FEBRUARY 16 — South-east Asia has grown accustomed to viewing Myanmar’s civil war as a continental conflict — a tragedy of jungles, mountain strongholds, and ruined towns battered by artillery and airstrikes.

Yet far from Yangon, Naypyidaw, Mandalay or even the heavily reported Rakhine frontlines, another theatre has quietly emerged along Myanmar’s Andaman coast and its scattered islands.

This maritime dimension of the war remains almost invisible in regional diplomacy.

But it may become one of the most consequential developments in the entire crisis.

The Andaman islands are no longer peripheral communities living beyond the reach of politics.

They have become a zone where the civil war intersects with longstanding struggles over identity, economic survival, and state authority. Entire settlements exist under the constant pressure of forced recruitment, displacement and sporadic violence.

Many men of fighting age have vanished into armed formations — whether junta forces or resistance units — leaving fractured societies behind.

The war here is not merely an extension of inland fighting. It represents a structural shift in the conflict itself.

Since the 2021 coup, Myanmar’s war has expanded into a mosaic of localised battlegrounds where centralised authority weakens progressively toward the periphery.

Coastal regions are historically the first places where state control erodes. The Andaman coast therefore signals not simply another front but a transformation — the movement of civil war toward maritime space.

This shift matters because the Andaman Sea is not an isolated body of water. It sits along crucial maritime routes linking the Indian Ocean to South-east Asia. Trade, fishing, migration, and naval movement converge there daily.

When conflict enters such waters, the consequences multiply beyond national borders.

Instability in the islands encourages smuggling networks to expand, human trafficking routes to reorganise, and displaced populations to seek escape across the sea rather than across land.

Criminal organisations thrive in areas where sovereignty is uncertain, while maritime militias or armed smuggling groups may emerge as substitutes for governance.

The presence of armed actors near busy sea lanes inevitably heightens suspicion among neighbouring states and raises the risk of naval incidents.

In other words, Myanmar’s civil war risks evolving from an internal humanitarian catastrophe into a regional maritime security challenge.

Asean has not yet conceptualised the crisis in these terms.

Its diplomacy remains centred on legitimacy, dialogue and political mediation through the Five-Point Consensus.

Yet the organisation continues to treat Myanmar primarily as a problem of governance rather than geography. This distinction is crucial. A government crisis can be negotiated.

A fragmented territory is far harder to manage.

As the war drags on, resistance groups control substantial territory while the junta increasingly depends on airpower to retain urban centres. Such conditions rarely produce decisive outcomes. Instead, they generate zones of partial authority.

Coastal regions, historically the weakest administrative areas in many states, are the first to slip beyond effective control. The Andaman front therefore reflects not merely conflict but the gradual dilution of centralised sovereignty.

The humanitarian implications for South-east Asia are immediate. The Andaman Sea connects Myanmar directly to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and India.

If violence intensifies, refugees will move by boat rather than by land, repeating patterns the region has struggled to manage in past crises.

Illegal fishing fleets may operate under protection of armed groups, while trafficking syndicates exploit stateless waters to expand operations.

Naval misunderstandings could occur as different countries attempt to secure their own maritime boundaries against instability emanating from the same source.

Once a civil war reaches maritime space, diplomacy becomes exponentially harder.

There is no longer a single authority to negotiate with, only fragmented actors controlling shifting territories.

Asean’s relative silence on this maritime dimension reflects an institutional limitation. Political engagement is easier than coordinated maritime stabilisation.

Dialogue requires meetings; maritime security requires patrols, surveillance, and operational cooperation.

Yet without such measures, the organisation risks confronting a conflict that slowly spreads outward rather than inward — not escalating dramatically but diffusing quietly across the region.

Myanmar today shows signs of prolonged stalemate. No actor appears capable of achieving total victory, and no settlement appears imminent.

In such circumstances, wars rarely conclude neatly. Instead they erode state structures at the margins.

The Andaman islands may therefore foreshadow the next phase of the crisis: not resolution, but territorial fragmentation.

Asean must therefore expand its approach beyond mediation toward containment and preparedness.

The region needs coordinated maritime awareness, humanitarian sea access arrangements, and closer cooperation among coast guards and neighbouring naval authorities. Most importantly, policymakers must understand that the geography of conflict often determines its trajectory more than formal negotiations.

The tragedy of Myanmar is no longer confined to inland battlefields. It has reached the sea.

If ignored, South-east Asia may not face a sudden regional war, but something more insidious — a slow maritime disorder stretching across the Bay of Bengal toward the Straits of Malacca.

Asean still has time to respond. But only if it first recognises that the war unfolding in Myanmar is no longer only on land, and that the Andaman theatre, though distant from conference halls, may shape the region’s security far more than any communiqué issued within them.

* Phar Kim Beng, PhD is the Professor of Asean Studies at International Islamic University of Malaysia and Director of Institute of International and Asean Studies (IINTAS).

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.