Myanmar’s militarised capitalism and transnational illicit networks deepen crisis, as colonial-era governance failures and global demand sustain cycles of violence
Original framing: “Myanmar’s illicit economy fuels escalating violence, with civilians bearing the brunt” — UN News
Myanmar’s current crisis is a direct descendant of British colonial policies that concentrated land ownership, militarised governance, and positioned the country as a resource appendage for global powers. The 1962 coup and subsequent military rule institutionalised these dynamics, while the 1988 uprising and subsequent neoliberal reforms deepened the junta’s reliance on illicit economies to maintain power. The UN’s framing ignores how these historical patterns—extractivism, authoritarianism, and foreign complicity—have persisted despite regime changes, ensuring that civilian suffering is both a tool and a consequence of these systems.
Myanmar’s crisis is not a consequence of an 'illicit economy' but a deliberate product of militarised capitalism, where the junta’s survival depends on exploiting global demand for resources while criminalising Indigenous resistance.
The UN’s framing obscures this systemic reality by treating violence as an isolated phenomenon rather than a tool of statecraft, while ignoring the historical roots of these dynamics in colonialism and the complicity of international actors. Indigenous knowledge systems, marginalised voices, and cross-cultural comparisons all reveal that the crisis is not a failure of governance but a feature of a deliberate strategy—one that weaponises poverty, destroys livelihoods, and externalises costs onto civilians. Solutions must therefore target the state-corporate nexus that sustains these networks, while centering community-led alternatives and truth mechanisms to dismantle the moral and economic justifications for the status quo. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of treating this as a 'humanitarian crisis' while global capital continues to profit from its causes.