As part of the military’s ‘Roadmap to Democracy’, elections were scheduled for 2010. Once the date of 7 November was announced in August that year, a framing contest around the elections took off. Those who saw the elections as an opportunity made a strategic decision to emphasize the political and societal changes inside the country, while opponents chose to emphasize the lack of significant political change and the need to maintain pressure on the government. Both camps drew selectively on ‘marketing strategies’ to emphasize their points and steer developments in the desired direction. Moreover, both parties claimed to act for the larger good of the country in advancing their preferred strategies towards democratization. For foreigners, too, the ‘in-between’ position became ‘both more appealing and less tenable amid the polarization surrounding the 2010 elections’ (Metro, 2011: 10). Those who were optimistic about the increased space granted by the government were not alone in their expectation that the elections would bring about further change: research on Malaysia two years earlier, for example, shows that elections may offer unique opportunities for political engagement by civil society in repressive environments, and may lead to a re-assessment of relationships between politicians, the state and the people (Lee et al, 2010). For many people in Myanmar, the 2010 elections would be the first time they could vote at all, thus providing an opportunity to discuss politics more openly in the context of voter education (Lidauer, 2012).

Yet the 2010 elections and the surrounding controversies also provided a unique opportunity for those opposing the military government to campaign against its political framework. In the course of 2010, a large election boycott campaign emerged consisting of two elements: a domestic component, calling on people inside the country not to vote (though there was some confusion as to the actual goal of the campaign, as discussed subsequently), and an international component, calling on other governments not to acknowledge the election results as legitimate. Although an election boycott by opposition parties is not uncommon in politically restrictive environments (Kagwanja, 2005; Beaulieu, 2006), the campaign in Myanmar was additionally characterized by a high level of involvement by civil society organizations (CSOs) that took the opportunity to publicize their goals.

Introduction

As a substantive field, the environment casts an important but distinctive light on the notion of ‘planning failure’ and its relationship with wider ‘state failure’. For a start, one must acknowledge that countries throughout the world have underachieved when it comes to adequately addressing major environmental problems. Analysts in many states, the UK included, have observed a tendency for national state environmental institutions to lose power and capacity since the late 1990s, leading this period to be labelled as ‘one of stagnation and decline in the environmental nation state’ (Mol, 2016: 52). Momentum was also knocked by the 2008 financial crash. Performance deficits have been particularly acute for cross-national environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss that have complex causes in patterns of production, consumption and mobility. The question that arises, then, is whether planning systems have evolved in ways that serve to ameliorate deficiencies in national environmental governance systems or exhibit tendencies that reflect and exacerbate wider failings.

Certainly, the evolution of planning in the UK can be seen as leading and then broadening the front of state environmental governance. From its birth in public health concerns in the 19th-century city, the planning system has provided mechanisms for enabling environmental factors to be considered in decisions about land use, development and infrastructure, and for protecting valued landscapes, buildings and wildlife habitats from damaging development. Since the 1980s, the environmental role of planning has expanded to embrace wider, more systemic issues, including pollution, air and water quality, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Beliefs about how planning might achieve positive environmental outcomes have extended from relatively straightforward protective actions to orchestrating urban forms that might better support multiple environmental and social goals, and reduce demands for car-based travel and energy, water and other resources. Indeed, planning was one of the first policy subsystems to be charged with delivering sustainable development (Owens and Cowell, 2011).

Broadening remits, however, tell us relatively little about environmental performance. Adding ever-more issues to the ‘to-do’ list of planning may overburden the system with expectations and perhaps even exemplify ‘local scalar dumping’, that is, passing responsibilities to local agencies with limited powers and resources in lieu of more effective national action. Moreover, planning has never just been about environmental ‘delivery’; rather, it involves the balancing of multiple economic, social and environmental objectives.

Although US President Bill Clinton had nonchalantly floated the imagery of South Asia as “the most dangerous place in the world” in the wake of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, his views were outrightly rejected by India (Babington and Constable 2000). Besides, China emerged as a stabilizing force in the region as it instigated its shuttle diplomacy between India and Pakistan not only after the nuclear tests in 1998 but also after the Mumbai attack in 2008. Even as the disputed Kashmir remains a nuclear flashpoint (notwithstanding the US offer to “help” resolve this lingering issue), several topical incidences—for example, the Doklam standoff, Pulwama attack, Ladakh clash, Taliban takeover, arms race, trade war, pandemic blame-game, and Russia–Ukraine crisis—have triggered fresh patterns of quadrilateral interactions between four key (non-)state actors in South Asia, namely, India, Pakistan, China, and the US. While the competitive and cooperative trends underpinning these quadrilateral interactions are difficult to fathom in terms of traditional Western realism (which considers the sphere of “the international” as fraught with dualistic self-other enmity), this chapter evokes a non-dualistic Global International Relations (IR) theory inspired by the Indian philosophy of Advaita to appraise India’s strategic response to the ongoing US–China rivalry in South Asia: unlike the dualistic Western IR theories based on a fundamental self–other distinction, the non-dualistic Advaita Global IR theory ties the self and the other together with a globe marked with single hidden connectedness. Since India is increasingly recognized as a rising power in world politics, a systematic study of its strategic response to the ongoing US–China rivalry in South Asia is decisive for making sense of the overall global transformations. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section illustrates the historical trajectory of geopolitical rivalries in South Asia. The second section identifies the topical issues that have cropped up as departure points in this conventional historical trajectory. Finally, the third section employs the Advaita Global IR theory (which refutes the Western style of IR hooked on the fixed logic of self–other enmity, friendship, or neutrality) to facilitate an improved investigation of these topical issues, thereby providing an alternative intellectual framework to interpret the contemporary postures of US–China contestations in world politics.

Introduction

Planning has long been ‘under attack’ (Lord and Tewdwr-Jones, 2014) – not just since the publication of the highly controversial White Paper Planning for the Future (MHCLG, 2020a). The prime minister’s opening remarks in the planning White Paper cited earlier are just some of many clearly laying the blame with the planning system for all that is wrong. England is not the only country struggling with a persistent housing crisis (Wetzstein, 2017) and using the planning system to address it, yet the debate seems a little more adversarial there than elsewhere. In addition to housing numbers, there is also a persistent issue in terms of design quality, with many approved developments even contradicting national planning policy (Carmona et al, 2020).

One of the key proposals of the White Paper (MHCLG, 2020a) was the introduction of a zoning mechanism in all but name. Local plans were supposed to zone land into three distinct categories: growth areas, renewal areas and protected areas. Growth areas indicate sites of substantial development, including both greenfield and brownfield land, which automatically grant outline approval. Renewal areas would cover the existing built-up area, where there would be a presumption in favour of sustainable development, with fast-track planning permission. Only in protected areas, which according to the White Paper, in essence, refers to open countryside that is not designated as growth or renewal areas, would the planning system continue to operate more or less as is, with each planning application being dealt with individually on its merits. Despite the attempt at a rulebased approach, the White Paper envisaged that planning applications that are different to the plan could nevertheless still be submitted (MHCLG, 2020a: 34).

For all the political sensitivities and organizational rivalries discussed earlier, civil society’s room to manoeuvre in Myanmar, as in any country, is conditional on having the funds available to carry out activities. This chapter describes both the opportunities provided and the challenges posed by foreign donor assistance to civil society. Although civil society actors in Myanmar have become skilled at organizing activities with relatively low budgets, many organizations, especially those without a clear religious affiliation, suffered from the pervasive poverty levels in the country and turned to outside funders for assistance. This partial dependence on foreign donors and the sudden rise in donor funding during the political transition period posed a number of challenges not unlike those described in development literature on other recipient countries. Senders of aid have been accused of prioritizing their own political, economic and geo-strategic interests over the interests of beneficiaries, of distributing aid insufficiently and inconsistently, and of paying lip service to values such as development and democracy while actually pursuing economic agendas. At the same time, donors have sometimes provided vital financial and moral support in environments where the country’s own government and local actors are incapable or unwilling to do so. The pervasive role of the military in Myanmar posed a number of unique challenges to donors and recipient organizations alike, resulting in particularly vehement debates around the politicization of aid.

Although funding for civil society can come from a number of sources, government assistance and private donations from inside the country are often ruled out in contexts of pervasive poverty levels and repressed civic space. As wealth in those contexts is often acquired in close collaboration with political and business elites, the more affluent sections of society tend to be reluctant to support activities that might challenge the status quo (Parks, 2008). Moreover, in authoritarian countries many organizations try to stay under the radar, which complicates their ability to fundraise (Cleary, 1997; Wells-Dang, 2012). This has certainly been the case in Myanmar; as a respondent commented in 2015: “I think we should also do fundraising inside the country. But those who have the money are the cronies.”

Introduction

One of the greatest puzzles in the academic study and contemporary practice of international politics is whether the rise of China, as a re-emerging global power, would be peaceful amidst the perception of declining US dominance (Christensen 2006; Mearsheimer 2006; Starrs 2013; Monteiro 2014: 122–126; Regilme and Parisot 2017a; 2020; Regilme and Hartmann 2018). Considered as the “most important rising power” (Hameiri and Jones 2015: 3), China, with its expanding sphere of influence in world politics, will “undoubtedly be one of the great dramas of the twenty-first century” (Ikenberry 2008: 23). Despite the countervailing discourses from some Chinese political elites who advocate a more pacifist tone, some Western scholars, pundits, and policy makers warned that China’s political ascendancy is inevitably dangerous (Mearsheimer 2006; Regilme 2019; Regilme and Parisot 2020). This sense of insecurity is felt more increasingly in the Southeast Asian region, where many of the smaller countries have traditionally depended upon the US leadership and security guarantees. The South China Sea (or the SCS hereafter)—a marginal sea area that is partially surrounded by Northeast (China and Taiwan) and Southeast (Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam) Asian countries—has become one of the most visible maritime geographic spaces of conflict in the region. In Southeast Asia, four out of ten countries therein are active claimants of a part of the SCS region: Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei.

As one of the world’s highly militarized site of inter-state territorial conflicts, the SCS is economically significant for the global economy primarily because a large chunk of annual world trade output passes through this maritime area. The US interest in the dispute is discursively sold as about “ensuring freedom of navigation,” considering that “half the world’s commercial shipping passes through the SCS—$5 trillion a year—and US warships regularly transit the region on their way to and from the Persian Gulf, Southwest Asia and the Indian Ocean” (Spitzer 2012: 8). The UN Conference on Trade and Development emphasizes the economic significance of the SCS, because nearly 60 percent of maritime trade comes through the Asia-Pacific, and at least one-third of the global trade needs to pass through the SCS ( Jennings 2021: 6).

Introduction

This chapter analyzes how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) allowed China to fill the void left by the US in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), its traditional sphere of influence, by increasing the region’s dependence on the Chinese economy and expanding its diplomatic exchanges. The participation of LAC governments in the BRI has brought about fewer economic benefits to the region than promised and has exposed them to pressure from the US on some vital security and technology issues. However, China has had noticeable gains from the BRI, as this chapter will explain. To understand the geographies of the rivalry in the Americas, one must study the implications of the Chinese initiative in which the promises of infrastructures allowed LAC governments to surmount geographical, cultural, and political distances.

The BRI is an international cooperation platform announced by the Chinese government in 2013 initially oriented to promote connectivity to its neighboring countries by celebrating official forums and the conclusion of non-binding bilateral agreements. The initiative seeks to boost Chinese foreign investment, infrastructures, and trade between China and its partners, especially developing countries that are eager for infrastructures. In 2022, according to the official statements, 144 countries joined the BRI (Xinhuanet 2021), despite no clarity concerning its accession and participation mechanisms. The BRI has progressively expanded its geographical scope, activities, and projects, becoming a fuzzy initiative that is challenging to conceptualize. Since its launch, it has evolved from “an effort to revitalise the connectivity of the Silk Road into a key point for Chinese foreign policy” (Myers 2018: 239) and then to “so omnipresent in Chinese foreign discourse and practice that it is now almost impossible to distinguish it from Beijing’s foreign policy” (Rolland 2019: 1).

Although the BRI at its origins did not contemplate the inclusion of LAC, after the celebration in 2018 of the China and Community of LAC States Forum (China-CELAC Forum), LAC countries started to participate (González Jauregui 2020; Oliveira and Myers 2021). The first few participating countries were less exposed to US influence—Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador—and China’s strategic economic partners in the region—Chile, Uruguay, and Peru (Bórquez and Bravo 2020). In 2023, 24 out of 33 members of the CELAC have joined the BRI. Except for Mexico, the biggest economies of LAC, namely Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, have participated in the initiative to different degrees.

Introduction

In April 2010, the average house price in England was £177,000; by April 2021, it was £268,000 (HM Land Registry, 2021) – an increase of more than double the average annual inflation of 2 per cent (Bank of England, 2022). Private rents have increased in line with incomes by an average of 1.9 per cent per annum since the start of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government (ONS, 2021a). In 2010, the average weekly local authority rent was £68; in 2020, it was £86. Over the same period, registered-provider rents increased from an average of £78 to £94 (MHCLG, 2021a), both inflating above earnings. Between 2012 and 2020, homelessness increased by 40,000 households, and projections are for this to continue rising under the current welfare and housing system (Fitzpatrick et al, 2021). In 2010, 65.2 per cent of dwellings were owner-occupied; in 2020, that had fallen to 63.8 per cent (MHCLG, 2021b). Affordable housing has been officially redefined so that new housing statistics include dwellings at 80 per cent of market rent and price, which remain unaffordable for low-income earners in many parts of the country. First-time buyers have been given support since 2013 through two new help-to-buy schemes, with the government effectively underwriting mortgages, though with little impact on housing affordability. Taxes on private landlords and second homeowners have increased, while local authority borrowing restrictions have been partially relaxed to enable further local authority housing delivery. The threshold for stamp duty land tax was lowered by the Coalition government in 2010, then the system was changed from a slab to a slice approach in 2015. In 2020, following the growth in COVID-19, a stamp duty land tax ‘holiday’ was introduced to encourage house sales to continue through the pandemic.

This list reveals that there are numerous challenges associated with housing numbers across accessibility, availability and supply. In this chapter, we explore the current state of planning for housing in England, focusing on one of the key reductionisms: housing numbers. Housing numbers have become the dominant discourse in local and national housing and planning policies, and are a colloquial euphemism for variously the amount of housing supply required, permitted and delivered.

At the start of the 21st century, the international system underwent at least three major critical junctures: the 9/11 terror attacks that paved the way for the US-led global war on terror and its consequent human rights abuses (Acharya 2007; Christie 2008; Foot 2008; Herman 2011; Shafiq 2013; Sanders 2017; Regilme 2018a, 2018b, 2021a); the 2007/2008 global financial crisis (Aydın 2011; Helleiner 2011; Drezner 2013; Kiely 2018; Ansell and Bartenberger 2019); and the COVID-19 pandemic (May and Daly 2020; Regilme 2020; Theidon 2020; Greer et al 2021). The most recent critical juncture—the COVID-19 pandemic—killed at least 6.6 million people since 2020 until October 2022. That pandemic, however, is not merely a global health crisis. Rather, it emerged as a powerful vector of other transnational challenges of catastrophic proportions, whereas some of these challenges may not be directly attributable to the pandemic itself, while others may have been reinforced after the start of the pandemic: the widespread inflation crisis in many parts of the globe (Aharon and Qadan 2022); democratic backsliding and widespread human rights abuses (Greer et al 2020; Pleyers 2020; Thomson and Ip 2020; Lundgren et al 2021; Passos and Acácio 2021; Regilme 2021b); climate catastrophes and extreme weather conditions (Bergquist et al 2022; Ford et al 2022); food insecurity (Kumar and Ayedee 2021; Sacks et al 2021; Bergquist et al 2022); energy insecurity (Ghilès 2022); and, the looming probability that Russian militarized aggression in Ukraine could spill over to other Central and Western European countries, which in turn, could trigger intensified military conflict elsewhere (deLisle 2022; Wu 2022).

Consequently, an apparent consensus seems to be emerging, perhaps regardless of one’s political ideologies: the world is in deep, multidimensional crisis (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020; Regilme 2020; Steger 2021). What this crisis means could differ depending on your positionality in this deeply hierarchical and differentiated world-system (Anthias 2008; Sakai 2012; Koinova 2017; McIntosh 2020; Soedirgo and Glas 2020). For a white, super-rich man living in the affluent quarters of New York, London, or Zurich, the crisis is likely triggered by a growing popular resistance against capitalism and extreme socioeconomic inequalities, while invoking that their private property rights are violated by state policy actions that redirect wealth to the most marginalized (Hammond 2016; Regilme 2019a; Whyte 2019).

Introduction

The final revisions to this book were drafted at the end of 2022, a year in which the UK had three different prime ministers, all from the same political party, inhabiting 10 Downing Street within a period of 45 days. In that context, it is almost surreal to remember the atmosphere in the Rose Garden of that premises on 12 May 2010. In a scene later described as ‘sick-inducing’ (Merrick, 2014), new Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg launched their agreed programme for government following the general election. In a very unusual outcome for the UK, that election had led to a coalition government between the Conservative Party of Cameron and Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. While fractures between them appeared quickly, their initial coalition agreement was full of inspirational rhetoric about the ‘common ground’ between the parties:

While the language about the ‘failure’ of ‘big government’ can, perhaps rightly, be seen as part of a continuum with neoliberal anti-state orthodoxy of the previous 30 years, the emphasis on dispersing power through what Cameron (2010) called the ‘Big Society’ is arguably different, ostensibly leaning more in the direction of social liberalism. What is certain is that the Coalition government embarked, through such legislation as the Localism Act 2011, on a programme of changes to governance, including planning, which had the potential to ‘disperse power more widely’ and certainly changed the planning system in fundamental ways.

Introduction

Transport infrastructure is essential for sustaining and facilitating everyday activities. As an agent of change, transport shapes territorial development, as illustrated by two economists writing half a century apart. Colin Clark’s (1958) path-breaking piece, ‘Transport: maker and breaker of cities’, reviews the role of transport over two centuries up to the mid-1950s and embraces the arrival of the 20th-century road/car era, when cars began to revolutionise travel and personal freedom. Similarly, Edward Glaeser’s (2020) recent review, ‘Infrastructure and urban form’, captures technological advances and geographical changes in transport over three major stages: the emergence of new transport technology; the expansion of transport networks around the new technology; and the restructuring of existing networks.

However, mega-transport investments have long been a subject of fierce debate and controversy. In his classic work Great Planning Disasters, Hall (1980) applied Friend and Jessop’s (1969) uncertainty models to analyse the planning processes of mega-transport project sagas, including London’s third airport, London’s motorways and San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) systems. He challenged the mainstream rational model approach for its failure to consider imperfect information, the conflicting values and interests of actors, and unquantifiable or unremunerative objectives.

Proposals for mega-infrastructure projects are inevitably controversial due to competing interests and demands, increasingly expansive networks, complex human settlements, high costs, and potential environmental disturbance. Since the 2008 financial crisis, an economic narrative has suggested that transport investment creates, sustains or unblocks jobs (Masden and McDonald, 2019). Providing persistent inequalities, England has been criticised for its lack of transport infrastructure investment, making it one of the most polarised countries among advanced economies. The policy objective for investing in mega-transport infrastructure, such as High Speed Two (HS2), has widened its conventional impacts beyond increasing network capacity, unblocking congestion and travel time savings to embrace further transformative effects, including addressing regional inequalities.

Over the past decade, the phrase ‘Rebalancing Britain’, which first appeared in a consultation document (DFT, 2011), has been used as the primary justification for HS2. Since the election of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government in 2010, followed by subsequent Conservative administrations after 2015, various reforms, funding programmes and policy documents on rail infrastructure have been produced, aiming to address inequality at different institutional levels.

Introduction

The starting point, and also the end point, for this chapter is that government in England has established the Office for Place and signalled its confidence in the use of design codes as a foundation for building more ‘beautiful’ places. There is nothing new in having a dedicated body to oversee development and place quality, and this is not the first time that design strictures have been codified. Reform is often about returning to the past and applying old ideas to today’s challenges. Institutional and political memory is short, while the processes that underpin development outcomes have greater longevity. Governments, of different stripes and ideologies, are inclined to return to the same problems time and again, and the odds are that their prescriptions, drawn from a limited repertoire, will be strangely similar. They are also compelled to offer fresh solutions to the challenges of the day – a prerequisite of electoral success in a parliamentary democracy.

In this chapter, I contend that the challenge confronting planning is often the pace and regularity of change – rooted in the oscillations of political rhythm – rather than the apparently ‘substantive’ dilemmas inherent in development. The chapter is organised into two principal parts. In the first, I will sketch what I see as the antecedents of contemporary debate over the long and short run; this is presented as the road to, and recurring interest in, ‘beauty’. In the second, I reflect on the last ten years of engagements with place quality – the shorter run of political rhythm. My argument is that the failure of planning is a political failure to think strategically and long term, rather than being buffeted by fashion and, in recent years, by the revolving door of ‘political advice’ and its perennial rebadging of old ideas. I argue for the need to acknowledge the value of foundational ideas that have been tested and retested over the years, and from which important principles can be distilled.

The road to beauty

The current place quality agenda in England is a mishmash of inconsistency. On the one hand, coding will deliver a uniformity of quality to be prescribed in local plans. However, on the other, decisions will be divorced from planning control through the distribution of permitted development rights (PDR). This is part of the recent narrative of ‘building beauty’, to which I will return shortly.

What is a public sphere?

Habermas and the public sphere

Before we can diagnose the disappearance of something called the public sphere, we need to find agreement on what it is that is disappearing. I should emphasize at this point that this book is not meant as a conceptual history of the notion of the public sphere in modern political thought and in theories of democracy. Rather, I wish to make this notion of the public sphere fruitful as a tool for scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds (mainly media studies, political science and sociology) to understand challenges to contemporary media and democracy. I want to show that the public sphere concept is still indispensable to formulating a critical agenda and engaging in critical research of the rapid transformation of our digital media and communication environments. Through the analytical lens of the public sphere, we can identify the current trends of democratic society and politics: opportunities for democratization and threats of nondemocratic backlashes.

Such a conceptual discussion needs to take as its starting point the voluminous work of Jurgen Habermas. If the ambition of this book is to combine the tools of structural analysis and critical assessment of contemporary media and communication developments, this design owes much – or almost everything – to the agenda of public sphere research that was set out in Habermas’ book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in German in 1962 (Habermas, 1990 [1962]). Habermas did not invent the concept of the public sphere but rather located its origins in modern political thought and in the history of the Enlightenment. The first part of his book provides a conceptual history of the notion of the public sphere, while the second part lays out the agenda of critical research of media and communication. It developed a normative template of the ‘modern bourgeois public sphere’ and can be read as an invitation to the social sciences to make this normative template applicable to research with a critical intent (Wessler, 2019). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is, therefore, not primarily a contribution to philosophy and conceptual history in that it has also contributed to the foundations of several disciplines of the social sciences, notably media studies, the sociology of communication, political theory and political sciences, for which it has become a standard reference.

After five years of contentious rule, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party secured its largest victory to date in the elections of November 2020. The military alleged voter fraud, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, and put pressure on the Union Election Commission (UEC) to hold off with the formation of a new government. When it became clear that the new parliament would convene as planned, Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing staged a coup on the morning of 1 February 2021. The military took control of parliament in Naypyidaw, imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and other elected NLD leaders, and took over all powers under the name of the State Administration Council (SAC). The SAC appointed its own ministers as well as a new UEC, which subsequently confirmed mass voter fraud and cancelled the election results (Reny, 2022).

The 2021 military coup was a major setback in the transition process and a big surprise to the international community, which had largely underestimated the continued role of the military in Myanmar politics. The move was less surprising to local observers, as the military had been raising doubts about the election process and the role of the NLD-appointed UEC since mid-2020. In the months after the elections, at least 45 demonstrations were held protesting against presumed electoral fraud, mostly organized by the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which reportedly paid participants to demonstrate (Bynum, 2021). Although the 2008 constitution contains a provision for a military coup, the 2021 coup was widely considered to contravene that provision. Min Aung Hlaing would have been forced to retire as head of the military in June 2021 and had likely hoped to become president. The NLD’s electoral victory deprived him of that opportunity and also posed a risk to the many military-controlled enterprises. The increasing number of international prosecutions of human rights violations involving the military probably also made its leadership less confident of a secure future (Jordt et al, 2021: 4).

The military initially seemed set on organizing elections mid-2023 in an effort to establish a legal basis for continued SAC rule. However, in early 2023 it extended the nationwide state of emergency without mentioning a new date for the election, which constitutionally should be held within six months after termination of a state of emergency (International Crisis Group, 2023b).