Towards Peace: Rethinking Justice and Legal Pluralism in the Bangsamoro

93 Pages Posted: 23 Jan 2015

See all articles by Imelda Deinla

Imelda Deinla

School of Regulation & Global Governance (RegNet)

Veronica L. Taylor

School of Regulation & Global Governance (RegNet)

Date Written: 2015

Abstract

In March 2014 the government of the Philippines signed a Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro for a final peace settlement in the armed conflict in the southern province of Mindanao. The Agreement will be given legal form in the Bangsamoro Basic Law, currently before the Philippine Congress and anticipated to be enacted in early 2015. A foundational assumption of the transitional process and the Basic Law is that the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) will, through a referendum process, become a politically and legally self-governing sub-region of the Philippines: the Bangsamoro.

How justice currently functions within the legally pluralist ARMM matters because long-held perceptions of injustice by citizens in ARMM are one of the key drivers of the current sub-national conflict in the Philippines. Existing studies and the preliminary empirical work on which this paper is based suggest that there is a direct link between failures of justice provision and violence in ARMM; that the most vulnerable citizens in ARMM currently have little or no recourse to legal protection and remedies; and that lack of attention to the legal architecture in the Bangsamoro could contribute to its ongoing political fragility. This paper summarizes the available data on legal pluralism in Mindanao and frames some of the unresolved questions for justice system design in the Bangsamoro transition.

Keywords: Legal pluralism, justice and gender, post-conflict, non-state justice, informal justice, shari’ah, Bangsamoro, Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), Mindanao, Philippines

Suggested Citation

Deinla, Imelda and Taylor, Veronica L., Towards Peace: Rethinking Justice and Legal Pluralism in the Bangsamoro (2015). RegNet Research Paper No. 2015/63, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2553541 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2553541

Imelda Deinla (Contact Author)

School of Regulation & Global Governance (RegNet) ( email )

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200
Australia

Veronica L. Taylor

School of Regulation & Global Governance (RegNet) ( email )

Australian National University
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200
Australia

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
461
Abstract Views
1,853
Rank
114,654
PlumX Metrics