Myanmar politics

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has promised to transfer power to whoever wins the election, but there are many reasons to be skeptical.

While the amnesty included around 600 political prisoners, it should not be taken as a sign of conciliation on the part of the military.

The announcement followed reports that the current acting president, Myint Swe, has been placed on medical leave.

Like much else, the country's normally raucous new year festivities have become a political battleground since the 2021 coup.

While the country's shadow opposition has attracted criticism, it has made significant gains on both the political and diplomatic fronts.

Attempts to map the areas controlled by the military junta and its various opponents frequently obscure more than they reveal.

As the military junta’s losses mount, the resistance faces growing challenges of cohesion and coordination.

The National Unity Government and three allies have released the most detailed plan yet for what would follow the collapse of the military regime.

The lakeside villa, where Aung San Suu Kyi spent more than 15 years under house arrest, will go under the hammer on March 20.

The region's problem is not that there is too much political contestation, but rather that there is not enough.

The rebel group has shed its reputation as an opium trafficking syndicate and pledged itself to the Spring Revolution. Is its transformation more than skin deep?

Resistance forces now face the challenge of building an ethnically inclusive and democratic state, something that no government in Myanmar has ever achieved.

The MNDAA says that it is close to capturing Laukkai, the capital of the Kokang region in Shan State, a hub of online gambling and cyber-fraud operations.

"The difference to the past," says economist Sean Turnell, "is that this junta does not seem to even pretend anymore that it has any sort of vision for Myanmar."

The extension is an admission that the military has failed to quell the broad-based armed resistance to its rule.

The country's prospects of democracy and development "have been repeatedly thwarted by a predatory military and an indifferent international community."

The country's neighbors continue to treat the military administration like a viable sovereign entity. They risk being left behind by events.

The National Unity Government is bereft of any meaningful external support while the junta has been well assisted by its fellow authoritarians since the 2021 coup.

The holiday amnesty is designed to depict the military administration as beneficent, and hence politically legitimate.

Aside from further embittering the population toward the military junta, the disbanding of the former ruling party is unlikely to have much impact on Myanmar's downward trajectory.

Given how central ethnic armed groups and political movements are to Myanmar's conflicts, how we define them carries a great deal of political weight.

For their own interests, if nothing else, India, Thailand, and China need to throw their support behind the country's resistance movement.

The six-month extension is likely to delay the "elections" that the coup government was planning to hold by August.

The military junta's possible handover of power to a quasi-civilian "transition council" could create complications for the country's resistance forces.