Past Program

Peace is key to ensuring Asia's sustained development and prosperity as the world's most populous region grows in global geopolitical and economic importance. But despite the region’s rich experience in mediating peace and reconciliation, the learning exchange between regional, local and community-driven initiatives has so far been low.

Launched in 2020, the Asia Peace Innovators Forum aims to shape long-term peace, stability, and regional cooperation in Asia by building a network of mid-career professionals working in different sectors and countries to exchange knowledge, community-driven approaches, and best practices. Due the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this program has been moved primarily online, where every two weeks the selected Asia Peace Innovators will tackle a different element of peace-building.

This online program addressed civilian-police-military relations.  Some common questions, explored first in plenary and then more deeply in breakout groups (one looking at the application of international lessons learned for the specific situation in Myanmar, the other focused primarily on comparisons from southern Thailand and the Philippines), included:  Are civil society, police, and military representative of the people they serve as opposed to agents of specific interests?  Do some voices excluded from peace talks actually need to be included in order to produce real peace?  How can security arrangements be trusted by the communities?  Can we ensure that individuals in the police and military adhere to professional standards (human rights, gender sensitivity, non-corrupt)?  Whether international intervention is helpful with respect to the groups it favors as well as in promoting local ownership of peace processes within the specific contexts of each country?  Can change happen through education at the grassroots level to create bottom-up dialogue?

This program is open exclusively to accepted participants of the Asia Peace Innovators Forum.