The Fire Next Time
Coming Soon…
“Everyone was following with bated breath, like what was going to happen with this movement!” exclaims Paul Vrieze, a Dutch journalist, about the protests that erupted in Myanmar after the coup. Vrieze has been intimately connected to the country for 15 years, first as a journalist for outlets such as The Irrawaddy and Myanmar Now, and later as a PhD researcher at the University of Gothenburg and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, focusing on the Spring Revolution. With his extensive journalistic background and PhD work on Myanmar’s protest movement, his insightful comments are a valuable perspective on what is transpiring there, and the direction in which a future Myanmar may go.
Vrieze spent several years working as a journalist in Cambodia, where he heard “old timers” talking about the excitement of Cambodia’s transition period in the 1990s. This made him feel like he’d missed something special. So in 2012 when he heard about Myanmar’s new opening, he felt that this was his opportunity to see a democratic government in the making. This was just after censorship had ended in the country, and independent media were allowed to operate in Yangon. Vrieze became the first foreign editor in The Irrawaddy’s Yangon newsroom. Politically, the Thein Sein government’s reforms and the NLD’s growing influence created a sense of momentum toward the 2015 elections.
However, Vrieze says there were some early warning signs that the transition was fragile. In particular, he notes the outbreak of anti-Rohingya violence just before he arrived. This revealed that although the government was enacting political reforms, it was still not addressing the country’s ethnic and religious divides, and that nationalist forces could quickly mobilize with impunity. And whatever democratic progress was being made was of course brought to an abrupt end by the February 2021 coup.
The initial nationwide protests in response impressed the world with their nonviolent discipline, even earning a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. However, the regime’s refusal to make concessions and its brutal crackdowns, particularly from late February to March 2021, triggered a shift toward armed resistance. It was then that Vrieze made his choice to focus his doctoral research on that transformation, seeing it as a rare and consequential case in social movement studies. Called Resisting the Return of Military Rule - Coalition Building, Armed Struggle and Governance by Myanmar’s Spring Revolution Movement, it traces the escalation from nonviolent protest to armed struggle, without significant fragmentation within the movement.
Vrieze explains a common dynamic of protest movements. They generally develop with a strong, collective identity and shared goals, so if the state attacks it through arrests, violence, or repression, participants experience it not just as a political setback but as a personal and communal assault, This, in turn, sparks both emotional and strategic responses, and what started as self-defense can quickly evolve into offensive resistance—what he calls a “slippery slope” toward armed struggle. This dynamic unfolded in Myanmar; the first armed actions arose in rural Sagaing and near Kale, where both Bamar and Chin communities engaged the military using traditional hunting rifles. Social media amplified this and other incidents, inspiring similar actions nationwide.
While some uprisings were impulsive, others—particularly in ethnic areas like Chin and Karen—were planned, building on ties with ethnic resistance organizations (EROs). Three patterns of uprisings emerged: spontaneous, rural uprisings in the Bamar region of central Myanmar; more organized insurrections in ethnic states; and individuals fleeing to ERO-controlled border areas for training. According to Vrieze, the state’s efforts to provoke fragmentation within the movement along the country’s historical ethnic and religious divides did not work. He notes that it has maintained a remarkable unity, and this inclusive, collective identity, which has enabled cooperation between Bamar-majority PDFs and ethnic armed groups, continues to be the movement’s main strength. But he says that sustaining unity will be challenging, especially as China attempts to draw some EROs into ceasefire deals with the junta. Grassroots solidarity remains strong, but political cohesion at leadership levels is harder to maintain, and political agreements on governance remain difficult to achieve.
Initially, that shift to armed resistance was bottom-up. The National Unity Government (NUG) adapted to the unfolding events, with its Ministry of Defense even initially proposing a Federal Army. This idea was resisted by EROs, however, who wished to maintain control in their areas, resulting in a lack of unified command structure between NUG-affiliated PDFs (People’s Defense Forces), autonomous forces, and EROs. In some regions, local PDFs happen to have strong ties to nearby ethnic resistance organizations, and so relatively smooth and joint operations are possible; an example of this is the cooperation between the Arakan Army (AA) and Bamar PDFs which, especially in strategic areas like the Ayeyarwady Delta, he believes could eventually be decisive. In other regions, however, tensions, mistrust, or competing priorities limit collaboration, with groups operating in parallel rather than under a unified command. The NUG’s lack of ground presence also limits its leverage over armed groups.
Turning to the topic of international recognition, Vrieze says that it ultimately hinges on effective control of territory. The NUG, while enjoying broad political legitimacy in the eyes of many, has never been able to establish a firm base inside the country. Without that presence, it struggles to turn its authority into real leverage, and any hope of formal recognition would depend on proving it can hold and administer territory. By contrast, the ethnic resistance organizations already run their own administrations, with long-standing systems for health care, education, and local justice. But these are seen as regional rather than national structures, which keeps them from being treated as a government in the eyes of the world. In areas under PDF influence, some rudimentary governance has emerged—local teams collecting taxes, organizing community defense, resolving disputes—but these efforts are fragile, reliant on volunteers, scarce resources, and often on cooperation with nearby EROs. The NUG has tried to project authority through “interim” institutions such as education programs and legal services, but without secure territory these remain patchwork efforts, run through clandestine networks and remote coordination. In the end, EROs can point to real governance but only at a regional scale, while the NUG has the broader political mandate but lacks the in-country structures to back it up.
Vrieze then addresses the issue of whether sustained non-violence would have worked. Theoretically, he explains, nonviolent resistance maximizes participation and can undermine a regime’s power base. Yet he believes that Myanmar’s military, deeply insulated from society, might well have withstood such tactics. Some historical cases, like South Africa, show that mainly nonviolent movements that also have a “radical flank” can benefit from its violent tactics; in Myanmar, it is now the opposite, a mainly armed resistance supplemented by nonviolent actions like the Civil Disobedience Movement. Vrieze also compares the situation in Myanmar with the resistance movement in Syria, where local governance under armed forces similarly emerged; civil society groups in both countries have played key roles in delivering humanitarian aid to hard-to-reach areas. And in both cases, the military regime has attacked their fledgling governance institutions to undermine alternative sources of legitimacy, which explains its assaults on non-military targets like schools, clinics, and administrative centers.
Overall, Vrieze says that although the Spring Revolution is not a coordinated movement, and in some regions relationships between groups is strained, its ability to escalate without fracturing is notable. He says that maintaining inclusivity, unity, and a shared political vision is essential whether resistance takes nonviolent or armed methods, and that sustaining cross-ethnic cooperation will determine the movement’s long-term viability. He warns that one factor that could erode that unity is China’s attempts to broker bilateral ceasefires with some EROs, a development that Vrieze is following closely.
He concludes with hope that the resistance’s collective identity and inclusiveness endure: “What’s going to be crucial is for the various parts of the resistance to be able to come together, agree on a shared vision for the future, and build the kind of political institutions that can sustain that unity. Without that, victory will be much harder to achieve.”