Interrogating Myanmar's 'Transition' from a Post-coup Vantage Point

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar appears to have rendered null the many projections, proposals and prognostications that academics advanced over the preceding decade-the period of 'democratic transition', as it was then optimistically regarded. But perhaps when considered from a post-coup vantage point those earlier analyses, which tell of the tensions and trajectories of the transition-era, can be made to speak to the political knots and contradictions that underlay the coup and that continue to haunt the post-coup moment. So motivated, this article revisits the 2020 volume Unraveling Myanmar's Transition, edited by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Patrick Strefford. The article proposes three overlapping frames for making sense of Myanmar's transition: seeing that period as one of structural adjustment, of an inter-elite pact and of an imperialist project.