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Originally published in Peace News

The road to democracy and peace in Myanmar has been long and fraught with false hopes and backsliding. The democratic gains of the 2010s, which included a bold peace process and the inauguration of a civilian government under Aung San Suu Kyi, descended into 2021’s military coup plunging the country into nationwide conflict between Myanmar’s despotic military leadership and the country’s highly diverse resistance forces. Despite the flood of international development assistance in the 2010s, the understanding and reach of international actors into Myanmar’s conflict-affected areas remained limited. This context makes for particular challenges in localising peacebuilding efforts, requiring novel methodologies.

Promising alternatives to localising peace have come in the form of processes pioneered by Adapt Peacebuilding and the Relief Action Network for IDPs and Refugees (RANIR).  From 2013-2020 Adapt and RANIR implemented a civil society-led peacebuilding process utilizing an adaptive peacebuilding methodology called Systemic Action Research (SAR). This approach did not pre-determine what topics would be worked on, what outcomes were expected, who could participate or when activities should be completed; these decisions were taken by local participants themselves.

This approach to peacebuilding has been used in the armed conflict in Myanmar’s north between the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and its allies and the Myanmar military. This conflict has had devastating consequences for local populations in terms of battlefield deaths, protracted displacement, and human rights abuses against civilians. Furthermore, the conflict has had indirect negative consequences including environmentally and socially-damaging business practices, epidemic rates of drug cultivation and use, world-leading rates of landmine contamination, and widespread psychosocial trauma.

The implementation of SAR in 2015-16 started with training in systemic inquiry, a process of participatory data collection and analysis. 30 community researchers from RANIR and other community-based organisations in and around the city of Laiza conducted semi-structured interviews, exploring issues of local peace, humanitarian, and development dynamics. These interviews produced 210 narratives of interviewees’ lived experiences. Community researchers were encouraged to gather narratives from ordinary people (e.g. farmers, shopkeepers, pedestrians) and marginalised people (e.g. internally displaced people, drug users).

Community researchers were trained to analyse these narratives using systems mapping. Participants closely examined each narrative, identifying the inter-related causes and consequences associated with a range of issues that they presented, such as ‘employment’, ‘displacement’, ‘drug abuse’, etc. The participants produced highly dense systems maps, depicting multiple interrelated causal chains and descriptive information about the complex causes of local peace and development issues.

Researchers identified dynamics of particular interest in the maps and chose three priority peacebuilding topics: drug abuse, the right of return for refugees and internally displaced people, and social cohesion between host communities and internally displaced people. Three action research processes were formed to design and implement their respective peacebuilding activities. More than 17,000 people were directly involved in the process, helping address the significant challenges of ‘process exclusion’ and ‘content exclusion’ that are characteristic of other peacebuilding processes in Kachin State and political processes in Myanmar more broadly.

On the issue of drug abuse, catastrophic rates of local youth addiction to opium and amphetamines were commonly understood prior to this process as the result of the long-term genocidal strategy being waged by the Kachin’s ethnic adversaries. When the actual lived experience of drug users and their social network was analysed by community researchers, a much more complex picture emerged: the biggest risks of relapse were being disowned by their families, or discriminated against by their community. Also, drugs were readily available in local schools and prisons. This indicated that the potential alleviation of drug problems could be within reach of local actions, such as preaching acceptance rather than discrimination against drug users in local churches, lobbying for rehabilitation rather than punitive strategies in the local justice systems, and multiple means of raising awareness of drug risks in local schools and camps for displaced people. Drug abuse awareness-raising messages were delivered to thousands via community radio and town hall presentations to at-risk populations in schools. Community peacebuilders advocated for changes to government drug policy, leading to a refocusing on rehabilitation rather than punitive approaches, prohibitions against alcohol and drug sales in IDP camps, and the inclusion of drug awareness-raising materials in school curricula for the first time.

This case demonstrates a novel peacebuilding methodology and some promising results. It points to the potential of seeing peacebuilding as a process of social mobilisation, which can scale up to include ever greater numbers of people, and affect national policies and peace processes. Local peacebuilders have shown how much can be achieved by combining small levels of outside support with the resources, knowledge, and voluntary time that is available locally.