Myanmar’s civil war rages on despite ‘whack-a-mole’ sanctions, scant aid. What more can be done?

Myanmar suffers from policymakers’ lack of imagination and unwillingness to act decisively for fear of sparking a US-China proxy war, researchers say

Three years of sanctions have been ineffective, according to a new Lowy Institute report, whose author advocates support for ‘parallel state building’

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A rebel fighter from the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force walks past a destroyed military outpost in Myanmar’s Karenni state last year. Foreign governments have avoided offering aid to rebel forces for fear of igniting a proxy war. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 8:00am, 14 May 2024Updated: 10:15am, 14 May 2024

The growing weakness of Myanmar’s military junta has created opportunities for international actors to bring about lasting stability, according to a new report, despite global responses to the civil war being ineffective so far.

“Outrage is not a policy: coming to terms with Myanmar’s fragmented state”, published on Sunday by the Lowy Institute think tank, argues that while the combination of sanctions and humanitarian assistance used by foreign governments so far was a reasonable starting point, “neither tool holds any real prospect of significantly influencing the course of the conflict”.

“Western governments have struggled to respond adequately to the 2021 military coup and resultant civil war, relying too heavily on a few traditional tools that simply do not match the dynamics or significance of these epochal events,” said Morten Pedersen, the report’s author and a senior international-politics lecturer specialising in Myanmar at the University of New South Wales Canberra.

People queue for food at a monastery-turned-temporary shelter for internally displaced people in Myanmar’s Shan state late last year. Photo: AFP

“It is understandable that governments are reluctant to provide military assistance to the resistance, which would risk drawing the West and China into a proxy war in Myanmar,” Pedersen said.

“Still, it is hard not to conclude that there is also a lack of imagination in some policy circles, or at least insufficient will to try new things.”

Sanctions and aid have been the main international responses to the Myanmar crisis so far, as no government wants to risk escalating tensions between China and the United States – both stakeholders in Myanmar – by providing direct military support, which experts said would be logistically difficult to provide anyway.

Even then, the global response has been tepid, the report notes, with many governments distracted by other conflicts such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.