Evaluates Burma at a pivotal tipping point after the 2021 military coup.

The 2021 military coup in Burma/Myanmar triggered popular resistance and a spreading civil war, reigniting long-standing struggles for ethnic self-determination. The chaos has enabled a huge rise in transnational criminal activities, including drug trafficking and the emergence of scam centers. The country’s geopolitical importance, not least as a source of rare earths, is also heightening the struggle for power. At the same time, accelerating climate change is destabilizing local ecologies and livelihoods, driving food production, socio-economic systems, and civil society towards collapse or massive change. Together, these forces have undermined the coherence of Burma as a centralized state. However, new forms of resistance and political organization have emerged in liberated areas across the country. At this critical juncture, rather than “state failure,” Burma demonstrates novel forms of complex, asymmetrical, and sometimes messy state-building, a “bottom-up” federalism based on the agency and resilience of Indigenous communities and anti-junta forces.