Vol. 50 No. 3 September 2019 ‘Accountability Amidst Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: Learning from Recent Cases’ This notwithstanding, independence leader General Aung San went to great lengths in his attempts to negotiate a federal settlement that included provisions for autonomy and power sharing with delegates from the Kachin, Chin, and Shan communities: the so-called ‘Panglong Agreement’ of 1947 (Walton 2008: 889–900). Tragically, Aung San was assassinated by ultranationalist Bamar paramilitaries shortly afterwards and Myanmar’s constitution never incorporated any federal provisions (Smith 1999: 79). Civil war broke out shortly after independence in 1948 after Karen in the east and communist forces in the north started to rebel against the state. By the late 1950s, most of Myanmar was embroiled in war, which placed the military firmly in the driver’s seat of postcolonial state-building (Callahan 2003). Seeing that the post‑independence civilian government of President U Nu proved incapable of pacifying the country, the Tatmadaw developed a self‑perception as guardians of the Myanmar state (Maung Aung Myoe 2009; Jones 2014; Egreteau 2016). After General Ne Win assumed power in a coup in 1962, all other political parties but the newly founded Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) were banned and decades of authoritarian rule commenced. 3 Transition from above Myanmar’s generals surrounding former dictator Than Shwe initiated wide-ranging political reforms in 2011 under the leadership of President Thein Sein. While this surprised international observers at the time, the initial phase of transition was well planned from above. In fact, the junta’s mouthpiece newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, announced a ‘roadmap’ to ‘a discipline-flourishing democracy’ as early as 2003, calling for restoring the National Convention, redrafting and holding a constitutional referendum in 2008, and thereafter holding national elections (The New Light of Myanmar 2003). Scholars of Myanmar point to several drivers behind the transition. Many highlight that the country’s generals felt secure enough, not least after adopting a new constitution in 2008, in their own positions of power to liberalise parts of the political system (Callahan 2012; Jones 2014; Egreteau 2016; Taylor 2015; Ruzza, Gabusi and Pellegrino 2019). By 2011, the Tatmadaw (wrongly) thought that it had neutralised viable threats from ethnic rebels in the borderlands with co-optative mechanisms used since the early 1990s (Jones 2014). In addition, the military rulers defused any sizeable opposition in the country’s centre after crushing the so-called ‘Saffron Revolution’ in 2007 (Pedersen 2014; Jones 2014). Moreover, it seems that Myanmar’s military rulers were driven to initiate reforms by a desire to end the country’s international isolation and to diversify its international relations, especially its dependence on China (Haacke 2010; Steinberg and Fan 2012). Importantly then, scholarship suggests that the swift and wide-ranging reform process in 2011 was not the outcome of mounting internal pressure on the streets of Yangon or the trenches of rebel borderlands. Neither was it the result of international pressure, such as Western 20 | Brenner and Schulman Myanmar’s Top-Down Transition: Challenges for Civil Society