The past year has seen a dramatic shift in momentum in Myanmar’s internal conflict, which emerged from the coup launched by the country’s ruling military junta in February 2021. Three ethnic armies in the northeast have made major territorial gains since launching a sustained offensive in Shan state, bordering China, in October 2023. Elsewhere, hundreds of local-level People’s Defense Forces, or PDFs, affiliated with the exiled National Unity Government formed by lawmakers deposed in the coup have escalated their armed resistance.
Combined, the fighting has stretched Myanmar’s armed forces—known as the Tatmadaw—thin as its troops battle on multiple fronts. This in turn has fueled a narrative that the Tatmadaw, which has dominated Myanmar since its independence from Britain in 1948, could crumble amid an assault by anti-coup forces in the central region of Anyar, where most of the majority Bamar population reside and which is home to Myanmar’s second-largest city, Mandalay, as well as the seat of power, Naypyidaw.
Yet the potential for a sudden military collapse has been overstated. After the rapid developments of the past year, the conflict might instead be headed toward stalemate. The three non-state ethnic armed groups that have expanded their control in Shan state—the Brotherhood Alliance comprising the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, or TNLA; the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA; and the Arakan Army—have loosely aligned with the PDFs’ primary aim: to overthrow the junta that forced out the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, or NLD. But the alliance’s ethnic armed groups have fought for decades not for national democracy, but to secure ethnic statehood and self-governance.