Following last week’s by-all-accounts successful Australia-ASEAN summit in Melbourne, I offered some unsolicited advice for an ASEAN audience, on the differences between non-alignment and neutrality. In the same presumptuous vein, my recommendation to Australian readers is always to keep in mind the distinction between ASEAN and Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia is a geographical term for the sub-region bordered by India to the west, China to the north, Australia to the south and Oceania to the east. ASEAN is a regional organisation, whose current membership coincides with the geographical definition of Southeast Asia, with the sole exception of Timor Leste, now on track to become its 11th member.

Put thus, the distinction sounds straightforward. And I admit to being repetitive here, as this was also the theme of my analysis in the lead-up to the first Australia-ASEAN summit six years ago. Then again, rinse-and-repeat is consistent with the ASEAN way.

The differences are worth thinking about seriously, however, since ASEAN’s internal weaknesses—most evident on Myanmar and the South China Sea—have deepened since 2018. Yet in the Australian debate ASEAN is still used interchangeably with Southeast Asia, as if it was a place or a destination. Landing this ideational grappling hook, in Australia and elsewhere, counts among ASEAN’s biggest unsung successes. As rhetorical overreach, it’s harmless. But as a basis for policy or analysis, it has the potential to cloud a clear-eyed perspective on our surrounding region.

‘Southeast Asia’ has its origins as a strategic term coined during World War II, when the subregion was a unified theatre of Allied military operations against imperial Japan. Ironically, it took a world war for Western powers to see Southeast Asia as a whole. Before the Japanese invaded, with the notable exception of Thailand which escaped colonialism as a buffer state wedged between British Malaya and French Indochina, the subregion was carved up between the European imperial powers and latterly the United States. While goods and people moved across these imperial frontiers, it was never an integral entity in a political sense. The subregion’s rich cultural, linguistic and religious diversity lent itself to a balkanised approach. For most of the colonial period, the inhabitants of Southeast Asia’s mountains and forests maintained a separate existence, as they always had. By contrast, the porosity of the littoral and riverine zones of Southeast Asia has always facilitated transnational connectivity, irrespective of where political boundaries are drawn.

Given its history and geography, it is not surprising that Southeast Asia’s contemporary political geography is such a varied tapestry.

This includes a city state (Singapore), a sultanate ruled directly by the monarch (Brunei), communist single-party polities (Vietnam and Laos), a junta (Myanmar), one democratic super-state (Indonesia), sizeable countries and democracies to varying extents (Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand) and a scattering of small states (Cambodia, Timor Leste, etc), each with its own distinct variations in governance and unique strategic personality.

One of ASEAN’s core rationales is to project unity across this political smorgasbord, like a thin diplomatic shroud intended to parry external interference and cover the subregion’s fissures and fault-lines. To do this, ASEAN must flatten Southeast Asia’s political and strategic contours as far as possible, including the schism between continental and maritime, which bisects several countries including Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Such a defensive motivation is perfectly understandable in light of Southeast Asia’s penetrated history. So too, is the genuine desire of extra-regional countries to show their support for Southeast Asia’s unity by placing ASEAN at the centre of their diplomatic engagement. And not simply for engaging Southeast Asia, since ASEAN has grown diplomatic wings as the convenor for loftier multilateral gatherings, such as the East Asia Summit. This ambition to be the regional diplomatic hub is expressed through ASEAN’s self-styled ‘centrality’, which  dialogue partners, including Australia, routinely and deferentially reference in their public statements.

Never precisely defined, ASEAN’s attachment to centrality harbours expectations of exclusivity in the multilateral convening role. This helps to explain ASEAN members’ touchiness towards the Quad, as a major regional multilateral initiative that pointedly does not include ASEAN as a member. ASEAN’s sensitivity about the Quad’s make-up also reflects its even-handed desire to keep China within the big tent of regional multilateralism, consistent with a longstanding commitment to the principle of open and inclusive architecture. But ASEAN’s consistent motivation is the (presumed) collective insecurity of its members, and fear that Southeast Asia will again become an arena for major power competition and conflict. ASEAN automatically designs in its demands for assurances on this score as a feature of everything it does in the political and security domain. When external partners, including Australia, voice support for ASEAN centrality, this is the context they are buying into.

Whenever Australia dons its ASEAN virtual reality goggles, Southeast Asia’s strategic contours recede into the fuzzy background. That’s OK, as long as Canberra invests its energy and resources within Southeast Asia where there is greatest alignment with Australian interests. Fortunately, the attention devoted to bilateral engagement with the Philippines and Vietnam, on the sidelines of last week’s Australia-ASEAN summit in Melbourne suggests that Canberra is doing precisely that.

While in opposition, the Labor Party initially declared that ASEAN would have a special focus in its foreign policy. Labor later changed this to Southeast Asia and carried that commitment into government, including through the appointment of Nicholas Moore as Australia’s economic envoy. That was an encouraging indicator that the distinction between Southeast Asia and ASEAN was also understood at a political level.

That’s where it counts most because Australia most often encounters fuzziness in foreign policy around the vexed question of its identity. In Melbourne, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said ’Southeast Asia is where Australia’s future lies’. While the prime minister avoided conflating Southeast Asia with ASEAN, many commentators are less circumspect, inviting comparisons with the perceived imbalance of Australia’s close identification with the US alliance or more broadly ‘the Anglosphere’.

The possibility of Australia seeking membership of ASEAN only nags from the margins of the debate, but it has not been altogether banished because of the lingering identity question. ASEAN remains the vehicle of choice for Australians seeking ‘security in, not from’ the region, because it seems to offer a bridge to Asia that Australia’s international persona can straddle.

This is misguided. So is the notion that Australia should engage regional countries for their own sake. Australia’s diplomatic resources are finite, so should be concentrated on those countries that share common security and economic interests. Multilateral engagement with ASEAN has its place, but mainly at a symbolic level.

The distinction between ASEAN and its constituent parts matters strategically but also economically. Australia has placed a bet big with the creation of a $2 billion fund to spur Australian investment into Southeast Asia, focusing on clean energy and infrastructure. This initiative should be applauded for its transformative ambition and scale, especially if it modernises the paradigm of Australia’s economic engagement from aid giver to capital provider. But Australian public and private investors alike still face the challenge of unsentimentally disaggregating the ASEAN single market not just to identify latent opportunities but also fully realised protectionist competitors.

In the strategic domain, it would be deeply misguided to believe that ASEAN somehow possesses a secret sauce for co-existence with China. Even if it did, it would be unpalatable in an Australian context, given the fundamental differences in outlook and situation from Southeast Asia. Australia’s partnerships with the subregion, collectively and bilaterally, prosper when our dissimilarities work, not as a barrier, but as a fillip to cooperation. Vive la difference!

When the topic of armed conflict comes up, it’s easy to fall into the habit of speaking abstractly or in hypotheticals. But for more than 50 million people in Myanmar, the civil war sparked and aggravated by the February 2021 coup is not academic. At least 1.5 million people have been displaced,  thousands have been killed in combat and thousands more have been unjustly imprisoned. The conflict has strangled the economy and thrown everyone’s life into some level of disarray.

The fact that almost all of these repercussions are felt only in one ASEAN member state means that, whether it be from Kuala Lumpur, from Thailand, and certainly from where I live in Tasmania, their severity is comfortably distant. That influences our level of concern about Southeast Asia’s most intense crisis, and we can all benefit from an extra dose of strategic empathy. One place to start is to get a stronger grip on what is at stake in Myanmar.

We analysts have built our consensus on the situation—that Myanmar’s post-coup stalemate won’t shift quickly, that Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and his subordinates are committed to their own authoritarian path, and that anti-regime forces are too weak and incoherent to prevail on the battlefield.

These arm’s-length assumptions should be continuously questioned. We should push our understanding of the Myanmar crisis to take in its multifaceted security, political, economic, humanitarian and cultural dimensions, with the hope that a resolution might still be found.

First, we need to get serious about the test we and our institutions all face. This means confronting our own indifference. While ASEAN and others have devoted diplomatic and political energy to the crisis, I’m not sure anybody feels that progress has been made. Myanmar’s empty chair at the political level is a rebuke to the military regime, but it could also be a metaphor for apathy, and even acquiescence.

When I attended the 36th Asia–Pacific Roundtable in Kuala Lumpur on 9 August, there was talk that ASEAN may not survive until 2045. Noting my position as an outsider, I’d suggest that this risk is amplified when a crisis like Myanmar is able to fester year after year. Simply waiting for ASEAN to reach a consensus in such circumstances probably means waiting too long. Could countries like Thailand and the Philippines, and perhaps also Malaysia and Indonesia, with their own historical experiences of managing contested transfers of power, jointly commit to a new approach to dialogue on Myanmar?

Second, we must find a way to influence—politically, and in a humanitarian sense—what happens on Myanmar’s hundreds of battlefields. Myanmar has a long, terrible history of civil war, but the coup has brought new aspects that we can’t ignore, including the proliferation of hard-punching militias across the Bamar heartlands. It’s a complex picture, but we need to keep the situations of vulnerable populations such as the Rohingya, the Chin, the Karen and, yes, the Bamar in constant focus.

Third, with maybe less than half of Myanmar under the control of the generals in Naypyitaw, we still aren’t seriously considering what happens if they are toppled. While it seems unlikely that a revolution will prevail, especially if the regime continues to receive combat support including strike aircraft from abroad, we shouldn’t declare it impossible.

That means thinking differently, right now, about the rebel forces and about how they’re supported, whether morally or in other ways. Also, let’s not pretend that a revolutionary outcome would be easy or inexpensive, or without its own new problems. Myanmar could unravel in the process.

Finally, and arguably most importantly, the impoverishment and desperation of the Myanmar people will need great and sustained attention over the years to come, whatever the political outcome. Even without a government-level breakthrough, the harsh reality is that Myanmar has gone backwards fast. If Myanmar were a Chinese province, it would already be China’s third poorest in absolute terms and the poorest per capita by a huge margin. Compared with China’s neighbouring Yunnan province, Myanmar is around nine times poorer per capita. If nothing else, ASEAN and its dialogue partners could find ways to make good on support to stem the socioeconomic bleeding, though we know that’s easier said than done.

In thinking through the steps between today’s tortured stalemate and a better future, it’s also worth thinking harder about how other countries in the region like Thailand and the Philippines have handled their own internal tensions and periods of intense political crisis.

There is no easy fix, but a clear assessment of the risks of allowing Myanmar’s multifaceted crisis to fester should amplify the call for more proactive regional diplomacy. The region must invest in an institutional and humanitarian way forward, while remembering that military confrontations can always go in unanticipated directions. As we grapple with how to embrace the ‘least worst options’, it’s clear that the Myanmar people need much more of our time.

While the defence strategic review shows Australia is focused on building capability through AUKUS, its declassified version fails to note a significant threat to regional security—Myanmar.

Myanmar’s junta is a threat to regional stability that could cause problems for Australia for years to come.

Australia has enjoyed relative stability across its northern outlook for decades, partly due to the peace and economic prosperity offered by ASEAN. While many commentators speculate about threats to ASEAN, such as China’s illegal behaviour in the South China Sea, ASEAN’s failure of unity in responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even the impact of AUKUS, none of these are as serious as its response to the situation in Myanmar.

The international community has relied on ASEAN leadership to address the crisis in Myanmar, yet the bloc has failed to generate meaningful progress.

Non-interference in the affairs of fellow member states is a thread running through ASEAN’s six fundamental principles, but the list is silent on what it should do in cases of genocide or other serious human rights violations. Attempts to influence Myanmar via soft diplomacy have so far failed to end the junta’s rule or its war crimes. ASEAN’s five-point consensus has been utterly ignored by the junta.

In February 2023, it was reported that a Japanese businessman negotiated a ceasefire between Myanmar’s military and an ethnic group in Rakhine state. The Myanmar military has waged war against many ethnic armed organisations like this since independence in 1948, arguably creating the world’s longest civil war.

Since the February 2021 coup in which the military ceased its power-sharing arrangement with Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, state-initiated violence has massively increased, with an estimated 3,400 political prisoners killed and many more imprisoned.

ASEAN’s non-interference principle has left the bloc dithering on what to do about its wayward member, even as its chair, Indonesia, asserts the need to resolve the crisis. Yet it was a Japanese businessman, not ASEAN, who held sufficient influence to broker a ceasefire.

Investment by China has muted the effect of divestment from Myanmar, meaning the junta hasn’t suffered much in terms of drawbacks. There is even talk of China’s using Myanmar to bypass the ‘Malacca dilemma’ of transporting its goods through Southeast Asia to and from the Middle East and Europe. China’s opportunism in Myanmar is at the direct expense of ASEAN and Australian interests.

The lack of consequences for the Myanmar military only serves to encourage other disgruntled actors in the region to act out—consider, for example, Thailand’s various military coups and Cambodia’s crackdown on independent media—and could be a hint of things to come.

ASEAN needs to draw a line in the sand. If a brutal civil war in which the army murders civilians and arrests Australian economic advisers for doing their jobs isn’t enough for ASEAN to take more drastic action, what is? As the situation forces foreign investors into expensive divestment from a once-burgeoning democracy, can they trust that other regional investments won’t go the same way?

Serious sanctions must be on the table. If other member states see the junta as getting away with murder for the sake of maintaining power, it may degrade norms across the region.

If ASEAN’s centrality wanes to the point of regional instability, China will step in, and Australia will be in for a panic much worse than it experienced over Solomon Islands. Decaying norms within ASEAN display a weakness of values at a time when values-based investments are as important to its stability as ever.

ASEAN must choose whether to let this decay continue or to find ways to side with the civilian population of Myanmar and create enduring peace in the region. This decision must occur before Myanmar is scheduled to become ASEAN chair in 2026.

Thirty years from now, we may find that ASEAN’s management of Myanmar over these next few years had a greater influence on Australia’s strategic interests than we appreciated at the time.

On Friday, the International Court of Justice announced that it had comprehensively rejected Myanmar’s objections to the continuation of the genocide case brought against it by the Republic of the Gambia over the treatment of Myanmar’s Rohingya ethnic minority. In a small but important victory for international justice, the case can now continue on to a final determination of Myanmar’s responsibility for genocide.

While the case can now proceed, Myanmar’s objections to the ICJ’s capacity to hear the case have delayed the proceedings, and thereby justice for the Rohingya, by at least a year and a half. The delay has meant that the one million Rohingya in Bangladeshi refugee camps and the tens of thousands still in internment camps in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State have continued to suffer in detention while waiting for these international legal processes to play out.

The case was originally brought in November 2019 by the Gambia, which alleged that Myanmar had committed genocide against the Rohingya during ‘clearance operations’ in Rakhine State, primarily in 2017. These operations resulted in the exodus of 740,000 mostly Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh, and involved serious human rights violations including mass killing, torture, rape and sexual assault, and the destruction of homes and mosques.

In December 2019, the ICJ heard arguments on whether to make an interim order for provisional measures—a hearing notorious for the appearance of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi as agent for Myanmar. The court in January 2020 unanimously ordered Myanmar ‘to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts’ of genocide (as defined in Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) against the members of the Rohingya group in its territory, and to periodically report to the court on the measures it had taken until a final decision on the case was reached. Myanmar complied with the court’s reporting requirements, but in January 2021 filed the objections to the court’s jurisdiction that have just now been resolved.

In February 2021, the Myanmar military staged a coup, which led to the jailing of Suu Kyi and a bloody crackdown on the military’s political opponents and civilians alike. Despite the coup, the case before the ICJ continues, and the military government has, perhaps surprisingly, continued its engagement with the proceedings. Ko Ko Hlaing, minister for international cooperation under the junta, appeared as agent for Myanmar at hearings conducted in February 2022, along with its attorney-general, Thida Oo.

But the coup may have directly contributed to the delay in these proceedings, since the exiled National Unity Government withdrew its objections to the ICJ’s hearing the merits of the genocide allegations less than a month after they were filed. Even the ad hoc judge appointed by Myanmar (an option for all states that don’t have a permanent judge at the ICJ) expressed some concerns with the court’s decision to allow the military junta to appear in the case.

Nevertheless, Friday’s decision is a resounding victory for the Gambia. The jurisdiction of the ICJ requires the consent of both parties to the dispute, which can be manifested by ‘matters specially provided for … in treaties and conventions in force’. In this case, the Gambia and Myanmar are both parties to the Genocide Convention, Article XIII of which provides that disputes relating to the ‘interpretation, application or fulfilment’ of the treaty can be submitted to the ICJ.

Myanmar had argued that the Gambia wasn’t the ‘real’ applicant in the case, but rather that it was the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, an international organisation. Only states can appear before the ICJ, a point that was reiterated by the ICJ president during her opening statement when the military government first made its appearance. Myanmar’s second objection was that, because the Gambia had suffered no injury as a result of Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya, it lacked standing to bring the case since the Genocide Convention doesn’t provide for the concept of an actio popularis (a legal concept meaning that actions can be brought in the public interest). It also argued that there was no dispute between the Gambia and Myanmar. A fourth, rather technical argument related to treaty reservations by Myanmar and Bangladesh.

The ICJ rejected all of these arguments, three unanimously and the other by 15 votes to 1, finding that the Gambia was bringing the case in good faith, and that all of the states parties to the Genocide Convention have a common interest to ensure the prevention, suppression and punishment of genocide. In other words, any state that is a party to the Genocide Convention can bring an action to prevent or punish acts of genocide, even if their nationals are not involved or the acts take place on another territory.

As the ICJ pointed out, to hold otherwise would undermine the protection offered by the convention, because ‘victims of genocide are often nationals of the state allegedly in breach of its obligations’. This conclusion opens an important door for other states to bring legal action against genocidal regimes worldwide.

The ICJ’s decision also paves the way for other interested states, such as Canada, the UK, Maldives and the Netherlands, to join in the case and support the Gambia’s legal position. Some states issued a diplomatic statement to that effect within moments of the ICJ’s handing down of its decision.

Canberra, too, should see this decision as an opportunity to support the Gambia as intervenor and to demonstrate that Australia is once again focused on being a good global citizen with a commitment to human rights, international law, and the Asian region more broadly. Intervention in this matter would go some way towards restoring Australia’s reputation on the global stage.