Myanmar Crisis Hinges on Stance of Ethnic Political and Armed Organizations
Ethnic political and armed actors are natural allies of the anti-coup resistance, but they are ambivalent about Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD.
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March 01, 2021
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More than three weeks after the February 1 coup in Myanmar, in which the military toppled the civilian government led by the National League for Democracy (NLD), all attention is on the struggle between the junta and the disparate Civic Disobedience Movement, which has mobilized hundreds of thousands of (mostly young) people from across Myanmar’s geographical, social, and ethnic spectrum.
The protests have been covered in the international media much in the vein of the various “color revolutions” that have taken place in recent years: as a story of the people vs. the dictator. But a decentralized protest movement is not an actor, it cannot negotiate, and it is by itself unlikely to topple a regime. T