PASIG CITY (MindaNews / 11 March) — There is a comfortable assumption that runs through every peace process: that everyone at the table — governments, armed groups, civil society, international partners — wants the process to succeed. It shapes how agreements are designed, how international support is structured, and how ordinary people understand what is at stake in the Bangsamoro.

The assumption is wrong. Or at least, it is naive.

Stephen John Stedman, who wrote the foundational analysis of spoilers in peace processes, defined them as “leaders and parties who believe the emerging peace threatens their power, world view, and interests and who use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it.” The definition is useful but incomplete for the Bangsamoro. Violence is only one form of spoiling. The more sophisticated — and more durable — form operates quietly: through delay, selective compliance, institutional inertia, and the accumulation of facts on the ground that formal agreements cannot easily reverse. In the Bangsamoro, multiple categories of actors have structural interests in peace failure. Understanding them is not a cynical exercise. It is a diagnostic one.

The Institutional Spoiler: Government Implementation Agencies

Implementation agencies can themselves become spoilers — not always through deliberate intent, but through the institutional habits of centralized governance that the peace architecture was designed to change. The spoiling signature is recognizable: delay in the release of mandated funds; unilateral decisions that should require coordination with the MILF; selective compliance with some aspects of normalization, e.g. decommissioning, while stalling on those that are essential to peace like transitional justice and reconciliation, disbandment of private armed groups, transformation of communities, amnesty, among others. The effect, accumulated over time, is a peace agreement that exists on paper but is hollowed out in practice.

What makes it durable is its deniability. Every delay has a plausible administrative explanation. The pattern is only visible in aggregate — and only to those willing to look at it as a pattern.

Traditional Political Elites: The Power Redistribution Problem

Peace processes redistribute power. This is not a side effect — it is the purpose. The Bangsamoro has its own class of traditional political elites whose power rests on patronage networks, clan influence, and control of local resources. For them, a functioning Bangsamoro government — one that redirects resources toward public services and democratic accountability — is a threat, not an opportunity.

Their spoiling behavior is characteristically internal: electoral manipulation, gerrymandering, resource capture within Bangsamoro institutions, and the colonization of new peace structures to ensure they serve old distributions of power. These actors rarely oppose the peace process in principle. They are often among its loudest public supporters. What they resist is its substance — particularly the provisions that would constrain their ability to monopolize political power, extract resources and maintain dominance over the communities the Bangsamoro was created to empower.

Military and Security Sector Actors

Decades of armed conflict generate institutional interests. Security sector actors develop mandates, budgets, and organizational identities organized around the management of conflict. Almost all commanders assigned in the 6th Infantry Division rise up in the chain of command. A genuinely successful peace diminishes the relevance of those mandates and opportunities. This is not a claim of bad faith — it is an observation about institutional incentives documented across many post-conflict contexts.

The persistence of operational postures in areas nominally governed by Bangsamoro authority, the preference for security-sector responses to problems the peace architecture assigns to civilian governance, the slow movement of the normalization track — these patterns reflect institutional interests alongside genuine security assessments. Distinguishing between the two is difficult. That difficulty is itself part of the problem.

Extremist Armed Groups: The Ontological Objection

For certain armed groups with ideological affiliations to transnational jihadist networks, the Bangsamoro peace process is not merely politically disadvantageous. It is theologically wrong. Their rejection of the settlement is not negotiable because it is not based on interests the settlement can address. They do not seek to build a nation. They seek to build a cause.

The argument is categorical: any peace that does not establish an Islamic state is surrender, not resolution. For these actors, the MILF’s acceptance of autonomy is a moral failure. Armed attacks timed to coincide with peace milestones serve a dual purpose: they demonstrate the peace structures’ inability to guarantee security, and they sustain the narrative that the process is capitulation dressed as progress. Every implementation failure, every delayed peace dividend strengthens the case they are making to potential recruits.

Splinter Groups: The Organizational Logic of Radicalization

A structural problem in any peace process is that when a movement negotiates, it marginalizes its own factions. The MILF’s shift toward a negotiated settlement created organizational space for groups that define themselves by their refusal to settle. These groups inherit the legitimating narrative — Bangsamoro self-determination — while rejecting the peace strategy. Their continued armed operations create a permanent security context that justifies Manila’s security-sector posture in the Bangsamoro — which is, paradoxically, one of their most consequential contributions to peace process failure. They create the conditions that enable other spoilers.

Shadow Economy Networks: Criminal Constituencies

The Bangsamoro’s decades of conflict have produced organized shadow economy constituencies: drug trafficking, arms smuggling, kidnapping-for-ransom, and illicit maritime trade. These networks are not ideologically opposed to peace. They are commercially dependent on the disorder that conflict enables — and therefore materially opposed to the territorial governance that peace requires.

Criminal networks have no grievance that peace can redress. Their spoiling operates through the corruption of Bangsamoro institutions, the financing of armed actors whose operations serve their commercial interests, and the maintenance of ungoverned spaces that peace implementation has not reached. When shadow economy actors capture regulatory positions or finance the private armed groups of traditional elites, they are not peripheral to peace process dynamics — they are structurally integrated into the conditions that prevent peace from consolidating.

What Is To Be Done?

The literature’s central finding is that management strategy must be matched to spoiler type. Applying the wrong strategy to the wrong spoiler type does not merely fail — it makes the situation worse.

Institutional spoiling requires accountability mechanisms that make selective compliance visible and costly. International partners and Bangsamoro civil society must be systematic in monitoring OPAPRU, OSAP and the MILF and document the gap between formal commitment and actual implementation — and in naming that gap explicitly. Peace agreements that cannot be held to account through clear attribution will be systematically exploited by actors who understand that deniability is their protection.

Traditional political elites and criminal networks require the same long-term response: genuine territorial governance, transparent fiscal management, and free and honest elections are a must. Anti-corruption mechanisms within Bangsamoro institutions that expose resource capture should be put up. 

Extremist armed groups and splinter factions require isolation from the political process, reduction of operational capacity, and — critically — protection of the MILF’s credibility as the legitimate representative of the Bangsamoro cause. Every genuine peace dividend the MILF can demonstrate weakens the splinter groups’ core recruitment argument. The peace process is its own counter-extremism program, if it delivers. 

There is a prior requirement behind all of this: the willingness to see the situation clearly. The assumption that everyone wants the peace process to succeed has allowed spoiler behavior to operate in plain sight — explained away as administrative difficulty or security necessity — when it is, in fact, structural and predictable.

Peace does not fail because its enemies are too strong. It fails because its friends are not clear-eyed enough about who its enemies are.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Camilo “Bong” Montesa of Cagayan de Oro is a lawyer and professor based in Pasig City. He has spent three decades in conflict and peacebuilding work in the Philippines.)