Forging Sustainable Peace in Mindanao: The Role of Civil Society

This study investigates the role of civil society in forging sustainable peace in Mindanao. Civil society's involvement in peace efforts can improve the chances of a lasting settlement-both in terms of addressing underlying causes and in terms of building a constitutency for the concessions needed for a peace agreement. There are limitations to the effectiveness of civil society, however, due both to certain characteristics of these organizations (such as their ideological divisions or their lack of representativeness of the whole Filipino community) and to the inherent nature of civil society (its inability to aggregate interests in order to achieve a wider settlement). In the end, civil society can have an impact in making it politically possible for policy elites to adopt positions other than that of "victory" (which seems to be the preferred policy stance of the general Christian Philippine citizenry). Through articulation of issues and networking, through a! ctivities parallel to the formal peace process, and through their efforts to bridge communal divides, civil society organizations keep alive the prospect for peace in Mindanao that sometimes seems forever elusive.