Myanmar Update—June 2026
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Parami University
On June 9, startup, online Parami University graduated its first class of Burmese students who have completed all four years of its B.A. program. The graduation ceremony was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and I was fortunate in being able to attend both the ceremony, a day of “conversations” on June 8, and the first day of a Parami U Faculty Retreat on June 10. A video of the graduation ceremony can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tlJIyqs9Mg
Thirty Parami students received B.A. diplomas from Bard College (in Upstate New York)
alongside their Parami U B.A. diplomas thanks to a formal partnership with Bard that
Parami established in 2020. On the same occasion, ninety students received A.A. diplomas (from both Parami and Bard) after successfully completing the first two years of Parami’s B.A. program. Only half of the students in each group were able to come to Chiang Mai to get their diplomas. The rest were unable to leave Myanmar for various reasons.
At the end of the 2025-26 academic year, there were 285 students enrolled in Parami U.
Ninety percent of these students live within the borders of Myanmar. A handful live in
the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh and a Sudanese refugee camp in Kenya.
Now that Parami has conferred its first B.A. diplomas it can apply for accreditation. This
process is expected to take at least two years and will be done with an accrediting
organization with standards comparable to those met by Bard College. Among the
features that make us optimistic about accreditation is a retention rate for our students
around 90 percent, well above the average for liberal arts colleges in the USA.
One of the attractions of Parami U as it began four years ago was an 8-week summer
internship program in Washington DC for up to ten students. In the 2024 summer, 9
Parami students came to DC for internships at top places like the US Institute of Peace
and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In the 2025 summer, because of
the Trump Administration termination of USAID and cuts to the “democracy” programs
of the State Department, only four organizations agreed to host Parami students, and
we were only able to get 2 students into the USA before the ban of visitors with
Myanmar passports went into effect in early June.
To replace the loss of this internship opportunity, Parami U initiated a program of 2-week
“cultural exchanges” with universities in Asia. The first exchange, in 2025, was with
National Sun Yat Sen University in Taiwan, and it is continuing. The second exchange
began in May 2026 with International Christian University in Tokyo. Parami U is able to
include about 15 students in each of these exchanges. We are working on establishing
exchanges with two or three more Asian universities.
One of the highlights of the graduation ceremony in June was conferring Parami U’s first
honorary doctorate degree on Kevin Quigley, who also delivered the Commencement
Address. Kevin was a member of Parami U’s inaugural Board of Trustees (as I am) and
has provided crucial support to Parami since then based on his experience as President
of Marlboro College in Vermont and his recent Fulbright Specialist engagements
advising Thailand’s Ministry of Education on higher education reform. In addition to
serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in the 1970s and being the Peace
Corps Country Director in Thailand from 2012 to 2015, Kevin was President of the
National Peace Corps Association from 2003 to 2012.
Another noteworthy part of the celebrations in Chiang Mai was introducing newly hired
Dean of Academic Affairs Dr. Winmar Way. She has impeccable education credentials
and will be a great help in pursuing accreditation. She has also been designated to
succeed President Kyaw Moe Tun if he is unable to continue in this position due to his
unresolved immigration status in the USA or any other reason.
A top concern of the Parami community now is finding good jobs or graduate education
for our B.A. graduates. While two of them have won generous scholarships or fellowships at leading institutions in Thailand and Taiwan, many of the others may survive by becoming “digital nomads”.
Parami University is not getting the attention it deserves, but it was featured in a story
published by Forbes in April 2026.
Parami University continues to struggle to finance its operations, with the loss of USG
funding hard to replace when NGOs everywhere are appealing to the major philanthropies. This funding constraint has forced Parami to introduce a tuition loan program to fund the relatively small tuition charges that remain after granting generous tuition waivers to most students. Small donations go a long way in this context and can be made easily from the home page of Parami’s website: www.parami.edu.mm
The Civil War in Myanmar
The main development in the war since my December 2025 Update was the inauguration of a new civilianized military government in April. The “sham” election process leading to this government began in December 2025 and was carried out in three stages because the armed Opposition controlled many of the country’s townships. As expected, the election produced a parliament dominated by the military-favored USDP party. Together with the seats reserved for the military under the 2008 Constitution, the Myanmar military can easily pass amendments to this Constitution.
There was a lot of speculation about which position(s) after the election would be
assumed by junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing. He chose to be President and
passed over several more senior officers to make General Ye Win Oo (former head of
military intelligence) the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. As President, Min
Aung Hlaing seems mostly interested in meeting with foreign leaders, especially China’s
President Xi (in June 2026) and Russia’s President Putin (in September 2025). He also
flew to New Delhi in early June to meet with India’s President Modi and has welcomed
visits to Naypyidaw by several foreign ministers of ASEAN member countries. Restoring
normal political relations with ASEAN appears to be Min Aung Hlaing’s top foreign
policy objective. ASEAN is still excluding Myanmar’s president from attending its
Summit meetings because of its failure to implement the “Five Point Consensus” for
restoring peace in Myanmar following the February 2021 coup.
The military regime’s oppression of the population has not diminished with the establishment of the new civilianized government and may be on an accelerating trend
using Chinese surveillance technology. New regulations to exert control over the population have been implemented, such as issuing new identification cards and making passport controls more stringent. Cities are losing their youth who have been fleeing to Opposition-controlled rural communities to avoid conscription.
So far, the new Myanmar government has been unable to alleviate the economic suffering of its population. Inflation remains high, trade and financial sanctions continue to bite, and foreign and domestic investment are insufficient to produce meaningful GDP growth. Few hospitals are still functioning. Not a single university is producing graduates who meet minimal global standards. Malnutrition is growing to include as much as one quarter of Myanmar’s population of 50-55 million people according to the UN’s World Food Program. Myanmar qualifies as a top priority for international humanitarian assistance, but the military regime strictly limits such assistance to the townships it controls, forcing people in the other townships to resort to the survival strategies they have perfected over six decades of ineffective military rule.
Since the beginning of 2025, the trend on the battlefield has favored the military. This
reverses the trend of the previous three years in which the armed Opposition was making gains not only in the mountainous regions on the borders with India, China, and Thailand, but also in the Bamar Buddhist heartland of Magway and Sagaing Region. This shift in favor of the military is closely associated with China’s support of the military regime, its restrictions on the flow of weapons to the armed Opposition, and its increasing pressure on the armed Opposition to concede territory especially along the China-Myanmar border.
The only area where the military appears to be losing control of territory is in Rakhine
State on the Indian Ocean coast where the Arakan Army is well established except in
the capital city of Sittwe and in Kyaukphyu, the terminus of the oil and gas pipelines to
Yunan Province in China.
While the Myanmar military has been making incremental gains in the country’s civil
war, no reputable analysts are predicting that it will be able to defeat the armed
Opposition in the near term (3-5 years). The consensus view is that the current
battlefield stalemate will continue.
The sad reality is that the armed Opposition is no more united in mid-2026 than it has
been at any point since the 2021 coup. In particular, the government-in-exile, the
National Unity Government (NUG) formed by members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National
League for Democracy (NLD) party that won a landslide victory in the 2020 election is
an obstacle to the building of an effective armed Opposition. To begin with, the NUG is
dominated by people from the ethnic Bamar majority who are not trusted historically by
the ethnic minorities. More problematically, the NUG has not been able to produce a
group of articulate and charismatic leaders that looks to foreign supporters like a credible alternative government for Myanmar.
The NUG has, however, been able to generate a modest flow of financing to its favored
armed groups. Aung San Suu Kyi herself remains in some form of house arrest and is
believed to be in poor health, but the military regime has refused to permit any visitors
leading to speculation that she may no longer be alive.
One hopeful effort to unite the armed Opposition was the creation in the first quarter of
2026 of the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF).
At one level it is shocking that the conflict in Myanmar is receiving so little attention in
the rest of the world. Statistically many more innocent civilians in Myanmar are suffering
from the military’s random attacks and the conscription of its youth than their counterparts in Ukraine or Iran or Palestine.
The only significant media attention Myanmar has received in the past year is about the
scam centers on its border with Thailand. These scam centers grew to the point of prompting initiatives to stop them led by China and the United States. The scam centers
are built and operated primarily by well-known Chinese criminal groups and their existence has been enabled both by the Myanmar military and by vested interests in the Thai military, business community, and government. Several scam centers have been demolished but others have quickly sprung up giving the business a whack-a-mole character as it spreads beyond Southeast Asia to Sri Lanka, African countries, and even Latin America.
Late-Breaking News: On June 3, Min Zin, a naturalized US citizen born in Myanmar,
disappeared after flying from Chiang Mai, Thailand to Kunming, the capital of Yunan
Province in China. After the 1988 uprising against military rule in which Aung San Suu
Kyi emerged as the opposition leader, Min Zin fled to the USA and eventually entered a
PhD program at UC/Berkeley. In 2016, during Myanmar’s decade-long “honeymoon”,
Min Zin established in Yangon a research institute—ISP Myanmar—to promote security
sector reform. After the February 2021 coup, he moved the institute to Chiang Mai,
Thailand, where it started producing detailed analysis of the civil war. Min Zin flew to
Kunming at the invitation of a Chinese professor and was arrested—according to a
Chinese government statement—for “engaging in espionage activities”. This charge is
patently ridiculous leading to speculation that he is being held hostage to be freed in an
eventual exchange of prisoners. By chance, I was scheduled to meet with Min Zin the
day after he was arrested and learned about his arrest when I sat down to interview his
deputy for this Update.
For anyone wanting more information about the situation in Myanmar, here are links to
several recently published reports:
--by Thailand’s top foreign relations analyst.
--from the German press, focusing on the military.
--the report of a Select Committee of the US Congress on scam centers.
--an extraordinary reflection by a former US Institute of Peace analyst who lost his job
when Elon Musk’s DOGE shut it down and is now working independently out of
Bangkok.
--a comprehensive examination of the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar by the
Transnational Institute.
--Three recent reports from the International Crisis Group can be found on this web
page. One on the fight in Karen State, one on the new military government, and one on
the battle for Sittwe, capital of Rakhine State.
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