Women’s League of Burma Leads Anti-Sham Election Campaign Across Ethnic Women’s Movements

2025-12-28

SET Contributor, Women's League of Burma

The Women’s League of Burma (WLB) has launched a coordinated Anti-Sham Election Campaign, bringing together ethnic women’s organizations across Myanmar to collectively reject the junta’s planned 2025 election as illegitimate, coercive, and incompatible with the realities of war, displacement, and authoritarian violence. Through a series of reels, photo stories, and short videos, member and allied organizations of WLB — including Karenni, Shan, Karen, Ta’ang, Pa-O, Lahu, Tavoyan and Burmese women’s groups — have raised a united voice against the military’s attempt to present repression as political process. Their message is shared, but deeply grounded in lived experience: there can be no free or genuine election under military rule, armed conflict, displacement, and systemic fear. The campaign is both a rejection of the junta’s political theater and a reaffirmation of women’s leadership in resistance, truth-telling, and people-centered democracy across Myanmar’s diverse communities.

A Collective Women-Led Stand for Justice and Representation

As a long-standing umbrella network of ethnic and women-led organizations, the Women’s League of Burma plays a coordinating role in amplifying local voices, cross-border solidarity, and feminist perspectives from conflict-affected regions.

In this campaign, WLB member organizations speak from direct experience with:

military offensives and airstrikes
forced displacement and loss of livelihood
shrinking civic and political space
everyday insecurity and fear

Yet the campaign is also marked by resilience, dignity, and solidarity.

Below are the organizations who took part in the campaign, each creating their own narrative through reels, photos, or video messages.

A Feminist Voice of Resistance Across Borders

Although each organization speaks from its own language, identity, and historical context, their messages converge around shared realities:

elections cannot be free under militarization and displacement
participation requires safety, dignity, and justice
imposed political processes do not reflect people’s will

The campaign also reinforces the role of women as:

movement leaders
community protectors
documenters of harm
advocates for justice and self-determination

At a time when civic space is severely repressed, these coordinated statements of refusal are themselves acts of courage and political agency.

A Collective Record of Resistance

The Anti-Sham Election Campaign organized by the Women’s League of Burma is not only a public awareness effort — it is part of a collective historical record. Each reel, photo message, and short video preserves women’s voices from conflict-affected communities who refuse to be erased by authoritarian narratives.

Together, they remind the world that legitimacy cannot be manufactured through fear, and that democracy cannot be rebuilt through a process controlled by those who continue to wage war against the people.

This campaign stands as a call — and a promise — that women across Myanmar will continue to resist, speak, and lead in the struggle for justice and genuine democratic change.

Women’s League of Burma Leads Anti-Sham Election Campaign Across Ethnic Women’s Movements

A Collective Women-Led Stand for Justice and Representation

Pa-O Women’s Union (PWU)

Karenni National Women’s Organization (KNWO)

Tavoyan Women’s Union (TWU)

Ta’ang Women’s Organization (TWO)

Lahu Women’s Organization (LWO)

Karen Women’s Organization (KWO)

Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN)

Women for Justice (WJ)

Burmese Women’s Union (BWU)

A Feminist Voice of Resistance Across Borders

A Collective Record of Resistance

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