Burma (Myanmar)

Burma sits at the intersection of Southeast and South Asia, bordered by China, India, Thailand, Laos, and Bangladesh — a geography that makes it a corridor state for every major regional power and a persistent theater for proxy competition. General Min Aung Hlaing's February 2021 coup, which dissolved the elected National League for Democracy government and detained State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, erased a decade of managed liberalization and returned the Tatmadaw to uncontested formal authority. The military, which has governed Burma under various institutional arrangements since Ne Win's 1962 takeover, treats civilian government as a concession to be revoked rather than a transfer of power to be respected.

The opposition has not collapsed. The National Unity Government, formed in the coup's immediate aftermath, drew in NLD figures, ethnic minority representatives, and civil society networks to contest the junta's legitimacy. Its armed wing — the People's Defense Forces — fights alongside ethnic armed organizations that predate the coup by decades, some since independence in 1948. By 2024 this coalition had seized meaningful territory, particularly in border regions where the Tatmadaw's reach has always been thin. Burma is not a state undergoing a civil conflict that interrupts normal politics; the contest over who constitutes the state is the politics. That distinction defines every other fact in this file.

Burma occupies 676,578 square kilometres of mainland Southeast Asia — slightly smaller than Texas — centred on geographic coordinates of 22°N, 98°E and positioned between Bangladesh to the northwest and Thailand to the southeast, with its western and southern margins opening onto the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Of that total area, 653,508 square kilometres is land; the remaining 23,070 square kilometres is water. The coastline extends 1,930 kilometres, and Burma asserts a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea, a 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone, and a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, with continental shelf claims reaching either 200 nautical miles or to the edge of the continental margin.

The defining structural feature of the terrain is a basin surrounded by walls. Central lowlands — the heartland of rice cultivation and the principal river corridors — are encircled by steep, rugged highlands that form natural barriers on every compass point. Mean elevation is 702 metres, but the range is extreme: Gamlang Razi in the far north rises to 5,870 metres, the highest point in Southeast Asia, while the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal define the zero-metre baseline to the south. That vertical span of nearly six kilometres across a single national territory is unusual anywhere in the region.

Burma's land boundaries total 6,522 kilometres shared with five states: Thailand accounts for the longest single border at 2,416 kilometres, followed by China at 2,129 kilometres, India at 1,468 kilometres, Bangladesh at 271 kilometres, and Laos at 238 kilometres. The Chinese and Thai frontiers together constitute more than two-thirds of Burma's total land perimeter, a structural fact that shapes the country's continental exposure. The river system reinforces that continental embeddedness: the Irrawaddy, which rises in China and reaches its mouth in Burma after 2,809 kilometres, drains a watershed of 413,710 square kilometres into the Indian Ocean. The Salween, sourced in China and shared with Thailand, runs 3,060 kilometres before its mouth in Burma. The Chindwin, an internal tributary, extends 1,158 kilometres. Burma also falls within the Mekong drainage basin — a 4,350-kilometre river whose watershed of 805,604 square kilometres drains to the Pacific Ocean through Cambodia and Vietnam.

Land use as of 2023 shows forests covering 42.4 percent of the country, the single largest category; agricultural land accounts for 19.9 percent, of which 16.9 percent is arable and 2.3 percent under permanent crops. Irrigated land stood at 17,140 square kilometres as of 2020. Natural resources include petroleum, natural gas, timber, hydropower, and a range of metals — tin, copper, zinc, tungsten, lead, antimony — alongside marble, limestone, coal, and precious stones, making the subsoil among the most mineralogically varied in the region.

The climate follows a dual-monsoon pattern: hot, cloudy, and humid from June through September under the southwest monsoon, then mild and dry from December through April under the northeast monsoon. That same June-to-September window brings flooding, landslides, and cyclone risk along the coast and river valleys, compounded periodically by earthquakes and drought.

Burma operates as a military regime. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing seized power on 1 February 2021, when the Tatmadaw declared the results of the November 2020 general election illegitimate and dissolved the Assembly of the Union — the bicameral Pyidaungsu Hluttaw established under the 2008 constitution. In place of the legislature, the military installed the State Administration Council, which has governed by decree since. The coup follows a pattern established across Burma's post-independence history: elected civilian government interrupted by military intervention, the 1962 and 1988 takeovers being the most direct precedents.

The constitutional framework nominally in force is the 2008 document, drafted under military supervision, approved by referendum on 29 May 2008, and designed with structural guarantees for military primacy. Most consequentially, it reserved 25 percent of parliamentary seats for military appointees by default, giving the armed forces an effective veto over any amendment requiring a 75 percent supermajority — the threshold that applies to all provisions touching basic principles, government structure, branches, emergencies, and the amendment procedure itself. The constitution's architecture was built to survive electoral defeat; the coup rendered even that arrangement moot.

Burma gained independence from the United Kingdom on 4 January 1948, the date commemorated as Independence Day. The administrative geography divides the country into seven regions, seven states, and one union territory. The regions — Ayeyarwady, Bago, Magway, Mandalay, Sagaing, Tanintharyi, and Yangon — are predominantly Burman lowland territories; the states — Chin, Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Mon, Rakhine, and Shan — correspond broadly to ethnic minority homelands along the country's borders. Nay Pyi Taw, the administrative capital constructed under military direction in the mid-2000s and whose name translates as "abode of kings," functions as the seat of government; Rangoon (Yangon), which the United States Government continues to recognize as the primary capital, remains the commercial center.

The legal system combines English common law inherited from codifications developed for colonial India with customary law. Burma has neither submitted a declaration accepting ICJ jurisdiction nor acceded to the International Criminal Court.

On 31 July 2025, the military government announced plans for elections to be held in late December 2025; polling took place on 28 December 2025. More than fifty parties registered under the regime's framework, though only nine contested nationwide. The National League for Democracy, which won the 2020 election by a decisive margin, was among more than eighty parties subsequently banned by the regime's election commission following a 2023 law imposing new compliance requirements. Universal suffrage at eighteen applies in formal statute; the political conditions under which that suffrage was exercised in December 2025 were defined entirely by the State Administration Council.

Burma's economy registers a GDP of $74.08 billion at official exchange rates as of 2024, with purchasing-power-parity output of $287.56 billion — equivalent to approximately $5,300 per capita in 2021 dollars. Real GDP contracted by 1 percent in 2024, reversing modest gains of 1 percent in 2023 and 4 percent in 2022. Industrial production declined 0.2 percent in 2024. The trajectory recalls the stagnation of the pre-reform decade before 2011, when external isolation and internal mismanagement suppressed output across every major sector.

Services account for the largest share of output at 41.4 percent of GDP, followed by industry at 37.8 percent and agriculture at 20.8 percent. A labor force of 22.742 million operates under a headline unemployment rate of 3.1 percent, though youth unemployment stands at 10 percent — 10.5 percent for males, 9.4 percent for females — indicating structural underemployment concentrated among younger cohorts. Households allocate 53.9 percent of expenditures to food, a figure that marks the economy's subsistence orientation more accurately than any output statistic.

Agriculture anchors rural livelihoods. Rice, sugarcane, vegetables, beans, and maize lead production by tonnage. Processing of these commodities feeds into an industrial base that also encompasses copper, tin, tungsten, iron, cement, pharmaceuticals, oil and natural gas, and the gem and jade trade. Garments and natural gas are the leading export commodities by value, joined by dried legumes, rare-earth metal compounds, and precious stones. China absorbs 32 percent of exports; Thailand takes 16 percent. On the import side, China again dominates at 40 percent, followed by Thailand at 18 percent and Singapore at 15 percent. Refined petroleum, synthetic fabric, and fertilizers constitute the primary import categories, revealing an economy that cannot internally meet its own energy or textile-input requirements.

Total exports reached $20.4 billion in 2021; imports stood at $23.1 billion the same year. External debt was valued at $8.748 billion in present-value terms as of 2023, against foreign-exchange and gold reserves of $9.338 billion — a margin that offers limited insulation. The kyat has depreciated steadily, moving from 1,381 per US dollar in 2020 to 2,100 in 2023. Tax revenues were recorded at 6 percent of GDP as of 2019, constraining fiscal capacity; the 2019 central government budget showed revenues of $10.945 billion against expenditures of $10.22 billion, a modest surplus by official accounting. Public debt stood at 35.7 percent of GDP as of 2016, the most recent available figure. Remittances contributed 1.6 percent of GDP in 2023, down from 2 percent in 2022.

Income distribution, measured by a Gini index of 30.7 in 2017, appears comparatively moderate by regional standards, though 24.8 percent of the population fell below the national poverty line that same year. The lowest income decile held 3.8 percent of income; the highest held 25.5 percent. Chinese import dependence at 40 percent, combined with China's 32 percent share of exports, leaves the trade account structurally anchored to a single bilateral relationship with limited diversification across either the export or import ledger.

The Tatmadaw's military expenditure has climbed steadily since 2020, when defence spending stood at 3.0 percent of GDP. By 2023 it reached 3.9 percent — the highest point in the five-year series, and a material increase from the 3.5 percent recorded in 2021, the year of the February coup. The single exception to the upward trajectory is the 4.1 percent recorded in 2019, under the preceding hybrid civilian-military arrangement, which sets the current mobilisation against a precedent of high expenditure predating the coup itself.

Active personnel strength is estimated at 150,000 as of 2025, though that figure carries acknowledged uncertainty. Reported losses in sustained fighting against anti-regime forces have eroded the Tatmadaw's standing manpower, and the gap between nominal order of battle and combat-available strength is a structural condition of the current conflict, not a temporary dip.

The conscription apparatus has undergone a significant formal change. The People's Military Service Law, enacted in 2010 but never enforced, was activated by the military government in February 2024. Under its provisions, men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 are subject to mandatory service with a 24-month obligation; specialists — doctors, engineers, mechanics — serve up to 36 months. In a declared emergency, all terms extend to 60 months. The military government announced an intake target of approximately 60,000 recruits annually. Separately, the Tatmadaw has recruited men between 18 and 60 into local militias during the insurgency, drawing on a manpower pool that extends well beyond the formal conscription cohort.

Taken together, the rising expenditure share, the contested personnel figures, and the enforcement of long-dormant conscription legislation define a force under sustained pressure absorbing heavier institutional costs than at any point in the post-2021 period.