The crisis has also paralyzed the banking system, resulting in an economic shutdown that puts many lives in danger. The World Food Program estimates that up to 3.4 million people will struggle to afford food in the next three to six months as Myanmar’s economy collapses.

ASEAN is finally converging today at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta as a first step in dealing with the crisis, following President Joko Widodo’s call for a special summit to discuss the Myanmar conundrum.

However, opposition to the summit has been rife since it was confirmed that the head of the Myanmar military junta, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, would be attending the summit.

International recognition, along with a defined territory, permanent population and government, forms a constitutive element of statehood in international law. With regard to an international organization’s standing, a leader who faces domestic constraints may turn to foreign policy to seek external authorization. There seem to be valid concerns among civil society actors in both Myanmar and the region that the Tatmadaw chief commander’s attendance at an international forum will boost the junta’s legitimacy in representing the Myanmar people.

The ASEAN special summit has thus sparked a political question: Does the arrival of Min Aung Hlain in Jakarta on his first international trip constitute formal recognition of military rule in Myanmar?

This is an ethical situation about what and how recognition is being made.

Political theory on recognition presupposes a coherent subject who can act and at the very least, “the recognized” and “the recognizer” prior to positive evaluation of “the recognized”. Political recognition is more than acknowledgement, since it involves wholesome affirmation beyond certain insights and values that an actor brings with them.

Recognition does not only require an autonomous being; it requires some mutual sense between the recognizer and the recognized that operates within the context of cultural or normative order.

Bearing in mind both positive evaluation and mutuality in the ASEAN context, the presence of Min Aung Hlaing at the special summit does not qualify as ASEAN recognition of Tatmadaw rule in Myanmar.

ASEAN was never institutionalized in the context of liberal political culture; rather, in the wider communitarian sense with great respect for Westphalian values. Assuming that the culture of the ASEAN Way remains intact within the current institutional foundation, holding a summit does not mean positive evaluation of Tatmadaw rule.

In various Southeast Asian cultures, if a family member becomes a somewhat “bad boy” and the whole family gathers to talk to him, this is not a way of giving their blessing to his wrongdoing. It is instead a strong response against the wrongdoing and the wayward family member should feel that he has been warned for the trouble he has caused to his whole family, especially in the event of a pandemic.

The summit does not consist of mutuality that will grant external legitimacy to what the Tatmadaw has committed since the coup. ASEAN can never grant legitimacy to any regime; this is something for the Myanmar people to determine.

The Tatmadaw is now the de facto power holder in Myanmar, and that is the reality.

For ASEAN, the first priority is to end the violence and killings. ASEAN’s respect for sovereignty and intervention in does not include tolerance of a nation’s military killing its citizens, let alone children.

A coup is not unprecedented in an ASEAN member state, but a coup that leads to mass killings and systematic collapse of human dignity is a serious attack on ASEAN principles, including its long-standing belief in the ASEAN Way.

We must bear in mind that once a power turns to actual violence that targets its subjects, it loses any attributes of legitimacy: a nation’s military that turns its weapons against the country’s citizens will always lose in the legitimacy game. In so doing, power is decoupled from authority.

Each ASEAN state can act unilaterally by condemning the situation in Myanmar or even mounting coercive diplomacy to deter the Tatmadaw from killing protesters and to restore democracy in Myanmar. But there is not much that ASEAN can do under its current charter, which does not differentiate between dispute settlement mechanisms and crisis management. It also somewhat restrains ASEAN from having an effective high-level panel that can tackle a crisis with the necessary agility.

The ASEAN special summit is thus probably what the regional grouping can do within a very limited time frame to stop the violence and open room for durable political solutions.

The incipient failure of the Myanmar state has been expedited since the coup, and we must keep in mind that the roots of the problem go back to both nation building and state building in Myanmar. Inasmuch as democracy is desired by both the virtue of the Myanmar people and the ideals founded in the ASEAN Charter, a multiethnic government has always been a problem for Myanmar.

For countries like Indonesia, durable political solutions for crises like the Myanmar crisis require not only the acknowledgement of autonomous political subjects – military, civil society, ethnic groups. It must also be embedded in the political institutions engendered by Myanmar’s statehood to ensure that all possible future conflicts may be absorbed by nonviolent conduct.

There are several reasons why Indonesia consistently promotes the role of ASEAN in dealing with conflicts and crises under the Security Council, with the hope that proximity to local cultures might provide better and durable political solutions.

Civil society groups must now pay attention to how the special summit works in ending the violence by immediately imposing a humanitarian pause in Myanmar and promising to depart on durable peaceful means to restore democracy and release political prisoners. Should the summit fail to do so, ASEAN member states like Indonesia may ramp up its stance against the Tatmadaw.

But this will likely mean that the people of ASEAN must put extra pressure on the regional grouping to not only restore Myanmar’s democracy to reinstate its people’s dignity, but also reform ASEAN, since its only mechanism has proved ineffectual.

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The writer is a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta.