Myanmar - the Junta's Quiet Grip
- Dawud Mustifa
- Feb 19
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 26
In July 2024, Myanmar felt compressed. Not geographically, but politically. Beyond Yangon, leaving the city required prior approval and an escort. The distance between places was measured in permissions, not miles, and restrictions could shift by township without warning. I felt imprisoned inside of Yangon.
By November 2025, the pressure had shifted. The country felt markedly different. Not free, but movement beyond Yangon no longer required an escort, opening access to towns, rural areas, and even stretches of jungle I couldn’t reach before. The contrast showed how power can loosen or tighten without any official announcement.
This isn’t a story about Myanmar “opening”. It’s about control changing shape: from movement restrictions to constraints embedded in fuel, electricity, phones, and planning.
What struck me, both times, was how control didn’t always announce itself in slogans or decrees. In July 2024, Yangon moved with practiced caution. People still went to work, still ate, still laughed. But the rhythm was defensive, as if normal life had learned to keep its head down. Conversation bent away from specifics. A taxi driver, noticing my questions, gave a half-smile and kept his eyes on the road: ‘Here, we talk about traffic, not about tomorrow.’ Then, softer: ‘You can be right and still get in trouble.’ Even simple questions, where to go next, who to visit, how to get there, seemed to trigger a silent internal risk calculation.
That summer, being unable to leave the city narrowed everything: queues that formed and vanished, gaps in shop shelves, and power cuts that reset the day into intervals. A shopkeeper near my street tapped the side of his small generator like it was a family member: ‘This is my second rent.’ When the lights dropped, generators and candles didn’t simply fill the darkness. They revealed who could afford continuity. Even the hum of a motor felt political, a private solution to a public failure.
Outside the city, the conflict and the economy pressed in closer. Myanmar’s civil war had intensified since the 2021 coup, with shifting frontlines and uneven control, and the economy had been dragged along behind it. By mid-2024, three million people had been displaced since the coup [1], a background fact that made ‘normal movement’ feel like a privilege rather than a default. The junta’s activation of conscription in February 2024 did more than add soldiers. On 10 February 2024, the authorities ordered the long-standing People’s Military Service Law to be activated, requiring men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27 to register for service, with penalties for evasion including prison terms [4]. State media and international reporting described plans to draft thousands each month. It helped explain the sudden rush to disappear from view. It added fear, and fear changed behaviour at household level: some fled, others stayed out of sight. Associated Press and Human Rights Watch documented the conscription drive, the coercive pressure around it, and how it reshaped civilian life, especially for young people and their families [5].
In that context, movement has a price. When you can’t move freely, you can’t trade freely either. You can’t change jobs or relocate without risking the wrong kind of attention. Even visiting family can feel like a decision with consequences. Poverty reached 32.1% by June 2024 [2], alongside labour shortages worsened by conflict and conscription. The kyat’s instability showed up in ordinary transactions, where prices could change between morning and evening.
On my return in November 2025, the change was immediately obvious. I could leave the city. I could go far. Even then, some signals stayed bluntly visible. In November 2025, I still saw armed guards posted on many street corners, a quiet reminder that the state’s presence is not an idea here but part of the street furniture.
If anything, the contrast exposed a different trade-off: physical movement felt looser, while the digital space tightened. A Cybersecurity Law enacted in 2025 widened the state’s leverage over online communication, including penalties linked to the tools people use to evade censorship. The road opened into smaller towns where daily life was more improvised, less tied to the city’s systems. In places like this, politics is rarely discussed in theory. It shows up in fuel prices and absences. In what arrives late, and what stops arriving altogether. At a roadside stall, a woman counted out change twice, then shrugged: ‘Fuel decides everything now. When it jumps, food jumps. When it disappears, people disappear too.’ When I asked where the young men had gone, she didn’t answer directly: ‘Some went away. Some stayed inside.’
The countryside also complicated the neat story outsiders sometimes want: that a country is either “open” or “closed”, stable or collapsed. Myanmar, in late 2025, felt uneven, like a patchwork. Areas that seemed looser on paper could still feel socially tighter. In some places, people were chatty, generous, quick to tease. In others, a sentence could end abruptly, as if a second person had entered the room. You learn to listen for what isn’t said. Silence is often the most reliable clue you get.
Economically, the strain was still visible. The World Bank’s Myanmar Economic Monitor pointed to weak demand and labour shortages, with power outages as the constant multiplier. In firm survey data, about three-quarters of businesses reported power outages in April 2025 [3], up from 42% a year earlier, the kind of infrastructure drift that turns time into a coping strategy. That matches the texture on the ground: days organised around electricity, commerce organised around scarcity, and the sense that the system can shift again without warning. That volatility is not abstract: travel advisories regularly note curfews and local orders that can change quickly, with real penalties if ignored [6].
What changed most between 2024 and 2025 was not a headline event. It was what became possible at the edges, and what quietly became riskier. A country can loosen without becoming free. It can tighten without declaring a new rule. And for travellers, residents, anyone trying to understand power when it isn’t giving speeches, the real story is logistical: who moves without friction, and who has to negotiate every step.
What stayed with me most was not a single scene, but a shift in my own instincts as an observer. In places that are routinely flattened into headlines, the real work is learning when to look harder and when to stop pushing. I found myself paying more attention to pacing than to spectacle: how quickly people warmed, how carefully they placed a detail, how often they returned to ordinary topics as a way of keeping life intact.
Having travelled widely since I was young, that early speed, country after country, taught me how to enter new places confidently. Myanmar demanded the opposite. It rewarded patience and understatement. You learn to leave some questions untouched. Not because the answers don’t matter, but because the cost of being too direct is rarely paid by the visitor.
A short visit offers a close-up, not the whole picture. My aim here was to report what I could see without claiming it as mine. Myanmar, on both visits, showed what it takes to keep ordinary life intact when “normal” is under strain, even when the map looks unchanged. If you stay at the level of temples and sunsets, you will miss the country itself.
Photography: All photographs accompanying this piece were taken by Dawud during the trips described.
Reporting note: The quoted remarks in this piece are anonymised and lightly paraphrased from translated conversations during both trips; where necessary, some lines are composites used to protect identities.
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