Post-Accord Peace: Hybrid Peacebuilding and the Diminishing Status of Indigeneity Among Peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts

Abstract

<p>The very ontological flaw of the recently emerged hybrid peace concept and its evaluation is that it is mostly based on normative analysis relying on assertions and interpretations rather than drawing on precision and prediction, as well, in considering evidence-based explanatory research. So, using primary field data, I examine a principal research puzzle of whether Liberal Peace, Peace Infrastructure, Positive Peace, and Indigeneity (together Hybrid Peacebuilding implementation) correlate with and predict Post-Accord Peace in so much as the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) indigenous peoples in Bangladesh perceive it. The statistical results and analyses establish positive associations between the variables to different extents. But Indigeneity emerges as a relatively weak variable which means that indigenous peacebuilding implementation alone is less likely to improve the extent of the Post-Accord Peace in the CHT. Rather a hybrid juncture of peacebuilding is found relatively significant to make indigeneity as stronger to improve the extent of Post-Accord Peace. This research identifies people from the CHT hilltribes as survey respondents for quantitative data collection. While professionals with research and other forms of relevant experience on peacebuilding and CHT affairs within the CHT and beyond are selected as key and expert informants for the generation of qualitative data in a bid to find explanations for two further research questions developed after completing the quantitative analyses. The research findings point to strong evidence for its second research question and arguments for the probable causes behind the failure of Post-Accord Peace. It turns out that the descriptive statistical analysis of the dependent variable reveals there is such a failure occurring. Accordingly, I argue that the post-Accord CHT peacebuilding trajectory is predominantly linked to (neo)liberal peace intervention and top-down hegemony of Bengali-Muslim nationalism that has mainly failed to connect local indigenous issues and peacebuilders with political actions from which the local CHT highlanders have mostly unsubscribed, particularly to this kind of political construction of hybrid peacebuilding intervention. The third research question inquires as to whether there are possible factors responsible for the detected lower association of indigeneity with post-Accord Peace which I theorize in the thesis as being due to 'indigeneity dilution' – an explanation of there being an 'effect' that convergently evolved from the interview data – to reveal a new idea/concept and this new idea I propose in my thesis as a fresh contribution to the peacebuilding literature. In this post-colonial era following independence, nationalist governments emerged as internal colonialists and in the case of Bangladesh, the government successfully kept the CHT indigenous community busy with survival struggles with state-administered demographic engineering policies. This post-Accord peacebuilding praxis deliberated for involuntary assimilation of the CHT indigenous community with the mainland Bengali settlers, adaption with (neo)liberal peacebuilding interventions, and their survival struggle with every day structural and direct violence. This together seems to cause permanent damage to their age-old indigenous resources in a parasitic way which has subtly resulted in the dilution of indigeneity with these stated issues with structural violence issue.</p>