Rebel Politics after the Coup: Ethnic Armed Organisations and Myanmar’s Spring Revolution

Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) play a pivotal role in the revolutionary war against Myanmar’s junta. These ethnonational rebel movements have not only captured large swathes of territory, but they have also been crucial in transforming resistance into revolutionary warfare in the first place. The early support of some EAOs for the Spring Revolution was instrumental in this transformation. However, this support was not self-evident, especially in 2021 when most EAOs remained on the sidelines. To understand why the two most powerful EAO supporters of the Spring Revolution – the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) – made their strategic moves, this article argues that focusing on their political objectives, external environments, and past allegiances is insufficient. Instead, it highlights the importance of internal politics and bottom-up social forces in shaping KNU and KIO strategies. In doing so, the article revisits a figurational sociology of rebel politics and evaluates its applicability for comparing EAO politics in Myanmar after the coup. This helps to devise a systematic approach for analysing how the politics of EAOs influence their positioning towards the current crisis and how the Spring Revolution, in turn, affects EAO politics.