As civil war rages, Myanmar is the most fragmented it has been since 1949. Back then, the recently established post-colonial government was beset on all sides, its various detractors challenging its ideology and its composition.

Now, some seven decades later, the ruling regime again has its back to the wall. The last time the government called on the military to save it. This time it is the military that needs saving.

The junta, which came to power in the 2021 coup, now controls less than 40% of the countryside. The various armed anti-junta groups are, however, only in a loose and sometimes internally conflicted alliance. On both sides, the dominant theme is warlordism.

Defined by colonial borders rather than a shared national identity, Myanmar is a patchwork of distinct ethnicities roughly located along the central Irrawaddy Valley and the mountain ranges that hem it from either side. The dominant ethnic Bamar people of the central Irrawaddy, who lent the country its colonial name Burma, had historically waxed and waned in their control of the “frontier areas” which, since independence in 1947, have sought autonomy in their own affairs.

There was a period, immediately after 2015, when it seemed there might be an accommodation between the majority Bamar and the ethnic minorities. But, following the coup, anti-junta National Unity Government with its People’s Defence Force and a swag of armed ethnic groups are now fighting the junta’s forces, even if their alliances are marriages of convenience.

There is tacit agreement between them all that, should the junta be toppled,........

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