NGOs Mediating Peace: Promoting Inclusion in Myanmar’s Nationwide Ceasefire Negotiations (Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict)

This book explores the role of nongovernmental mediators in promoting “inclusive peace” to negotiating parties in Myanmar’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) negotiations from 2011-2015. The influx of NGO mediators directly engaging with the negotiating parties and promoting the inclusivity norm coupled with the salience of discourse around “all-inclusiveness” at the end of the NCA process forms a puzzle around the agency that NGO mediators wield in influencing political outcomes, despite their lack of political and material leverage.The author argues that NGO mediators can effectively promote norms, using mediation processes as a site of norm diffusion. Bespoke international conflict resolution NGOs have become key mediation actors, within the last three decades through creating the niche world of “private diplomacy” and acting as "norm entrepreneurs" at the same time. As informal third parties, these NGO mediators directly engage with politically sensitive actors or convene unofficial peace talks. As NGOs, they are part of an epistemic community of mediation practice, professionalizing the field and producing knowledge on what peace mediation is and what it ought to be. This dual identity as both NGOs and mediators nicely sets them up with a unique agency to promote and diffuse norms. These norms often reflect the liberal peacebuilding paradigm promoted from the Global North, such as inclusion, gender equality and transitional justice, with the view that these norms are not ends in themselves but as necessary ingredients for effective mediation.The book further questions whether NGOs should promote norms in the first place. The outcome of the NCA process presents a critical and cautionary tale of promoting a presumed universal norm into a given locale and expecting a certain outcome without understanding how an external norm interacts with existing normative frameworks. The book illustrates that while NGO mediators do possess the “normative agency” to effectively promote norms to negotiating parties, my empirical research analyses how their promotion of the “inclusivity” norm to the negotiating parties in Myanmar’s NCA paradoxically resulted in exclusionary outcomes: only half of the armed groups in the ethnic armed groups’ negotiating bloc signed, and civil society was effectively crowded out from meaningful participation despite lofty rhetoric. This is an open access book. Foreword Preface Praise for NGOs Mediating Peace Contents About the Author List of Abbreviations List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Unsettled Reflections From Golden Valley, Myanmar 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Are Mediators Norm Entrepreneurs? 1.3 Why NGO Mediators in Myanmar? 1.4 My Argument 1.5 How I Did the Research for This Book 1.6 Overview of This Book References Chapter 2: Promoting Peace or Pushing Norms? Normative Agency and Mediators as Norm Entrepreneurs 2.1 The Normative Turn of International Peace Mediation 2.2 From Peace Broker to Peacebuilder: The Role of Mediators in Conflict Resolution Mediators as Peace Brokers Mediators as Peacebuilders? 2.3 Norm Diffusion and Norm Entrepreneurship in International Relations 2.4 A Theory of Normative Agency Norm Entrepreneurship and Normative Agency 2.5 Concluding Thoughts: Promoting Peace or Pushing Norms? References Chapter 3: New Kids on the Block: The Rise of NGO Mediators in Peace Mediation 3.1 The Rise of NGO Mediators in Contemporary Peacemaking 3.2 The Alternative Legitimacy of NGOs as Mediators 3.3 Three Types of NGO Mediators 3.4 Concluding Thoughts References Chapter 4: The Promised Land of Inclusive Peace: NGO Mediators as Norm Entrepreneurs of Inclusion 4.1 Introduction: The Promised Land of Inclusive Peace 4.2 Applying the Analytical Framework: Assessing NGO Mediators’ Normative Agency NGO Mediators and Framing Inclusivity NGO Mediators and Social Practices Promoting Inclusivity NGO Mediators’ Power: Legitimacy and the Limits of Normative Agency 4.3 Concluding Thoughts References Chapter 5: What’s in a Norm? What Normative Frameworks in Myanmar Reveal About Inclusivity 5.1 A Moral Touchstone? The Concept of “Unity” Among Myanmar’s Conflict Parties 5.2 Unified National Identity Through Ethnonationalism The Forging of Ethnic Identity in Pre-colonial and Colonial Burma (-1886–1941) The Panglong Conferences and the Promise of Inclusion (1945–1947) EAGs, Ethnic Alliances and the Limits of Ethnic Unity in Armed Ethnonationalist Movements (1948 to Present) 5.3 Unified National Identity Through Militarized State Formation The Formation of the Tatmadaw (1941–1960) The BSPP Military Government (1962–1988) SLORC and SPDC (1990s–2010s) 5.4 Unity and Inclusivity in Myanmar: Congruent or Clashing Normative Frameworks? 5.5 Concluding Thoughts References Chapter 6: Chronicles of a Norm for Sale: Norm Entrepreneurship in the Myanmar NCA Negotiations 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The “Homegrown” NCA Process in Myanmar: A Niche for NGO Mediators and Private Diplomacy 6.3 NGO Mediators Frame Inclusivity to the Negotiating Parties? (2012–2013) Framing Inclusivity to the EAGs Framing Inclusivity to the Government Framing Inclusivity to Actors Outside the Negotiation Table 6.4 Agency of Local Agents: How Do Negotiating Parties Treat the Inclusivity Norm? (2013–2015) EAGs’ Acceptance of the Inclusivity Norm The Government’s Acceptance of the Inclusivity Norm 6.5 Concluding Thoughts References Chapter 7: “The Trouble With Inclusivity:” How Promoting Inclusive Peace Led to an Exclusive Outcome 7.1 The Outcome of the Norm Diffusion Process in Myanmar (2013–2015) Inclusivity of Non-armed Actors 7.2 The Role of NGO Mediators in the Outcome of Norm Diffusion in Myanmar (2015) The Limits to Normative Agency of NGO Mediators 7.3 Effects of Norm Localization on the Myanmar Peace Process 7.4 Chapter Conclusions References Chapter 8: Conclusion: Should NGO Mediators Promote Norms? 8.1 Return to Peaceland? 8.2 NGO Mediators as Peacelanders: Where Do We Go From Here? 8.3 The Limits of Inclusive Peace in Myanmar 8.4 Future Research Agendas 8.5 Concluding Thoughts References Appendix: Interview List Index