BAOSHAN, Shanghai (MindaNews / 02 April) — I have spent the better part of my adult life in the unglamorous business of dialogue. Not the kind that makes headlines in Manila or gets celebrated in Brussels. The kind that happens in barangay halls, in masjid ante-rooms, over cups of native coffee with community leaders who have every reason to distrust the word “peace” because they have watched it being used against them so many times.
The kind of work we do at Al Qalam Institute — patient, embedded, rooted in the fabric of Bangsamoro identity and Islamic tradition — is built on a single, irreducible premise: that the people who live in the Bangsamoro, who will die there, who have been buried there for generations, are the ones who must ultimately own whatever peace emerges.
I still believe that. But I will be honest with you today in a way that I am not always permitted to be in official forums: I am deeply, profoundly worried.
A few years ago, a Japanese researcher named Miyoko Taniguchi came to see me in Cotabato City. She was writing a chapter for a book on adaptive mediation, and she wanted to understand how the Bangsamoro peace process had managed, against all odds, to produce the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) and the creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM). Her question was essentially this: how did something this complex, this layered, this burdened by history, actually move forward?
I told her what I have told anyone who asks. The formal peace panels, the Malaysian facilitation, the European Union and the International Contact Group — all of it was necessary. But none of it was sufficient. What made the difference, in the moments when the process was about to collapse, was the work that the cameras never filmed. The lawyers and academics and community leaders and religious figures who knew all parties personally, who shared the same social world as the combatants and the negotiators, who had no exit strategy because Mindanao was their home — these were the people who kept the process alive when the formal architecture was shaking.
The scholars have a term for this: insider mediation. The argument is elegant and true. Insider mediators are trusted not despite their rootedness in the conflict but because of it. We share the same context as the parties. We bear the reputational cost of our choices over the long term. We cannot fly back to Kuala Lumpur or Geneva when the talks break down. We live with the consequences of what we do or fail to do. That accountability, paradoxically, is what makes us credible. We are partial in the sense that we are Bangsamoro, that we are Muslim, that we are from the Bangsamoro — and it is precisely that partiality that earns the trust of communities no outsider can reach.
I believe in this framework. I have watched it work. During the darkest days of the Bangsamoro Basic Law deliberations in Congress, when Mamasapano had poisoned the political atmosphere and legislators in Manila were competing to prove their hostility to Moro aspirations, it was civil society — lawyers arguing the constitutional merits, academics providing historical framing, community figures holding the rage of ordinary Bangsamoro people just long enough for the process not to implode — that kept the door from closing permanently. It was not perfect. Nothing about this process ever has been.
What the theory of insider mediation does not sufficiently address — and I say this with deep respect for those who have formalized the concept — is that insider mediation works only under specific conditions. It works when the other side, the government side, is genuinely willing to create space for that dialogue to matter. It works when the confidence-building measures actually build confidence. It works when civil society is not merely tolerated as optics but genuinely consulted as stakeholders. It works when the government treats the peace process not as a problem to be managed but as a promise to be kept.
That condition, I am sorry to say, is not presently met.
I write this not as a partisan. Al Qalam has always been careful to position itself as a platform for honest dialogue, not as an instrument of any particular faction. I have worked with government officials I respect. I have seen moments of genuine sincerity from Manila. But sincerity is not structural, and individual goodwill cannot substitute for institutional commitment. When the spaces for civil society participation in the peace architecture are narrowed, when the voices of Bangsamoro communities are heard only when they are convenient to the government’s political calendar, when every delay and every broken commitment is dressed up in bureaucratic language and offered back to us as process — what we are left with is not peacebuilding. It is peace performance.
And performances do not survive crisis.
Let me now say plainly what too many people in this peace process are still speaking around in careful whispers: the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is fracturing. The emergence of competing factions within the movement is not a rumor or an exaggeration by spoilers who wish the Bangsamoro ill. It is the documented, observable consequence of years of deferred expectations, of an implementation process that moves slower than the patience of a generation that grew up watching their parents negotiate and their communities remain poor and marginalized.
This is how peace processes die — not in a single dramatic collapse, but in a slow dispersal of credibility. Young Bangsamoro men and women who were children during the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro in 2014 are now adults. They have watched the BARMM be constituted, watched the Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA) assume governance, and watched many of the structural injustices of their communities remain stubbornly in place. When a movement fractures, it is usually because one part of it has decided that the patient path is no longer producing results.
Insider mediation can bridge many things. It can bridge community tensions, clan rivalries, the suspicions between MILF and Moro Nation Liberation Front (MNLF) constituencies. It can create platforms for dialogue in communities where the government has no presence and no credibility. But it cannot manufacture political will in Manila. It cannot compel a government to honor its commitments. It cannot hold together a movement whose members are watching the fruits of a peace agreement remain, year after year, just out of reach.
The fracture of the MILF is not primarily a military problem, though it will have military consequences if it deepens. It is fundamentally a political problem rooted in the government’s failure to make the implementation of the BOL meaningful in the lived experience of ordinary Bangsamoro people. When one faction within the MILF begins to conclude that the formal peace track no longer serves Bangsamoro interests, that conclusion is an indictment of the government’s sincerity — not just of the faction’s patience.
I want to be precise about what I mean when I say the government must provide space for dialogue. I do not mean the ceremonial kind, where representatives of civil society are invited to consultations that have no influence on outcomes. I do not mean the kind where Bangsamoro voices are recruited to provide legitimacy to decisions that have already been made. I mean genuine, structurally embedded participation, where the concerns raised by communities, by women’s groups, by indigenous people, by former combatants trying to reintegrate, by young professionals who chose to build the BARMM rather than abandon it — where all of these voices have a real path to shaping policy.
At Al Qalam, we have always argued that sustainable peace in Mindanao is inseparable from the question of our own Islamic identity. The peace process has never been simply about territory or autonomy in the administrative sense. It has been about dignity — the right of the Bangsamoro people to be recognized, within the Philippine state, as a people with their own history, their own religion, their own way of governing themselves. When the government narrows the space for that recognition, when it treats Bangsamoro governance as a security problem rather than a rights claim, it is not just failing the peace process. It is failing the constitutional promise enshrined in the BOL.
I say this not to assign blame without nuance. There are genuine complexities in the relationship between the BTA and Manila. There are competing political interests, constitutional constraints, and bureaucratic inertia that any government would struggle to overcome. I understand all of this. But understanding the obstacles does not excuse us from naming them clearly. And the clearest obstacle to the Bangsamoro peace process at this moment is not the MILF’s internal divisions — those are a symptom. The disease is a government that speaks the language of peace process without embodying the sincerity that peace process requires.
I am aware of the irony of writing this column. As someone who has spent his career arguing for insider mediation, for the importance of civil society’s presence in the peace architecture, for the irreplaceable value of trust-based, locally-owned dialogue — I am now saying that the conditions for that work are being eroded.
I do not say this to step back. Quite the opposite. The value of insider mediation is precisely that it must be maintained even when — especially when — the formal process is struggling. The relationships we have built, the networks of trust between communities, the interfaith bridges that Al Qalam and similar institutions have spent years constructing, do not disappear because the political climate is hostile. They become more necessary.
But I say this to those in government and in the international community who cite insider mediation as evidence that the peace process is resilient: resilience is not infinite. Civil society cannot indefinitely compensate for governmental bad faith. Insider mediators cannot build sustainable peace in a vacuum. We can hold spaces open, but we cannot force a government to walk through them.
The Bangsamoro people have given this peace process extraordinary patience. They have absorbed broken timelines, frustrated elections, and delayed governance. They have done so, in large part, because figures across the civil society landscape — in the MILF, in the MNLF, in academic institutions, in religious organizations, in community groups — have maintained their credibility and their commitment. That credibility is a finite resource. Once it is exhausted, once communities conclude that no amount of civil society engagement will move a government that has made up its mind, the space for insider mediation collapses.
We are not there yet. But I have been in this work long enough to see what the early signs look like. The fracturing of the MILF is one of them. The narrowing of civic space is another. The ritualization of consultation — where communities are heard but not listened to — is a third.
The peace of Mindanao is still possible. The BARMM, for all its limitations, represents an institutional achievement that should not be abandoned. The BOL, imperfectly implemented as it is, remains a legal framework worth defending and deepening. But none of it will hold if the government continues to treat the Bangsamoro peace process as a concluded matter rather than an ongoing obligation.
In the language of the scholars who study what we do in the Bangsamoro: adaptive mediation requires adaptive commitment. Peace is not a document. It is a practice — daily, unglamorous, and entirely dependent on whether the people responsible for it choose, every day, to mean what they signed.
We are still choosing. The question is whether Manila is.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mussolini Lidasan is the Executive Director of Al-Qalam Institute for Islamic Identities and Dialogue in Southeast Asia at Ateneo de Davao University. Lidasan is presently based in Baoshan, Shanghai, on a study leave until July).
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