Myanmar

Myanmar's post-coup reality has created a generation of young men whose defining masculine experience is armed resistance against their own military. University students who were studying engineering and medicine in February 2021 were training with rifles in the jungle by December. These men are experiencing the moral complexity of revolutionary violence — killing soldiers who are their countrymen, watching friends die in ambushes, and making impossible decisions without any of the psychological support that armies of recognized nations provide.

The Rohingya genocide adds an ethnic dimension to Myanmar's male crisis that the world has recognized but not resolved. Rohingya men who survived the 2017 military operations — which killed thousands, destroyed villages, and displaced nearly a million people — now languish in refugee camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar, unable to work, unable to return, and unable to fulfill any of the masculine roles their culture defines. These men are trapped in a liminal existence that destroys identity: not citizens of any country, not providers for families they can barely feed, not men by any definition their culture recognizes. The methamphetamine crisis in Shan State — where yaba (meth pills) are produced in volumes that flood Southeast Asia — adds another dimension: men in northeastern Myanmar live in a narco-economy that offers employment but destroys communities.