Here Be Dragons
Coming Soon….
“This is not simply about solving the conflict, but about understanding the conflict, to begin with,” explains Bhanubhatra “Kaan” Jittiang, an assistant professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University and director of the Nelson Mandela Center for Conflict Resolution and Human Security. He argues that external efforts to mediate or manage Myanmar’s conflict repeatedly fail because they begin from a mistaken assumption: that Myanmar functions as a centralized, coherent nation-state. In his view, that assumption collapses because Myanmar is structurally complex, rapidly changing, and shaped by fragmented authority, layered identities, and long-running patterns of violence that have become normalized. Any workable pathway, he insists, must begin with an accurate account of how power, legitimacy, and survival actually operate, rather than with slogans about peace, formulaic dialogue, neat stakeholder categories, or one-size-fits-all templates.
Kaan situates his engagement with Myanmar in a professional trajectory focused on refugees, humanitarian affairs, international development, and conflict. As a graduate student in 2016, he studied refugee issues and began examining the Rohingya situation as a major regional displacement dynamic, most specifically in terms of refugees in Bangkok. After the 2021 coup, his work shifted toward the refugee influx in border areas due to the conflict. He began going more regularly to the frontier to understand refugee dynamics there, still approaching them through the lens of Thai policy and perspective, but increasingly drawn into Myanmar’s political landscape. Refugee work, he explains, is not an endpoint but an entry point, because taking displacement seriously forces attention to the political and security systems that produce it.
Although Kaan grew up in Thailand with constant proximity to Myanmar and frequent interaction with people from there, he distinguishes everyday familiarity from genuine understanding. Myanmar is often perceived in Thailand— even among educated observers— as something like Thailand itself: a centralized state in which authority flowed from a governing center to the periphery. Ethnic diversity was acknowledged in general terms, but the political meaning of those differences, and the way they shaped governance and conflict, were poorly understood. Myanmar was frequently described in Thailand as “federal,” yet that description was filtered through a centralized Thai frame, mistaking political rhetoric for lived governance on the ground.
Kaan argues that this frame quickly breaks down, however, when confronted with Myanmar’s reality. During early fieldwork after the coup, he encountered an environment crowded with organizations, armed actors, and affiliations that did not fit a simple center–periphery model. He recalls needing to carry lists of acronyms just to keep track of the groups involved. That initial confusion became, for him, emblematic of Myanmar itself: many of the categories outsiders rely on are not fixed, and political and social organization often operates through overlapping layers rather than neat units. But within Myanmar’s major ethnic groups, Kaan emphasizes, smaller subgroups exist whose distinctions matter deeply for social life, political authority, and representation.
Kaan argues further that Myanmar’s complexity is not simply one of many characteristics to consider when engaging with the country, but actually defines the situation. When outsiders try to simplify it in order to fit familiar frameworks, they similarly reach for simple solutions, such as “bringing everyone to the table,” without confronting what “everyone” means in practice. The composition of that table, he argues, is not a technical detail; it is the conflict. Who is included, who is excluded, who recognizes whom, and who refuses to sit with whom, are not secondary questions. Pretending otherwise leads to plans that appear coherent on paper but fail in the field.
He also emphasizes that Myanmar’s situation changes rapidly, making static understandings dangerous. Kaan recognizes that even brief disengagement can render analysis outdated, including his own. “In just two to three weeks, things change,” he says. As a result, many actors operate with stale narratives and misread shifts in alliances, territorial control, or changes in who actually issues documents, manages services, and regulates daily life. This volatility produces what he describes as parallel conversations: external actors stabilize the situation into simplified narratives, while those with closer exposure respond to realities that continue to shift. Because these perspectives are built from different information and assumptions, they do not converge, and decisions about aid, engagement, or mediation are often made for conditions that no longer exist.
Kaan repeatedly anchors his analysis in regional dynamics, arguing that Myanmar cannot be separated from neighboring states that share long borders and constant cross-border effects. In Thailand’s case, he argues, Myanmar’s crisis is not a distant tragedy but a direct pressure on security and governance. He stresses the length of the shared border and the fact that Myanmar spans Thailand from south to north, making spillover a permanent condition rather than an occasional disruption. This is why Thailand’s perspective matters—and also why it can distort understanding when Thailand projects its own administrative model outward.
Kaan also argues that Thailand’s official engagement with Myanmar typically reflects its centralized bureaucracy. In a centralized state, officials often assume that meaningful engagement begins at the capital, so whoever controls the center is treated as the primary interlocutor for policy, security coordination, and diplomacy. Kaan contends that this assumption leads to persistent focus on whichever regime holds Naypyidaw, because bureaucrats default to treating it as a government capable of projecting authority in the way Bangkok often can. Myanmar, he reiterates, does not function this way. It is closer to a fragmented political space where multiple authorities operate and where the center has historically attempted to force cohesion rather than embody it. All this makes Thailand particularly prone to misreading Myanmar’s highly fragmented reality, even if some pragmatic engagement with sub-state authorities does occur on the ground.
He frames this mismatch as a practical policy problem rather than a theoretical one. If Thailand’s interests include border security, he argues, they cannot be served by capital-focused engagement alone, because many of the actors shaping stability or instability operate along the border rather than at the center. Engagement in border regions already occurs through local officials, NGOs, and informal relationships, but it depends heavily on trust and exposure. Trust builds over time through repeated contact, and exposure allows practitioners to learn who actually holds authority in specific places. This is why border-derived understanding can diverge sharply from capital-based perspectives, and why policy coordination often falters when situational knowledge cannot be absorbed by centralized systems.
Turning to humanitarian affairs, Kaan argues that humanitarian action is often conceptualized too narrowly. He criticizes approaches that equate humanitarianism with emergency delivery alone, as if catastrophic displacement would be just a brief interruption. In Myanmar’s context, he insists, humanitarian work should also address dignity, protection, and agency. People need more than survival; they need education, livelihood pathways, and the ability to avoid exploitative systems. Displacement is long-term, and border populations can live in constrained conditions for decades. Ad hoc responses fail, he argues, because they assume crises will end soon and therefore neglect long-term human capacity.
He links this critique to national security. State actors, he argues, often conflate state security with national security, treating the stability of governing institutions as synonymous with the safety of the population. In reality, security cannot be bounded by borders. Disease, trafficking, and illicit economies cross freely. Even when health systems are badly degraded, he argues, targeted preventive investment—such as maintaining vaccination in border areas—can still prevent far more costly outbreaks later. He uses scam economies and trafficking to make a similar point: enforcement alone cannot succeed when people are driven by survival and the absence of lawful livelihoods. Creating legal pathways, protection, and opportunity is therefore part of building security, not separate from it.
Kaan’s people-centric focus intensifies when he describes the generational impact of prolonged crisis. Myanmar, he argues, is losing a generation of young people whose education and professional development are frozen by conflict and displacement. He recalls interviewing a young woman who, many years later, would ask him, “Can you remember me?”—a question that, for him, captures the fear of being forgotten, with her life remaining frozen and her circumstances unchanged, as the rest of the world moves on. He also recalls meeting a refugee who had been a trained teacher, but became a farmer in Thailand because the exigencies of survival had removed choice from his life. These encounters reinforce his view that the crisis is not only military or political; it is a slow erosion of human capital that any future recovery will require.
This perspective shapes his skepticism toward political milestones promoted as solutions without enabling conditions. He rejects the elections conducted under current conditions, stating plainly that, “it’s not an election, it’s a sham.” Elections, he argues, are beginnings rather than endpoints, and they require security, participation, and legitimacy that cannot exist amid displacement and fear. Treating procedural performance as resolution risks normalizing violence and encouraging fatigue.
Kaan returns to his most challenging claim: the typical “nation-state” frame does not really apply to Myanmar. Ethnicity, nation, and state, he argues, are constructed rather than timeless entities. Because Myanmar does not function like a unified, sovereign state, engagement premised on that assumption is bound to miss the mark. He suggests that neighboring countries engage with the authorities that actually shape border realities, prioritizing civilian protection and development across health, education, welfare, and livelihoods. He is not advocating that Myanmar become fragmented into multiple, smaller, sovereign states, through what is commonly known as Balkanization. Rather, he argues for pragmatic, flexible engagement that allows governance and protection to emerge without forcing the premature resolution of formal sovereignty.
Kaan closes by reaffirming that people must remain at the center. Outside actors should help create enabling environments for Myanmar people to deliberate, build, and decide their own pathways, without dictating outcomes. Durable engagement, he argues, depends less on rigid state protocols than on sustained investment in human beings, because people are the only foundation on which any future political order can be rebuilt. He concludes, “People have to be at the heart, and it must always be at the heart.”