"Myanmar is at a point of no return. The army’s February coup, meant to surgically shift power within the existing constitutional framework, has instead unleashed a revolutionary energy that will be nearly impossible to contain. Over the past four months, protests and strikes have continued despite the killing of more than 800 people and the arrest of nearly 5,000 more. On April 1, elected members of parliament from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), together with leaders from other political parties and organizations, declared a “national unity government” to challenge the authority of the recently established military junta. And through April and May, as fighting flared between the junta and ethnic minority armies, a new generation of pro-democracy fighters attacked military positions and administrative offices across the country. The junta could partially consolidate its rule over the coming year, but that would not lead to stability. Myanmar’s pressing economic and social challenges are too complex, and the depth of animosity toward the military too great, for an isolated and anachronistic institution to manage. At the same time, the revolutionaries will not be able to deal a knockout blow anytime soon. As the stalemate continues, the economy will crumble, extreme poverty will skyrocket, the health-care system will collapse, and armed violence will intensify, sending waves of refugees into neighboring China, India, and Thailand. Myanmar will become a failed state, and new forces will appear to take advantage of that failure: to grow the country’s multibillion-dollar-a-year methamphetamine business, to cut down the forests that are home to some of the world’s most precious zones of biodiversity, and to expand wildlife-trafficking networks, including the very ones possibly responsible for the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in neighboring China. The pandemic itself will fester unabated. The task now is to shorten this period of state failure, protect the poorest and most vulnerable, and begin building a new state and a freer, fairer, and more prosperous society. A future peaceful Myanmar can only be based on both an entirely different conception of its national identity, free of the ethnonationalist narratives of the past, and a transformed political economy. The weight of history makes this the only acceptable outcome but also a herculean task to achieve. The alternative, however, is not dictatorship, which can no longer achieve stability, but rather ever-deepening state failure and the prospect of a violent, anarchic Myanmar at the heart of Asia for decades to come.....A COLONIAL INHERITANCE: Myanmar is a colonial creation. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United Kingdom conquered the coastline from Bengal to the Malay Peninsula, the valley of the Irrawaddy River (home for a millennium to Burmese-speaking Buddhist kingdoms), and then the surrounding uplands (regions that had never before come under external control). Myanmar—then called Burma—was forged through a military occupation and governed as a racial hierarchy. Imperial census administrators complained that the many and varied identities of its inhabitants were too fluid and contingent and that the country was “a zone of racial instability.” They nonetheless divided everyone into neat racial categories, with some races deemed “indigenous” and others “alien.” The British also established an incredibly unequal and exploitative colonial political economy, based on the large-scale immigration of Indian labor and the export of primary commodities—mainly rice, oil, and timber—to global markets. Modern Burmese politics emerged a century ago, and at its core was an ethnonationalism rooted in the notion of a Burmese-speaking Buddhist racial identity. In 1937, ten years before Pakistan was partitioned from India along religious lines, the British partitioned Burma from India on the basis of perceived racial difference. After winning independence in 1948, the new Burmese state tried to incorporate those non-Burmese peoples of the country also deemed indigenous, such as the Karens and the Shans, but within a framework of Burmese racial and cultural supremacy. Those peoples categorized as “aliens,” such as the more than 700,000 people from the Rohingya Muslim community viciously expelled to Bangladesh in 2016 and 2017, have fared worse. Myanmar’s nation-building project has failed for decades, leaving behind a landscape of endemic armed conflict and a country that has never truly been whole. The Burmese army has been the self-appointed guardian of this ethnonationalism. It is the only army in the world that has been fighting nonstop since World War II: against the British and then the Japanese, and, after independence, against an extraordinary array of opponents, including Washington-backed Chinese nationalist armies in the 1950s, Beijing-backed communist forces in the 1960s, drug lords, and ethnic armed forces struggling for self-determination, all the while taking as well as inflicting enormous casualties. Since the 1970s, most of the fighting has been confined to the uplands, where the army became an occupation force imposing central rule on ethnic minority populations. But every now and then, the army would descend into the cities of the Irrawaddy River valley to crush dissent. The ranks of the armed forces have grown to over 300,000 personnel. In recent years, the military has acquired new Chinese and Russian combat aircraft, drones, and rocket artillery. It is led by an officer corps that cannot imagine a Myanmar in which the military is not ultimately in control..."