In this blogpost, Monalisa Adhikari, Jennifer Hodge, and Laura Wise reflect on findings from their recent paper on the impacts of global fragmentation and conflict fragmentation published by the ‘Global (dis)Order’ project, led by the British Academy and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Drawing on insights from PeaceRep Myanmar research, they argue that that contemporary approaches to mediating conflicts can be understood as ‘Peace process lite’: a reductionist format which challenges conventional mediation orthodoxies.
The Global (Dis)Order of Peacemaking in Myanmar
On 25 January 2026, the Union Solidarity and Development Party declared victory in parliamentary elections in Myanmar. The results were unsurprising, given that the USDP are backed by the military junta, which after taking all executive power in 2021 launched a violent crackdown against a nationwide anti-military resistance movement. This crackdown escalated existing conflicts in many parts of the borderlands, and unleashed new fronts of violence in central parts of Myanmar. The elections were neither free, nor fair, nor inclusive. Declaring the elections as a sham, and with the popular National League for Democracy party dissolved by the military, opposition groups not did not participate. In areas under the control of Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) and People’s Defence Forces (PDFs), such as parts of Rakhine, Shan, and Kachin states, or in parts of the country currently being violently contested, such as rural areas of Mandalay and Tanintharyi, polling simply did not happen. In areas under the military’s control, there were widespread reports of voter coercion and intimidation, with many voting in fear of the consequences of abstaining.
As predictable as the election conduct and results were, so too was the spectrum of reactions from external states and multilateral organisations. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) declined the Myanmar military’s invitation to send election observers, and refused to endorse the election; however, member states could independently send their own observers, a step taken by Cambodia and Vietnam. Regional heavyweights China, India, and Japan also sent election observers, with China ‘congratulating Myanmar on a steady and orderly general election with active turnout.’
The United States’ administration has neither officially endorsed nor condemned the polls, but in November the Department for Homeland Security cited ‘plans for free and fair elections’ as a reason for removing Temporary Protected Status for citizens of Myanmar in the US. Meanwhile, multilateral organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union have rejected the polls as ‘neither free nor fair’, with similar concerns raised by the governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.
This global fragmentation in response to Myanmar’s recent election is echoed in the distinctions of how many of these same actors approach resolving the armed conflict that is being waged between a complex ecosystem of actors. With multilateral organisations such as the UN struggling to maintain primacy and legitimacy in a crowded marketplace of emergent third-party states, peacemaking has become more fragmented, competitive and transactional. Consequently, conflict parties such as the Myanmar military, EAOs and PDFs are navigating the competing forums and interests of different external actors, with their own preferences for the involvement of different third parties, due to factors such as pre-existing social or cross-border relationships, views on partiality, or the leverage of different mediating states.
Post-coup, there is a conspicuous absence of many Western states and a reduced presence of the UN, who are occupied by conflicts elsewhere and geopolitical fracturing – namely Gaza, Ukraine, and the unpredictability of the Trump administration. Filling the diplomatic void, discreet and disaggregated dialogue processes have emerged in Myanmar, brokered by different international third parties, including: regional organisations such as ASEAN, regional states such as India, China, Japan, and Thailand, and, albeit in a limited form, multilateral organisations such as the UN. Each of these third parties bring their own varied objectives and motivations, with regional peacemaking initiatives visibly tied to the geostrategic and economic interests of the intervening states, or normative values and institutional capacities of multilateral organisations.
The diverse peacemaking initiatives at play in Myanmar point to a fundamental reset of the imagination, practices, and objectives of contemporary peace processes. In a new paper for the ‘Global (Dis)Order’ project led by the British Academy and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, we argue that contemporary approaches to mediating conflicts can be understood as ‘Peace process lite’: a peacemaking approach that emerges when highly fragmented conflicts meets the fragmentation of global third parties in peacemaking. Peace process lite is reductionist in that it rearticulates liberal visions of peacemaking in its most minimalistic form and points to how the substance and objectives of peacemaking endeavours are becoming less institutionalised and more piecemeal, parochial, and transactional.
Peace process lite is marked by the presence of four key features:
- The primacy of stabilisation through ceasefires and local peace agreements rather than comprehensive peace plans – such as limited ceasefires between Myanmar military and EAOs brokered in Rakhine by Japan and in the Northern Borderlands by China – the latter with the express aim of reducing violence and stabilising the China-Myanmar border. Whilst such deals can reduce violence and bring immediate stability to a specific locality, they are temporary, fragile, and require continual renegotiation.
- A focus on immediate ‘wins’ such as humanitarian assistance rather than long-term stability and conflict termination – such as humanitarian ceasefires brokered by Japan, and ASEAN engagements with conflict parties through its Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA Centre). Agreements that centre humanitarian access can temporarily relieve human suffering at the local level, but also risk being co-opted by the Myanmar military in its quest for legitimation.
- Short-term and ad-hoc institutional arrangements to bring actors into talks – such as ad hoc bilateral dialogues led by neighbouring states, including Thailand and India. The limits of ASEAN institutional mechanisms such as the Regional Forum and the Chair’s Special Envoy to negotiate a political settlement has revealed an institutional vacuum that impacts the scale, pace, and continuity of peacemaking initiatives, and reduces potential for coherence, co-operation, or co-ordination across disaggregated processes.
- Transactional mediation relationships shaped by the economic and security interests of regional powers – such as India’s focus on engaging with EAOs operating across the India-Myanmar borderland, and China’s strategy of protecting its economic interests in Myanmar through brokering deals between the military and northern-based EAOs. The overt transactionalism of contemporary peace processes in Myanmar has led to a greater domestic demand for peacemaking initiatives by Western actors, contrary to narratives of the death of liberal peace.
By unpicking the complexity of contemporary mediation efforts in Myanmar, we demonstrate how peacemaking operates in practice under conditions of fragmentation. Peace process lite gives name to an approach to peacemaking that has emerged as an alternative to multilaterally-driven comprehensive peace processes and is contextually defined, localised, regionalised, and adapted, presenting both opportunities and challenges. We suggest that peace process lite opens up opportunities such as localised violence reduction, maintaining dialogue even if a comprehensive settlement seems unlikely, and temporary humanitarian access, but also risks stalling discussion of core conflict issues, increasing transactionalism, and incoherent or counterproductive competition among interested third parties.
For mediation practitioners and funders, peace process lite presents a key dilemma. While these processes may be more attractive than waiting for a comprehensive bargain that might never appear, the potential for unintended consequences is high. Any international support to such processes will need to confront difficult questions of how to incrementally build lite processes amid constraints posed by conflict dynamics and the international context, accurately map and understand how such lite processes relate to other initiatives within the multi-mediation ecosystem, and take note of what opportunities and risks investing in lite peace processes could bring.
About the Authors:
Dr Monalisa Adhikari is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Stirling and leads PeaceRep’s Myanmar research.
Dr Jennifer Hodge is a Research Fellow for PeaceRep at the University of Stirling, working on peace and transition processes in Myanmar and Colombia.
Laura Wise is a Senior Research Fellow for PeaceRep at the University of Edinburgh, working on comparative peace processes and inclusive mediation.
Associated links:
https://peacerep.org/publication/disaggregated-mediation-the-localisation-of-peace-processes/
https://peacerep.org/country-findings/myanmar/