Robert S. Burrell, and Chris Mason
The conflict in Myanmar is the world’s longest ongoing civil war. The former British colony gained its independence in January 1948 and has been in a state of civil war almost continuously ever since. The British colonial policy of classifying and institutionalizing ethnolinguistic differences as part of the imperial schema of colonial rule is partly to blame. “Divide and rule” served imperial interests by subverting any sense of a larger national identity. Even with this approach, Great Britain fought three major wars in Burma and innumerable police actions before the invasion by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1939.
But colonial policy is only partly to blame. Going back more than a millennium, there has never been a sense of a broader national identity within the borders of what is now Myanmar. The government of Myanmar itself codified the classification of 135 ethnic groups in 2014.
Does Myanmar Have a Unifying Identity?
The efforts by the British, Japanese, and now the global world order to maintain the fiction of Myanmar have come at an enormous human cost. Just between May 2021 and December 2024, at least 76,000 people were killed, and this is almost certainly an undercount. The United Nations Refugee Agency now reports 3,443,592 displaced persons from Myanmar. Most of these have fled west, and the tidal wave of refugees is destabilizing Bangladesh and India. The second-order effect of this human catastrophe is the reification of tribal boundaries.
War creates hatreds, and no one alive in Myanmar today remembers a time when all the country’s many tribal groups lived together in peaceful coexistence. Social trust is the essential foundation of any multiethnic society, and it is fair to say that nowhere on earth is there less of it than in Myanmar today.
Indeed, Myanmar lacks the social capital necessary for peace and is farther away from being a nation today than at any point in its history.
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