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.

This article surveys the trajectory of peace and conflict studies in Myanmar—from its early focus on civil war and insurgency, to state institutions and ethnic armed actors, and later broadening into relational and networked approaches covering formal peace processes, regional geopolitics, conflict economies, and everyday peacebuilding. It suggests that the widening of peace and conflict studies was brought about by the opening of the country from the early 2010s, which both granted scholars and researchers more access to the country and introduced new foreign specialists, discourses, and developmental actors into the political sphere. The peace agenda and directions of peace studies have been upended by the military coup of 2021; how reconciliation, justice, and federal democratic reform will look like in the future remains to be seen.

This article examines the outcomes of collective forms of engagement in the ASEAN region. By examining how convening power in these south-south engagements has worked since the Bandung Conference, the paper reviews how the mode of consensus building adopted in 1955 has been channelled into regional cooperation. In particular, the paper considers the implications of these forms of cooperation for the consensus building that characterizes ASEAN today. The paper uses the processes evident in the ASEAN Development Outlook to set out the consequences of these findings for how the UN system can set out more effective criteria for global South cooperation. This has direct implications for institutional mechanisms for advancing capacity and expertise in new forms of cooperation between the global North and global South.

This study discusses social accountability in Timor-Leste by scrutinizing the patterns of state-society interactions and the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Analyzing five case studies in peacebuilding and development, it highlights NGOs’ multiple positions—from oversight and advocacy, to their role in facilitating statesociety relations in service delivery, suggesting alternative forms of public services, and conveying citizens’ views on government performance to the state. It elaborates how NGOs are closely associated with suco (village) and community authorities and bridge the gap between the state and society. In a fledging state, these dynamics emerge from the state’s attempts to formalize this relationship into law and society’s accommodation of its citizens within the local context. The study also addresses international actors who strive to support NGOs.

The people of Muslim Mindanao in the southern Philippines overwhelmingly approved, in a plebiscite in 2019, the creation of a new and more autonomous region, raising hopes that the decades-long conflict in Mindanao would soon end. This article asserts that the Mindanao peace process is not just about peace talks between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, but it should also include the effective participation of grassroots organizations and community-based peace advocates in resolving local conflicts. It evaluates four significant contributions of grassroots-level, local organizations and NGOs to the peace process: (1) combating violent extremism, (2) broadening peacebuilding by local women’s organizations, (3) solving local conflicts and rido (clan wars), and (4) ceasefire monitoring and civilian protection.

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 decade-long low-intensity armed conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) that surfaced soon after the independence of Bangladesh (1971) due to the failure of the state-building project ended with the CHT Accord which was signed in 1997 between the government of Bangladesh and the Parbattya Chattagram Jana Sanhati Samiti (PCJSS). This study uses qualitative research methods to explore the fundamental research question of who is in the driver’s seat of the post-accord CHT peacebuilding process. A mostly top-down approach to peacebuilding has been used in the CHT due to an entirely donor-driven peacebuilding partnership between local and international stakeholders. Under this asymmetric power structure, the marginalization of local ownership is expected to produce unintended results in the peace process.

Liberal missteps have paved the way for the local turn in post-conflict peacebuilding. However, localized peacebuilding does not always produce peaceful outcomes. Several scholars have previously demonstrated that unresolved tensions from international-local encounters result in a negative hybrid peace in which political and social hierarchies are preserved and conflict and violence persist. To add to existing analyses on the local turn in peacebuilding, this article analyzes some of the causes and consequences of negative hybrid peace using the case of Timor-Leste. Exclusive and superficial local involvement, political cleavages within the local leadership, and unresolved tensions from international-local encounters were roadblocks in Timor-Leste’s post-conflict peacebuilding. These characteristics prelude a return to a status quo dominated by the local elite and plagued with governance and socio-economic issues.