For Myanmar and its people, the earthquake that struck central Myanmar on March 28 was not an isolated event but part of an unrelenting cycle of crises.
People and landscapes in Sagaing Region, at the earthquake’s epicenter, had already irrevocably changed in the four years since the coup. Once a relatively calm area, the coup triggered widespread conflict in Sagaing, as local resistance groups were met with intense counterinsurgency violence. But the earthquake’s impacts are not geographically delimited to areas along the Sagaing fault. In Thailand, an unfinished skyscraper collapsed in Bangkok, killing an unknown number of construction workers from Myanmar and elsewhere in the Mekong region. Millions of Burmese people work in Thailand today, often without documentation, having fled the combined effects of the coup, the conflict, and the countrywide economic crisis.
The disaster, in other words, added a layer of upheaval to a country already repeatedly unsettled. Most drivers of upheaval have emanated from outside the control of Myanmar’s civilian population, starting with the coup on February 1, 2021. The coup was met by mass demonstrations, fronted by those who felt they had been robbed of the future glimpsed in the preceding decade, during which Myanmar seemed finally to be veering off a path of cyclical coups and counter-coups.
The earthquake also piled demands onto those who were already responding to other crises, particularly local aid delivery systems that are resilient but nevertheless under-resourced. Local aid organizations have been a lifeline for many in recent years, especially those in resistance-controlled areas, to which the junta has blocked aid deliveries, yet they have been systematically overlooked by the international humanitarian regime.
In Myanmar, crisis fatigue reaches new heights. Not only have crises accumulated in the lives of individuals, but each crisis has revealed failures in internationalist responses to conflict and disaster that seem more and more difficult to resolve. Today, with the Trump administration and militarization in Europe, growing insularity and austerity when it comes to aid spending has had tremendous impacts on aid-receiving countries. Myanmar, where the United Nations’ humanitarian action plan was the world’s most underfunded in 2023, appears to be receding further from view to Western governments that once positioned themselves as supporters of the country’s democratic transition.
Crises are often considered opportunities for change, but Myanmar’s crises have not as yet produced a rebirth of the systems and structures that have produced them.
The Accumulated Tolls of War and Disaster
The Myanmar earthquake wrought immense physical destruction. To date, collapsed buildings have killed more than 3,600 people, injured more than 5,000, and rendered many more without shelter. Days after, residents of Sagaing town estimated that 90 percent of the town had been completely destroyed. Similar eyewitness accounts across affected areas are accompanied by pictures of roads torn apart, destroyed buildings, and piles of rubble. A week since, people still sleep in the open because they are unable to return to damaged buildings, which are still at risk of collapse.
Destroyed buildings are not new to those worst-hit by the earthquake. Sagaing Region has been by far the area of Myanmar most affected by arson since the coup, home to nearly 64,000 out of the 106,000 buildings ruined by fire across the country. Arson is a practiced counterinsurgency tactic used by the Myanmar military in its efforts to sever links between resistance groups and the civilians suspected of supporting them. First used decades ago against ethnonationalist movements in borderland areas, arson became a mainstay of the regime’s strategy in central Myanmar after the coup, deployed against People’s Defense Forces operating in the country’s historic heartland. Pre-earthquake estimates ranged from 1 to 2 million people displaced in Sagaing alone, whereas no displacement figures were recorded before the coup.
Physical destruction resulting from the earthquake also afflicts those who have fled to areas they considered safe from the war. At present, major urban areas are generally under the regime’s grip, although resistance groups now control large swaths of the countryside. Myanmar’s second largest city, Mandalay, remains junta-controlled despite advances made by resistance forces in surrounding areas late last year. Now, Mandalay is in turmoil; more than 500 buildings collapsed, but equipment shortages forced rescue workers and relatives of those missing to dig for survivors with bare hands.
Many of those killed, injured, missing, and displaced were likely to have fled to the city in the last four years. Last year, Mandalay was reportedly “overwhelmed” by a “third wave” of people fleeing from war, resulting in overcrowded monasteries and apartments housing up to five families. Despite escaping areas of active conflict, the displaced continue to be subject to military abuses in the city, as the military and its paramilitary groups extort “unregistered guests.”
Fatigued Responders and Survivors
Since the coup, the junta has imposed a battery of constraints on aid deliveries, including obstructing travel to resistance-controlled areas and launching attacks on aid workers. A similar pattern has emerged since the earthquake. Following the military’s call to “any country, any organization, or anyone in Myanmar” for help, the country received international aid commitments of up to $50 million and nearly 1,000 overseas rescue workers. Nevertheless, there are reports of the military hindering both international and local relief efforts on top of existing risks posed by the war, including possible landmines around rescue sites. The junta reportedly refused aid from Taiwan and complicated access for Western aid agencies, while being comparatively welcoming to Chinese and Russian aid. The junta took five days to announce a humanitarian pause and conducted airstrikes in the meantime, whereas the National Unity Government announced a two-week long ceasefire two days after the earthquake hit.
Local aid organizations are forced to navigate an even more complex matrix of restrictions despite their proximity to the disaster. This is because the military has prioritized counterinsurgency over relief. It manages aid efforts in a manner that seeks to soothe the regime’s anxieties over civilians’ ties to the resistance, even if these impose immense bureaucratic and operational costs on urgent humanitarian efforts. Since the earthquake, the regime has, for example, foisted arduous authorization procedures on local groups, during which it has struck off activities, areas, or townships from proposed relief plans, and blocked medical professionals from entering rescue sites if they are affiliated with the Civil Disobedience Movement. On the ground in Sagaing, “security checks” conducted by the 33rd Light Infantry Division made rescue efforts extremely difficult. The current patchwork of junta-imposed restrictions places local aid groups in a bind: register and conform with the regime’s heavy-handed controls, or operate under the radar and risk severe penalties.
This dilemma is familiar to local aid groups. Many foresaw it, as evident in a statement signed by 265 Burmese organizations, released two days after the earthquake, warning that the regime would weaponize aid. The statement pointed to the military’s mismanagement of previous natural disasters, among them Cyclone Nargis in 2008, Cyclone Mocha in 2023, and Typhoon Yagi in 2024.
But it is aid organizations in Myanmar’s borderlands that have dealt with the regime’s aid obstructions for the longest time. For decades, cross-border supplies – first delivered informally from across the Thai border, and then through more established organizations – have attenuated the impacts of war on people in ethnic Karen areas. To facilitate their work, cross-border organizations have negotiated access with or been accompanied by soldiers of ethnic armed organizations, putting aid workers at even greater risk of retaliatory violence. Nevertheless, cross-border organizations have been remarkably effective in areas otherwise unserved and have provided a model for aid groups across Myanmar, especially in the last four years, when the war took on unprecedented, countrywide proportions.
Today, an independent aid ecosystem exists outside the regime’s purview. This aid ecosystem comprises a flexible network of Burmese organizations that, while dissimilar in structure from mainstream humanitarian agencies, is nevertheless sophisticated and adept at mobilizing local knowledge and leadership to respond to emergencies. This ecosystem mobilized soon after the coup, calling for donations to support aid channels that bypass the military and collecting information about the earthquake outside junta-controlled areas, where the regime has restricted information flows.
Many in this ecosystem have worked overtime to respond to the multiple crises that have beset Myanmar over the last four years. Many have also been personally affected by them, being Burmese themselves, as there is no place untouched by war. The exhaustion they feel is compounded by a sense that local organizations are systematically overlooked by a state-centric humanitarian regime.
The Costs of International Neglect
Rocked already by multiple emergencies, Myanmar’s people also confront a sense that the country’s crises are escalating in scale, careening out of their control. What have arguably been domestic crises are coinciding with geopolitical shifts that are likely to make foreign support for the country’s democracy movement and local aid groups more difficult to acquire.
The earthquake is the first major natural disaster to occur after the Trump administration dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in January 2025. The organization had funded grassroots organizations and projects in Myanmar in years past. The USAID shutdown had an immediate impact on Myanmar, shuttering critical health services in refugee camps on the Thai-Myanmar border. On the day of the earthquake, USAID employees working on the Myanmar earthquake were terminated via email.
Prior to the USAID shutdown, other Western donors traditionally involved in Myanmar also announced reductions to aid spending so as to redirect funds toward defense. Although some of these countries have responded to the earthquake, their roles in disaster relief and reconstruction are expected to reduce as part of a general trend toward more miserly aid budgets among OECD countries. The democracy movement in Myanmar, which has already faced an uphill battle to gain the external recognition and resources it desired, is now challenged by a Western foreign policy environment dominated by inward-looking defensive and geostrategic interests.
The resistance movement is also concerned that as Western donor governments turn away, other countries will leverage the natural disaster to promote their interests at the expense of peace and stability in Myanmar. China has made the “most significant contribution” to humanitarian aid since the earthquake, committing 100 million yuan of aid (approximately $14 million) and the largest contingent of rescuers. Russia, India, and ASEAN member states – all countries often criticized for their support of or inaction toward the regime – have also offered financial resources and aid workers.
Civil society groups’ skepticism is informed not only by these countries’ post-coup foreign policy, but also by prior experience. China in particular has been a target of resentment for Burmese people, especially in areas where Chinese-funded infrastructure projects were perceived as encroaching on Myanmar’s sovereignty or on lands inhabited by minoritized ethnic groups.
The junta remains deeply unpopular even as Myanmar’s people, already exhausted by multiple emergencies, find themselves with fewer external allies. Foreign governments may expect that Myanmar’s people will eventually acquiesce to the regime, thereby slowly if painfully containing instability within the country’s borders. Yet research shows that even before the earthquake, even as most people in Myanmar were adopting a survival-first mentality, they continued to seek opportunities to express their disapproval of the regime.
Today as war and disaster overlap, and as outside assistance remains unforthcoming, what survival means for Myanmar’s population could have destabilizing impacts beyond the country’s borders. The rise of cyberscam operations in Myanmar – first in border areas, and increasingly in covert sites in major cities – is in part sustained by Burmese workers for whom few other livelihood options are available. The industry, worth billions, has been blamed for human trafficking and cyber fraud on a global scale.
Crisis Fatigue
The earthquake has taken a pervasive albeit hard to measure psychological toll on war-weary Burmese people everywhere, including those multiply uprooted, those sharing homes with the displaced, and those supporting friends, relatives, and the democracy movement from afar. Survivor’s guilt and a sense of helplessness are common among Myanmar’s diaspora.
A Burmese friend living overseas told me she felt “suffocated,” thinking about how the earthquake would worsen the lives of already “war-torn, poor, vulnerable” communities. Some of her relatives have lost their homes. “Not being able to provide on-ground support for those affected people and help in-person makes me feel guilty,” she said, but she cannot return for fear of conscription into the military.
Myanmar’s people have experienced the earthquake as part of a seemingly unremitting cycle of crises. These emergencies have recurred frequently and across the country since the 2021 coup, although they have a longer history in many places. In Myanmar’s borderlands, counterinsurgency violence has been a facet of everyday life for generations, while in the military’s centers of power, movements for democracy have been repeatedly and harshly suppressed in decades past. Crises accrue in the lives of many. They are also compounded by the difficulties people face in responding to them, including both the exhaustion of responding to multiple emergencies and a sense that external support runs thin.
Perhaps it is possible in Myanmar to speak not only of being fatigued by crises, but also of being fatigued of the concept of crisis itself. In theory, crises are precipitous moments of catastrophe that in exposing flaws in existing systems, provide an impetus for new and potentially better systems to arise. Yet as the language of crisis is normalized in Myanmar, Anne Decobért and Tamas Wells cautioned that using the word can put the focus on moments of emergency while “deflecting attention away from systemic inequalities and injustices.”
Indeed, the cumulative impact of the earthquake and responses to it are manifestations of deeper currents that shape Myanmar today, chiefly the violent role that the military plays in statebuilding and the geopolitical currents that sustain its rule. This becomes clear when the earthquake is not perceived in isolation, but as adding another layer to the damage and destruction that country has long endured.
