A billboard of the chairman of the Myanmar military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party ahead of the start of the campaign period for the junta’s elections in Yangon, October 27, 2025. © 2025 STR/AFP via Getty Images

Myanmar’s planned election—staged in phases and necessarily partial under civil-war conditions—should be analysed less as democratic arbitration than as a recognition project. A non-universal election is a sovereignty statement: it marks where authority can be performed as routine governance, and where rule remains contested.

In international relations, recognition operates in three registers. De jure recognition is formal diplomatic legitimacy. De facto recognition is legitimacy conferred through practice—being treated as an interlocutor, admitted to diplomatic routines, and progressively de-risked for commerce and institutional engagement. In civil wars, the most geopolitically consequential form is often constitutive recognition: external treatment that helps produce the appearance and functionality of authority, rather than merely acknowledging what already exists. The election is designed to accumulate de facto and constitutive recognition first, and to translate that accumulation into more durable legitimacy over time.

Recognition as wartime statecraft

Elections in civil-war contexts can function as statecraft—a technology for converting coercive control into administratively legible “government.” The political move is not subtle: shift from overt emergency rule to a managed civilian façade, preserve coercive capacity, and invite external actors to engage with “process” rather than confront the underlying conflict. This is why elections in war are often less about competition than about reclassification: changing the form in which power is presented so it can be interacted with as normal.

External actors are structurally susceptible to this reclassification because it reduces transaction costs. Once an authority can be treated as routine—through meetings, technical interfaces, observation exercises, or “stability” narratives—the practical benefits of recognition begin to accrue even without formal endorsement. Recognition is therefore not a diplomatic nicety; it is a currency that buys access, predictability, and material pathways of engagement.

A cartography of governability

The election’s decisive geopolitical content lies in its geography. A partial election is a map of territorial governability. It differentiates administratively governable zones—where procedures can be staged, information can be managed, and dissent can be contained—from zones of contested sovereignty, where the minimum conditions for a poll cannot be secured.

That differentiation is not neutral. It builds a two-tier political order. The governable core becomes the institutional showcase through which “the state” is displayed. The excluded periphery is recoded as exceptional space—politics deferred until control is restored—so that exclusion itself is treated as compatible with national authority. In effect, the election institutionalises the claim that partial governability can stand in for sovereignty.

The sequencing contest and the mechanics of normalisation

The central geopolitical contest is sequencing: does an election precede violence reduction and inclusive political dialogue, or does it follow them? A conditions-first sequence treats elections as consolidation of a settlement. A procedure-first sequence treats elections as a substitute for settlement—tempting because it provides an event to anchor engagement, corrosive because it rewards the capacity to stage procedure rather than the willingness to reduce coercion and broaden political space.

This is where “recognition pathways” become operational. Normalisation rarely arrives as a single decision; it accumulates through layered practices—observer routines that can slide into validation, technical interfaces that transfer legitimacy by treating authorities as standard counterparts, diplomatic contact that becomes habitual, and market language that reframes coercion as “stability.” In such settings, repression is not collateral to the election; it is part of the election’s machinery, because managed silence is the easiest substitute for consent.

A serious counterargument is that elections can sometimes reduce uncertainty and open channels for bargaining. That claim fails when two conditions dominate: territorial non-universality (a partial election cannot credibly settle national authority) and criminalisation of contestation (when scrutiny is treated as sabotage, elections cannot do legitimating work). Under those conditions, elections do not resolve uncertainty; they redistribute it—consolidating a governable core while pushing coercion and conflict pressures outward.

What should be watched, therefore, is not vote totals but the recognition scoreboard: shifts in territorial coverage, repression metrics, observer access conditions, and the quiet expansion of “technical” or “routine” engagement that confers de facto recognition without measurable de-escalation and inclusion.

A geopolitically serious response is sequencing discipline: do not treat voting alone as legitimacy; condition recognition pathways on demonstrable violence reduction and inclusive dialogue; and treat repression that silences scrutiny as disqualifying evidence, not as a stability signal. Myanmar’s election is an attempt to convert partial governability and managed silence into external legitimacy; the geopolitical question is whether recognition will be granted to procedure—or reserved for peace.

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**Dr. Atom Sunil Singh **is Registrar, Khongnangthaba University, and Faculty of Geography at Pravabati College, Imphal, Manipur. He writes on Northeast India, India–Myanmar connectivity and the geopolitics of the Southeast Asia. He could be reached at his email address: atomsunil[at]gmail.com.