I only just noticed that the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect placed an op-ed in last Friday’s Jakarta Post – “ASEAN has responsibility to protect the Rohingya from genocide” by Casey Karr and Naomi Kikoler. In a couple of respects, that’s good – important to remind ASEAN of its substantive regional duties, and better (as I’ve said before) than simply uploading material to the internet from an office on New York’s Fifth Avenue. In other respects, though, it’s more of the same – the alarmist language used in the header (perhaps not the authors’ choice, since they themselves write of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing), the renewal of a strategy of lecturing Myanmar from outside, the failure to outline concrete steps that might be taken inside. In short, there’s nothing here that’s likely to make GCR2P part of the solution to the Rohingya problem. To succeed in that, committed grassroots engagement is imperative – bringing to people’s attention the various human rights instruments found in international society, triggering debate about their implications for Myanmar, facilitating understanding of parallel experiences around the world, enhancing inter-communal contact. Only by such means will GCR2P have a chance, in the Myanmar case, of delivering on its stated mandate “to transform the principle of the Responsibility to Protect into a practical guide for action in the face of mass atrocities”.