8.1 Return to Peaceland?

In this book, I set out to answer the question: can NGO mediators promote norms, and with what consequences? Tracing the path of the “inclusivity” norm in Myanmar shows that—yes, NGO mediators can promote norms. They do have the “normative agency” (their ability to promote norms and navigate between different normative frameworks) to redefine entry points into the peace process and with the parties and promote their own working interpretations and definitions of inclusivity with a certain degree of success. To be sure, bespoke international conflict resolution nongovernmental organizations (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, based on the assumption that these norms are not ends in themselves but as necessary ingredients for effective mediation.

In Myanmar, NGO mediators promoted the inclusivity norm in the NCA process by gaining a mandate from the parties and framing the inclusivity norm as salient. Second, conflict parties localized the inclusivity norm by building congruence with pre-existing normative frameworks around the concept of unity in Myanmar ethnic politics and history. However, things are rarely that simple and neat in complex political processes. While NGO mediators had the normative agency to promote their intended interpretations of the norm in early stages of the peace process, this agency was limited in later phases of the negotiations, which negatively affected their handle on the outcome of the norm diffusion process. Multiple localization processes were occurring at the same time with different stakeholders, which led to both intended and unintended consequences on the peace process itself: conflict parties localized inclusivity as all-inclusiveness based on competing notions of ethnonationalism and militarized state formation led to a deadlock in negotiations and ultimately an exclusive outcome.

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 inclusion despite lofty rhetoric.

The consequences successful norm promotion has on the actual political outcomes of a process, as shown in Myanmar, raises a far thornier query: should NGO mediators promote norms in the first place? Answering this question requires returning to Autesserre’s (2014) metaphorical world of Peaceland. NGO mediators can be seen as mainstays in such a world—with their own sets of practices, goals, motivations and interests about “peace and “inclusion” that interacts with existing sets of beliefs, practices and strongly-held narratives with the negotiating parties in a given peace process and the communities they represent. If NGO mediators accepted their role as Peacelanders, how would the field transform?

One of the main objectives of this book was to show how NGO mediators, traditionally having been seen as part of civil society or as weak mediators with little power or leverage, have become established mediation actors alongside more formal actors and are redefining the mediation field through norm promotion. One of the central ways in which they are redefining the mediation field is through indelibly linking effective mediation practice with normative imperatives, such as the need for peace processes to be inclusive in order to be sustainable, implementable and legitimate. However, the unintended negative outcomes of the promotion of inclusivity in the Myanmar peace process echoes many of the perils of “Peacelanders” promoting liberal peacebuilding norms in practice, for instance the struggles of promoting democracy, justice and liberal peace through enacting military interventions via the Responsibility to Protect framework or conducting liberal peace interventions in so-called “fragile states”. The promotion of these norms have already been critically assessed by a group of critical peace scholars who contend that liberal peacebuilding requires a more hybrid approach that challenges mainstream Western approaches and raises local approaches to peacemaking.

In this vein, NGO mediators and adjacent peace support actors using mediation processes as an arena for norm promotion adds further empirical evidence to the critique that the ahistorical and apolitical promotion of a bureaucratized peace process design laden with normative frameworks can lead to unintended and at times negative impacts on the peace process. The critiques of norm promotion without understanding its potential consequences echo calls from within mediation epistemic communities and Burma scholars to include anthropological and historical considerations when supporting peace processes rather than transposing international “one-size-fits-all” approaches that depoliticize inherently political processes.

8.2 NGO Mediators as Peacelanders: Where Do We Go From Here?

In this book, I highlight the dilemma that many NGO mediators find themselves in when figuring out the role and purpose they play in peace processes: should they be advocates of peace or facilitators of peace processes? Should they emphasize the normative or the pragmatic in their programming, their interventions and their organizational fittings? Is there a way to transcend such as central dichotomy? I offer some insights on NGO mediators as norm entrepreneurs of inclusion to enrich this debate, but there are no easy answers.

Clearly, NGO mediators possess a high amount of normative agency: the ability to interpret their mandate or set the mandate themselves; the ability to act on a pre-conceived strategy through an array of practices; and the ability to wield persuasive power through an alternative form of NGO legitimacy. NGO mediators may use their agency to promote the inclusivity norm to the negotiating parties in peace processes. However, a close reading of the Myanmar peace process display how bringing power into the analysis complicates matters and illustrates that normative agency can vary at different points in a peace process. While NGO mediators displayed “high” levels of normative agency in the early design phases of the process, their agency was undermined at high-pressure points towards the end of the process ahead of the signing of the NCA. This variability points to a contribution of the empirical findings: normative agency can be modular and vary in strength in different phases of a process dependent on the specific discourses, practices and power dynamics employed. Under certain conditions, NGO mediators can promote norms using discursive framing and social practices, but the ‘position-place’ element renders their agency higher earlier on in the process rather than at the end—outcomes of norm diffusion processes may therefore not be temporally or spatially linear.

With this in mind, my research shows that it is possible to distinguish between the norm diffusion process and outcome. This is a theoretical distinction not often made in empirical studies on norm diffusion. NGO mediators’ normative agency is concerned with both the diffusion of a norm and the outcome of norm diffusion, but these are two different things, as the outcome of the NCA process showed. While NGO mediators ‘successfully’ promoted the norm shown by the acceptance of the norm by the parties and its salience in the discourse of the NCA process, NGO mediators lacked agency regarding an “all-inclusive outcome” of all EAGs and non-armed actors being included in the process. This can be attributed at least partly to the failure to explicitly consider and incorporate the cognitive priors of the parties into their norm promotion. NGO mediators in Myanmar who employed multiple interpretations of the inclusivity norm, did not have control over the consequences of norm diffusion—their normative agency may have actually resulted in unintended consequences on the process.

This book therefore unveils the limits of norm diffusion, underscores the centrality of understanding the local context, and shows the difficulties of translating universal norms without a proper understanding of the existing cognitive priors. If these cognitive priors and knowledge of how unity is used and instrumentalized by both parties, this could have been a condition which may have prevented inclusivity from being localized as all-inclusiveness (e.g. the UNFC would not have been pushed upon by the parties as a vehicle for inclusivity by NGO mediators early on in the process). It is worth noting, however, that perhaps the expectation for NGO mediators to control the consequences of norm localization is too high. Mediation theory often touts that mediators have limited agency in controlling the outcome of peace processes despite their important roles in driving the process forward, and my empirical findings provide more evidence supporting this argumentation.

Furthermore, NGO mediators do not operate in a vacuum. The book’s agentic approach to norm diffusion emphasizes the important role of local agents and the agency they possess to resonate with, accept, reinterpret and localize norms within the framework of mediation processes. Contributing to peace research scholarship that nuances the meaning of local and criticizes reductionist attempts to view local approaches to peacemaking as inherently “good” and international, foreign or external approaches as inherently “bad,” the book makes the case that a solid understanding of the EAG’s cognitive prior of unity through ethnonationalism and the Tatmadaw government’s cognitive prior of unity through militarized state formation are crucial to any attempts at norm promotion around inclusion and attempt to peace. However, these cognitive priors that have underlined decades of previous attempts at peacemaking in the country are not solutions for conflict alone. These narratives are incredibly powerful vehicles for both inclusion and exclusion and does not view them as inherently positive nor negative. In a similar vein, my analysis of three types of NGO mediators (the insider mediator, the regional outsider, and the international model) as well as the description of local agents who claim membership to the international technical peace community and Myanmar national identity further provide nuanced empirics on what “local agent” means. It does not view them as passive recipients of the inclusivity norm, but active participants in the constitutive localization to the norm that better “fits” the Myanmar conflict context.

NGO mediators grappling with this dichotomy should therefore expand their interpretations of inclusivity or other norms that they promote beyond a Western, liberal conception. In this book, I avoid the assumption that liberal norms are inherently good, which is often prevalent in peace and conflict literature. I approached the inclusivity norm, often touted as a “good” norm and vehicle for effective, sustainable and legitimate peace negotiations—in an a priori manner, and instead inductively researched how it manifested in the normative frameworks of NGO mediators in the Myanmar context. By looking at inclusivity in an a priori manner, I analyzed multiple interpretations and ‘working definitions’ being used in the same peace process, with the result that promoting inclusivity does not necessarily end up in more inclusive processes: it depends on the interpretation of the norm and on who is doing the interpreting.

NGO mediators could also understand the nature and extent of the normative agency they wield in a given context. Normative agency is modular and temporal and can vary based on the phase of the peace process. The book’s equal analytical emphasis on both the norm entrepreneur and the receiving community highlights that the interaction between the NGO mediators and local agents shifts during the different phases of the process (pre-talks, negotiations, final stages of negotiations towards signing of peace agreement). The analysis of the interaction between NGO mediators and the parties rather than NGO mediators and other stakeholders in their sphere highlights the interactive, multi-directional reality of norm diffusion that is growing increasingly prevalent in norms literature and applies equal import and agency to so-called “norm-takers” in norm diffusion models. Similar to mediation literature that focuses solely on the mediator, resulting in limited analysis of the norms of the parties and the existing normative frameworks that constitute their interests and behavior, norms literature has tended to focus on norm entrepreneurs and linear models of norm diffusion. This book contributes theoretical exploration into what kinds of norms, beliefs, and narratives constitute the existing normative framework for the parties This is critical, as these normative frameworks often underlie the political negotiating positions of the parties, as was illustrated in the Myanmar case.

Lastly, it’s important for would-be norm entrepreneurs to understand that norms themselves can change and transform through the processes of norm diffusion. While NGO mediators wielding normative agency is one condition, an equally important condition for constitutive changes to norms is the existence of a cognitive prior that is highly congruent with the external norm in question. In the Myanmar case, the inclusivity norm was congruent, at least superficially, with existing normative frameworks held by the negotiating parties around the notion of unity. The notion of unity acted as a gateway for norm diffusion. From analyzing the cognitive priors of the Myanmar peace and conflict context, I found that inclusivity was seen as a salient norm in the discourse surrounding the negotiations and that this discourse around unity was the gateway for congruence between the participatory understanding of inclusivity and the cognitive priors of the context. I therefore found that an important condition for norm diffusion is the presence of not only local agents, but existing norms that can facilitate diffusion. Field research and discourse analysis of Myanmar’s contested history yielded two important insights. First, the discourse around unity is a gateway for greater participation but also for exclusivity. Secondly, it is important to consider not only normative frameworks, but moral frameworks that fall outside the liberal/non-liberal dichotomy, including Buddhist moral and political thought and ethnic histories.

8.3 The Limits of Inclusive Peace in Myanmar

Nuancing the normative agency of mediators into different components as well as applying a mechanistic, time-bound approach to peace processes also sheds light on possible alternative explanations for the outcome of the diffusion of inclusivity. If NGO mediators were not present in Myanmar, would the inclusivity norm have been localized as inclusivity? First, a possible alternative account may argue for the influence of other mediation actors, such as diplomats and multi-donor trust funds playing political roles directly with the parties (e.g. such as the Joint Peace Fund) in localizing the norm. However, in-depth process tracing provides account evidence for the exogeneity of the norm and the specific moments in time that the inclusivity norm was introduced into the NCA draft text agreement as well as the decision-making for the government (bilateral ceasefires to NCA) and the EAGs (bilateral ceasefires to NCCT negotiating bloc/UNFC alliance), and based on this analysis, can be attributed to the influence of NGO mediators working with the designers and early movers of the peace process in 2012–2013. A second alternative explanation for the discourse around all-inclusiveness (taking NGO mediators out of the analysis) points to pressure from the Chinese government on the KIO and other influential EAGs operating along the Myanmar-China border based on economic and geostrategic motives. While Chinese pressure on certain EAGs to sign or not to sign the NCA played a major role in the process, it does not account for the KIO’s willingness to lead the UNFC and other groups in their calls for ethnic unity. It also does not explain the Myanmar government’s resistance to China’s explicit intervention until after the NCA agreement was signed. This shows that normative parameters still matter and provide complementary explanatory power where pure geopolitical explanations are left wanting. Given the strategic and dominant role that China plays in the region and in Myanmar specifically, its role in the process cannot be ignored. However, despite China’s clear influence and investment in the outcome of the NCA process, these do not provide mechanistic explanations through which they affected the outcome. These factors are more circumstantial than mechanistic, and further do not account for the specific discourse around inclusivity and all-inclusiveness from 2011 to 2015. In the international peace support architecture in Myanmar, there is a distance between Western and non-Western international actors involved in the process. For instance, the Joint Peace Fund was a large-scale attempt to shift donors from funding peace initiatives bilaterally towards a joint trust fund for the peace process. The Chinese government is not part of this fund and works bilaterally with the Myanmar government.

With these alternative explanations in mind, it should not be assumed that inclusive processes make for more effective peace processes. While there is burgeoning theoretical work on the link between inclusive peace processes and effective peace agreements, there is no causal link between the two. As the all-inclusiveness discourse in Myanmar shows, there are many possible outcomes of the promotion of the inclusivity norm. Those who promote the norm should understand this and not assume that cosmopolitan interpretations of their norms will prevail and immediately result in effective processes or agreements.

The NGO mediators’ experience in the NCA process should act as a cautionary case of bringing an external norm into a given locale, promoting multiple interpretations of the norm to a range of actors, and expecting a certain outcome without understanding how the norm interacts with existing cognitive priors. Peacemakers should question the glorification of over-technicized approaches to peacemaking that are ahistorical and result in “over-architechturalized” process design. In Myanmar, the social practices that NGO mediators relied on were often predicated on their generalized technical expertise and knowledge about peace process design, which often depoliticized inherently political peace processes (see Baechtold 2015, 2). These ‘knowledge support practices,’ (e.g. process design, ceasefire text drafting, coaching on comparative approaches to designing negotiations) largely drew from examples of how inclusive peace process mechanisms in other ongoing peace processes, such as the Colombian or Philippine peace process were designed. These practices are also built on the liberal peacebuilding mantra of strengthening state institutions as a vehicle for sustainable peace. While this may work in other contexts, this approach is problematic in Myanmar. The erroneous assumption that state incapacity is the explanation for the region’s many subnational conflicts overlooks the fact that weak institutions may actually be in the interests of elites who work to weaken the state and institutions to entrench their own power and personal interests.

As my analysis of Myanmar politics illustrated, the military and the state in Myanmar were one and the same for many decades. When Thein Sein’s reformist government came into power, the tenuous process of separating military and state had only begun. Furthermore, these attempts to strengthen the capacity of the state can “undermine confidence in ceasefires and lead to the augmentation of institutions that are antithetical to lasting peace” (Joliffe 2015). It is not only the focus on building up state capacity and institutions that misses the root causes of conflict. The Myanmar case is no exception, as conflicts are not waged near the seat of political power but in the “periphery,” where mixed-controlled or EAG controlled areas resist the power of the state rather than seeking to capture it (Denney and Barron 2015). Unfortunately, the highly technicized approach of many NGO mediators in Myanmar illustrated this ‘standard peacebuilding toolkit’ approach. While the three NGO mediators highlighted in this chapter primarily worked towards a Myanmar-specific strategy, interview respondents often highlighted how the international peacebuilding community in general did not incorporate the complex relationships between the state and military in Myanmar when designing their interventions. For instance, in this highly complex environment, international peace process actors reached out to the government promoting inclusive peace processes, but did not conduct the same level of outreach to the Myanmar military. Furthermore, many other NGO mediators’ technocratic approaches also did not necessarily account for Myanmar-specific aspects of the conflict, such as the war economies in the form of illicit drug industry the political economy of opium, jade, teak, animals and other illicit activities; and the role of powerful regional actors such as China in the context. These knowledge support activities focused on technical peace process design without consideration of the decades of the culture of elite deal-brokering that characterized certain past iterations of peacemaking in Myanmar. Thus, the wholly technocratic and bureaucratic approach to peacebuilding practice present in Myanmar misses these contextual considerations. In Myanmar, many actors promoting the inclusivity norm under the assumption it would lead to a more “effective” process severely underestimated the complexity of the process, the grievances of the EAGs, and the underlying logic of the government and Tatmadaw.

Second, in Myanmar, norms like inclusivity will inevitably interact with religion and ethnicity. Therefore, applying a modular technique in a piecemeal and asymmetrical way is not advisable. These pitfalls in norm diffusion meant that the promotion of the inclusivity norm brought historical grievances to the fore and reified them, rendering the all-inclusiveness issue the most salient aspect of negotiations. Therefore, simply because a norm is cosmopolitan or rights-based does not mean it leads to effective, sustainable and legitimate peace agreements—as existing policy documents and practice sometimes assume. Therefore, undertaking an analysis of existing priors such as Buddhist cosmology, ethnonationalism and militarized state formation is absolutely essential and having a strong understanding of how international concepts translate in locales with their own complex histories is non-negotiable. Unfortunately, international peace support actors are already experiencing a reckoning with the ahistorical, technicized approach failing to account for incredibly deeply-rooted norms about identity, inclusion and belonging in the context of the horrific crisis continuing to unfold in Rakhine State. From the highest levels of the UN to international development and education NGOs running long-time operations in Rakhine State, many international actors face normative dilemmas on how to address the vitriolic and systematic expressions of oppression and violence that Rohingya Muslims have faced for decades. Attempts at orthodox mediation, dialogue and development-based solutions have been met with outright rejection and hostility by hardliner Buddhist leadersFootnote 1 and denial by State Counsellor and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD-led government. Current approaches by many international peace and development actors use the label “social cohesion” projectsFootnote 2 when designing interventions to explicitly avoid language and terms such as “human rights violations” to retain humanitarian and political access to government and military actors; despite the September 2019 damning report by the UN accusing the military of systemic ethnic cleansing Footnote 3; and The Gambia filing a case against Myanmar to the International Court of Justice over allegations of genocide of the Rohingya Muslim population in Rakhine state in November 2019.Footnote 4 The crisis in Rakhine state is a horrific and urgent example for international actors to understand how the concept of inclusion manifests in manifold and complex ways—and the limits not only of mediators, but the enterprise of peacemaking and dialogue writ large.

8.4 Future Research Agendas

This book raises many questions that would benefit from further research. First, some of these questions point to a need for more empirical work on different types of norms, norm diffusion mechanisms and causal relationships present in mediation processes. In particular, tracking not only the acceptance of a norm by a given locale, but its internalization or sedimentation over time would be important and would entail a broader and more longitudinal study. For instance, the theoretical framework developed in this book could be applied to historical cases of peace processes that have resulted in comprehensive peace agreements, for instance studying the promotion of norms in the Northern Ireland peace process leading to the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in April 1998, or the signing of peace agreements in Guatemala in 1996 ending 36 years of civil war between the Government of Guatemala and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit. Alternatively, more recent examples of agreements signed as the outcome of peace processes touted as highly ‘inclusive,’ such as the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro signed between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front in 2014 or the peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 2016. The difficulties implementing the Bangsamoro Agreement or the narrow rejection of the Colombian peace agreement in the 2016 Referendum in Colombia following the agreement’s signing pose questions around the impact of inclusive peace process design beyond the signing of a peace agreement and requires further systematic assessment.

While the case study findings were based on the interactions between these particular actors, specific cognitive priors and particular time in the peace process, my research demonstrates analytical generalizability: beyond my case study, my theoretical framework can be applied to different types of mediators, different types of mediation processes (in specific contexts), and different types of norms. First, my three-part conceptualization around normative agency (framing, practices and power) can be applied to other types of mediators. Mediators mandated by the UN, states or regional organizations can be studied in terms of how they interpret and frame inclusivity, the specific types of practices they use to promote the norm to the parties, and how the power dynamics they have vis-à-vis the parties affect the outcome of norm diffusion. For instance, UN mediators may focus their efforts into framing inclusivity as increasing the political participation of civil society actors and women. Using their abilities to act as lead mediators taking strong roles in process design all the way through the process (not just early on) could result in a wide range of interesting results beyond the case of NGO mediators in Myanmar. Second, my application of normative agency to mediation processes can be applied to other mediation processes in a similar universe of cases governed by different sets of cognitive priors—for instance, how can the normative agency of NGO mediators active in the Aceh peace process or the Bangsamoro peace process be analyzed? Third, analytical generalizability could be applied to norms in question beyond inclusivity—my research question could be applied to other norms such as gender equality, transitional justice, human rights or democracy promotion. How do mediators use their normative agency to promote different norms and what are outcomes of these norm diffusion processes?

Furthermore, future research agendas could critically examine the type of norms being promoted by international peacemaking actors and the outcomes of these norm diffusion processes—gender equality, security sector reform, national dialogue designs, and other “norms” found in the UN Guidance and other peacemaking toolkits can be studied in the same vein as the inclusivity norm. The nature of norms being diffused also warrants greater attention—while looking at norms in an a priori manner is important, it would be interesting to look at norms that fall outside of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm, tracking the diffusion and non-diffusion of illiberal norms. This is timely in light of the upheaval of liberal internationalism and the rise of far-right and populist movements currently being examined in a new wave of IR theory and empirics. Norm diffusion research must be taken up in future studies tracing the centering of English-language and Western concepts and norms in the liberal progressive tradition must be critically re-examined.

8.5 Concluding Thoughts

Should mediators promote norms in peace processes or not? The answer necessarily cannot be a binary yes or no. The political nature of peace processes and the growing normative framework in mediation processes is here to stay—mediators may not have a say in the matter. But they do have a say in the way they promote norms: understanding that promoting norms is a process and is malleable, recognizing existing normative frameworks and taking a historical an anthropological approach that considers complex and contested histories and the importance of religion and other belief systems. Norm diffusion is also affected by other actors who employ their own forms of norm promotion, especially in contexts of multiparty mediation and multitrack mediation. This book aims to portray NGO mediators as mediators in their own right and not “just” as alternatives to state or UN mediators. NGO mediators are mediators, period, with normative agency. Therefore, it is important for the mediation field to more systematically address NGOs as mediators alongside state, UN or regional actors as this new trend can pose challenges for coordination and coherence, especially in complex contexts with multiple international and mediation actors playing roles. NGO mediators and other peace support actors should be more explicit about their interventions and practices, and be more cognizant about the multiple “working definitions” that they may apply to different norms. Would-be norm entrepreneurs must be cognizant of their own interpretations of norms and be explicit about them to both donors and the negotiating parties. They must also be aware of the role they play in norm diffusion, and their limited agency in determining the outcome of the norm diffusion process: while it may be possible, it is important to understand the risks involved and the range of consequences that occurs if the diffusion of the norm does happen.

The case of NGO mediators promoting the inclusivity norm in Myanmar shows that they are well suited for some aspects of the job but not others. The same may be true for other types of mediators promoting different sets of international norms to negotiating parties and other actors. The complex histories behind existing cognitive priors and the challenges and unintended consequences of localizing norms must be understood before and while engaging with the parties. Yet the growth of the normative framework shows no signs of abating, with clauses in a growing number of ceasefire and peace agreements (for instance in South Sudan or Colombia) explicitly mentioning international norms such as gender equality and inclusivity. While widespread debate exists between mediation practitioners, the voices of national actors themselves often fall to the wayside. Norm localization in mediation processes may have both positive and negative consequences on the process, and international actors should refrain from assumptions that normative processes are necessarily more effective, sustainable or successful. As armed conflicts become more violent and protracted and peace processes become more complex, the need to understand the role norms play in mediation processes remains imperative.