The Role of Adaptive Peacebuilding in Japan’s Assistance of the Mindanao Peace Process in the Philippines

Abstract

Multi-layered armed conflicts and violence have prevailed over the last five decades in Mindanao despite various peacebuilding activities on the ground. In this context and with the growing recognition of the failure of liberal peacebuilding, this chapter argues that Japanese assistance to peacebuilding in Mindanao since the late 1990s has incrementally contributed to sustaining peace, synchronizing development, diplomacy, and security from a non-Western perspective. This chapter examines the Japanese intermediatory role in all aspects of the peacebuilding intervention that provided multi-layered stakeholders—and the respective vertical and horizontal links—with spaces to share ideas, needs, issues, and visions for conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and reconciliation, while creating new common norms and values in historically divided societies. This intermediatory role underpinning aid norms with diverse stakeholders can be expressed as “process facilitation” in the adaptive peacebuilding discourse, reflecting Japan’s aid principles of request-based, self-reliance, ownership, and capacity development.