Security Council · Committee 04

The Myanmar War

UNSC · 30 delegates · Advanced

Myanmar Civil War Atrocity Crimes P5 Gridlock

The United Nations Security Council holds primary responsibility under Article 24 of the UN Charter for international peace and security, with powers ranging from authorizing peacekeeping to imposing sanctions and referring situations to the ICC. At HTSMUN VI, the Council confronts one of the world’s most severe ongoing conflicts — Myanmar’s post-coup civil war — sitting at the intersection of sovereignty, humanitarian catastrophe, and great-power rivalry.

Since the Tatmadaw’s February 2021 coup, Myanmar has fallen into a multifront war involving the military junta, newly formed People’s Defence Forces, and dozens of long-established ethnic armed organizations, leaving over 2 million people internally displaced and 18 million in need of aid. As with the Council’s climate-security agenda, P5 veto politics has repeatedly blocked draft resolutions on sanctions and arms embargoes.

Topics

One war. One council.

Myanmar’s post-coup civil war is the crisis the Council has condemned in statements and struggled to act on in practice — ethnic fragmentation, atrocity crimes, and great-power rivalry all at once.

Topic A

Ethnic Conflict, Atrocity Crimes, and Foreign Involvement

Myanmar’s civil war runs along three interlocking dimensions. First, decades of colonial-era ethnic division and military rule have produced deep territorial fragmentation: over 75 ethnic armed organizations and PDF units now contest roughly a third of the country — concentrated in Kachin, Shan, Chin, and Rakhine — where war economies built on jade, timber, and narcotics reward conflict over settlement. Second, the Tatmadaw has carried out widespread atrocities against civilians — airstrikes on villages, mass detention, sexual violence, and the destruction of schools and hospitals, with over 4,000 killed and 26,000 detained since 2021 — raising urgent questions of accountability. Third, geopolitical competition between China, India, and a largely ineffective ASEAN consensus has made coordinated pressure nearly impossible. Debate centres on overcoming veto gridlock to pursue accountability, what enforcement is realistic given China’s strategic interests, and how to balance sovereignty against the obligation to protect civilians.

Sub-questions

  • What can the Council achieve through sanctions, arms embargoes, or an ICC referral that it has not already tried — and what would make any of it bite?
  • How should the principle of state sovereignty weigh against the Responsibility to Protect when the state itself is the threat?
  • What role should ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus play, given that it has produced little — and is the Council willing to outsource the problem to it?

Starter Resources

  • UN Security Council Resolution 2669 (2022) — the first-ever Council resolution on Myanmar UNSC, 2022
  • ASEAN Five-Point Consensus — the regional framework, and its limits ASEAN, 2021
  • UN Special Rapporteur reports on Myanmar — the human-rights record on the ground OHCHR, 2023–24
Topic B

Topic B

A second topic will be released with this committee’s background guide this fall.

Sub-questions

  • Coming with the background guide.

Starter Resources

  • Coming with the background guide.
Coming this fall Background Guide

Background guide ships this fall.

Written by the chair, the UNSC guide will run a full primer on Council procedure and the veto, a history of the Myanmar crisis from the 2021 coup forward, both topic briefs, the crisis-committee rules of engagement, and the position-paper rubric.

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