The Rohingya Crisis, Myanmar, and R2P ‘Black Holes’

Abstract

The world has failed the Rohingya. Yet, the essence of this failure is widely misunderstood. While the existing literature on the Rohingya crisis tends to blame specific agents for having failed to fulfil their obligations under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), this article directs our attention to the structural obstacles to mass atrocity prevention in Myanmar. Given the high risk of mass atrocities against the Rohingya and low feasibility of effective protection under any of the three pillars of R2P, it concludes that it was never plausible that R2P could work in this case. The idiom of R2P ‘black holes’ is introduced to denote situations where nothing that can realistically be done within the framework of R2P is likely to be sufficient to prevent mass atrocities or protect the victims.