ABSTRACT
The chapter posits that the protection of human rights is a vital part of conflict prevention, i.e. the absence of violent conflict within and between societies. It argues that a major pitfall in the Southeast Asian regime’s conflict prevention capacity is its lack of real ‘protection’ mechanisms, national and regional, which are important parts of good governance and the legitimacy of states. The weak human rights mechanisms are placed in the wider geopolitical context in the Asia-Pacific area from the perspective of preventing ‘wars of the third kind’, i.e. wars that often have human rights violations at the heart of conflict. It argues for the crafting of a human rights early warning and risk assessment by the ASEAN Regional Forum.
