Since the 2021 military coup, Myanmar’s higher education system has been widely described as in a state of collapse. Despite major disruptions, emerging alternative higher education initiatives are becoming more than emergency responses to conflict — they are experimental spaces in which new forms of knowledge production and possible federal futures are being negotiated in practice.
The post-coup educational disruption is unprecedented — hundreds of thousands of students have been pushed out of the formal system, unwilling or unable to attend military-controlled universities, while thousands are studying in precarious conditions of displacement. Myanmar’s universities have been militarised and forced back into the junta’s authoritarian model of control.
Yet students and academics are drawing on a decade of government-led educational reform (2011–21) prior to the coup that transformed higher education into a space of political agency, critical thinking and transnational connections. Rather than disappearing, higher education in Myanmar is being reimagined through resistance, creating spaces for new — often cross-border and hybrid — education and research.
Long-standing ethnic education governance systems are scaling up. In Karenni State, a medical college was established in 2024 to train healthcare workers for conflict-affected communities, tying education closely to the provision of services shuttered by the junta. In Kachin State, institutions managed by the Kachin Independence Organisation are upholding the right to higher education as they absorb the growing number of students excluded or opting out from government-run institutions. And in 2022, the New Mon State Party established the Mon National College for students excluded from state universities, sustaining Mon intellectual and cultural life.
