ABSTRACT

Among the many challenges that were inherited by the NLD-led government in 2016, perhaps the most difficult is alleviating the country’s seven-decade-old armed conflicts, which in recent years have seen their most intense period of violence since the 1980s. The conflicts emerged over constitutional disputes prior to independence and have persisted through more than five decades of rule by the Bamar military class, manifesting in sporadic armed conflict between countless Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) and the Myanmar Armed Forces (Tatmadaw).