Liberal Dreams, Illiberal Ends
Coming Soon…
“The military was pursuing an illiberal strategy to peace, and Norway became complicit, not necessarily by design, but by its effect, it became a de facto sponsor of a strategy for illiberal peace building by the military.”
Kristian Stokke, speaking from his office at the University of Oslo, traces the roots of Norway’s involvement in Myanmar to a pattern of misjudged optimism and self-serving diplomacy disguised as benevolence. His reflections expose a dark irony: the same nation that once held itself up as a beacon of peace and democratic mediation has, through a mixture of naivete and quiet ambition, helped enable the persistence of dictatorship and violence in Myanmar.
Before Myanmar, Stokke’s background was in studying such conflicts such as Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Indonesia— contexts where international actors, Norway among them, had attempted to promote peace and democracy… but often misunderstood the dynamics at play. In Sri Lanka, he tells, Norway entered the peace process proclaiming neutrality and flexibility, promising no hidden agenda. But as the talks progressed, it became clear that their actions subtly reinforced the state’s dominance over marginalized communities. Norway lacked both the strategy and leverage to confront the structural inequalities driving the war. In other words, under the guise of facilitating peace, Norway aligned itself with the powerful. Its efforts, Stokke tells, wrapped in the rhetoric of liberal peacebuilding, failed to address real political grievances and instead smoothed the return of a neoliberal state order. The same pattern then re-emerged in Myanmar in the 2010s.
“Norway became the envoy of the West, that went in to test the waters, to find out what do they [the Thein Sein administration] say? See how they respond, and report back to the West,” he recalls. “When [Norway] came to Myanmar, it was very clear that [their] engagement was interest-based. It was no longer pretending to be just altruistic.”
Stokke argues that the process that Norway ultimately undertook during these years was worlds apart from other, more benign and effective models from past decades which it could have looked to instead. “This was not the negotiated transition of South Africa or Latin American countries in the in the 1980s,” he says. “It was an authoritarian-led transition to less-closed dictatorship or electoral autocracy.” Scholars, he added, “now call [this] illiberal peace building.” The result was a peace that looked good on paper but hollow in practice—what Stokke describes as “a fake democracy and fake peace.”
The tragedy, in his view, lay not in Norway’s intentions but in its blindness. Its peacebuilding approach “actually undermined the forces for power sharing and democracy,” he says. “It was done in in a developmentalist way, relying very much on the state actor and in the process then reducing, cutting or making relatively less important the support to the political forces fighting for democracy and federalism.”
When asked whether this was complicity or naivete, Stokke chooses a mix of both. He believes that Norway acted in good faithm but without courage or comprehension. Oslo hoped that it was nurturing reformist generals—“softliners”—when in fact it was strengthening the architecture of repression. The Norwegian establishment internalized a fantasy of gradual transition, mistaking a military-led managed opening for democratization. He adds that diplomats hung clung to the notion that momentum alone would push Myanmar forward, ignoring the army’s unwavering goal: a controlled electoral autocracy that preserved military supremacy under a democratic mask. “So Norway was there as a diplomat, as an aid donor and as an investor,” he explains—roles that revealed a convergence of moral rhetoric and strategic ambition.
The 2015 election shattered this illusion. Contrary to Oslo’s expectations, the military’s proxy party was crushed, and the NLD’s overwhelming victory revealed how little they had understood Myanmar’s political reality. The people had not rewarded the generals for their “reforms”; they had rejected them entirely. For Norway, this was a rude awakening— a moment when its careful alignment with the regime became a moral humiliation. Yet rather than confront its mistakes, Stokke shares how Norway quietly adjusted course, continuing its aid programs and business interests without public reckoning. “There should be a critical reflection and an open debate about it, and we haven’t really had that,” he says. “At the very least there should be an independent study of Norway’s engagement.”
After the 2021 coup, Norway’s response again revealed timidity. Aid continued but was carefully sanitized— channeled through UN agencies and international NGOs, keeping a polite distance from the resistance movement. “At times, I find it surprising or unfortunate that they don’t come out in support of those actors who are really at the forefront of the struggle for better democracy in Myanmar,” he admits. After all, the coup created “a very strong movement for a federal democratic revolution,” yet Norway, trapped in old logics of neutrality and state-centrism, withheld recognition and support.
Stokke laments what he called a global normalization of autocracy— a dark age of democratic erosion in which Myanmar is both victim and vanguard. Meanwhile, Western nations like Norway cling to outdated formulas of dialogue and state-building, unable to recognize that these frameworks now serve dictatorships rather than dismantle them. The resistance inside Myanmar, Stokke argues, has written the true playbook for this era— a model of symbolic, political, and armed resistance that continues to hold ground against overwhelming odds.
Stokke sees Myanmar’s struggle in a global context. The autocrat’s playbook, he says, is now international— and so must be the response. Supporting Myanmar’s resistance is not charity; it is solidarity for a battle now facing us all. Oslo’s failure to recognize this— its retreat into procedural neutrality and self-justifying modesty— is more than a diplomatic mistake. It is a moral collapse, one that echoes through its history of well-meaning interventions that leave broken nations in their wake. “Norway should be a risk taker again,” he says in closing, “because Norway, as a small country with some capacities and some resources can afford to do that.”