Beyond Liberal Peacebuilding

Why do formal peace settlements contain large-scale state–insurgent conflict yet leave violence embedded in everyday politics? This book revisits liberal peacebuilding through a historically grounded study of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Moving beyond a simple success-or-failure view of peacebuilding, it examines how the Bangsamoro peace process transformed a protracted state–insurgent conflict into negotiated autonomy while reconfiguring the political order in which localized violence persists. Tracing the long history of colonial incorporation, national integration, Moro insurgency, clan politics, and autonomy, the book shows how vertical conflict between the Philippine state and Moro revolutionary movements has intersected with horizontal forms of coercion, including clan feuding, electoral violence, and struggles over land, office, resources, and protection. It develops the concept of the state–clan–insurgent nexus to explain how state institutions, rebel organizations, political clans, and local brokers have cooperated, competed, and bargained over authority and legitimacy. The book argues that institutionalized peace in Mindanao has produced a form of bounded stabilization: renewed large-scale state–insurgent war has become less likely and governance more routinized, yet authority remains plural, legitimacy uneven, and violence increasingly localized. By analyzing peacebuilding as political order-making rather than simply post-conflict reconstruction, this book offers a context-sensitive framework for understanding protracted conflict, territorial autonomy, hybrid governance, and the unfinished politics of peace in conflict-affected societies.


Miyoko Taniguchi is Professor of International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies at Miyazaki Municipal University, Japan.