Winners and Losers of the 2021 Coup and the Bamar Heartland’s Awakening

If we view the last five years in Myanmar through the lens of a cost-benefit analysis, a picture emerges that is rarely discussed in public.

Such an analysis would show that the winners of the February 2021 coup have in fact been the most strategically positioned ethnic armed organizations. The Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in the north, the Arakan Army (AA) in the west, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in the northeast, the United Wa State Army (UWSA) operating as a de facto autonomous entity, and various Chin, Karenni, Karen, Mon and southern Shan groups have consolidated territory, deepened administrative control, and expanded their political legitimacy and resources in ways that would have seemed improbable before February 2021.

In the Bamar heartland, there have been two clear losers. The National League for Democracy—stripped of its 2020 electoral mandate and much of its leadership including founder Aung San Suu Kyi—is a shell of its former political self. Some analysts now question whether the NLD can survive Aung San Suu Kyi and whether any of the current generation of leaders can carry on after her.

But the military, which governed Burma for most of the half-century after 1962 and gambled everything on the coup, has also been the loser. True, it holds on with heavy Chinese backing, but whether it can ever again thrive as it did in the 1990s and early 2000s is deeply uncertain. Compared with its pre-coup position, the military controls less territory and fewer resources, and its hold of the subject population is tenuous at best: its coercive power has considerably diminished, and its old strategy of divide and rule is working less well against the resistance.

In the crude calculus of winners and losers, then, the NLD and the military find themselves paradoxically on the same side of the ledger—with one conspicuous exception. Min Aung Hlaing, the former senior general now calling himself president, and his family are widely reported to have grown considerably richer since the coup.

But even that is a double-edged sword, and this very wealth grab may be what limits his grip on the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). At the party’s fourth congress in September, which he formally attended as a member, the party’s old guard kept the top posts, while Min Aung Hlaing loyalists won only some of the seats they sought. The outcome points to quiet resistance within the regime’s own ranks to letting one man hold all the political, economic and military power at once.

And yet the USDP’s fortunes remain tied to the military’s: the two rise or fall together, locked in a deadly embrace.

The heartland as frontier

For generations, the Bamar heartland, known also as the dry zone or Anyar and covering Sagaing, Magwe and Mandalay regions, was said to produce three types of people: farmers who worked the baked earth, monks who filled the monasteries, and soldiers who filled the military’s ranks. It was both the NLD’s most reliable electoral base and the military’s most dependable recruiting ground. Yet its reputation for political loyalty never meant unquestioning obedience.

During Aung San Suu Kyi’s March 2013 visit to the Letpadaung Copper Mine near Monywa, local women, farmers and monks openly challenged her after a commission she chaired recommended that the project continue with modifications rather than close. That confrontation foreshadowed a political agency that would become far more visible after the 2021 coup.

Anyar was, in the literal sense, the ground on which Burma’s postcolonial order was built, yet its political agency went unnoticed for years. The assumption in Naypyitaw, shared by some analysts, was that the heartland would remain passive, that whatever fire the 2021 coup lit at the ethnic periphery would not reach the Bamar center.

That assumption was wrong.

Few anticipated that the Bamar heartland, where the Bagan and Konbaung dynasties flourished and which many Burmese regard as central to the country’s identity, would become a new frontier of armed resistance working toward federalism—or at least a place where people are now asking to manage their community affairs under local rather than national leaders.

Emerging institutions

Within a few months of the coup, and with backing from the civilian National Unity Government (NUG) and Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), People’s Defense Force (PDF) units and new local governance structures were forming across Sagaing, Magwe and Mandalay at a pace that nobody could stop—but nobody could coordinate either. By mid-2022, there were nearly 1,000 PDF and local armed units operating across the country, with Anyar hosting a disproportionate share. They collected taxes, policed communities, and ran local courts, schools and clinics. The military responded as it always has: with airstrikes, scorched earth, and the arming of Pyu Saw Htee militias. But it was burning its own recruiting ground. Communities that had sent their sons to the army for decades were now sending them to the resistance.

What makes this moment different from previous episodes of Burman democratic opposition in 1962, 1974, the 1988 uprising and the 2007 Saffron Revolution is that this time the resistance developed an institutional spine.

Unlike the ethnic periphery, where organized armed movements have fought for autonomy for decades, the federal dialogues emerging in central Burma freshly arose to fill the political vacuum created by the coup. As the junta retreated, regional stakeholders used platforms such as the Sagaing Forum to establish coalition-led, inclusive dialogue inspired by the Federal Democracy Charter. Ousted NLD regional parliamentarians, civil servants, activists, and local PDF built a blueprint for a regional democratic process that ultimately gave rise to formalized revolutionary governance.

By the beginning of 2026, Sagaing, Magwe and Mandalay had established interim sub-national governments named “federal units” by NLD lawmakers elected in 2020. These are not protest movements. They are embryonic self-governing bodies attempting to provide administration, services, justice, and policing in territory the military can no longer effectively control. The NUG is now formalizing transitional arrangements through these units, using its three-pillar township-level governance structure.

In August 2026, the interim bodies of the three regions joined the new Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF), the main resistance coalition, alongside the NUG, the CRPH, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the Karen National Union (KNU) the Chin National Front (CNF) and the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP).

Some analysts rightly ask what their membership means. Are the Anyar units now negotiating the shape of a future union as federal units in their own right, on an equal footing with the ethnic organizations, or are they still merely junior partners of the NUG at a table with the ethnic organizations?

Strong will, fragile unity

The new Bamar-majority armed resistance forces—most notably the Burma People’s Liberation Army (BPLA)—were almost unthinkable before 2021. But now they have emerged explicitly endorsing federalism, reframing Bamar political identity in ways that cut directly against the ethnic nationalism the military has always claimed to embody. Alongside them, a range of resistance organizations have expanded their presence across the region: the Student Revolutionary Army (SRA), the People’s Revolution Alliance (PRA)–Magwe, the Sagaing PDF, the Sagaing Federal Troops and many more local PDFs, and the Mandalay–PDF. It remains to be seen whether these armed forces and the dry zone’s new political units can be brought together under a shared political direction.

Recent survey evidence reinforces this assessment. A Stimson Center study based on fieldwork in Anyar found that support for the Spring Revolution remains strong despite years of violence, displacement, and economic hardship. But respondents also identified fragmentation, weak coordination, forced taxation, and fiscal misconduct as serious problems within the resistance. The findings support both sides of the argument developed here: the political awakening of the heartland has endured, but converting it into a durable federal project will require greater accountability, cohesion and coordination among resistance organizations and EAOs.

These forces remain fragmented, but their weakness lies in leadership, not in will, and that gap may close over time. As long as Aung San Suu Kyi remains imprisoned and continues to occupy a singular place in the Burmese political imagination, no alternative national leader is likely to command comparable legitimacy.

Yet the deeper shift in Anyar is not only organizational. Beneath the institutional spine lies a genuine awakening in political consciousness across the heartland. It is a paradigm shift.

Anyar is becoming a place where a federal future is imagined and organized from below. The question now is whether its political figures can turn the weakening of both the military and the NLD into a real say in determining where the country goes next.

Federalism from below

For decades, the argument for federalism was framed as an ethnic minority demand, something the Kachin, Shan, Karenni, Karen, Chin, Mon, and Rakhine wanted and that the Bamar center resisted. But now farmers and monks and former soldiers build self-governing institutions from the ground up. They are not asking Naypyitaw for a federal system. They are practicing one, imperfect though it may currently be.

The irony is that the military’s coup was intended to reassert central authority but has done more to advance ethnic federalism than any diplomatic process or peace negotiation managed in the previous decades. By eliminating the NLD as a functioning political force and by demonstrating its own incapacity to govern, the military created political opportunities that the periphery and the heartland are now grabbing with both hands.

That miscalculation may prove the most consequential in Myanmar’s modern history.

Zaw Tuseng, a former pro-democracy activist, is the founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute (MPI). MPI supports conflict-affected communities in Myanmar’s Sagaing Region and conducts cross-border policy advocacy with Indian policy actors. He holds an Executive Master of Public Administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.