Myanmar and Sudan are, in mid-2026, two of the deadliest conflicts on the planet — and two of the least reported. The first application of the MST framework to the two dossiers yields a clear result: Sudan has entered systemic breakdown, Myanmar is in critical convergence. And the most dangerous common factor is not military: it is the attention that is missing. This analysis belongs to the Geopolitical Analysis section and offers a structural reading of the two conflicts: not the chronicle of events, but the measure of the pressure the two systems accumulate and of their capacity to withstand it. It is the first application of the MST framework to the two dossiers, conducted on verified evidence from the UN, Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group and ACLED.
| Scope: | Geopolitical Analysis |
| Type of analysis: | Structural and Systemic |
| Subject: | Conflicts in Myanmar e Sudan - July 2026 |
| Domains involved: | Security • Finance • Regulatory • Cognitive • Technology • Energy |
| MST Score | Myanmar 4.35 (Critical convergence) · Sudan 4.62 (Systemic breakdown) |
| State | First application — initial baseline for both dossiers |
Two wars at the margins of attention
The figures alone would justify a top position on the international agenda. In Myanmar, six years after the coup, independent monitors estimate more than one hundred thousand dead and some 3.6 million internally displaced people. In Sudan, after three years of war between the regular armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the displaced exceed 14 million — a third of the population — and 28 million people face acute hunger: the United Nations calls it the world's most severe food crisis.
Yet both conflicts remain at the margins of international public discourse. This marginality, as we shall see, is no detail: it is itself a structural factor of the crisis.
Myanmar: the stalemate that consolidates military power
The Burmese conflict originates in the February 2021 coup and has moved through alternating phases: the resistance's coordinated offensive between 2023 and 2024 stripped the junta of large portions of territory; since 2025 the pendulum has swung back towards the military, sustained by Chinese and Russian supplies, compulsory conscription, and a drone fleet technologically superior to that of the resistance.
On the institutional level, the junta has completed its legitimisation operation: elections with severely limited participation between December 2025 and January 2026, an indirect presidential vote, and the installation of General Min Aung Hlaing as president in April 2026. The International Crisis Group describes it without ambiguity: military consolidation, not transition.
On the ground, the major offensives of the first half of 2026 have stalled: as of early July the northern push is bogged down, following the conflict's recurring pattern. What remains is the humanitarian substance: systematic airstrikes against schools, hospitals and displacement camps, and the deliberate blocking of aid as collective punishment — conduct that UN bodies qualify as war crimes and crimes against humanity. On the separate track of the Rohingya crisis, the genocide case before the International Court of Justice, relating to the 2017 campaigns, remains pending.
Sudan: genocide confirmed
The Sudanese case crossed a legal threshold in 2025-2026 that post-2021 Myanmar has not. The fall of El-Fasher in October 2025, after an eighteen-month siege, produced according to the UN Fact-Finding Mission more than six thousand dead in three days: door-to-door executions, ethnic selection, the documented massacre at the El-Saudi hospital with some four hundred and sixty victims.
The legal qualifications have accumulated with rare speed: the formal determination of genocide by the US State Department (January 2025); the conclusions of the UN Mission, which in February 2026 identified the hallmarks of genocide in El-Fasher and in its report of 9 July 2026 concluded that the campaign against the Zaghawa and Fur communities constitutes genocide under the 1948 Convention; and the Amnesty International report of 1 July, documenting eight crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in the conquest of the city.
The risk is now moving east: the Rapid Support Forces are replicating around El-Obeid, in North Kordofan, the tactics seen at El-Fasher — encirclement, attacks on infrastructure, the strangling of essential services. On 6 July the UN Human Rights Council opened an urgent inquiry into the city, with an explicit warning: El-Obeid must not become the next crime scene. On both fronts the technological dimension weighs heavily: civilian casualties from drone strikes rose by six hundred per cent between 2024 and 2025.
Measuring the pressure
The MST framework measures, for each observed system, the structural pressure across six domains — security, energy, finance, regulatory order, the cognitive dimension, technology — and compares it with the system's adaptive capacity: its robustness, its redundancies, its cohesion. When adaptive capacity falls below pressure, effective pressure amplifies; when transmission between domains is documented — conflict generating famine, external funding fuelling atrocities — a contagion factor is added.
Applied to the two dossiers for the first time, the framework returns for Myanmar an MST Score of 4.35: critical convergence, with the security domain touching the threshold of sectoral breakdown. The Burmese system is locked in a very high-pressure stalemate: no actor can win in the short term, and the dominant risk is the chronicisation of the humanitarian catastrophe.
For Sudan the result is more severe: MST Score 4.62 — systemic breakdown. The formula has a precise meaning: the system's internal compensation mechanisms are insufficient to contain systemic pressure. The security domain sits at the top of the scale, the regulatory order at the breakdown threshold; Sudan's adaptive capacity is the lowest observed in CSR dossiers. This is not a forecast: it is the structural snapshot of a system in which the state has lost the monopoly of force, a third of the population is displaced, and genocide has been formally confirmed.
A methodological note: these values constitute the initial baseline for the two dossiers and do not enter the historical series of the Global Systemic Dashboard, which aggregates macro-areas. They will be updated against documented structural variations.
The cognitive deficit as an autonomous risk factor
In both dossiers the cognitive domain shows the same anomaly: a radical disproportion between the scale of the atrocities and the attention the international system devotes to them. This is not a neutral circumstance. Inattention reduces the political incentive to act: no government pays an electoral price for inertia over a crisis its public does not see. And inertia, in turn, consolidates the impunity of actors on the ground, who learn they can proceed without consequences.
It is the mechanism CSR analyses in its work on cognitive power: what does not enter the field of attention does not enter the field of the decidable. "Forgotten wars" are not forgotten by chance — they are the outcome of a competition for attention that Myanmar and Sudan, lacking immediate energy relevance for the West and far from the spotlight of the major crises, systematically lose.
Enabling actors and international responsibility
Neither conflict is self-sustaining. The Burmese junta depends on supplies and diplomatic cover from Beijing — which has underwritten its military rebalancing and presses the border armed groups — as well as on Russian weaponry. The Rapid Support Forces depend on the financial and material support that multiple sources trace to the United Arab Emirates: seven Sudanese survivors have filed a communication with the International Criminal Court asking it to investigate Emirati figures for complicity in the Darfur atrocities.
Here opens the legal question destined to matter: the Genocide Convention imposes obligations on third states as well — to prevent, and not to be complicit. After a formal determination of genocide, material support to those committing it ceases to be a foreign-policy choice and becomes legal exposure. Controlling arms transfers to the parties is no longer merely an ethical option: it is consistency with treaty obligations.
Cui prodest?
In the CSR method, the question cui prodest? identifies who increases their systemic power as a result of the observed transformations. The Burmese junta has converted stalemate into consolidation: the electoral process has given it a formal guise that some regional actors show signs of accepting. The RSF have turned territorial faits accomplis into bargaining power. External suppliers gain leverage at low cost: Beijing tightens its grip on Myanmar as a strategic corridor; Abu Dhabi extends its projection over the Red Sea and the Sahel.
The loser is the system as a whole: every month in which a formally confirmed genocide produces no consequences for its perpetrators and financiers erodes the deterrent value of the 1948 Convention — a precedent the international system will pay for well beyond Sudan's borders.
CSR conclusions
The two trajectories diverge: Myanmar is heading towards chronicisation — a high-pressure stalemate in which humanitarian catastrophe becomes a permanent condition; Sudan is in systemic breakdown, with an acute and dated risk: the fate of El-Obeid in the coming weeks will tell whether the El-Fasher pattern repeats, under the eyes of a UN inquiry opened in advance — a rare circumstance that strips every actor of the alibi of unpredictability.
CSR will follow both dossiers with updates as structural conditions change. Readers interested in a specific follow-up can send a request to our editorial team.
CSR methodological note
This analysis derives from the application of the Multi-System Tension (MST) framework, developed to assess structural pressure, adaptive capacity and systemic configurations through validated open-source evidence. The values reported are not forecasts, but a synthesis of the structural state observable in the cycle considered. For these two dossiers this is the framework's first application: the values constitute the initial baseline.
Related CSR sources
Cognitive Power as the Infrastructure of Strategic Decision-Making
How cognitive power normalises crises
Risk Assessment (gateway)
Sanctions as systemic coercion
External sources
Sudan: mass killings in El Fasher constitute distinct markers of genocide — OHCHR, luglio 2026
Sudan: evidence in El-Fasher reveals genocidal campaign — OHCHR, febbraio 2026
‘El Obeid must not become the next crime scene’ — UN News, luglio 2026
UN probe finds mass killings, gang rapes by Sudan’s RSF amount to genocide — Al Jazeera, 9 luglio 2026
Sudan: RSF atrocities in El Fasher ‘a stain on the conscience of humanity’ — Amnesty International, 1 luglio 2026
Myanmar’s New Administration: Military Consolidation, Not Transition — International Crisis Group, 2026
The war from the sky: how drone warfare is shaping the conflict in Myanmar — ACLEDFiber-optic drones add new dimension to Myanmar’s civil war — Nikkei Asia