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.

Read more: Myanmar military’s ‘ceasefire’ follows a pattern of ruling generals exploiting disasters to shore up control

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.

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........

© The Conversation