Myanmar’s war is often described as a clash of ideologies, ethnic identities and competing visions of the state. That is true, but incomplete. At its core, Myanmar’s crisis is also a resource-driven conflict, intensified by geography.
The generals did not cling to power for the symbolism of uniform and flag alone. They did so because Myanmar sits on jade, gas, oil, timber, minerals, rare earths, and hydropower potential, while occupying corridors that connect China and India to the Indian Ocean.
Natural wealth should have helped Myanmar build a modern state. Instead, it has helped to finance a permanent war economy.
In resource-dependent states, rulers who can survive on oil, gas, minerals, or timber rents often feel less pressure to tax citizens fairly, deliver services, or build accountable institutions. Wealth flows upward through monopolies, concessions and military-linked companies. Citizens become subjects to be managed, not stakeholders to be served.
The contrast with resource-poor success stories is striking. Japan, South Korea, and Singapore had no comparable mineral cushion. They were forced to treat human beings as their primary national asset.
The World Bank has described Singapore’s rise as a case of integrating human capital into national development planning. Myanmar, during many of the same decades, repeatedly closed universities, suppressed independent thought, and pushed educated citizens to leave.
The tragedy is not that Myanmar lacked wealth. It is that the state treated land, minerals, and border corridors as prizes to be controlled, while treating people as threats.
The Military’s Rentier State
Since Ne Win’s 1962 coup, Myanmar’s military has behaved like a rentier elite. Rather than building legitimacy through public service, it captured revenue streams from state-owned enterprises, military conglomerates, gas exports, jade, timber, mining and cross-border trade.
Myanma Economic Holdings Limited and Myanmar Economic Corporation have long given the armed forces autonomy from civilian oversight. A UN fact-finding mission found extensive military business interests across gems, manufacturing, tourism, banking, and natural resources, and concluded that these revenues helped sustain the Tatmadaw’s independence from elected authority.
Oil and gas remain central. The US Treasury has described Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise as the military regime’s largest single source of foreign revenue, providing hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Human Rights Watch has estimated that MOGE’s natural-gas projects generate more than US$1 billion annually for the junta.
Jade and rare earths show the same pattern in borderland form. Hpakant’s jade mines have enriched military-linked companies, armed groups, cronies, and smugglers for decades.
Global Witness has documented how jade money has helped fund conflict and corruption, while its reporting on rare earths shows Myanmar’s growing role in conflict-linked supply chains for China’s clean-energy and high-tech industries.
The result is not simply corruption. It is a political economy in which violence protects revenue, and revenue sustains violence.
Corridors and fragmentation
Myanmar is rich not only in natural resources but also in strategic routes. For China, Kyaukphyu provides access to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean through oil and gas pipelines to Yunnan. The CSIS think tank describes Kyaukphyu as the endpoint of China’s pipelines to Kunming and a key part of Beijing’s strategy to diversify energy routes.
For India, Myanmar is the land bridge to Southeast Asia and a buffer against China. India’s Act East policy depends on connectivity projects such as the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, both constrained by Myanmar’s instability, as regional analysts have noted in the Lowy Institute.
For Thailand, Myanmar is an energy source, a border-security concern, and a major source of migrant labor. More than two million Myanmar nationals are formally registered as migrant workers in Thailand, while many more remain undocumented, according to an IOM figure cited by DVB. They help staff farms, fisheries, factories, construction sites, and households.
This combination of commodities and corridors gives external actors incentives to deal with whoever can provide access, regardless of domestic legitimacy. Myanmar’s crisis is also a regional economy of access, extraction and risk management.
That is why the Tatmadaw has always needed a divided Myanmar more than a united one. Ethnic diversity did not cause the war. It became the raw material for a divide-and-rule strategy that helped secure resource zones and strategic routes.
Many of the country’s richest assets lie in ethnic areas: jade and rare earths in Kachin and northern Shan; ports and offshore gas near Rakhine; cross-border routes through Karen, Mon, and Shan areas; and hydropower potential across upland regions.
Instead of treating these communities as partners in a federal union, successive military regimes treated them as obstacles to be pacified, fragmented, or co-opted.
Ceasefire deals allowed some armed actors to profit from timber, mining, and border trade. Counterinsurgency campaigns depopulated strategic zones and opened land for military-linked business. Propaganda framed ethnic demands for federalism as secessionism. From the standpoint of extraction, semi-governed space was not a failure – it was useful.
The post-junta danger
The post-2021 revolution has changed the military balance, but not the material incentives. As territory falls out of junta control, resistance forces and local authorities face the same hard question: how to fund administration, welfare, and war?
The easiest answers are also the most dangerous: taxing checkpoints, controlling border trade, tapping timber or mining, seeking shares of jade or rare-earth revenue, or tolerating criminal economies. These may seem necessary in wartime. If they become permanent, the revolution risks reproducing the system it set out to destroy.
That is the danger of warlordism. Once commanders, local elites, or armed organizations depend on resource rents without civilian oversight, their incentives begin to resemble those of the old order. A post-junta order must therefore be more than an anti-military coalition. It must become a new social contract.
If Myanmar’s war is partly fueled by resource rents, then resource governance cannot be postponed until after victory. It must be built into the political settlement from the beginning.
Natural resources should be treated as a shared national trust, not the spoils of war. Extraction, taxation, and concessions must require civilian authorization, transparent accounting, environmental safeguards and community consent. Ethnic states and regions must have meaningful authority over local resources within a democratic federal framework. Federalism cannot be symbolic.
Armed organizations, including resistance forces, must also move away from direct control of resource revenue. Security actors may be necessary in wartime, but they cannot become permanent gatekeepers of mines, forests, checkpoints, and ports.
Most importantly, Myanmar must elevate human resources from rhetoric to strategy. Even during war, opposition bodies, civil society, ethnic administrations, and the diaspora can support community schools, digital education, health networks, professional mentoring and training for displaced youth. These efforts are the foundation of a country that does not return to rentier politics.
Regional and global actors also face a choice. They can keep treating Myanmar as a problem to be managed at the lowest possible cost, or they can stop feeding the structures that make the conflict profitable.
Reducing support for junta-controlled resource sectors would weaken the regime’s capacity to wage war indefinitely. Supporting civilian-led governance in non-junta areas would shift the balance toward people and institutions.
Myanmar’s future turns on a simple choice. Will it remain a resource state, where armed men fight over what can be dug, cut, pumped, taxed, or smuggled? Or will it become a people-centered federal republic, where natural wealth serves human development instead of financing domination?
Myanmar’s people have already shown extraordinary courage. But courage alone cannot defeat the resource curse. The revolution must also build rules, institutions and safeguards before victory, not after. Otherwise, the old war economy may survive under new flags.
James Shwe is a Myanmar American professional engineer and advocate for democracy in Myanmar, affiliated with the Los Angeles Myanmar Movement.
