Myanmar’s struggle for survival: vying for autonomy and agency

Abstract Despite terminological variations used to characterize Myanmar’s foreign policy within the extant literature, in practice Myanmar has adopted a foreign policy of neutrality and non-alignment since independence to avoid being drawn into global and regional post-World War II power struggles. As realist perspectives suggest, Myanmar’s behavior is a rational choice derived from inherent limitations that a typical weaker state must inevitably conform to the systemic pressures and changes. However, as the discussion illustrates, a weaker state can also be relatively autonomous and possess the ability to pursue independent foreign policies in relation to more powerful states at the international level while dealing with unit-level domestic security problems and challenges. Meanwhile, it is essential not to treat the state as a cohesive unit, as commonly done within existing IR theories based on the experiences of the West. Rather, the state should be treated as a fragmented unit in which its segments possess varying degrees of agency to interact and leverage with other actors at both the international and domestic levels. In order to understand Myanmar’s foreign policy behavior, this article examines how the country has actualized its avenue of agency in coping with both the fluidity of international order and the multidimensional internal instability.