Myanmar's Years of Living Dangerously Could Come to a Head in 2025

While South-east Asia watches distant wars, Myanmar's civil war—an unfolding crisis with regional consequences—remains dangerously overlooked.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

In 2024, across Singapore and South-east Asia, conversations about world affairs seem to surface more frequently in daily life—at dinner tables, with colleagues in the office or over coffee shop chats.

A growing sense of unease about the state of the world seems to draw attention to the two major wars dominating global headlines: Ukraine and the Middle East; conflicts defined by immense casualties, superpower rivalries, and the weight of historical grievances.

These wars disrupt supply chains, unsettle economies, and fuel fears of a fracturing global order. Small wonder they capture both public imagination and media narratives.

Yet, closer to home, Myanmar's civil war slips into troubling obscurity. Outside the circles of diplomats, humanitarian aid workers, and security experts, much of South-east Asia seems to view the conflict as peripheral, even inconsequential.

But this neglect is both dangerous and short-sighted. Myanmar's proximity makes its unravelling anything but trivial.

Further chaos—or the collapse of its fragile power structures—would send shock waves across the region, destabilising borders, economies, and lives.

What unfolds in 2025—both on the battlefield and in diplomacy—will shape South-east Asia's future in profound ways.

Myanmar's current state is a stark and undeniable reflection of its turmoil. Three years after junta leader Min Aung Hlaing's 2021 coup, the country is mired in a full-blown civil war, with consequences that are nothing short of catastrophic.

Ranked second from the bottom among Asian nations on the Global Peace Index—just above North Korea—the scale of the crisis is staggering.

Some 3½ million people displaced, and 20 million—roughly a third of Myanmar's 57 million inhabitants—projected to need humanitarian aid by 2025, according to the United Nations.