ASEAN Beat | Diplomacy | Southeast Asia

Does Myanmar Still Have One Government to Recognize?

Much of the world still views Myanmar through a narrow diplomatic lens that cannot encompass the full political complexity of its conflict.

Last month, Myanmar’s new military-backed government rejected a request from the Philippines’ Foreign Secretary Ma. Theresa Lazaro to meet with the country’s detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, citing her prison sentence. Days later, Min Aung Hlaing, who led the 2021 coup and anointed himself president in April, traveled to Laos on an official bilateral visit, his first to an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member state since the coup.

Although ASEAN itself has not officially recognized the new government, nor accepted the result of the election held in December and January, it still structures every visit and appointment around the notion that the junta is Myanmar’s sole government.

That is usually interpreted as ASEAN being cautious, compromised, or slow to react to the situation on the ground inside Myanmar. It instead reflects a diplomatic practice that recognizes one government per territory. Instead of asking whether ASEAN should recognize the military regime, or which of Myanmar’s competing authorities it might recognize instead, a more useful question may be whether looking for one government to recognize is the best or only way to think about the situation.

ASEAN’s founding non-interference norm took for granted a settled order of single territorial states protected from outside interference. This was codified as a principle in the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, but the founders did not foresee a situation in which a member has a contested government.

International law distinguishes a state’s existence from recognition of its government. States continue to exist under contested or divided control without losing statehood. Myanmar is not the only case. Somalia has sustained divided control for decades, and Libya has been contested by rival governments since 2014. Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations has been frozen since 2021. The gap exists in diplomatic practice, which treats a settled state as the default because it is the more common case.

The statistics on Myanmar show how the gap has widened. As of mid-2026, the military regime administers a territory covering between a fifth and a third of the country, albeit nearly all the major population centers. This includes areas where it maintains only a military presence with no administration. Beyond this, close to half the country has slid into a form of “warlordism,” with power fracturing into rival centers rather than converging on one single entity. The Arakan Army administers nearly all of Rakhine State, and it maintains its own independent relations with Bangladesh, although the latter states that this does not amount to diplomatic recognition.

The junta, the National Unity Government (NUG), and ethnic resistance organizations, whether or not they are aligned with the NUG, are all establishing competing centers of authority, each running their own initiatives in parallel rather than competing to be recognized as the sole government. The NUG’s own claims about how many townships it controls have shifted and been difficult to verify. In March it formed a new coordinating body with four ethnic armed organizations, in an effort to consolidate administrative control.

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