When we remember: peacebuilding and transgenerational resilience in the Southern Philippines
Creators: name: Ragandang, Primitivo
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2023

description: How can we restore something when there is nothing? How can a political order endure if protracted shocks continually deplete their resources? The resilience turn in global politics, particularly in peace and conflict studies and development studies was ground-breaking in how the epistemic community conceptualised political orders. It paved the way for an epistemic shift from looking at state fragility into community resilience. Building on existing contribution, this thesis explores community resilience as an epistemic move rather than previous labelling states as fragile. It takes a conceptual departure from a point where depletion is less explored in the scholarship's inquiry into community resilience. A broad assumption of scholarship on resilience hinges on the bouncing back of communities and endurance from extreme shocks. As such, resilience has frequently been considered as strong and adaptive. This thesis takes a different approach and focuses on depletion - particularly in the context of resource scarcity brought by protracted conflicts, low support systems, and when the lines towards social mobility are broken. It asks- if community resilience indeed creates a political order, what sustains them when resilience is depleted? As a response, this thesis introduces the ayom-ayomic political order that exists in the Bisayan-speaking communities in the Southern Philippines. This order captures a certain kind of resilience - at times of depletion, resource scarcity, and shock continuity. As this thesis shows, the ayom-ayomic concept emerges when the community uses a variety of locally and readily available resources for a political order to endure. It further argues that this political order endures through time and space because of transgenerational resilience. Tracing through the region's wars and peace process, this thesis reveals how a political order endures across time despite depleting shocks. Through primary research undertaken in the post-conflict Bangsamoro region and elsewhere in the Southern Philippines, this thesis demonstrates the emergence of a strong and sustainable ayom-ayomic political order developing as a result of protracted and extreme shocks, very low level of support system, and resource scarcity. One key implication of ayom-ayomic elements' transmission is the transgenerationality of resilience. Transgenerational resilience connects the past, the present, and future generations through a journey of recollection. Stories from remembered memory facilitate the transgenerational transmission of resilience. While transitioning from conflict to post-conflict, the younger generation does not have similar experiences to that of the older generation, they are deeply connected through memories of lived experience. Through primary research, this thesis shows, first, how such experience reconstructs resilience of the elders-those who have lived through a traumatic past. Second, how learning about the past allows transgenerational transmission of resilience from one generation to another. As such, ayom-ayomic elements are collected across generations attempting to archive their memories, stories, and lived experiences of the past. This implies that a political order may endure through the generational retelling of the community's memory of not only of wars but also of peacebuilding.