Commentary

The Conversation: Myanmar’s forgotten war: How the world is failing the test of the UN’s Responsibility to Protect

burned landscape
Estimated Read Time:
1 minute
Smoke rises from debris and corrugated roofing of a school that was burned to the ground in Taung Myint village in Myanmar in October 2022 during an intensification of fighting in the country’s civil war. (AP Photo)
Smoke rises from debris and corrugated roofing of a school that was burned to the ground in Taung Myint village in Myanmar in October 2022 during an intensification of fighting in the country’s civil war. (AP Photo)
Estimated Read Time:
1 minute

As written in The Conversation Canada by Dr. Kawser Ahmed, Natural Resources Institute. 

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.

Read the full article at The Conversation.