More than five years after the 2021 military coup, the struggle is no longer over who governs the country, but increasingly about how fragmented legitimacy can be brought together into durable political authority.
Key words: Myanmar, political legitimacy, military coup.
Today, Burma/Myanmar is facing not one crisis, but many at once. Civil war continues to intensify across large parts of the country. More than 3.7 million people are internally displaced while 1.6 million others seek refuge and asylum abroad. Airstrikes, forced conscription, economic collapse, and widespread displacement have become part of everyday life for millions. Natural disasters in recent years including cyclones and earthquakes have further deepened humanitarian suffering in a country already beyond capacity. Yet, despite the scale of the crises, Myanmar often receives limited sustained international attention compared to other global conflicts.
Responding to the above-mentioned overlapping crises is not just a humanitarian or technical challenge, but also a political one because it depends very much on who holds power and who has the authority to address these challenges. However, in a country where authority is deeply contested, even basic questions such as who governs, who delivers services, and who represents affected communities have no straightforward answers.
In today’s Myanmar, the question of who holds legitimate political authority has no simple answer. While the military junta claims state authority, the politicians elected in the 2020 elections, despite being ousted and exiled, claim democratic legitimacy. At the same time, revolutionary actors—existing ethnic resistance organisations and newly emerging entities—exercise political and territorial control across large parts of the country. More than five years after the military-staged coup in 2021, the struggle is no longer simply over who governs the country, but rather to what extent each of these groups can credibly claim the right to exercise political authority. In this sense, authority and legitimacy are closely related but distinct: authority concerns the exercise and claim of political power whereas legitimacy concerns whether that authority is regarded as rightful or justified. An actor may therefore exercise political authority without that authority being widely regarded as legitimate.
While legitimacy is often treated as something political actors either possesses or lack, Burma’s post-coup reality suggests something more dynamic. Legitimacy is not static. It is continuously contested, challenged, adapted, and renegotiated. Political actors must constantly reinforce their relevance, especially when rivals make moves that threaten their authority. This ongoing push and pull helps explain the complex political landscape.
Competing claims to authority
Since the February 2021 coup, the military has repeatedly tried to present itself as the lawful authority of the state. It justified its seizure of power through Section 417 and 418 of the 2008 Constitution, which provide for a nationwide one-year state of emergency and the transfer of legislative, executive and judicial powers to the Commander-in-Chief. It subsequently renewed the state of emergency multiple times and promised elections as a pathway back to civilian government. Recently, the junta attempted to restore formal state institutions through tightly controlled elections and parliamentary processes.
These moves are not merely symbolic. They reflect deliberate attempts to strengthen the junta’s legitimacy by appealing to legal continuity, state institutions, and the language of order and stability. Even the repeated restructuring of authority around Min Aung Hlaing reveals this search for political footing. Over the past five years, he has accumulated and reshaped formal titles—commander-in-chief, chair of the State Administration Council, prime minister, and president—while consolidating power around military institutions.
Yet the junta’s ability to maintain centralised control should not be mistaken for broad legitimacy. The military’s relative coherence stems less from public acceptance than from hierarchy, institutional continuity, and coercive capacity. Centralised command allows faster decision-making, clearer strategic direction, and more predictable channels of engagement for regional actors such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, and Thailand. These actors may not endorse the junta politically, but they know where authority formally resides and with whom negotiations can be conducted.
The revolutionary movement, on the other hand, presents a very different picture. Its legitimacy does not rest in a single institution, leader, or chain of command. Instead, claims to authority and the sources that underpin them are dispersed across elected lawmakers, the National Unity Government, ethnic resistance organisations, local governance bodies, and grassroots resistance networks. This diversity is both a strength and a challenge.
Legitimacy beyond elections
In the early months after the coup, elected representatives moved quickly to counter the junta’s claim to authority. The Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, formed by ousted lawmakers, argued that parliamentary legitimacy remained with elected representatives rather than the military. The later formation of the National Unity Government expanded that claim from parliamentary representation to governmental authority. These institutions drew heavily from a democratic mandate. Their legitimacy rested on a straightforward argument: the military had overthrown a government elected by the people.
However, when we discuss legitimacy, elections are just one piece of the puzzle. It is, in fact, only one component of one source of legitimacy: ‘process legitimacy’, which refers to the ways in which authority is acquired and exercised, including through elections, representation, participation, consultation, accountability, and established institutional procedures. A second source is ‘performance legitimacy’ which is grounded in what an institution actually does, such as providing security, administering territory, resolving disputes and responding to people’s needs. A third is ’shared beliefs’, which is grounded in shared identities, values, political aspirations, collective understandings and experiences. These sources are not mutually exclusive. They can overlap, reinforce one another, and become more, or less, important depending on the actor, its constituency, and the circumstances in which it exercises authority.
This broader understanding of legitimacy is particularly important when considering ethnic political organisations and resistance organisations. Many ethnic resistance organisations had exercised political authority long before the coup. Groups such as the Karen National Union, the Kachin Independence Organisation, and the Arakan Army have governed territories, administered schools, mediated disputes, collected taxes, and represented political aspirations rooted in decades of armed struggle. Their claims to legitimacy therefore draw on multiple sources: their capacity to govern and provide services contributes to performance legitimacy; their representation of ethnic communities and long-standing struggles for self-determination draws on shared beliefs; and their political institutions, representative structures, and established forms of consultation provide additional grounds for process legitimacy.
Evidently, their role is no longer peripheral. Recent estimates suggest opposition forces now exercise effective control over roughly one-third of Myanmar’s territory, while the military retains firm control over only about one-fifth, with much of the remainder contested. In Karen State alone, the Karen National Union is estimated to control around 61 percent of the territory, while in Rakhine State the Arakan Army has established near-complete administrative control over most townships. While these forms of territorial control do not automatically make an institution legitimate, they create opportunities to demonstrate performance through administration, service delivery, security and responsiveness.
In addition to the longstanding ethnic resistance organisations, the Civil Disobedience Movement, student networks, women-led organisations, and local resistance groups have also developed political significance. Their legitimacy may stem from their sacrifice, moral resistance, and their ability to mobilise public support against military rule but their influence is especially visible in areas where local councils and community-led institutions continue to coordinate education, humanitarian relief, and civilian administration. In this sense, their legitimacy is likewise not reducible to a single source: community trust and shared political commitments can reinforce the performance legitimacy that comes from providing services and mobilising communities.
Indeed, the fact that no single actor can draw equally on all these sources of legitimacy and that different actors bring different strengths to the movement has shaped the revolution from the beginning.
Why legitimacy keeps shifting
One of the defining features of post-coup Myanmar is that legitimacy is constantly being renegotiated. Political actors do not simply claim authority once and retain it. They adapt their institutional arrangements and political narratives in response to changing realities.
This can be seen through a series of political counter moves. When the military seized power in 2021, the body formed by ousted lawmakers, the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, emerged almost immediately as a direct challenge to the junta’s legal claims. Soon after, the National Union Government formed to present an alternative government. As the junta increasingly promoted elections and institutional restoration as a route to legitimacy, revolutionary actors expanded coalition-building and federal coordination.
Military developments also changed political legitimacy within the resistance itself. Operation 1027 in late 2023 significantly altered the balance of power. The coordinated offensive by the Three Brotherhood Alliance, involving the Arakan Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, not only captured more than 200 junta bases and key towns along the China–Myanmar border; it also shattered the long-standing perception that the military remained territorially unbeatable. This shifted political influence within the revolutionary camp. Armed actors with territorial control and battlefield success gained greater bargaining power in shaping the movement’s direction, while the National Unity Government’s electoral legitimacy alone was weakened. The offensive also underscored a deeper reality: some of the most consequential strategic developments in the revolution were being driven not by national political institutions, but by actors exercising military and administrative control on the ground.
This helps explain the significance of newer political platforms aimed at broadening coordination across the resistance. In 2024, revolutionary actors formed the Multi-Ethnic Council, a nine-member coalition that brought together ethnic resistance organisations and political councils representing different states and national communities. Its emergence reflected growing recognition that revolutionary coordination could not rely solely on nationally recognised bodies or electoral mandates. It also signaled an effort—both principled and strategic—to build more inclusive and deliberative political structures that better reflected Myanmar’s multi-ethnic political reality.
This trajectory helps explain the emergence this year of the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF). SCEF can be understood not simply as another coalition but as evidence of a deeper political reality: the National Unity Government’s legitimacy alone, however important, was not sufficient to consolidate the diverse political, military, and territorial authority needed for revolutionary governance. Rather than replacing existing institutions, these new platforms reflect ongoing attempts to aggregate legitimacy dispersed across elected representatives, armed actors, ethnic political institutions, and subnational governance bodies.
The core challenge is therefore no longer only who can claim to be Myanmar’s rightful government. It is increasingly about how fragmented legitimacy can be brought together into durable political authority.
Legitimacy beyond the national level
Myanmar’s legitimacy landscape cannot be understood solely through national institutions such as the junta, the National Unity Government or the most recent SCEF.
Some of the most important political authority exists below the national level. Across Karenni, Chin, Sagaing and other resistance-held or contested areas, local councils, interim administrations, and community governance structures play crucial political roles. These institutions coordinate aid distribution, support displaced communities, resolve disputes, and mediate relations between civilian populations and armed actors. Their authority is often exercised in close cooperation with civil society organisations and community-based groups.
For many civilians, these institutions matter more in daily life than national political bodies. This reveals an important asymmetry between the junta and the revolutionary movement. The military retains administrative reach through bureaucratic structures and coercive power. But coercive reach does not necessarily translate into socially embedded authority. In many contested areas, the military can bomb, raid, and punish—but it remains unable to meaningfully govern everyday political life.
Relationships among revolutionary actors further demonstrate how legitimacy can be shared, reinforced, and contested. Ethnic resistance organisations often exercise territorial and governing authority in the areas they control, including through administration, service provision, and security. At the same time, they may work with local administrations, civil society organisations, and community-based groups to deliver services, coordinate humanitarian assistance, and govern communities. These relationships can reinforce political standing while also generating contestation over representation, credit, and authority. The NUG has at times been criticised for presenting the territorial gains of ethnic resistance organisations as achievements of the broader revolutionary movement, raising questions over who can claim political credit for them.
Civil society organisations similarly occupy an important position between communities and political actors. Their networks, technical expertise, and proximity to communities can strengthen the capacity of political institutions to provide services and develop policies. This is reflected in the NUCC, whose membership includes civil society organisations, women’s and youth organisations, labour unions, civil disobedience groups, and strike committees alongside elected representatives, political parties, and ethnic resistance organisations. Similar efforts to incorporate these groups can be seen in other emerging political bodies and consultative councils such as the Karenni State Consultative Council, Mon State Federal Council and Chinland Council. Yet their growing involvement in political and governing structures has also raised concerns about the trade-offs between maintaining independence and gaining influence.
The strength and challenge of dispersed legitimacy
At first glance, fragmented legitimacy appears to be a weakness. Distributed authority can slow decision-making, complicate coordination, and create uncertainty over who speaks for whom. Inclusive political processes, while normatively important, do not necessarily produce strategic coherence.
This has become especially visible in moments of crisis. Myanmar’s revolutionary movement must navigate war, displacement, economic collapse, humanitarian emergencies, and shifting battlefield realities simultaneously. Under such conditions, inclusive legitimacy must still be translated into workable institutions capable of making decisions and coordinating action.
Yet fragmentation tells only half the story—what appears as weakness can also be a source of resilience. Unlike highly centralised systems, distributed political authority is much harder to eliminate. This is particularly important in Myanmar, where the military has long relied on decapitation strategies: arresting leaders, assassinating local administrators, criminalising organisations, and dismantling institutions. Such strategies are most effective when authority is concentrated in a single institution or leadership centre.
Myanmar’s revolutionary movement increasingly operates differently. Since legitimacy is dispersed across multiple actors and multiple levels of political life, when one institution weakens, authority often persists elsewhere, making the movement far more difficult to suppress completely.
From legitimacy to governance
Myanmar’s legitimacy crisis is no longer simply a binary contest between the military and the resistance. It is better understood as a continuous process in which rival actors adapt institutions and legitimacy claims in response to one another.
The junta seeks legitimacy through centralised authority, institutional continuity, and coercive control. The revolutionary movement draws legitimacy from representation, resistance, governance, and deeply rooted political aspirations for a federal democratic future.
The junta’s centralised structure provides coherence but remains heavily dependent on coercion and institutional control. The revolutionary movement’s distributed structure fosters resilience and inclusion but struggles with coordination and political aggregation. These competing legitimacy structures matter not only for Myanmar’s internal political future, but also for how the country is understood from outside.
For international audiences, the lesson is not simply that Myanmar deserves greater attention—though it clearly does. It is that meaningful engagement requires moving beyond simplified narratives. Myanmar’s crisis cannot be understood solely through binaries such as military versus resistance, state versus non-state, or dictatorship versus democracy. Such frameworks may offer convenient shorthand, but they often obscure more than they reveal.
Its political reality is far more layered. Authority is contested not only between two opposing camps, but across multiple actors, institutions, and levels of political life. Legitimacy is continuously built, challenged, borrowed, and renegotiated in ways that are often difficult to capture through conventional policy language or headline-driven analysis.
If Myanmar is to receive the attention it deserves, it must be met with more than sympathy or episodic concern. It requires serious engagement grounded in curiosity, humility, and a willingness to grapple with complexity. Only by taking that complexity seriously can international observers, scholars, and policymakers hope to understand Myanmar—and engage with its political future in ways that are informed, meaningful, and responsible.
Note: This article builds on and extends arguments developed in the author’s earlier paper, ‘Walking on the Tightrope of Legitimacy: An Analysis of Political Institutions’ Claims to Authority in Burma’, with a particular focus on how competing political actors in post-coup Burma continuously renegotiate claims to authority.
Image: Women carrying baskets across the fields in Bagan, Myanmar, 2021. Credit: Rockwell/Pexels.
