Myanmar’s generals didn’t expect the nation to rise up against the coup they staged in February 2021. But after decades of stifling, direct military rule, the Burmese people had become used to another way of life during the relative openness of 2011–21. The army has been unable to suppress anti-coup protests as it did in 1962 and 1988; and, three years after sending tanks into Yangon, Naypyitaw and other cities, the army has yet to establish a functioning administration. For the first time since the 1970s, armed resistance is not confined to traditionally strife-torn frontier areas, where ethnic insurgents like the Karen National Union and Kachin Independence Army have been active for decades—it has spread to the majority-Burmese heartland, in the shape of the People’s Defence Forces. But the anti-junta forces are insufficiently well-equipped to defeat the much more heavily armed Myanmar army, which itself is stretched too thin, on several fronts, to crush the resistance. And, despite foreign observers’ assurances, there is no unity, common command or synchronised strategy among the various ethnic-minority and ethnic-Burmese resistance groups. This is a war that neither side can win. Caught in the middle, and bound to suffer most, are civilians.

A world-leading expert on Myanmar assesses the ongoing popular uprising against the military junta that deposed Aung San Suu Kyi.

Celebrated as a theatre of geo-economic connectivity typified by the ‘Act East’ policy, India’s near east is key not only to its great-power rivalry with China, which first boiled over in the 1962 war, but to the idea(s) of India itself. It is also one of the most intricately partitioned lands anywhere on Earth. Rent by communal and class violence, the region has birthed extreme forms of religious and ethnic nationalisms and communist movements. The Indian state’s survival instinct and pursuit of regional hegemony have only accentuated such extremes. This book scripts a new history of India’s eastward-looking diplomacy and statecraft. Narrated against the backdrop of separatist resistance within India’s own northeastern states, as well as rivalry with Beijing and Islamabad in Myanmar and Bangladesh, it offers a simple but compelling argument. The aspirations of ‘Act East’ mask an uncomfortable truth: India privileges political stability over economic opportunity in this region. In his chronicle of a state’s struggle to overcome war, displacement and interventionism, Avinash Paliwal lays bare the limits of independent India’s influence in its near east.

Alternate LCCN: 60-9882.