This project seeks to expand the dialogue about international humanitarian intervention in a complex emergency or mass atrocity situation by asserting that post-intervention political reconstruction is as essential to the intervention as is the provision of material humanitarian aid and even the ostensive goal of protecting the aid regimes. As a result of this assertion, consideration of humanitarian intervention has, to this point, been too focused on the legal, ethical, and theoretical implications of war and hegemony. The current dialogue centers on its security studies aspects, owing largely to its Cold War precedent. However, a full consideration of the subject of humanitarian intervention must also consider the broader implications of the intervention, including recovery and mitigation of future events. When this is considered at all, the literature to this point largely treats post-intervention establishment of political and social infrastructure as a secondary consideration to the military intervention. The primary approach to address this needed expansion includes drawing a comparison between humanitarian intervention and a similar domestic concept: comprehensive emergency management theory. While there are several dissimilarities between emergency management and its putative international correlate, the theoretical framework it establishes—including not only the response found in the usual literature, but also the well-defined concepts of recovery, mitigation, and preparedness—can expand our understanding of the implications and requirements of humanitarian intervention. It also provides an important lesson in its mirror example for the prescribed evolution of humanitarian intervention scholarship away from its Cold War genesis. This is because domestic emergency management also has a foundation in security studies concerns, but has since evolved into an all-hazards philosophy that embraces prevention and recovery as much as simple response to a human crisis. This parallel will provide a framework for approaching humanitarian intervention that goes significantly beyond the literature to this point and provides a much more encompassing approach to the subject than there has been to this point.

In August 2017, the Myanmar military initiated what the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights called a text-book example of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya ethnic minority. In 2020, Myanmar is called to the International Court of Justice to answer to allegations of committed genocide. As the UN has failed to invoke the responsibility to protect, the world has turned to regional organizations as a prevention mechanism in mass atrocity prevention. The research objective of this study is to examine how Myanmar’s regional organization ASEAN has responded to the oppression of the Rohingya minority, as to explain why the atrocities targeting the Rohingya in Myanmar could not be prevented regionally and add to the research on mass atrocity prevention. This thesis is an abductive text analysis with an analytical framework based on Regional Security Complex Theory, which is used to investigate power relations within the region. This thesis argues that the reason the crisis could not be prevented by ASEAN was due to problems on the national, regional, and international levels. Myanmar’s disinterest in human rights, ASEAN’s norm of non-interference, and the international community’s interest in Myanmar’s rich resources all became obstacles in preventing the atrocity from happening. Since genocide prevention has failed several times since the UN’s genocide convention was adopted and entered into force, it is important to add more research to previous work to understand why mass atrocities continue to happen and how we could prevent these atrocities from happening again. The research looks at the Rohingya crisis to draw learnings that can be added to the research on mass atrocity prevention.