Most Powerful

• #1 Than Shwe
  Myanmar MilitaryParty State ControlPolitical World Wars and Midcentury Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Than Shwe (born 1933) was the Myanmar army officer who presided over the country’s military regime for nearly two decades and shaped the political order that endured well beyond his formal retirement. He rose from a modest background, entered the army in the years after independence, and built his career inside institutions designed to treat internal dissent as a security problem rather than a political question. When he became head of the junta in 1992, many observers briefly hoped for a softer style than that of earlier generals. Instead, his rule reinforced military supremacy, blocked meaningful democratic transfer, and treated civilian politics as something to be contained, scripted, or delayed.Than Shwe‘s authority rested less on public charisma than on command over the Tatmadaw, the senior officer corps, the intelligence and police apparatus, and a system of patronage linking generals, ministries, military-owned firms, and favored business families. He governed through distance and opacity. Public appearances were limited, information was tightly managed, and important decisions often emerged from closed circles rather than open institutional debate. Under his leadership the regime refused to recognize the opposition’s electoral mandate, continued restrictions on Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy, moved the capital to Naypyidaw, crushed protest movements, and advanced a controlled constitutional transition that preserved decisive military privileges.His historical importance lies in the durability of the order he built. Than Shwe did not simply command a junta for a season of emergency. He helped convert military domination into a constitutional and economic system capable of surviving changes in uniform, title, and procedure. Even after he stepped aside in 2011, Myanmar’s political field remained marked by the institutions, habits, and elite protections created under his watch. He stands as a leading example of party-state style control without a formal mass party: a security order in which the army itself functioned as the core political class.
• #2 Khun Sa
  Golden TriangleMyanmarThailand CriminalCriminal EnterpriseMilitary Cold War and Globalization Illicit NetworksMilitary Command Power: 97
  Khun Sa (1934–2007), born Chang Chi-fu, was a Shan-area warlord and narcotics trafficker who became the most famous opium overlord of the Golden Triangle in the late twentieth century. His significance lay in the fusion of commerce, militia power, and frontier politics. Rather than operating as a simple smuggler, he built armed organizations, held territory, taxed movement, negotiated with governments, and used the profits of opium and heroin to sustain a semi-autonomous power base in the borderlands of Myanmar and Thailand. His career illustrates how criminal enterprise can merge with insurgency, ethnicity, and weak state control to produce a form of hybrid sovereignty.