The political implications of aid distribution on the Thai-Myanmar border
Elena Harris-Bauer, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP)
In Myanmar’s Karen State, over 200,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) rely on international humanitarian aid to meet their daily needs. Yet formal channels, encumbered by bureaucracy, political blockades and the complexity of Myanmar’s protracted civil war, are ill-equipped to deliver lifesaving support. In this environment, informal networks often prevail. Along the Thai-Myanmar border, community-based and ethnic-backed organizations operate highly coordinated informal aid channels that provide key alternatives.
The challenges of delivering humanitarian assistance in Myanmar’s ethnic-controlled regions are inseparable from the contested political landscape within which aid providers operate. Battles over local and national sovereignty shape how humanitarian aid is organized and accessed, with implications for regional governance and consequences for populations on the ground.
Myanmar’s governance is highly contested. Over years of conflict, fighting between Myanmar’s ruling military junta and ethnic opposition forces has displaced millions of civilians. Vastly exceeding UN figures, data from Myanmar’s regional ethnic authorities like the Karen National Union (KNU) report over a million IDPs across KNU-controlled territories in eastern Myanmar. While some civilians have fled to nearby countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh, the majority have remained in the country as IDPs, relying on a precarious combination of internationally funded and community-administered systems of support.
Within Myanmar, ethnic opposition groups play a central role in resisting military rule and supporting displaced communities. Together with their allies, these organized and militarized groups manage IDP populations and deliver aid to areas often inaccessible to international humanitarian organizations. Challenging the principle of neutrality embedded in humanitarian practice, ethnic organizations’ humanitarian interventions carry profound political implications.
As offensives by Myanmar’s military junta, alongside economic and environmental decline, continue to drive displacement, community-based systems to manage IDPs have proliferated and strengthened—becoming the most effective channel for delivering aid and supporting displaced communities.
A key actor in the local humanitarian landscape is the KNU-affiliated Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People (CIDKP). Since 1998, CIDKP has navigated the politics of aid delivery, balancing institutional donors’ requirements with locally led implementation. Community-based and opposition-linked humanitarian actors like CIDKP remain central to complex relief efforts. Ethnic opposition actors play a key role in aid processes that both embody the “localization” zeitgeist of international humanitarian practice and embed humanitarian responses within longstanding political disputes.
After Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, tensions over governance and legitimacy intensified, long-running conflicts between national and ethnic authorities escalated, and international humanitarianism collided with a conflict that was deeply politicized.
In 2021, Myanmar’s military overthrew the democratically elected government and consolidated its power, and as civilians rose in protest, the international community responded swiftly with sanctions and condemnation. Western governments sympathetic to civilians defending democracy and resisting military rule launched a flood of humanitarian assistance. Yet while international aid increased, formal mechanisms struggled to adapt to politically blockaded delivery systems and other on-the-ground difficulties. Rather than facilitating humanitarian responses, the military junta obstructed aid from reaching displaced civilians, especially in contested zones.
The inflexibility of formal aid channels and the lack of a state-led response to large-scale displacement led to ad hoc support systems originating in impacted communities across Myanmar. Many of these systems were organized by the same ethnic resistance groups already challenging the legitimacy of military rule. In this setting, CIDKP and other community-based organizations (CBOs) offered ground-up, extra-institutional support—and ready partners for international funders —helping aid thread the needle legally, politically, and logistically to reach where it was needed most. Long-standing de facto authorities like KNU, with CIDKP as its humanitarian arm, were embedded within large-scale aid operations funded directly by international partners. Far from interim or stopgap measures to traditional aid architectures, CIDKP and other operators connected to the civilian resistance movement became essential humanitarian infrastructure.
In Myanmar’s ongoing civil war, the delivery of humanitarian assistance intersects directly with questions of territorial authority, political legitimacy and civilian governance.
Areas controlled by Myanmar’s ethnic authorities have well-established strategies for bringing aid to displaced populations. The militarized branches of these groups, such as the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), are also engaged in an unfolding process of revolution and political transformation. Myanmar’s political transformation has various centers of gravity. This process is concentrated in ethnic minority regions like Karen State, Rakhine State, and Shan State, and is guided by a cohort of resistance actors creating localized sovereign formations that lead governance, security and military operations, service delivery, and other state functions.
Tensions related to governing authority further shape humanitarian practice, as engagement with resistance actors in Myanmar can be necessary for effective service delivery. CIDKP sees this engagement as fundamental. Entities like CIDKP must be exceptionally flexible and diplomatic, brokering compromise with international donors while maintaining credibility with local communities and authorities, and access to hard-to-reach beneficiaries. How to accomplish it? Keep a “low profile, no matter what”, says Saw Kelly, deputy director of CIDKP.
Conversations with Saw Kelly in Chiang Mai and Mae Sot in spring 2026 covered the evolving dynamics of aid delivery in Myanmar, the cross-border activities CIDKP and its partners undertake, and the political implications of this work.
Though not directly organized under its leadership, CIDKP acts as KNU’s humanitarian branch. Saw Kelly quickly notes that CIDKP follows its own authority, acts independently of KNU’s organizational structure, and is guided fundamentally by humanitarian principles. CIDKP’s institutional distance from KNU is essential to maintaining its neutrality and upholding the humanitarian edict of “do no harm”.
Despite CIDKP’s explicitly humanitarian mandate, ongoing disputes over territorial authority and political legitimacy in the regions where CIDKP works demand precise political navigation. Displacement and conflict yield a fragmented picture of sovereignty, compelling aid workers to collaborate with non-governmental and de facto authorities to reach impacted communities.
CIDKP does not work with any one authority to deliver services, nor does it restrict its activities to KNU-controlled territories. The organization works across KNU-held areas, in contested territories and conflict zones, and in areas controlled by the Myanmar military. Its impartiality in delivering support to affected communities reflects humanitarian principles at work and provides sufficient justification to collaborate with foreign institutional donors. But the realities of the conflict in Myanmar consistently bring humanitarian actors into relationships with armed groups and ethnic governance systems.
CIDKP’s regular activities include coordinating aid delivery, distributing food and cash, furnishing building materials for shelters, and providing education, health, and social support. In collaboration with KNU district administrators, CIDKP also tracks IDP numbers, keeping close records of population movements. Here, CIDKP’s work extends beyond critical service provision to encompass functions related to governance.
In Saw Kelly’s view, humanitarian activities are both necessary lifesaving measures and legitimizing practices for ethnic resistance groups defending political claims. “What CIDKP is doing is the work of the government”, says Saw Kelly.
In the setting of Myanmar’s protracted conflict, aid is not only an emergency measure, but an embedded resource supporting the survival of hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians. Having long exceeded the temporal limits of crisis intervention, humanitarian activities are an established part of territorial governance and civil administration in parts of Myanmar. In this context, aid delivery contributes to broader projects of sovereignty and ethnic statecraft. While CIDKP’s humanitarian function drives its work, its role as a service provider also legitimizes KNU’s territorial and political authority.
KNU is a prolific administrative authority in its own right: it grants land titles; issues birth certificates; builds roads, schools, and hospitals; and fulfills many duties. In KNU-controlled areas, organized initiatives gather demographic data, and the first socioeconomic household survey of Kawthoolei was published in 2023. KNU functions as a coherent governing entity, and has for decades.
KNU’s longstanding authority in Karen State reflects both a history of parallel governance by actors that challenge the legitimacy of Myanmar’s military rule, and the broader, sustained efforts of ethnic authorities to provide support to civilians. In the absence of an official state apparatus, ethnic authorities in Myanmar provide relatively stable, ground-level support to civilian populations. Within Myanmar’s political crucible, basic service delivery systems are precariously scaffolded between formal humanitarian mechanisms on the one hand and adaptive, responsive, and flexible systems on the other.
Under these conditions, practitioners like CIDKP, who combine local access, diplomatic dexterity, and institutional credibility, are essential to bridging significant operational and political gaps and bringing support to vulnerable communities in Myanmar.
And while KNU’s militarized branches defend civilians and resist encroachment by the junta, entities like CIDKP generate state-like authority through the dexterous management of international aid and the independent administration of local IDP populations. Both sides constitute a process of political claims-making that contests the legitimacy of the Myanmar military and provides viable alternatives.
- THEME