The Long Stalemate
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“I don't see how there could be a new social contract for a post-war, post-conflict Myanmar.” With this bleak statement, Henning Glaser sets the tone for his reflections on Myanmar’s unraveling tragedy.
Glaser is a German legal scholar whose career bridges European constitutional law and Southeast Asian governance, and he has been at the Faculty of Law at Thammasat University since 2007. Glaser also co-founded the German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance, known as CPG, which he continues to direct. Over the years, his expertise has spanned from Afghanistan to Japan, with Myanmar becoming one of his most sustained areas of engagement.
Glaser’s involvement with Myanmar began soon after the founding of CPG. As the country tentatively opened politically in the early 2010s, he helped convene dialogues on the transition. In subsequent years, he organized lectures and panels on Myanmar’s political landscape, and after the 2021 coup, the CPG pivoted to analyzing the conflict and its regional implications, hosting webinars, publishing commentary, and briefing international delegations. Glaser's academic research also contributes to scholarly debates about constitutional design and democratization in Southeast Asia.
Glaser begins the discussion by noting that his outlook on the conflict is somewhat pessimistic. He does not foresee a viable constitution emerging, nor a decisive collapse of the junta. “It doesn't look like the military is getting to the point of weakness, that it breaks down," he notes. Instead, he anticipates a prolonged stalemate: the regime retains enough capacity to sustain operations, while opposition groups remain too fragmented to forge a nationwide social contract. Glaser adds that the ethnic armed organizations have vastly different interests, roadmaps, and visions, making consensus on a federal constitution nearly impossible. At the same time, he acknowledges the remarkable energy of Myanmar’s younger generation and their grassroots experiments in local governance, though he doubts these can coalesce into a coherent national framework. As an illustration, he points to Kurdistan in Iraq: a region that achieves stability locally without catalyzing a broader national solution.
Glaser warns that global power struggles lie at the heart of Myanmar’s predicament. He argues that the world’s strongest states are less interested in peace or democracy than in positioning themselves in a larger contest for influence. “It is inevitable that a primary focus on geopolitics is creating tension and border conflicts and wars," he says. "We see that everywhere.” This obsession with power politics, he continues, reduces countries like Myanmar to pawns on a wider chessboard, where strategic interests outweigh humanitarian concerns. The result is a cycle of border clashes, proxy struggles, and wars across the globe, of which Myanmar is only one of many tragic examples caught in this relentless game.
From this global perspective, Glaser turns to Myanmar’s regional and international entanglements. He describes China as the most decisive external actor, simultaneously supporting the junta while cultivating ties with select ethnic armed groups. He explains that Beijing has moved from outright junta backing to a more pragmatic “play both sides” approach, carefully balancing its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) interests and border security. Thailand, he says, suffers destabilization from narcotics, arms, and human trafficking, but its internal factions pursue different agendas toward Myanmar. Bangladesh, he notes, is crushed by the Rohingya crisis, with organized crime in the refugee camps destabilizing both human rights and domestic security. India, he observes, watches uneasily due to insurgencies in its northeast, with its engagement hinging largely on relations with China. Russia and Belarus, he sums up, continue to supply weapons and doctrine to the Burmese military, while Western countries, in his view, lack both will and influence. He does not foresee Washington deliberately siding with the junta, but worries about waning Western commitment to human rights in the global south.
Glaser also stresses how the conflict entrenches organized crime. Scam centers, narcotics, arms smuggling, and human trafficking thrive in lawless border zones, creating a criminal economy that feeds on despair, benefits armed actors, and sustains the war. Such networks destabilize neighboring states but remain hard to disrupt. “If you have this involvement of organized crime and an organized criminal economy, then you can sustain that for a very, very long time," he warns. "That is also why [it can produce a] rather long stalemate.” In this environment, he sees little hope for decisive change.
On the question of constitutions, Glaser stresses the immense importance of genuine constitutional drafting in any democratic transition. He argues that constitutions are not just technical documents but the foundation for legitimacy, governance, and a shared social contract. Yet what currently exists in Myanmar, he laments, falls far short of this standard. “The documents we have right now, they are very vague," he says. "They are not legal in nature. I would say they are more like political pamphlets, political declarations, but they would not carry a constitution drafting project.” For Glaser, this lack of legal seriousness dooms the attempts to build a durable framework for peace or democracy, leaving the country stuck with declarations rather than binding law.
Concerning the upcoming December elections, Glaser dismisses the junta’s plans as neither free nor fair. He predicts they will yield only a thin layer of legitimacy without altering the underlying reality. He recalls that even the earlier transition was a cruel illusion, having described it as a “democratic façade with a military heart.” The 2008 Constitution’s guarantee of 25 percent parliamentary seats for the military, he argues, is unique globally and designed to entrench praetorianism— the military’s role as perpetual guardian and kingmaker in politics. Reflecting on Aung San Suu Kyi's role as State Councilor, he suggests that once she realized she could not reform the military, she instead accommodated herself to its system, perhaps hoping to preserve limited democratic elements.
Glaser repeatedly emphasizes the complexity of Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts, describing them as perhaps the most fragmented conflict in the world today. With dozens of groups pursuing divergent goals, some aligned with democratic ideals and others indifferent or hostile, he sees little prospect of unifying leadership. There is no internal unifier and no external guarantor. This asymmetrical anarchy, in his words, leaves Myanmar staring into an abyss with perhaps the most hopeless outlook of any global conflict waging today.
Ultimately, Glaser’s analysis offers a chilling assessment. He acknowledges the dedication of Myanmar’s young activists, the resilience of the diaspora in building legal expertise, and the creativity of local governance experiments. Yet he insists these positive forces are overshadowed by overwhelming obstacles: a junta capable of survival, fragmented opposition, intrusive neighbors, and entrenched organized crime. For him, Myanmar’s future is shaped not only by its internal struggles but also by a global order marked by geopolitics, waning Western influence, and the rise of the global south. The result, he fears, is a protracted stalemate in which the people of Myanmar bear the heaviest burden.
Yet even in the midst of his grim analysis, Glaser circles back to the one source of light he sees: the profound energy of those still striving for change. He stresses that despite the overwhelming odds, their determination and resilience stand out as a force that cannot be ignored, a reminder that even in the darkest contexts, there remains a reservoir of hope. “I totally admire all the young people, middle-aged people, and older people in the diaspora who put incredible efforts to keep up and to gain legal knowledge, to draft laws, to understand how to translate policies into law, how to interpret laws. That is remarkable.”