Myanmar and the Institutionalization of Exception: Governance Five Years After the 2021 Coup
From Emergency to Enduring Order
Five years after the February 2021 military coup, Myanmar presents a central analytical question for the study of emergency powers: is the country still operating under a state of exception, or has the exception itself become the governing order?
The military’s seizure of power was formally justified through a constitutional declaration of emergency. Yet what began as a purportedly temporary response to alleged electoral fraud has evolved into a prolonged and deeply contested system of governance. Recent developments, most notably the reconvening of parliament (embedded new link credited to Jurist News) following military-administered elections, alongside ongoing disputes over who legitimately governs the state, illuminate how Myanmar is no longer simply experiencing an emergency. It is confronting the institutionalization of exception. An opinion piece published anonymously, also by Jurist News, entitled Who Rules Myanmar? Five Years On, International Law Has No Clear Answer, reflects on this unresolved legal paradox of governance, where neither the military authorities nor the government-in-exile can definitively claim sovereign legitimacy. Taken together, these pieces begin to demonstrate how exceptional power, once invoked, can embed itself across institutions while leaving the underlying question of authority unsettled.
The Legal Architecture of the Coup
The February 2021 coup was not presented as an outright rejection of constitutional order. Instead, the military invoked emergency provisions contained in Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution, transferring authority to Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing under the claim of a national crisis stemming from alleged electoral fraud.
These provisions, on their face, allow for the temporary concentration of power in response to existential threats. However, their activation in this instance depended on a series of deeply contested conditions: the detention of civilian leadership, the installation of a military-aligned acting president, and the absence of credible evidence supporting the alleged electoral irregularities. The result was not the lawful exercise of emergency authority, but rather what may be understood as pretextual constitutionalism, the use of formal legal mechanisms to simulate legitimacy while subverting their underlying purpose.
Crucially, the constitutional framework itself had long embedded military prerogatives. The reservation of 25 percent of parliamentary seats for military appointees ensured that even under civilian governance, the armed forces retained structural veto power over constitutional change. The emergency declaration did not create military dominance ex nihilo; it extended and intensified an already asymmetrical constitutional order.
From Temporary Measure to Embedded System
Emergency powers are often justified as temporary deviations from ordinary governance. In Myanmar, however, the initial declaration of emergency has been repeatedly extended and operationalized into a durable system of rule. Over five years, the exceptional has migrated across institutional domains:
Executive authority has consolidated under military leadership
Legislative processes have been suspended, reconfigured, and selectively revived
Judicial and administrative systems have operated under coercive oversight
This trajectory reflects a broader pattern identified in the study of emergency governance: the transformation of exception from a time-bound measure into a standing mode of rule. The language of emergency persists, but its temporal limits dissolve.
Fragmented Sovereignty and the Problem of Rule
If the emergency has become embedded, it has not produced uncontested authority. On the contrary, Myanmar today illustrates how prolonged exception can generate fragmented sovereignty.
Five years after the coup, the question of who governs Myanmar remains unresolved in both legal and practical terms. The military, operating through the State Administration Council (SAC), exercises coercive territorial control over key urban centers and state institutions. At the same time, the National Unity Government (NUG), emerging from the ousted civilian leadership, asserts de jure legitimacy as the continuation of the 2020 electoral mandate.
This duality produces a persistent legal and political paradox:
The SAC demonstrates elements of de facto governance, maintaining administrative functions through force
The NUG sustains a form of de jure legitimacy, including international representation and financial continuity
The result is not merely competing claims, but a deeper condition in which the locus of sovereignty itself becomes indeterminate. International law, typically pragmatic in recognizing effective control, has not fully resolved this tension, leaving Myanmar in a prolonged state of legal ambiguity. From an ISSE perspective, this is a critical insight: The state of exception does not always consolidate authority, at times it can also destabilize and pluralize it.
The Return of Parliament: Normalization of Mimicry?
Against this backdrop, the reconvening of Myanmar’s parliament in 2026 marks a significant moment. After five years of suspended or disrupted legislative activity, the military-backed government has reestablished formal parliamentary proceedings following elections conducted under its own rules. Yet this apparent restoration of constitutional form raises more questions than it resolves.
The elections themselves were widely contested. Opposition parties were dissolved, barred, or boycotted the process, while the structural advantages afforded to the military (both through constitutional seat reservations and electoral control) produced a legislature dominated by junta-aligned actors. Simultaneously, a shadow parliament composed of ousted lawmakers continues to assert its legitimacy, refusing to recognize the newly constituted body. The result is not a unified legislative authority, but competing institutional claims to representation.
Analytically, the reconvening of parliament may be understood not as a return to constitutional normalcy, but as a form of institutional mimicry. The procedures of governance are restored. The forms of legality are reactivated. But the conditions under which they operate remain shaped by the prior, and ongoing, exception. This raises a central question: Does the revival of institutions mark the end of the exception, or its normalization? In Myanmar’s case, the evidence suggests the latter. The legislature does not displace the exceptional order; it operates within it, potentially reinforcing its claims to legitimacy.
The ISSE Lens: Exception as Constitutive Order
Myanmar illustrates a broader theoretical progression in the lifecycle of emergency powers. The Emergency is invoked through formal legal mechanisms. It is extended beyond its initial justification. It becomes embedded across institutions. And it is ultimately normalized as the default mode of governance.
Invocation → Extension → Embedding → Normalization
In that final stage, normalization, the distinction between ordinary and exceptional rule collapses. Institutions continue to function, but they do so within a framework fundamentally shaped by the prior suspension of constitutional norms. This dynamic reflects how sovereignty is revealed in the decision on the exception, but also how the exception, once invoked, risks becoming permanent. Myanmar demonstrates how these theoretical concerns manifest in practice: not simply as authoritarian rupture, but as the gradual reconstitution of order through exceptional means.
The Unresolved Threshold
Myanmar today stands at an unresolved threshold. The forms of governance are reappearing as parliament reconvenes, elections are held, and administrative systems persist. Yet the foundational question of legitimacy remains unsettled, and the conditions under which these institutions operate continue to reflect the enduring influence of emergency power. This is what makes Myanmar a consequential case for ISSE’s work. It is not only a story of a coup or a junta, but of how exceptionality can migrate into the structures of ordinary governance, reshaping them from within while leaving their formal appearance intact. The key analytical question moving forward is not simply whether Myanmar will exit its state of emergency, but whether such an exit remains conceptually meaningful once the exception has become embedded in the architecture of rule itself.
Opinions expressed in the Jurist News opinion piece embedded and discussed above are the sole responsibility of the anonymous author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISSE.
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash.
