Elite Survival Strategies in Times of Change: Rethinking Local Power in Regime Transitions

Research on political elites has increasingly highlighted the importance of sub national actors in shaping political orders, yet their role during moments of regime transition is often overlooked. Existing scholarship on local authoritarianism shows how local elites entrench their authority by subverting national democratic processes, while studies of warlordism demonstrate how they leverage networks of coercion, patronage, and external alliances to maintain power during conflict. However, far less attention has been paid to how these actors navigate the profound uncertainty of regime transitions, when national authorities seek to reconfigure political institutions and when local elites face acute threats to their authority, resources, and legitimacy. This paper examines how local elites respond to nationally driven transition processes by strategically combining cooperation and contestation to ensure their political survival. Drawing on the case of Myanmar’s post conflict and post authoritarian transition, the analysis shows how local elites—ranging from ethnic armed organisation leaders to sub national political brokers and administrative authorities—deploy hybrid strategies that simultaneously accommodate and resist central state reforms. These strategies include selective compliance with national directives, the preservation of autonomous governance structures, the mobilisation of local constituencies, and the instrumental use of transitional uncertainty to renegotiate power. By tracing these dynamics, the paper advances a framework for understanding local elites as pivotal actors who shape the trajectory and outcomes of regime transitions. Rather than passive recipients of national reform, they emerge as political entrepreneurs whose choices influence institutional consolidation, centre–periphery relations, and the durability of post conflict settlements. The findings contribute to broader debates on democratisation, hybrid governance, and elite politics by demonstrating how local elites mediate the reconfiguration of political authority during periods of systemic change.