On Monday morning, the Myanmar military staged a coup, its first coup since 1988 but hardly unique in the country’s modern history.
This coup bore all the hallmarks of previous military takeovers, even in an era in which telecommunications technology is far different from 1988, and information about Myanmar cannot be hermetically sealed off from the world. The armed forces detained most senior civilian politicians, and went beyond just detaining political figures to detain a wide range of critics of the armed forces.
The army also instituted many roadblocks, throttled internet traffic, cut phone lines and other types of communication, closed banks and took control of regional governments and the central government, with power now clearly residing with the army’s top commander, Min Aung Hlaing.