MORE than 100 local and international organizations, academe, government offices, and civil society groups participated in the Principles for Peace-South East (P4P-SEA) Asia Regional Launch on July 11, 2023 at the Insular Waterfront Hotel, Davao City.
In a statement given by P4P, the peace forum launch should “develop new principles, standards, and norms to fundamentally reshape peace processes”, using the P4P initiative.
The basic eight principles of this P4P approach cover dignity, solidarity, humility, enhancing integrated and hybrid solutions, accountable people-centered security, integrated and hybrid solutions for peacemaking, adopting subsidiarity in responding to conflict, and promotion of pluralism, being unified into a single covenant.
The launch will also focus on how the P4P approach will be used in revitalizing the peace process in the Bangsamoro Region.
“The Peacemaking Covenant... aim[s] to foster the inclusive and flexible discussions needed to chart a new path towards sustainable, legitimate, and lasting peace,” P4P said in a statement.
P4P chair Bert Koenders said through the launch of the peace process approach, it should lead as a model to sustain and cultivate peace.
“What we are engaged in is peace gaining... We are here today because what we’ve learned is... to embrace, to look forward, to practice our collective learning and to safeguard and advance this collective effort of peace in this region and throughout the world,” Koenders said.
Meanwhile, Gus Miclat, executive director of the Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID) said the initiative must address the need of the Bangsamoro Region for “newer strategies for a lasting resolution”, amid “the spike of horizontal and vertical violence in the region”.
He also said that the framework will be observed not only in Mindanao but in other peace processes as well.
“While we already knew this [principles] from the past it hasn’t been integrated as a framework, so ngayon mayroon na tayong diagnostic tools and metrics pag-measure ng ating ginagawa sa Bangsamoro (we are now looking into these tools and metrics measuring on our peace processes in Bangsamoro),” Miclat said.
“It’s like a humanitarian and national law na mayroon silang metrics to look at what’s happening... but sa peace wala tayong metrics na sinasabi (we don’t have this type of so-called metrics), so this is something that they are offering us (P4P) to use, we will look at it and see,” Miclat added.