Resolving Internal Conflicts in Southeast Asia: Domestic Challenges and Regional Perspectives‪.‬

When the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver embarked on an exercise to measure changing trends in global security, no one expected the results to show a marked decline in the level of political violence. Yet the Centre's Human Security report reveals that over the past dozen years civil wars, genocides, and international crises have all declined sharply. With regard to internal conflict between 1991 and 2004, the Human Security Report, 2005 shows that 28 armed struggles for self-determination were started or re-started, while 43 were contained or ended. "There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts under way in 2004, the lowest number since 1976", the report's Overview states. However, this dramatic change in the global security picture is not so evident in Southeast Asia, which remains afflicted by a number of lingering internal conflicts in marginal and border regions. From Aceh and Papua in Indonesia, to Mindanao in the Philippines, the three southernmost provinces of Thailand, and of course Myanmar, where more than a dozen ethnic groups are only held back from resisting central government authority by precarious ceasefire agreements. Most of these conflicts pit weak but determined ethnic nationalist forces against central governments in a battle for autonomy or independence. Whilst irredentism is not uncommon in South Asia, and is latent in China's westernmost provinces, it is certainly a chronic irritant to the governments of Southeast Asia, where protracted conflict has killed tens of thousands and complicated moves to reform military and civil society institutions. For as well as sustaining the tragedy and blight of war in these areas, the conflicts themselves have exerted a drag on democratic development and drained resources that could be more usefully deployed elsewhere.