The official end of armed hostilities between insurgents and the Bangladesh military in 1997, post-conflict development interventions by international donors and the Government of Bangladesh, along with a greater emphasis on local ownership over peacebuilding interventions, as expressed in the Rangamati Declaration (1998), have given birth to the onset of NGO peacebuilding in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). This article argues that the aid flow has not only transformed community-based organizations into project-based local NGOs, but has also bred a new generation of profit-oriented and donor-driven local NGOs. This article concludes that NGO implementation of development projects and advocacy for human rights, despite being mostly effective in its identification of local needs, is severely affected by three major risk factors: legitimacy, security, and sustainability.

The Weberian notion of states holding the monopoly on violence can be challenged in the light of states dealing with street protests. In established democracies, the police handling of street protests is characterized by the oscillation between confrontational and nonconfrontational approaches. In the United States, the escalated force approach was common up until the 1980s, while in the UK, the government dealt with urban riots heavy-handedly. In the 1990s the negotiated management approach emerged. This research argues that unraveling this oscillation requires understanding of democratic states’ upholding of their legitimacy. Violent crackdown on protests can undermine governments’ legitimacy. However, by associating public order violators with threat, democratic states may resort to force against protesters, deriving its legitimacy from the public’s paranoid mentality.

Myanmar is currently undergoing widespread changes that are transforming the country’s political and socio-economic landscape. These changes include the newly promulgated Constitution that was ratified in 2008 and a national election held in November 2010. Additionally, by-elections in April 2012 saw the return to Parliament of the National League for Democracy and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The reforms under the new Thein Sein-led government include a congenial working relationship with the political opposition, freeing political prisoners and the granting of amnesty to political exiles to encourage their return, the negotiation of ceasefire agreements with almost all of the ethnic insurgent armies, and the inauguration of the Myanmar Peace Centre as a vehicle for the resolution of domestic conflict. These and related reforms are designed to secure the government’s internal and external political legitimacy which it has lacked since the fall of the previous socialist government in 1988.