For a glimpse of the labyrinthine conflict in Myanmar, head to the gemstone markets along the country’s border with Thailand and try on a ring encrusted with the finest imperial jade. If you meet the merchant’s asking price of 300,000 baht ($9,200), your purchase will bolster at least three different sides in Myanmar’s complicated and spreading civil war. You will help the brutal Burmese army, which controls the jade mines in the Himalayan foothills of Kachin state, worth tens of billions of dollars a year. And you will help an ethnic militia or two, representing minority groups that for years have fought for autonomy or independence in their homelands around Myanmar’s periphery. They collect a tax on goods that are trafficked across their turf.

You will also be contributing, via the shopkeeper, to a more recent military enterprise: the People’s Defence Force (pdf), a network of militias that has sprung up among the country’s Bamar majority to oppose its junta. Thein Han is a Bamar refugee from Sagaing province in Myanmar’s heartland. Two years ago, after General Min Aung Hlaing seized power in a violent coup and threw Aung San Suu Kyi and her recently re-elected government in jail, Mr Thein Han took to the streets in protest. He fled his home when soldiers sought to arrest him one night; instead they nabbed his sister, who remains locked up. Mr Thein Han (not his real name) wants his future back. So each month he sends his savings to a chapter of the pdf.