Dean: Myanmar Democracy (NLD) through 2012 by-elections. It removed thousands of names from the official blacklist, thus opening the country for exiled compatriots. It abolished the 25-year-old ban on public gatherings of more than five people and the requirement for a prepublication approval. Myanmar became the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2014, the daring of international aid and investment, and hugely improved its relations with the West that abolished much of the earlier sanctions regardless the government’s failure to stop ongoing civil wars and the alleged human rights violations in ethnic states. This government, headed by President Thein Sein, also organized new elections in 2015, deemed free and fair by international observers, and handed over power to the popularly elected NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2016. These developments have prompted the designation of Myanmar’s political context as a transition in public discourses and academia alike. In line with the general ‟pronounced democratizing bias” in the study of post-Cold War hybrid regimes (Levitsky and Way 2010: 3), Myanmar’s transition has widely been viewed in the context of democratization and described as fragile, emergent, nascent or as Myanmar’s version of democracy. The democracy assumption has been expressly strong not only because an extreme authoritarian regime was procedurally abolished and a popular government elected—but also because the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi have both epitomized Myanmar’s struggle for democracy since 1990, internationally and domestically, with Aung San Suu Kyi being compared to Nelson Mandela and awarded prizes for defending human rights and freedoms.2 The idea that Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD represent Myanmar’s best chance for wider public participation in Myanmar’s governance is usually taken for granted (Farrelly and Win 2016: 38), regardless of many serious structural and tangible impediments pointing to the institutionalization and impunity of Myanmar’s military. The article will focus on the coercive capacity of Myanmar’s military in the context of the ongoing ‟regime change” in Myanmar. There are extensive theoretical discussions, beyond the scope of this article, on whether any systematic prerequisites for democratic transition exist. Importantly, however, Albertus and Menaldo (2012) argue that the robustness of state’s coercive capacity is to be directly linked to the persistence of authoritarianism. Following their finding that ‟one crucial step in the transition process is the scaling down of the coercive apparatus” (ibid: 166-167), this article compares the state coercive capacity in Myanmar before and during the ‟transition.” After discussing the context of ‟transition,” the article explores surveillance as one form of coercion, establishing that low-intensity coercion more widely, and surveillance specifically, continues unabated. It demonstrates that the political context in Myanmar is conducive in two crucial ways to plying its powerful surveillance legacy to continuing the serving of authoritarian interests: by neither remarkably reducing the practices of surveillance nor prioritizing their subjugation to law. A regime change: To what? Studies conducted on regime change following the collapse of single-party or military dictatorships during the late 1980s and early 1990s show that the countries, while adopting the system of electoral competition, have followed diverse paths: some indeed have democratized, while others installed hybrid regimes that Levitsky and Way (2010) view as competitively authoritarian. Neither the breakdown of authoritarian regimes, nor the holding of multiparty elections has necessarily led to democratization, challenging an earlier assumption that a change from authoritarianism leads to democratization (Levitsky and Way 2010; Carothers 2002; Brownlee 2009; Ottaway 2003). In the context of the general understanding of military regimes as the weakest form of authoritarianism with their average lifespan worldwide being just seven years, Myanmar’s military regimes are exceptional as the most resilient and stable forms of such coercive governance in the contemporary era (Bünte 2011: 7; Geddes 2 Aung San Suu Kyi’s prizes include the Nobel Peace Prize (1991), Sakharov Prize (1990), Rafto Prize (1990), Jawaharlal Nehru Award (1993), Congressional Gold Medal (2008) and several others. Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 497