The need to move from episodic conflict management to more equitable peace processes is more urgent than ever.
Key words: conflict transformations, Asia, peacebuilding
Armed conflicts are increasing in number and intensity across Asia. Interstate flashpoints—maritime tensions in the South China Sea, cross–strait friction over Taiwan and volatile nuclear–armed standoffs along the Indian-Pakistan border and the ongoing tensions of the Korean Peninsula—continue to simmer alongside internal wars and violence in Afghanistan, West Asia and Myanmar and porous borderlands. Driven by increased geopolitical competition and social, environmental and technological change, violent conflicts are more complex, long-lasting, and resistant to traditional solutions.
These trends manifest in enduring, overlapping conflicts that increasingly blur the line between internal insurgencies and inter-state rivalries and transnational security threats. Increasing militarisation, securitisation and geopolitical competition and insecurities have escalated the risks of rapid interstate conflicts. Increasingly fragmented insurgent movements are becoming more adaptive, exploiting and reshaping borderlands and local grievances to sustain cross-border militant networks.
Conflicts are more complex
These trends are amplified by the erosion of state capacity in some contexts, the politicisation of religious and ethnic identities, regionalisation through proxy wars, and transnationalisation of violence and militant networks. The confluence of many of these factors in conflicts clearly test the limits of humanitarian action, regional diplomacy, or coordinated, multilateral responses. The traditional focus on ‘state actors’ is insufficient in a region contending simultaneously with increasingly authoritarian state and non-state actors, militant groups that operate transnationally, ethnonationalist separatists, and powerful non-state resistance coalitions that operate in complex, shifting webs of alliances and rivalries among a plurality state and non-state armed actors.
Broader shifts such as rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, rising socioeconomic inequality, environmental change, and the polarising effects of digital platforms are reinforcing conflict dynamics. Authoritarian regimes are shrinking civic space, at home and transnationally, which restricts civil society’s capacity to contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding.
Peacebuilding is more difficult
There is an increased tendency to reduce peacebuilding across many contexts in Asia to the management and stabilisation of conflicts rather than transforming and resolving the underlying causes of violence.
This shift can be understood as ‘disaggregated mediation’—multiple, concurrent and often uncoordinated dialogue processes that are geographically and thematically bounded rather than designed to produce a comprehensive settlement. Such processes can achieve precious breathing space: ceasefires that protect civilians, local accords that keep services running, technical arrangements that avert immediate crises. But without coherence, accountability and political inclusion, they risk calcifying inequalities and displacing violence to other zones.
In this special issue of Melbourne Asia Review, we have invited scholars and practitioners to offer rigorous and empirically grounded analysis of conflict dynamics across diverse social, economic and geographical contexts. Reflecting both the diversity and complexity of conflict dynamics and peacebuilding and multidisciplinary perspectives, the collection of articles provides an overview of common patterns across contexts and different local and geopolitical contexts.
South Asia
Following the withdrawal of the US and NATO forces from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban has consolidated a repressive authoritarian regime. While the Taliban claims its rule has brought stability and control, systematic human rights repressions especially of women and girls, marginalisation and persecution of ethnic and religious communities such as the Shi’a Hazaras, the ongoing presence of regional and transnational militant groups, and deep humanitarian crises compound to create risks of new conflicts.
Borderlands and the reconfiguration of violence require renewed attention and analytic frames. Syed Ali Akash’s fieldwork in Waziristan documents a shift from mass insurgency to dispersed targeted killings, digitalised propaganda and drone use. Violence is now embedded in everyday life and civic space is being narrowed. Masoom Stanekzai and Sanullah Tasal place Afghanistan–Pakistan–India insecurity in systemic relief: proxy dynamics, remobilised militant networks and great power competition have converted local insurgencies into regionalised, interconnected conflict systems. Niamatullah Ibrahimi’s study of the Taliban’s madrasa expansion highlights how education policy is being weaponised to shape future generations, with regional consequences for radicalisation and state capacity. Ibrahimi also suggests future interventions to disrupt such long-term cultural violence and instability across generations and borders. Saran Prakash and Robert Mizo’s analysis of the Indus Basin demonstrates how securitisation of water—India’s suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty—turns essential technical cooperation into a geopolitical lever. Their feminist–ecology lens highlights how such action disproportionately harms women and marginalised groups and how technical cooperation (data sharing, joint flood forecasting) needs to be insulated by institutional mechanisms that can endure diplomatic ruptures.
Myanmar
The role of China across sites along its border with Myanmar illustrates these dynamics. The war in Myanmar, driven by a 2021 military coup, is Asia’s deadliest conflict. As resistance forces and ethnic armed groups consolidate territorial control in parts of Myanmar and along border regions, neighbouring states face growing security dilemmas. The multiple and diverse civil wars, primarily against the junta, have tested regional peace architecture with ASEAN leadership failing to have any impact in reducing or managing the ongoing violence.
Xuwan Ouyang’s study of China in Myanmar demonstrates how diplomacy, investment leverage and security guarantees are used to manage violence in ways that protect strategic interests more than address deeper political grievances. As Su Mon Thant warns in her article on rising militarisation in Southeast Asia, from Myanmar to Papua and the Philippines, security–first strategies can entrench coercive practices and obstruct inclusive arrangements.
Iran and the Middle East
Davoud Osmanzadeh and Fateh Saeidi find these patterns of the management of instability without structural inclusion in relation to political transitions in the Middle East. Exemplified by Iran, the prioritisation of short-term stabilisation and territorial unity over restructuring authority, as well as securitising minority group demands, reproduce the hierarchies they claim to overturn. The authors argue that the crucial question is not whether transitions can manage diversity, but whether they are prepared to dismantle the institutional arrangements that have rendered these differences politically unequal.
These trends expose a central political paradox: Powerful states and geopolitical actors increasingly treat conflicts and peacemaking as an instrument of strategic management, protecting investment, stabilising corridors, or fragmenting threats, while local civilian and non-state armed actors continue to pursue transformative rearrangements of power, rights and reparations.
What does a reimagined conflict transformation look like?
There are examples of successful transitions away from major interstate or civil wars, such as in the Philippines, Nepal and the Indonesian province of Aceh. In the Philippines, expanded civic engagement and peace dialogue in Mindanao has resulted in the establishment of BARMM, the Bangsamro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Senior Filipino peace negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer is concerned about continuing political rivalries, economic disparities and security issues, but points to a decade largely free of armed conflict.
Post-conflict transitional justice approaches, such as those developed in Nepal, too often fail to be connected with localised and informal approaches to support survivors and communities most impacted by past violence. Jaya Luintel’s research on ‘Truth Listening’ reframes survivors of conflict–related sexual violence in Nepal as knowledge–builders: whereby listening must lead to recognition, reparations and holistic support rather than remaining a procedural step for commissions alone.
Muhammad Ammar Hidayahtulloh and Shelli Israelsen examine how Acehnese women have shaped, and continue to contest, Aceh’s post-conflict transformation. While the women’s movement secured important legal and policy reforms and moral gains, the peace agreement and its legacy have not fully transformed the deep-seated social relationships that sustain gender violence and injustice.
Locally led conflict prevention and community-based approaches to peacebuilding draw on local knowledge and agency, relationships and contextual expertise to address the deeper drivers of conflict and offer longer-term efforts to address deeper structural and cultural underlying conflict dynamics.
Mujib Abid’s account of the 2016 Afghan agreement with Hizb-i-Islami reminds us that Afghan mediators carved space for locally owned settlement even inside an internationalised peace architecture. Past agreements—the 1988 Geneva Accords, the 2001 Bonn Agreement and the 2020 Doha Agreement—willfully excluded a key party to the conflict, either the Afghan government or the insurgency.
Regional initiatives such as the Southeast Asian Women Peace Mediators (SEAWPM) provide a platform for Southeast Asian women engaged in mediating, negotiating, and facilitating peace processes to provide nuanced analysis, create safe spaces for candid dialogue, and align internal and external stakeholders through quiet and public diplomacy.
Atikah Nuraini also looks at how conflict systems can be better approached. Her research demonstrates that policy in relation to Indigenous forest conflicts in Indonesia formed at the national level, that engages meaningfully with Indigenous rights as well as grassroots advocacy, can create forms of participatory governance, essential to a resilient peace infrastructure that can hold multi-layered and plural interests.
The patterns of conflict in Asia seem to be pushing against the longer-term aims of conflict transformation, that seeks redistribution of power, inclusive processes and institutions and political courage. More likely, it seems, are approaches that manage or produce islands of stability but which do not transform the drivers giving rise to many grievances.
Reimagining conflict transformation in Asia therefore must help movement from episodic management to linked, locally legitimated transformation, amidst fragmentation, towards deeper and more equitable peace processes.
Authors: Dr Tania Miletic and Dr Niamatullah Ibrahimi.
Image credit: SARET SAYON/Pexels.
