Starvation as a weapon: The ICJ Myanmar case could redefine genocide

 

Long before the 2017 killings, Myanmar was dismantling the Rohingya’s ability to survive.

Yuyun Wahyuningrum                                                                                    28 July 2026

As the International Court of Justice deliberates its judgment in the case of The Gambia v. Myanmar(Opens in new window)after the conclusion of public hearings earlier this year, the court faces a question that reaches far beyond Myanmar: can the deliberate weaponisation of hunger(Opens in new window) itself constitute genocide?

The answer may lie in one of the Genocide Convention’s least examined provisions. Article II(c) prohibits deliberately inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about [a group’s] physical destruction in whole or in part”. Drafted after the Holocaust, it recognised that genocide can occur not only through mass killing, but also by making survival systematically impossible.

Yet Article II(c) has remained the Convention’s forgotten clause. International accountability has focused on overt violence while paying less attention to the systematic destruction of the conditions necessary for a community’s survival. The Gambia v. Myanmar gives the ICJ an opportunity to give substantive meaning to this neglected provision and reshape how international law understands the weaponisation of hunger.

The military in Myanmar did not simply create a humanitarian crisis. It engineered a system of deprivation that progressively dismantled the material foundations of Rohingya life. Its long-standing “Four Cuts” counterinsurgency strategy – designed to sever insurgents from food, funding, recruits and intelligence – was adapted into a broader architecture of civilian control. Hunger(Opens in new window) was not an unintended consequence of conflict but an instrument of state policy.

Long before the mass atrocities of August 2017, Myanmar had systematically eroded the Rohingya’s capacity to sustain themselves. The 1982 Citizenship Law rendered them stateless, stripping them of legal protection and secure land rights. Restrictions on movement, arbitrary travel permits, military checkpoints, barriers to fishing and farming, and the confiscation of agricultural equipment steadily destroyed livelihoods.

The burden fell unevenly. As primary caregivers, Rohingya women bore the daily struggle of feeding families amid deepening scarcity, exposing them to heightened risks of malnutrition, maternal health complications and exploitation, while children suffered severe acute undernutrition. 

Hunger was not an unintended consequence of conflict but an instrument of state policy.

Following 2012 violence(Opens in new window), more than 128,000 Rohingya were confined to camps and made almost entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. Even that lifeline was manipulated. Weeks before the 2017 military operations, Myanmar reportedly pressured the World Food Program(Opens in new window) to withdraw findings documenting acute child malnutrition, obscuring a crisis it had itself engineered.

After the mass displacement of 2017, Myanmar’s actions further illuminate why Article II(c) matters. States accused of genocide rarely acknowledge an intention to destroy(Opens in new window) a protected group, instead invoking counterterrorism or the unintended consequences of conflict. But what followed the Rohingya’s expulsion points to something more enduring than a temporary security operation.

After more than 740,000 Rohingya had fled, the authorities harvested crops from abandoned farms, channelled the proceeds into state coffers, and leased “ownerless” land to others. New settlements followed, turning displacement into permanent dispossession. It was the deliberate destruction of the material conditions on which the Rohingya’s survival depended.

Fatema Khatun, as a 35-year-old mother of four in 2017, one of thousands of Rohingya refugees who fled Mynamar for Bangladesh (Russell Watkins/DFID)

This pattern also exposes a deeper challenge for ASEAN. The regional bloc has largely approached Myanmar through the language of conflict management, humanitarian assistance and political dialogue. While these efforts remain essential, they are insufficient when deprivation itself becomes an instrument of state policy.

When authorities deliberately restrict access to food, land, livelihoods and humanitarian assistance, hunger is no longer merely a humanitarian consequence of conflict but a potential indicator of atrocity risk. Recognising this distinction requires ASEAN to move beyond managing emergency needs and confront the policies that are intended to undermine civilian survival.

Food systems have become battlefields where civilians are targeted not only through direct violence but through sieges, aid blockades and the destruction of livelihoods.

The Gambia has not built its case around formal famine declarations or technical food-security thresholds. Instead, it relies on the Genocide Convention’s own language of “conditions of life”. That distinction could prove transformative. Formal famine declarations depend on humanitarian access, nutritional surveys and reliable data – precisely the conditions that perpetrator states can obstruct. If genocide is recognised only after famine is officially declared, governments could evade responsibility simply by blocking aid, suppressing evidence and preventing independent monitoring. The question is whether authorities intentionally manipulated the systems on which a protected group’s survival depends.

If the ICJ gives meaningful effect to Article II(c), it will do more than advance justice for the Rohingya. It will revise the Convention’s forgotten clause and modernise genocide law for an era in which destruction is increasingly carried out not only through bullets, but through the systematic weaponisation of hunger.

For ASEAN, the lesson is equally clear. Starvation, forced displacement and the destruction of livelihoods are not merely humanitarian consequences but warning signs of atrocity crimes, recognising this is essential if ASEAN is to move from managing crisis to preventing atrocities.