Commentary | Nyi Nyi Kyaw, Dormant, Not Dismantled: Myanmar’s Riot Machine and the Question of When
On 15 August 2026, monks from the Patriotic Myanmar Monks Union visited and inspected allegedly illegal construction work at the Sein Kone Mosque in Thanlyin, about ten kilometers from Yangon, and the mosque administrators were made to produce documents and offer explanations. Likewise, on 28 August, U Wirathu, the poster monk of Myanmar’s Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim violence in the years before the coup, visited the 59th Street Mosque in Yangon, appearing, at least outwardly, friendly.
These are only two examples among several. Incidents like these are not always isolated or spontaneous. They reflect a pattern that has operated in Myanmar since at least the 1990s, in which nationalist monks test, provoke, or apply pressure on Muslim communities through small, seemingly local acts. Some of these acts can even look friendly, as with U Wirathu’s mosque visit. Between 2012 and 2014, this pattern crystallized into a wave of anti-Muslim riots across the country. By 2016 and 2017 it had helped pave the way for the campaign of violence against the Rohingya that has since been characterized as genocide. Monk-led organizations and movements such as Ma Ba Tha (Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion) and the 969 movement often worked in tandem with sympathetic officials within the security apparatus and the ruling party at the time. Street incidents became religious violence, and vice versa.
Given the recent history of Buddhist nationalist and Islamophobic monastic activism and anti-Muslim/Rohingya violence in Myanmar, the question of “why not now” is a vexing one. A select group of Buddhist monks has remained active in Myanmar since the 2021 coup, and I have been asked several times — and have wondered myself — why these monks, who are allied or at least aligned with the military, have had to tone down their somewhat militant activism and now emerge from the shadows only occasionally. In short, this institutionalized riot system has not been fully dismantled since the 2021 coup, as shown by the recent, smaller episodes described above. Rather, it lies dormant. Below I lay out several reasons why this might be so, and consider when it might be reactivated.
Who are these Buddhist nationalist monks? It is worth distinguishing between at least three types of them, based on my own research on these networks and individual monks since 2012. The first type consists of state-aligned senior monks, such as Sitagu Sayadaw and Ywama Sayadaw, both of whom founded Ma Ba Tha in 2013. One of Myanmar’s top Buddhist orators and philanthropists, Sitagu Sayadaw preached to promote Ma Ba Tha profusely while the organization was active. The second type consists of hardcore former Ma Ba Tha figures and their allies, such as U Wirathu and U Thu Seikta (Patriotic Myanmar Monks Union). These younger monks built their reputations on precisely the kind of militant and confrontational anti-Muslim mobilization seen in the streets. The third type might be called militia-style monks, such as Pauk Kodaw and U Warthawa, who are founders and godfathers of the Pyusawhti militias in central Myanmar. This categorization only generally reflects the current situation, and the categories are not always mutually exclusive. The senior monks and the hardcore radicals may well remain allies behind the curtain. The reasons that follow, I should note, apply with different force to each of these three types.
The first reason has to do with the absence of a common enemy or target to rally around. Before the coup, these Buddhist nationalist monks had Islam and Muslims, the Rohingya in particular, to direct their activism against. Now, the civil war being fought is one between the military on one side and the Bamar Buddhist majority together with other ethnic groups on the other. It is also worth recalling that, during the riotous years of 2012 to 2014 and the genocidal years of 2016 and 2017, the monks, along with their military and Union Solidarity and Development Party sponsors, were able to make use of this activism for a further purpose: deflecting public attention away from the National League for Democracy and from other, arguably more pressing, issues such as democracy, constitutional change, the Myitsone Dam and labor rights.
There is also little to suggest that the top echelon of the current junta’s leadership has either actively or passively endorsed a Ma Ba Tha type movement at present. The reason for this difference lies in the fact that, whereas military leaders and Union Solidarity and Development Party elites from 2012 to 2017 were either tacitly or openly endorsing the monks’ campaigns, the current junta’s high-level leadership has not made use of its authority to endorse a new campaign. However, it does not appear that the network has been dismissed entirely. Some individual generals, both serving and retired (and therefore capable of exerting influence), will probably continue to support preservation of the monks’ networks and capacity for some eventual crisis, whether for use in diverting popular outrage at a time when the regime is weak, to chasten a restive Buddhist population, or simply to preserve an option should the junta’s military fortunes change. In short, the monks remain “on file” as an insurance policy.
Already engaged in a war on multiple fronts, the junta might not want to unleash an actor it cannot fully control. Monks mobilized for one purpose have, in the past, proven difficult to rein back in. It might be better to leave the network dormant than to risk disorder it cannot direct. At a pro-military rally held in Pyin Oo Lwin in January 2024, for instance, Pauk Kodaw himself openly and daringly called on junta chief Min Aung Hlaing to step down and let his deputy, Soe Win, replace him. The Pyusawhti militias, which attracted considerable attention in 2022, have similarly become mobbish, thuggish, and provincial, rather than the decisive force against the resistance the junta may once have hoped for.
The junta stands to gain little from rekindling rioting at a time when Myanmar is already under siege from an ongoing, multi front disaster. The economic situation is collapsing, and significant swaths of territory are contested or lost to armed resistance groups. The junta may be making gradual gains in the conflict, but it is far from having achieved victory, and it has little reason to open up a new front of unrest through the sort of communal violence a Ma Ba Tha type movement would almost certainly generate. Riots and violence on the scale of those Myanmar experienced during 2012 to 2017 would stretch thin a security apparatus already overburdened by the demands of the civil war. There is also a good chance, I suspect, that such riots would turn against the junta itself rather than against whatever target the monks might choose to direct their anger toward.
Nor should we overlook the Buddhist majority public, which seems unlikely either to applaud such a movement openly or to simply remain quiet and indifferent, as it may have done in the past. Two developments are noteworthy here. The first has to do with the institution of the Sangha itself. The coup effectively split the Sangha between monks who joined the resistance and openly defied the junta and monks who chose to remain aligned with the military or stay quiet. In terms of size, the former group is considerably smaller than the latter. That said, this intra-Sangha split has cost pro-junta or silent monks a good deal of the moral authority they once relied upon when posing as defenders of race and religion. The Sangha is now largely seen by much of the Buddhist public as standing on the other side of that very question of moral legitimacy. The second development is the changing nature of the public in general, and of the Buddhist majority in particular. The coup produced a degree of cross-ethnic and cross-religious solidarity against the junta that simply did not exist during 2012 to 2017, however strategic, artificial and superficial this solidarity may have been at times. A public that has come to see itself as sharing in victimhood under the junta across communal lines is unlikely to respond well to a movement premised on turning those very communities against one another. At bottom, even as considerable anti-Rohingya sentiment remains dormant, the Myanmar Buddhist public will most likely not clap its hands if anti-Muslim violence recurs.
Private Myanmar media that once gave Ma Ba Tha and the 969 monks generous coverage, often in tones that echoed the monks’ own worldview and arguments rather than questioned them, simply no longer exists in that form. Many of the journalists and media houses, such as The Voice and Eleven Media, who once did this Buddhist nationalist reporting are now defunct or have taken a different and more measured tone. Also, the exile media outlets, which are now largely against the junta, would be far more inclined to investigate and condemn such activism than to give it a friendly platform. As for social media and the spread of hatred, while TikTok and Telegram have largely replaced Facebook as the preferred platforms within Myanmar, Facebook remains the most popular one among a sizeable section of the Myanmar diaspora and exile media outlets. Anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya content on Facebook would therefore be unlikely to recur at scale, while TikTok, increasingly the platform of choice, is seen as one on which such messaging surfaces only periodically. But the scale is simply incomparable to that of the years before the coup.
Finally, I suspect the monks themselves are also operating under real material and institutional constraints. Mobilising a movement on the scale of Ma Ba Tha was never a costless exercise for the monks involved. At its zenith in 2014 and 2015, it enjoyed resources, networks of patronage, freedom of movement, and a visibly high degree of personal security. I personally attended numerous Ma Ba Tha monks’ sermons and lay campaigners’ speeches in 2013 and 2015 and saw them in action. In those years, the Ma Ba Tha monks and their lay campaigners were able to travel, preach, and organize. Now gripped by economic collapse and armed conflict, Myanmar no longer affords these things as readily as before. Monasteries in contested or war affected regions are, after all, not immune to the same disruptions to income, movement, and safety that the rest of the population has had to endure. And prominent monks such as Sitagu Sayadaw and U Wirathu are hardly exempt from the risks that come with operating in a state that is at once fragmented and heavily surveilled. Whatever residual appetite there may be to revive their (militant) activism, then, is constrained as much by what these monks themselves are currently in a position to do as by what the junta or the public would tolerate.
I began this essay with the question of “why not now?” It is worth asking what might eventually turn that question into “when.” Here a specific trigger seems worth naming. Most Rohingya have by now fled or been driven out of Myanmar, and Rakhine State is largely under the control of the Arakan Army rather than the Myanmar military. A judgment on the merits in The Gambia’s genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, expected sometime later in 2026, could plausibly serve as such a trigger. The scenario is quite likely should the ruling go against Myanmar.
I doubt this would revive mass rioting in the form Myanmar saw in 2012 and 2013, which depended on a degree of mass participation, or at least tacit approval, from ordinary Buddhists living alongside Rohingya and other Muslim communities. Given the scale of displacement since then, those conditions simply no longer hold in the same way. What seems more likely, instead, is a reactivation of the institutionalized riot system in a more targeted and one-sided form. This would involve attacks on Muslim properties and religious buildings by aligned, or even implanted, mobs, justified and legitimized by monks such as U Wirathu, without requiring the broader participation or approval of Buddhist communities at large. Such a sequence would likely begin, as it has before, with rhetorical and nationalist mobilization, statements, sermons, social media activity, before escalating into attacks on property.
The eventual scale is difficult to estimate, but the form would resemble the smaller, more targeted anti-Muslim attacks Myanmar saw in the 2000s or in earlier years. Even so, the ruling alone might not fully reactivate the machine. The deeper dormancy, rooted in the shifts in public mood, social media, and the monks’ own capacity discussed above, would probably persist regardless. This is, after all, an institutionalized riot system with roots reaching back to at least the 1990s. The system has weathered long periods of quiet before, and it has been dormant, not dismantled, in recent years. And the Hague might reactive it.
Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a Research Associate at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Dormant, Not Dismantled: Myanmar’s Riot Machine and the Question of When,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, September 16, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/WCXP4253.