“Performative Battles” and the Prolonged Civil Wars in Myanmar

• In Event: Building Peace and Reducing Violence

Abstract

Myanmar continues to suffer from the longest civil war in the world today. Why is it difficult to end the armed conflicts in Myanmar which have lasted for more than 70 years? In addition, why has the war ebbed and flowed over time, with periods of acute violence and other periods of peace? It has been argued that the mountainous terrain, abundant resources, and commitment problems in the civil war are the reasons why Myanmar’s internal conflicts cannot end. Analytically, conventional wisdom can explain the origins of the Burmese civil war, but not sufficient to tell why it lasted for so long. Moreover, most factors are constants, and thus cannot explain the variations in the level of violence in civil war.

The Tatmadaw, with about 300,000 to as many as 400,000 troops, is fully capable of defeating the active 20 Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) in Myanmar, the largest of which possesses only 20,000 fighters. That conflict persists is a choice made by the military rather than a result of a balance of military power between the state and EAOs.

We argue that a series of performative wars is the reason why the civil war in Myanmar can’t end. As Clausewitz said, war is a tool that policymakers use to achieve their objective, and the use of military force is a means to reach a regime’s political goals. In Myanmar, the military is using armed conflicts with EAOs to keep itself politically relevant and justify its continued role in politics.

Considering domestic political developments in Myanmar and the availability of resources, we choose 1989-2021 as the study period of the research. In 1988, the “8888 uprising” movement started the process of democratization in Myanmar. Under pressure, the new military made concessions to the public. They agreed to hold multi-party elections in 1990 and sat back to allow the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) to govern the state in 2010. After the victory of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in the 2015 election, however, the military was forced to formally hand over executive power to a civilian government. Since then, Myanmar’s political structure has gradually turned from a “one-party junta” to a “two-headed government”.

Facing the challenge to its ruling legitimacy, there would be three options for the junta. Option 1 is to suppress the protesters and implement more authoritarian rule over the state. Option 2 is to become accede to the protestors and put liberalizing reforms into practice. Option 3 is to remain politically relevant by provoking conflicts with the EAOs. Among these three options, initiating conflicts with EAOs might be the best choice for the military to maintain its power currently, while the other two actions could take the military directly out of the game.

While we cannot directly test the argument why the civil war has not ended, an event that has not occurred, this argument nonetheless implies two testable hypotheses. If supported, these hypotheses suggest that the civil war continues because it sustains the political role of the military.

H1: When the military is politically weak, it provokes conflict with EAOs and the intensity of armed conflicts in Myanmar increases.
H2: When the military is politically strong, in contrast, it reduces conflict with EAOs and the intensity of armed conflicts within Myanmar decreases.

The hypotheses are tested by an observational study of the relationship between the political strength of the military and the intensity of conflict with the EAOs. There are two main indicators of the independent variable – strength of the military’s political power: whether the junta is directly in power, and the change in Myanmar’s political system. In addition to a historic analysis, we use Polity scores to further measure the military’s strength. Combining two indicators, variations of the military’s political strength can be divided into four different periods: strong period (1989-2003); very strong period (2004-2010); weak period (2011-2014); very weak period (2015-2021).

The dependent variable - intensity of the conflict can also be evaluated by two indicators, the number of conflicts as well as the deaths caused by the conflict. This information is derived from the UCDP dataset’s records of conflicts in Myanmar. Observing the intensities of the conflicts in four periods, the outcome shows that the correlation between these two variables is consistent with the hypotheses accordingly.

To further demonstrate the military’s intention as in our hypotheses, we also use case studies to examine whether the military provokes conflicts with EAOs to show its continuing importance to the Burmese majority. We select the 2009 Kokang incident and the “clearance operation” against Rohingyas in 2017 as the cases. Findings are: First, the violent clashes mostly erupted around the general election time. Second, some conflicts broke out on Myanmar’s borders. Third, most conflicts were escalated by the military.

Author

• Shujun TAN, Renmin University of China