During a 20-year civil war, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has served as a bastion of international support, democratic values, and humanitarian assistance. Highlighting democratization, security, economic assistance, and human rights, we employed over 20 years of United Nations (UN) archives to examine the effectiveness of its mission mandates, and found that UNAMA had reduced child labor and judicial corruption while increasing civil society and facilitating international humanitarian aid. However, UNAMA failed to improve security or establish an inclusive government, particularly with respect to human rights violations. After the US military withdrawal in 2021, the future of UNAMA is contingent upon political negotiations with the Taliban. Only time will tell whether contributions of the mission will persist into the post-conflict era.

As the Indo-Naga peace process nears its finality, the longstanding competing territorial and identity claims between Nagas and Kukis in India’s northeastern state of Manipur remain unabated, with no earnest efforts to reconcile the two groups. The Kukis have a foreboding that the future Naga Peace Accord will be imposed on them as a fait accompli. Given the high stakes on both sides, New Delhi’s quest for durable peace in the region cannot afford to focus only on the Nagas—as though the concerns of the already beleaguered Kukis, or any other stakeholder, are dispensable at the altar of the Naga peace talks. Instead, New Delhi must display willingness, sensitivity, and finesse to consider how both groups’ legitimate concerns could be assuaged and reconciled.

The Myanmar military staged a coup against the elected civilian government in February 2021. Since then, the country has been in a state of emergency and ruled by a military junta. Resistance to the coup was swift and widespread, beginning with the Civil Disobedience Movement that has now morphed into the People’s Defense Forces. A state of civil war has remained for well over two years now, reversing the previous trend toward democratic transition. Nonetheless, the democratic interlude has spawned strong resistance to military rule. The armed conflict and contestation for power looks set to continue into the medium term and may eventually lead to domestic political changes toward democratization.

This study investigates the extent to which the benefit levels of the North Korean Defector Settlement Support System (NKDSSS) have changed and differentially impacted the various groups of North Korean Defectors (NKDs). It employs a historical approach to policy analysis and uses datasets compiled, summarized, and converted with the Consumer Price Index by the author. Findings suggest a portion of Unconditional Cash Transfers decreased through the first pro-work reform period (2005-2014) and Conditional Cash Transfers conditioned on job preparation decreased through the second pro-work reform period (2015-2019). The changes may generate a blind spot of poverty and enhance inequality among the NKDs. For the NKDSSS to accomplish its goals of promoting socio-economic integration of NKDs in South Korea and preparing for a peaceful Korean unification, supplemental policies are required.

The survey for practical consideration is crucial in social and policy science inquiries. Several systematic reviews in the post-conflict peacebuilding literature have thus far ignored its efficaciousness. This knowledge gap motivated in developing ConflictAffected Population Survey technique to survey the conflict-ravaged Chittagong Hill Tracts indigenous peoples for the purpose of examining peace hybridity in Bangladesh, as the quantitative part of the study. This article outlines guidelines for designing probabilistic sampling and survey procedures for a robust sequential explanatory mixed-methods case study research in a terrain where an accurate sample frame is difficult to define. The systematic methodological strategy adopted herein enabled the compilation of a comprehensive cross-sectional case study where findings are generalizable, especially the concept and model central to our thesis on indigeneity dilution.

Lived experiences of conflict-affected locals are an important source of local knowledge that should be incorporated into peacebuilding. However, the national project of peacebuilding in post-war Sri Lanka has failed to consider local knowledge and voices. Utilizing a grassroots perspective, this study examines the experiences of grassroots activists in north and east Sri Lanka to understand the various challenges that have hindered their attempts to share experiences and narratives of war and cultural practices across communities. The findings show that a “context of denial,” identified variously as institutional denial, fear-based denial, and community denial, has prevented grassroots activists from engaging in a meaningful dialogue about peace, reconciliation, and justice. This study helps build an understanding of how grassroots activism functions and is challenged.

The Sri Lankan government implemented commissions of inquiry between 1977 and 2010. Though several commissions of inquiry produced comprehensive accounts of the violence in Sri Lanka’s civil war, and offered thorough recommendations, they rarely resulted in policy reforms or accountability. What motivated successive administrations in Sri Lanka to hold truth-seeking measures throughout the war? Building on theories concerning the alternative objectives of justice, this article argues that the commissions of inquiry in Sri Lanka were created by the government as strategies of legitimation. Drawing on empirical evidence from fourteen distinct commissions, the article discusses four strategies of legitimation, the impact of these strategies, and the implications of this case for future research on justice processes conducted during civil war.

Peace and security studies in Southeast Asia show a rich array of theoretical and policy-oriented research that highlights key themes in the prevention and management of conflicts. These themes also highlight salient concepts that define approaches to peace and security. Two themes are noteworthy. First, while peace and security are not mutually exclusive, security cannot be assured by focusing on negative peace alone but also by a purposeful pursuit of positive peace, hence comprehensive security is critical. The second theme is the importance of regional institutions like ASEAN in managing intra-state relations. Given the fluid state of the global security environment, there is now greater scope for new thinking on how approaches to peace and security can be made more responsive to achieve shared goals.

This article traces the development of peace studies in Mindanao, arguing that Mindanao’s distinct multicultural context ensured the field’s tight linkage to Islamic and Mindanao studies. In all, the search for peaceful resolution of the armed conflicts in these parts of the Philippines provided the activist-inspired impetus for the field’s growth and determined the highly localized focus of formal and nonformal peace education, research, and publications in and on Mindanao. Peace studies practitioners— from the academe, non-governmental organizations, and religious institutions—contributed to the shaping of national policies and programs for Mindanao, with government policy, in turn, buttressing the institutionalization of their initiatives. This article also provides comparative insights on the nature and evolution of Mindanao peace studies and that of Western peace studies.