However, diminishing trust in government institutions, a lack of adequate peace dividends, and the fracturing of the radical and separatist fronts make the peace process remarkably fragile.Īnother prominent conflict line is the communist insurgency with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), at the center.

The MILF also rejected the ARMM and has continued wage armed conflict with the Philippines government.Īfter several rounds of failed peace negotiations, an agreement was reached between the MILF and the government in 2014, which led to the creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in March 2019. The MILF also rejected the 1996 peace agreement, in which the MNLF and the government agreed on self-autonomy by creating the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). The most notable of these groups are the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and its breakaway faction, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which split from the MNLF after it entered the Tripoli Agreement with the Philippine government in 1976, brokered by Muammar Gaddafi. Violent conflicts between several armed groups representing the Muslim Moro ethnic and indigenous people and the Philippine government have persisted since the 1960s. In this context, the authoritarian populist government of the Philippines, with its appalling record of human rights violations in recent years, can misappropriate the act to designate the actors of conflicts as terrorists, and thereby close much-needed space for peacebuilding.Ĭonflict dynamics and the spaces for peacebuilding in Mindanao Meaningful differentiation will be especially complicated in the Southern Philippines, where armed conflicts and violent extremism, albeit two separate phenomena, are spatially overlapped and parallelly fuelled by both grievance and greed-based root causes: injustice, discriminations, exclusion, exploitation of natural resources, and clan-based feuds. Although the act is promulgated to address violent extremism and terrorism, its imprecise definitions of violent extremism and terrorism make it challenging to differentiate these phenomena from armed conflicts. On 3 June 2020, the Philippine House of Representatives passed the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, which replaces the Human Security Act of 2007. However, imprecision in defining terrorism has blurred its boundary with armed conflict, which means the law can be misappropriated to close the space for peacebuilding in the Mindanao region. The new anti-terrorism law in the Philippines is aimed at addressing violent extremism and terrorism.

Insurgency definition