide variety of actors would unlikely have been able to participate in drafting a federal constitution. More importantly, broad-based political dialogues have never before successfully happened in Myanmar, despite the holding of Panglong Peace Conferences under the ousted NLD government. This paper explores the role of NUCC as a multistakeholder political dialogue platform, which is very essential to build a genuine federal democratic union. The paper addresses the following questions: What are the opportunities and challenges of the NUCC in the current Myanmar context? How are some of the civil society groups, women, and strike committees in collaboration with some EROs able to shape the platform so that it becomes a genuine multilateral political dialogue platform that reflects the essence of collective leadership instead of being dominated by one group.

Abstract

Keywords

• Coup
• Federalism
• Minorities
• Myanmar
• Violence