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Southeast Asia
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Thailand's COVID crisis
At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand won global praise for the quality of its response. It has since watched a rising caseload overwhelm world-class public health defences. Craig Keating argues that government complacency left the country unprepared for the influx of new, highly-transmissible, virus strains.
Coronavirus compounds Myanmar's coup crisis
Having suffered the depredations of a violent military takeover and a collapse in medical care, the people of Myanmar are now confronted with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the region. Former ambassador Nicholas Coppel argues that the past record suggests little action can be expected from a military regime that is likely to “callously welcome” the impact of the disease on dampening civil unrest.
Myanmar: no light on the horizon
The prospect of popular ‘democratic’ revolution displacing the military in Myanmar looks increasingly remote. Veteran analyst Andrew Selth argues the more likely scenario is for Myanmar to lurch back into isolation as a poor, “bitterly divided and broken-backed authoritarian state”.
What next for Myanmar’s blundering army bosses?
As fighting in Myanmar between the army, armed ethnic groups and civilians drags on, there appears little prospect of a peaceful compromise to end the bloodshed. Professor Nicholas Farrelly argues the military’s model of co-option of pliant civilians worked for a time but there is increasingly no way back to that experiment in quasi democracy.
Myanmar’s protests now a revolutionary cause
Myanmar’s protest movement is fighting back against the army coup with urban guerrilla warfare tactics, turning passive resistance into armed revolution. The outlook, writes former ambassador Nicholas Coppel, is a bleak and increasingly bloody situation that will require facilitated mediation.