Why diplomacy and conflict resolution still matter for Myanmar’s fractured resistance
Guest contributor
Aung Ko Ko
February 1 marked five years since Myanmar’s military coup and the start of the Spring Revolution. Over this period, revolutionary forces have achieved important gains, including significant territorial control and sustained popular support.
Yet many fundamental problems remain unresolved. The most visible and serious issue is that, despite years of sacrifice, the revolution still speaks in many voices rather than a unified voice across military coordination, political strategy, and international engagement. This problem is deeply connected to a more structural failure.
While revolutionary actors are coordinated against a common enemy, they have struggled to agree on how to build a new country. Five years on, the absence of a shared vision for Myanmar’s future has become increasingly evident.
The failure of the union
At the outset of the Spring Revolution, many placed their hopes in the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC) as a broad revolutionary alliance.
It brought together parliamentary representatives, political parties, long-established ethnic revolutionary organizations, strike committees, and civil society groups.
At the time, NUCC was widely described as the most inclusive political coalition in Myanmar’s modern history.
Today, it is difficult to avoid the hard conclusion that NUCC has failed to function as intended. It has not carried out the responsibilities assigned to it under the Federal Democracy Charter(s).
Major member organizations, including the National League for Democracy, the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, the Karen National Union, and the Karenni National Progressive Party, have withdrawn or suspended their participation.
As NUCC weakened, a range of new governance, political, and military alignments emerged, such as ad hoc alliances, coordination bodies, and armed coalitions. Despite their different structures and objectives, none has yet offered a convincing path toward building a future federal democratic union.
Most concerning is the persistent lack of deep trust between the majority Bamar revolutionary forces and the non-Bamar ethnic revolutionary forces.
As pressures have mounted, mutual criticism, sometimes subtle and sometimes openly public, has emerged. This raises critical questions about whether the revolution can sustain a genuinely collective struggle.
Factionalism and Myanmar politics
Although revolutionary actors share a common enemy and profess a commitment to federal democracy, the past five years have revealed intense competition among them. This should not surprise us. Myanmar’s political history has long been shaped by factionalism.
As journalist Nathan Maung documents in his recent book The Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder jealousy and factional rivalry have been embedded in Myanmar politics since the feudal era and have persisted through the independence struggle.
When the NUCC was formed, its broad participation was celebrated as a sign of inclusion. In reality, the proliferation of organizations with similar political visions reflected an unresolved problem. It can be said that factionalism was dressed up as pluralism.
Many preferred to believe optimistic narratives of revolutionary unity, while avoiding the harder and more objective question of whether such arrangements could function amid a deep historical trust deficit among diverse communities.
Lessons from the independence struggle
History offers a useful contrast. During the struggle for Burma’s independence, Aung San, founder and national hero of modern Burma, brought together diverse political forces, not only left- and right-wing actors, but also religious and ethnic minorities such as the Burma Muslim Congress and Chinese community organizations under the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL).
Through this coalition, Burma secured independence from Britain.
Two agreements were central to that achievement: the Aung San–Attlee Agreement with the British government and the Panglong Agreement with leaders from Chin, Kachin, and Shan areas.
These agreements were not victories of arms but outcomes of political diplomacy. Panglong, often mythologized, was neither simple nor inevitable. What is often overlooked is how fragile the process was and how close it came to failure.
At a critical moment, when Aung San was prepared to abandon the Panglong talks and return to Rangoon, it was U Pe Khin, the AFPFL’s Secretary for Frontier Areas, who helped save the process.
Drawing on personal trust and long-standing relationships with Shan leaders, he persuaded key actors to return to the table. Without his intervention, the Panglong Agreement might never have happened.
As early as 1946, a year before the Panglong Conference, U Pe Khin had pushed the AFPFL to adopt a resolution calling for self-determination and joint negotiation between the plains and the frontier areas by rejecting British attempts to divide them.
Born in central Burma and later moving to the Shan State capital Taunggyi, he served as a bridge between communities during a critical moment in Burma’s independence struggle.
After Panglong, U Pe Khin went on to serve Myanmar as a diplomat, first as ambassador to Pakistan, then to Thailand, and later as Myanmar’s permanent representative to the United Nations.
Conflict resolution, not conflict transformation
Since the 2021 coup, some analysts have argued that Myanmar no longer needs conflict resolution, only conflict transformation. This framing reflects a familiar pattern in Myanmar politics, embracing one concept while discarding another.
The result has been damaging. Practical mechanisms for resolving disputes across political, ethnic, and institutional divides have been neglected. Yet factionalism does not disappear on its own.
In the absence of a single charismatic and powerful leader in the Spring Revolution, the movement requires trusted institutions and processes capable of managing disagreement before it becomes destructive.
Five years into the Spring Revolution, such mechanisms remain largely absent. This failure, too, is part of NUCC’s unfinished legacy.
The need for a new generation
What Myanmar urgently needs, both to sustain the Spring Revolution and to build a future multi-nation state, is a new generation of U Pe Khin(s), individuals capable of pursuing a shared future not through force or dominance, but through diplomacy, mediation, and patient negotiation.
In Myanmar, where the political culture is continually shaped by coercion and zero-sum thinking, collective political action will not emerge spontaneously. It must be built systematically and deliberately. Without credible and trusted conflict-resolution mechanisms, the revolution risks reproducing the very divisions it seeks to overcome.
If the Spring Revolution is to succeed not only in defeating military rule but also in creating a peaceful and inclusive union, it must rediscover the difficult work of bridge-building. History has already shown that this work matters.
Aung Ko Ko is Executive Director of Mosaic Myanmar and a Visiting Fellow of the Myanmar Research Centre at the Australian National University. He holds a Master’s degree in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from Brandeis University. The views expressed here are his own.
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