Myanmar’s conflict history begins with the expansion of Bamar kingdoms, but its modern state was forged through British conquest in the nineteenth century, which dismantled the monarchy and governed the Bamar heartland and ethnic borderlands differently. The defining process has been the unresolved struggle over nation-building in a multiethnic state: independence in 1948 promised a federal union, yet centralised Bamar-majority rule soon collided with minority demands for autonomy. Myanmar’s greatest regional significance lies in how this struggle has made it a long-running test case for post-colonial state formation in Southeast Asia, drawing in neighbouring powers, refugees, and cross-border armed movements. Military rule after 1962 entrenched the conflict by presenting central control as national unity. The 2021 coup then shattered the democratic opening and widened the civil war, exposing the failure of a state built on coercion rather than an inclusive federal settlement.
In 2025, Myanmar’s civil war continued between the military government and resistance forces alongside ethnic armed organizations such as the KIO, with heavy civilian tolls. UCDP recorded 2,317 battle-related deaths, including 1,885 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Myanmar (Burma)’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Myanmar is a large country in mainland Southeast Asia, set between India and China on the Bay of Bengal, and its history turns on a single stark geography: a fertile central lowland threaded by the great Irrawaddy River, ringed on almost every side by a horseshoe of mountains and highlands. In the lowland core live the Bamar, the country’s ethnic majority, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist; in the surrounding hills live scores of distinct minority peoples. The mainstream story of Myanmar is the long, unfinished effort of the lowland centre to hold this fractured whole together. Powerful Buddhist kingdoms rose in the river valley from the eleventh century onward; in the nineteenth century Britain conquered and dismantled the last of them; independence in 1948 handed the new state a valley heartland and a rebellious rim it had never fully governed. Historians see in this the through-line of Burmese history — a recurring struggle to bind a diverse, mountainous country to a single lowland authority, a struggle colonial rule interrupted and that independence inherited unresolved.
Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps (2006); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels (2003–2009).
Four transformations made modern Myanmar, and each mattered because it broke or remade the country’s structure. The first was the founding of the kingdom of Pagan in the eleventh century — the first unification of the river valley, and the moment the Bamar adopted Theravada Buddhism, the austere older branch of the faith that has defined the culture ever since. The second was the British conquest, carried out in three wars across the nineteenth century and completed in 1885, which destroyed the monarchy and folded Burma into Britain’s Indian empire. The third was the Second World War and the drive to independence, achieved in 1948, which produced a sovereign state but also, almost immediately, a civil war with its ethnic minorities that has never fully ended. The fourth was the military coup of 1962, which began nearly half a century of army rule, economic isolation, and repression. Each threshold is visible at once in the country’s politics, economy, and social order — the kingdom that made it, the conquest that unmade it, the independence that could not unite it, and the army that seized it.
Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (2000); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels (2003–2009).
The mainstream account stresses a hard irony: Myanmar had a strong pre-colonial state, and colonial rule destroyed it, leaving independence with a country but no settled nation. Before the British, the Burmese kingdom — most recently the Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885) — was a genuine state, centred on a king who was also the protector of the Buddhist religion. When Britain deposed the last king in 1885 and governed Burma as a mere province of India, it swept away that entire structure: monarchy, court, and the old bond between crown and faith. Independence in 1948 therefore inherited a state stripped of its unifying institutions and a territory whose highland peoples — Shan, Kachin, Karen, and others — had never seen themselves as part of a Bamar nation. The independence leader Aung San tried to bind them in by the 1947 Panglong Agreement, which promised the highland peoples autonomy within a federal union; his assassination that same year, and the promise’s collapse, is widely seen as the original wound of the modern state. Here the state long predated the nation, and the nation has never securely formed.
Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps (2006).
The long-term force the mainstream identifies is the incomplete integration of a diverse country by a lowland centre — state-building that never finished. For a thousand years the valley kingdoms expanded outward toward the hills and contracted again; the British interrupted the cycle by conquering the whole and governing its centre and periphery on entirely different terms; the independent state then tried, and largely failed, to complete by force what the kings had never finished and the empire had never intended. The result is one of the world’s longest-running civil wars — a continuous condition, not a single event — between the Bamar-dominated centre and an array of ethnic armies on the rim. What best explains Myanmar’s trajectory, on this reading, is this unresolved problem of holding a mountain-ringed, many-peopled country together under one authority: the defining process is national integration attempted, and never yet achieved.
Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (2000); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels (2003–2009).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the idea of a timeless Burmese nation with ancient, natural divisions, and argues instead that much of what looks primordial was manufactured — above all by British colonial rule. On this account the sharp ethnic categories that structure Myanmar politics today (Bamar, Shan, Karen, Kachin and the rest) were not fixed facts of nature but were counted, mapped, and hardened into rigid boxes by colonial administrators and their censuses, turning fluid identities into fault lines. The very intensity of Myanmar’s later ethnic conflict, this school suggests, is partly a colonial inheritance rather than the resurfacing of age-old hatreds. The most influential recent version of the argument, by the historian Thant Myint-U, places race and capitalism at the centre of the modern crisis — showing how colonial-era ideas about ethnic difference, fused with the shocks of a global market economy, shaped the disasters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is a reinterpretation, and a contested one: critics note that real distinctions of language, religion, and region long predated the British. Its claim is not that the divisions were invented from nothing, but that colonial rule froze and weaponised them.
Thant Myint-U, The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (2019); Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (2011).
The revisionist backbone keeps the familiar sequence — kingdom, conquest, independence, coup — but rereads each turn as an act of construction rather than a natural unfolding. The pre-colonial kingdoms are treated with more scepticism, their reach and unity often exaggerated in later nationalist memory. The British conquest is read not merely as the destruction of a state but as the creation of new categories: a colony administered as two zones — the lowlands under direct rule, the highlands left to indirect rule through local chiefs — a split that taught the peoples of Myanmar to see themselves as fundamentally separate. The major anti-colonial revolts, such as the peasant uprising led by Saya San in the early 1930s, are re-examined too: the historian Maitrii Aung-Thwin has shown how the colonial courts and officials themselves helped construct the image of that rebellion, shaping how it has been remembered ever since. Independence and the 1962 coup are then read as attempts by the lowland centre to impose a single national identity onto divisions that colonial rule had entrenched. Because it reinterprets accepted events rather than denying them, this is legitimate scholarship — but how far the divisions were colonial inventions, as against pre-existing realities the British merely sharpened, remains genuinely disputed.
Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King (2011); Thant Myint-U, The Hidden History of Burma (2019).
In this reading the “nation” is not an ancient thing recovered at independence but a modern construction, assembled — and fractured — in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Burmese nationalism itself, the revisionists point out, took shape in reaction to colonial rule and to the mass immigration the British encouraged: under the empire, Burma was flooded with Indian labourers, moneylenders, and merchants, and the port city of Rangoon became for a time majority-Indian. Early Burmese national identity formed partly against these newcomers, fusing anti-colonial feeling with anti-immigrant and religious grievance — a fusion that produced deadly anti-Indian riots in the 1930s and that echoes in the anti-Muslim violence of recent decades. The nation, on this view, was defined as much by who was excluded from it — Indians, Muslims, and the highland minorities — as by any positive shared identity. State and nation are therefore both seen as recent, unstable, and built on exclusions. This corrects the romantic story of an ancient people reclaiming its state, though it can understate the genuine depth of pre-colonial Buddhist and Bamar identity that the cultural perspective emphasises.
Thant Myint-U, The Hidden History of Burma (2019); Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King (2011).
The force this school foregrounds is the colonial and capitalist remaking of Burmese society — the argument that the deepest driver of the modern crisis is not ancient tribal hatred but the wrenching transformation the country underwent under empire and the global market. Colonial rule tore up the old order, threw the economy open to world trade and mass immigration, sorted the population into rigid racial categories, and left, at independence, a society primed for conflict along lines the empire had drawn. In Thant Myint-U’s formulation, race and capitalism together — inherited colonial ideas about ethnic difference, colliding with repeated economic shocks — best explain why Myanmar’s attempts at democracy have collapsed into violence. This is a materialist and post-colonial interpretation, and it departs deliberately from the mainstream emphasis on an age-old struggle to unify the country. Its strength is that it explains the modern catastrophe without treating ethnic hatred as timeless and natural; its contested point is how much of Myanmar’s division was truly made by colonialism, and how much the British merely inherited and hardened.
Thant Myint-U, The Hidden History of Burma (2019); Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King (2011).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through its faith, Myanmar is above all a Buddhist civilisation, and for most of its history religion and rule were bound tightly together. The great majority of Burmese practise Theravada Buddhism — the older, more austere branch of the faith, centred on monastic discipline and the earning of spiritual merit through good works. From the kingdom of Pagan onward, the Burmese king drew his legitimacy from his role as defender and patron of the religion: a good king built pagodas, supported the sangha (the community of Buddhist monks), and upheld the moral order, and in return the religion sanctified his rule. Identity, kingship, and faith were a single fabric. This is why the British removal of the monarchy in 1885 struck so deep — it severed the tie between the state and the religion, leaving Buddhism, for the first time in centuries, without a royal protector. Much of modern Burmese history can be read as the search for a new guardian of the faith to replace the lost king: a role that anti-colonial monks, elected politicians, and eventually army generals have all, in turn, claimed.
Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes (1970); Juliane Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar (2011).
Seen through religion and identity, the transforming moments are moments in the life of the faith. The adoption of Theravada Buddhism at Pagan in the eleventh century set the cultural mould for the next thousand years, binding kingship to religion. The British conquest of 1885 shattered that mould by abolishing the king who had been the religion’s protector — and so, unexpectedly, it was Buddhist monks who became among the first leaders of the anti-colonial movement, casting the struggle against Britain as a defence of a faith under threat. After independence, religion moved to the centre of politics again: in 1961 the government made Buddhism the official state religion, deepening the alienation of Christian and Muslim minorities. And in recent decades a militant Buddhist nationalism has surged — monks’ movements preaching that the faith is endangered by Islam, feeding the violence against the country’s Muslim minorities. Each turning point reshaped how religion and political power relate, and the religious record maps directly onto the political one, which is why cultural historians read the two as a single, continuous story of a faith in search of a protector.
Juliane Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar (2011); Matthew J. Walton, Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (2017).
On this reading a religious and cultural identity long predated the modern state and supplied the deepest sense of what it means to be Burmese. To be Bamar was, in large part, to be Buddhist; the monastery was the centre of village life, the source of literacy and moral order, and the sangha a national institution that outlasted dynasties. This is why Burmese nationalism, when it emerged under colonial rule, took so strongly religious a form — the earliest rallying cry was that Buddhism itself was in danger, and monks led the first marches. But this same fusion of nation with a single faith built exclusion into the country’s identity from the start: if to be truly Burmese was to be Buddhist, then the Christian highland peoples and the Muslim communities stood permanently outside the nation. The state that formed at independence inherited this religiously defined idea of nationhood, and with it a built-in fault line. Cultural historians favour this account because Burmese self-understanding, over centuries, is expressed overwhelmingly in the language of Buddhism, kingship, and merit rather than of ethnicity or economics.
Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society (1970); Matthew J. Walton, Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (2017).
The lasting force, in this cultural reading, is the enduring bond between Buddhism and political power — and the long crisis set off when the British broke it. For a thousand years legitimate rule in Myanmar meant rule that protected and was sanctified by the religion; the king was the keystone of a moral and cosmic order. When colonial conquest removed the king in 1885, it did not merely change the government — it left a sacred office vacant, and Burmese political history ever since can be read as a succession of claimants to it. Anti-colonial monks claimed the mantle of protector; the post-independence state claimed it by making Buddhism official; and the military has repeatedly claimed it too, presenting itself as the guardian of faith and nation against internal enemies. The deep driver of Burmese development, on this account, is this unbroken expectation that rightful power must defend the religion — a template of sacred kingship that has survived the king by well over a century, and that still shapes how authority is claimed and contested today.
Juliane Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar (2011); E. Michael Mendelson, Sangha and State in Burma (1975).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
The shape of Myanmar’s land explains much of its history. A fertile central lowland, watered by the Irrawaddy River as it runs the length of the country to the sea, is enclosed by a horseshoe of mountains and highlands. That single contrast — rich, rice-growing valley at the centre; poor, rugged highlands on the rim — has organised the country for a thousand years. The valley could support dense populations, taxation, and strong states; the hills could not be easily taxed or governed, and became a refuge for peoples who preferred to stay beyond a ruler’s reach. The lowland states repeatedly tried to draw manpower and revenue from the hills; the hill peoples repeatedly evaded them. On this reading the fundamental facts of Burmese history are geographic: the wealth and power concentrated in the river valley, the near-ungovernability of the surrounding mountains, and the permanent tension between the two. The anthropologist James C. Scott has given this landscape a name — “Zomia,” the vast upland zone across mainland Southeast Asia whose peoples, he argues, long organised their whole way of life around escaping the lowland state.
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009); Michael Adas, The Burma Delta (1974).
The turning points, in economic and geographic terms, follow the movement of resources and trade. For centuries the centre of gravity lay in the dry upper valley, where irrigated rice supported the kingdoms. The decisive economic transformation came with British rule in the nineteenth century, which turned the lower Irrawaddy delta — once a thinly settled swamp — into the largest rice-exporting region on earth, feeding much of Asia. This rice frontier was built with imported labour and capital: hundreds of thousands of migrants from India came to clear and work the land, and Indian moneylenders known as Chettiars financed it, until a great part of the delta’s farmland passed into their hands. The result was a society the colonial official J. S. Furnivall famously called a “plural society” — Burmese, Indian, Chinese, and European communities living side by side but barely mixing, held together only by the marketplace. When world rice prices collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930s, that brittle order broke into debt, dispossession, and racial violence. Each threshold answers to resources, trade, and migration, and the economic record — acreage, exports, debt, and the movement of people — tracks them closely.
Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941 (1974); J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice (1948).
On this reading geography drew the country’s internal boundaries long before politics did. The productive river valley generated states, cities, and a settled majority population; the surrounding highlands, hard to reach and harder to tax, sheltered a patchwork of peoples who lived largely beyond state control. The line between the governed lowland and the ungoverned highland is, in this view, the oldest and deepest division in the country — older than any modern ethnic label — and colonial and independent governments alike simply inherited it. British rule then added a second geographic layer by transforming the delta into a plantation-style export economy peopled by immigrants, laying a new commercial society over the old one. The modern state thus formed on top of a landscape already sorted into a taxable core and an untaxable rim, and the failure to bind the two is written into the terrain itself. State and nation, on this account, are constrained above all by geography: a centre that could always be governed, and a periphery that never could.
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009); Michael Adas, The Burma Delta (1974).
The force that best explains Myanmar’s development, in this reading, is the enduring struggle between the lowland state and the ungovernable highlands — a contest set by geography and never resolved. The rich central valley perpetually sought to extend its control, its taxes, and its manpower outward toward the hills; the hill peoples perpetually used distance, altitude, and mobility to keep the state at bay. Colonial rule overlaid this ancient pattern with a modern export economy and a wave of immigration that added new fault lines to the old, but it did not erase the fundamental divide. One of the world’s longest civil wars, still burning today, is on this account the direct continuation of that geographic contest — the centre still trying to hold the rim, the rim still resisting. What best explains Myanmar over the long run, then, is neither faith nor colonial invention alone, but the hard fact of a landscape that made a powerful lowland core and an unconquerable periphery, and set them against each other.
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009); Michael Adas, The Burma Delta (1974); J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice (1948).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The origin of Myanmar’s divisions is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings treat the country’s fractures as old and deep — rooted in a thousand-year struggle to unify a diverse land, and in a religiously defined idea of nationhood. The revisionist reading treats those same fractures as largely made by colonial rule, which counted, mapped, and hardened fluid identities into rigid ones. Same conflict, opposite origins: ancient inheritance, or colonial construction.
The endless civil war divides the lenses too. The cultural account traces it to a sacred bond between rule and religion, broken by the British and never repaired; the economic-geographic account traces it to the physical divide between a taxable valley and an untaxable highland; the revisionist account traces it to categories drawn by empire. Each explanation fits the same war, and each points at a different root.
On one point all four perspectives agree: the state came before the nation, and the nation has never securely formed. They part on why — a broken kingship, a landscape that resists integration, colonial categories, or an unfinished thousand-year project of unification.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (2000), The River of Lost Footsteps (2006), The Hidden History of Burma (2019); Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels (2003–2009); Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King (2011); Melford Spiro, Buddhism and Society (1970); Juliane Schober, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar (2011); Matthew J. Walton, Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (2017); E. Michael Mendelson, Sangha and State in Burma (1975); Michael Adas, The Burma Delta (1974); J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice (1948); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009). Furnivall’s “plural society” and Scott’s “Zomia” are both influential but actively debated theses, and are presented here as such.
Myanmar today is once again at war with itself. After nearly fifty years of military rule that began with the 1962 coup, and a partial opening after 2011 during which the long-imprisoned democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi led an elected government, the army seized power once more in a coup on 1 February 2021. The coup triggered mass resistance that hardened into a nationwide civil war; armed opposition forces and ethnic armies now hold significant parts of the countryside, though they remain divided and the junta retains the central lowlands and major cities. In December 2025 the military held an election that excluded Suu Kyi’s dissolved party and was dismissed by observers as a means of dressing continued military rule in civilian clothes; the pro-military parliament it produced elected coup leader Min Aung Hlaing president, and he was sworn in on 10 April 2026, formally converting his military rule into a nominally civilian presidency. Weeks later, on 30 April 2026, state media announced Suu Kyi had been moved from prison to house arrest under a reduced sentence, a gesture widely read as an attempt to rehabilitate the government’s international image rather than a genuine political opening. The International Criminal Court has meanwhile sought the arrest of Min Aung Hlaing over the military’s 2017 campaign against the Muslim Rohingya minority, which drove some 700,000 people into neighbouring Bangladesh. The country’s oldest problem — a centre trying to hold a fractured whole — remains, at the time of writing, unresolved and violent.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR, International Crisis Group) as of 20 August 2026.
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According to UCDP, Myanmar (formerly Burma) has had continuous internal conflict since gaining independence from the United Kingdom in 1948. A major root cause is the struggle between a strong central state and many ethnic communities seeking self-determination, autonomy, and protection of their rights. The Myanmar military (the Tatmadaw) has also been deeply involved in politics for decades, often ruling directly or shaping civilian governments.
UCDP describes today’s main violence as a struggle over who governs Myanmar after the 1 February 2021 military coup. The military authorities face the pro-democracy National Unity Government (NUG) and its local People’s Defence Forces (PDF), as well as long-standing ethnic armed organizations such as the KIO, KNU, KNPP, and the Arakan Army. In late 2023, the Brotherhood Alliance launched “Operation 1027,” intensifying fighting in places like Shan and Rakhine states.
In 2024, UCDP reports a slight drop in recorded fatalities (below 2,900), though conflict remained highly active and reporting limits may affect totals. Government forces used airstrikes, shelling, and raids, while resistance groups used ambushes, landmines, and sabotage. One-sided violence against civilians stayed widespread, including killings and abductions. Earlier violence in Rakhine also caused major displacement, including about 650,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh in 2017.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Since the February 2021 military coup, China has significantly enhanced its position in Myanmar, reaching influence levels unseen in over a decade. Beijing initially supported ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) along the border for leverage, then pivoted to backing the junta with arms, diplomatic cover, and economic aid to safeguard investments like pipelines and infrastructure. This balancing act protects China’s strategic corridor to the Indian Ocean, South Asia, and Southeast Asia amid Myanmar’s civil war, where the junta controls only 40-60% of territory. Such dominance challenges regional stability and counters Western influence, prompting calls for U.S. special coordination.Sources: Stimson Center, Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M)
Myanmar adheres to an ‘independent and active’ foreign policy, evolved from non-alignment since 1971, emphasizing non-alignment on international issues, peaceful coexistence via the Five Principles (mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality, and mutual benefit), and friendly relations with all nations. It opposes war, imperialism, and colonialism while supporting UN activities, disarmament, national liberation, and decolonization. This self-reliant stance avoids bloc alignments, prioritizes good-neighborly ties, and underpins junta diplomacy despite isolation from Western sanctions.Sources: Myanmar Government (State Law and Order Restoration Council Declaration), IRIS France
Myanmar’s strategic location between India and China positions it as a rivalry arena. The US views deeper engagement as vital to counter China’s Indo-Pacific advances, urging support for pro-democracy forces to prevent Beijing’s dominance and regional instability. India, wary of Chinese border influence and arms supplies to the junta, has deepened ties post-1988. Russia provides key military weaponry and legitimacy advocacy, helping the junta diversify dependencies amid sanctions. Myanmar balances these powers economically and militarily to maintain independence, while ASEAN grapples with non-interference amid the junta’s Five-Point Consensus failures.Sources: Stimson Center, Asialink, Geopolitical Monitor
Burma is home to ethnic Burmans and scores of other ethnic and religious minority groups that have resisted external efforts to consolidate control of the country throughout its history. Britain conquered Burma over a period extending from the 1820s to the 1880s and administered it as a province of India until 1937, when Burma became a self-governing colony. Burma gained full independence in 1948. In 1962, General Ne Win seized power and ruled the country until 1988, when a new military regime took control.
In 1990, the military regime permitted an election but then rejected the results after the main opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi won in a landslide. The military regime placed Suu Kyi under house arrest until 2010. In 2007, rising fuel prices led pro-democracy activists and Buddhist monks to launch a “Saffron Revolution” of large protests against the regime, which violently suppressed the movement. The regime prevented new elections until it had drafted a constitution designed to preserve the military’s political control, passing it in a 2008 referendum. The regime conducted an election in 2010, but the NLD boycotted the vote, and the military’s political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, won easily; international observers denounced the election as flawed.
Burma nonetheless began a halting process of political and economic reforms. Suu Kyi’s return to government in 2012 eventually led to the NLD’s sweeping victory in the 2015 election. With Suu Kyi as the de facto head of state, Burma’s first credibly elected civilian government drew international criticism for blocking investigations into military operations against its ethnic Rohingya population — operations the US Department of State later determined constituted genocide. When the 2020 elections resulted in further NLD gains, the military denounced the vote as fraudulent.
In 2021, the military’s senior leader General Min Aung Hlaing launched a coup that returned Burma to authoritarian rule, with crackdowns that undid the reforms and led to the detention of Suu Kyi and thousands of pro-democracy activists. Pro-democracy organisations have formed in the wake of the coup, including the National Unity Government (NUG), whose members include representatives from the NLD, ethnic minority groups, and civil society. In 2021, the NUG announced the formation of armed militias called the People’s Defense Forces (PDF) and an insurgency against the military junta. As of 2024, PDF units across the country continued to fight the regime with varying levels of support from and cooperation with the NUG and other anti-regime organisations, including armed ethnic groups that have been fighting the central government for decades.
The root of Myanmar’s conflict lies in a combination of military rule, the 2021 military coup, and decades of unresolved tensions between the central government and diverse ethnic groups. The coup prompted civil resistance and led to the creation of the National Unity Government (NUG) and countless local People’s Defense Forces. Meanwhile, longstanding demands for ethnic autonomy have prompted major ethnic armed organizations to intensify their struggle against the government, leading to a fractured landscape of fighting.
Civilians in Myanmar are caught in the crossfire of government offensives, opposition attacks, and clashes among various armed groups. According to UCDP data, there have been at least 1,873 civilian deaths in state-based fighting, with an additional 421 deaths from deliberate government actions, and significant harm attributed to other groups as well. Many civilians face threats such as airstrikes, arbitrary arrest, displacement, and targeted killings, making the cost of conflict extremely high for the general population.
Myanmar’s conflict is uniquely complex because it involves not just a single rebellion but dozens of active ethnic and political groups, each with its own objectives and alliances. The 2021 coup united previously fractured opposition movements, yet local wars over autonomy and territory persist. The presence of many competing armed groups, shifting alliances, and widespread one-sided violence against civilians set Myanmar apart from most regional civil conflicts.
Sources: UCDP data.
The Government of Myanmar is engaged in armed conflict with a wide range of ethnic armed organizations and the opposition National Unity Government. According to UCDP, it is responsible for both collateral and deliberate civilian harm, including targeted killings and broader violence during military operations.
The ABSDF, founded by student activists, is aligned with the pro-democracy opposition and ethnic armed groups, with little evidence of independent attacks on civilians in this period.
The Chin National Front campaigns for greater autonomy and rights for the Chin people. There are no recorded significant attacks on civilians attributed to the CNF in this period.
The KIO controls territory in Kachin State and is known for its armed resistance to central rule. Reports do not record systematic attacks on civilians by the KIO in the dataset provided.
The KNPP is fighting for autonomy and recognition of Karenni rights. Civilian casualties directly caused by the KNPP appear low in available data.
The KNU is one of Myanmar's oldest ethnic resistance groups, with major influence in Karen State. There are no major civilian attacks attributed to the KNU in this data segment.
The MNDAA operates primarily in Kokang region and is part of joint operations with other ethnic groups. There are minimal direct reports of civilian targeting by the MNDAA in this dataset.
The NUG forms the civilian-led opposition, coordinating resistance activities. UCDP data records incidents where NUG-linked forces caused civilian casualties, including one-sided acts of violence.
The PNLO operates in Shan State and fights for Pa-O self-determination. There are no major civilian attacks attributed to the PNLO in the UCDP dataset.
The PSLF is associated with the Ta'ang National Liberation Army and fights for Palaung/Ta'ang rights. Reports do not show significant civilian harm directly caused by this group in the current data.
The RCSS is active in Shan State, seeking autonomy for Shan people. There are no major incidents of deliberate civilian attacks by the RCSS in this period's data.
The SSPP is another prominent Shan armed group. Like others, its primary focus is autonomy, and there is little evidence of systematic civilian targeting in this dataset.
The ULA is the political wing of the Arakan Army, active in Rakhine State. UCDP records both collateral and deliberate civilian harm involving ULA-known actors.
ARSA conducted one-sided attacks against civilians, particularly in Rakhine State. The group is responsible for severe deliberate civilian harm according to UCDP data.
Myanmar's conflict is driven by military rule, ethnic minority grievances over autonomy and self-determination, and the fallout from the 2021 coup which spurred the formation of the National Unity Government and intensified armed opposition. Widespread rejection of military authority and long-standing divides between the central government and ethnic groups sustain violence across much of the country.
Burma gains independence from Britain as a parliamentary union state including diverse ethnic regions. Early promises of autonomy to minority groups are only partially fulfilled, laying foundations for long-running ethnic insurgencies that still shape today’s fragmented conflict landscape and parallel authorities.
Communist and ethnic armed groups, including Karen and others, launch rebellion against the central government. The state struggles to control borderlands, entrenching armed politics, militarized governance, and complex alliances that continue to influence today’s overlapping civil wars and localized ceasefires.
General Ne Win seizes power, abolishes the constitution, and installs a military-led socialist regime. Centralized authoritarian rule, Burman nationalism, and economic decline intensify ethnic grievances and distrust of the army, anchoring the military’s dominant political role that persists in today’s conflicts.
Mass protests demand democracy and economic reform; the military violently suppresses demonstrations, killing thousands. The junta rebrands as the State Law and Order Restoration Council and deepens military rule, while Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy emerges, shaping later electoral confrontations.
The junta signs ceasefires with several ethnic armed groups, granting local autonomy and economic concessions. This reduces some frontline fighting but entrenches militarized business networks and fragmented authority in border regions, influencing the later behavior of groups like the Arakan Army and others.
A junta-drafted constitution reserves key ministries and 25% of parliamentary seats for the military, and allows a managed transition toward semi-civilian rule. These entrenched veto powers set the structural tension that later drives the 2021 coup and current contest over state legitimacy.
Elections boycotted by the NLD bring a military-aligned party to power, while many ethnic groups remain outside the process. A semi-civilian government begins limited reforms, but the army retains decisive control, leaving core ethnic and civil–military disputes unresolved and feeding future confrontations.
President Thein Sein’s government frees political prisoners, eases censorship, and pursues ceasefires with ethnic armed groups. These moves open political space but fail to achieve a comprehensive peace settlement, leaving many ethnic armies armed and organized for later phases of the civil war.
The NLD wins a large parliamentary majority and forms government, but the military keeps control of security ministries and significant autonomy. Attempts at a nationwide peace process stall, while unresolved Rohingya and borderland conflicts deepen mistrust that becomes critical after the 2021 coup.
Militant attacks in Rakhine State trigger major army operations and mass Rohingya displacement to Bangladesh. The area’s militarization and grievances encourage the rise of the Arakan Army, which later becomes a key actor in Rakhine and northern Shan, shaping today’s multi-front conflict dynamics.
The NLD again wins a sweeping election victory. The military alleges fraud without credible evidence, escalating a constitutional crisis. This standoff directly precedes the February 2021 coup and frames today’s struggle between military rulers and parallel civilian institutions claiming electoral legitimacy.
The armed forces arrest civilian leaders, annul the election, and declare emergency rule. Mass protests evolve into armed resistance, with new People’s Defense Forces cooperating with some ethnic armies. The coup reopens large-scale war across much of Myanmar, defining the current civil conflict.
Ousted lawmakers and activists form the anti-junta National Unity Government, claiming to represent the people and coordinating armed People’s Defense Forces. This parallel authority becomes a main rival to the junta in central regions, underpinning today’s intense clashes in Sagaing, Magway, and beyond.
The Arakan Army and allied ethnic forces launch major offensives in Rakhine and northern Shan, seizing territory and bases from the military. Their advances further fragment state control and contribute to ongoing, though slightly reduced, nationwide violence and civilian suffering reported into 2024.
