Myanmar’s civil war is one of the clearest tests of the international community’s promise to protect civilians. Two decades on from the creation of the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect,” that promise has been quietly abandoned.
Myanmar has spent most of its independent life in conflict. Since its inception in 1948, it has struggled to build a political order that can hold together its highly diverse ethno-politico-religious communities. At its core is an unequal relationship between a Bamar-dominated central state and the ethnic border regions.
Military rule has defined the country’s governance. Since General Ne Win’s 1962 coup, the army — known as the Tatmadaw — has governed directly or through proxies. The so-called 8888 uprising of 1988 and the monk-led Saffron Revolution of 2007 were both handily crushed.
A democratic opening from 2010 to 2015 gave Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy a landslide victory before the military seized power again in February 2021. The elections the junta staged in late 2025 and early 2026 were widely condemned as neither free nor fair.
(AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)`
The Responsibility to Protect
Myanmar should matter to anyone who takes the Responsibility to Protect seriously. The edict emerged from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001, a process tied to Canadian leadership, and was endorsed by UN member states in 2005.
Its premise is simple: when a state cannot or will not protect its people from ethnocide, commits war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, that responsibility passes to the international community (although this is an ambiguous entity in geopolitical terms).
Yet Responsibility to Protect provisions have always been applied selectively. Some crises attract diplomatic energy and intervention; others are treated as distant and inconvenient. A doctrine written for human protection loses its moral authority when it’s applied selectively.
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Myanmar exposes this weakness. Its war draws far less western attention than Ukraine or the Middle East. Why is such an enduring and intractable conflict being treated with scant urgency? The cost is not only battlefield deaths, but the slow attrition of refugee camps, children growing up stateless and unschooled and people denied for years the right to return home or work.
The scale of displacement is hard to absorb. Bangladesh hosts well over a million Rohingya refugees, most in the camps of Cox’s Bazar, with roughly 150,000 more arriving since early 2024 as violence in Rakhine, a coastal state in western Myanmar, intensified in 2025-26.
Thailand shelters more than 80,000 refugees from Myanmar in nine temporary shelters along the Thai-Myanmar border. In addition, it’s home to several million Myanmar nationals or migrants, with the International Organization for Migration estimating around 4.1 million Myanmar nationals residing in Thailand in 2024, including a large irregular migrant population.
These are not temporary inconveniences; they are long-term political failures.
(AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu)
Fighting the state
The Rohingya are the most visible face of this catastrophe. The 2017 exodus from Rakhine drew global attention, and Gambia’s genocide case has kept legal pressure on Myanmar.
In January 2026, the International Court of Justice held three weeks of hearings on the merits, with a judgment expected this year.
But the Rohingya are only one part of a wider conflict. For decades, ethnic armed organizations have fought the state for autonomy or territory, and many are more than armed entities. As Prof. Imtiaz Ahmed from Dhaka University has argued, some function as “proto states,” meaning they have their own currencies, control over territories and armed forces.
Most importantly, the cost of non-resolution is enormous. The five economic and cost-analysis models in the Myanmar Crisis Dashboard show that inaction carries measurable human, regional and economic consequences.
(AP Photo/ Shafiqur Rahman)
A war economy keeps the fighting alive.
Rare earth mining, drug trafficking and online scam compounds did not cause the conflict, but they sustain it. Kachin State has become central to the global rare earth supply chain and UN investigators have traced a multi-billion-dollar scam industry to the country’s lawless border zones.
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How to end the conflict
If a war economy helps sustain the conflict, ending it means building something that can out-compete it. That is the premise behind Charting a Lasting Peace in Myanmar, a project funded by Global Affairs Canada and implemented by the organization I direct, the Conflict and Resilience Research Institute Canada.
Myanmar needs peace architecture that offers an alternative to war. One idea is a stabilization and reconstruction plan for Rakhine, among the country’s poorest regions and central to both Rohingya displacement and the wider conflict. The reconstruction proposals draw inspiration from the post-Second World War Marshall Plan and, more recently, from China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Justice alone has not produced safety or peace for decades. A reconstruction plan could build a peace dividend, showing that infrastructure, schools, clinics and livelihoods can deliver more than a war economy ever will.
Such a plan would rest on three commitments. Displaced people, in the camps and the diaspora, would be trained for work so they are ready to rebuild when conditions allow. Planning should not wait for a final peace deal; negotiation and reconstruction are separate tracks that reinforce each other.
These proposals also need credible backing from donors and regional governments. The risk is that reconstruction money could be seized by the entities who profit from the war. Designing to guard against that possibility is part of the work.
(AP Photo/Aung Shine Oo)
Global effort required
Geopolitics cannot be ignored. China holds major stakes through the Belt and Road Initiative and hedges between the military and the armed groups; India has concerns about its northeastern frontier. The crisis is regional, not just domestic.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, must play a larger part. Its Five-Point Consensus, agreed in 2021, has not resolved the crisis and is now widely judged as a failure, yet it remains the most legitimate regional platform. The organization’s Institute for Peace and Reconciliation could study reconstruction-based alternatives.
Canada has a role, too. It helped shape the origins of the Responsibility to Protect and has funded research on peace in Myanmar. It can do more by lobbying partners, supporting regional reconstruction architecture and ensuring Myanmar isn’t forgotten.
The Responsibility to Protect cannot apply only when intervention is politically convenient. The real test isn’t how loudly governments speak when a crisis is visible, but whether they act equitably when the suffering is slow, distant and inconvenient. Myanmar is one of those tests. So far, the world is failing it.
