Hermeneutic Experience as Paradigm of Conflict Resolution

Abstract

The Philippine government has recently been preoccupied with cultivating a sense of genuine and lasting peace among the Moro-Islamic ethnic and cultural groups in Mindanao, Southern Philippines through the ongoing Bangsamoro Peace Process (BPP) that would eventually grant the Moro-Islamic communities with political autonomy and self-government. Such policy highlights the notion that conflict resolution is just a matter of re-negotiating and the re-defining of the terms of power and power relations between the national government and the Moro-Islamic communities in Mindanao to forge a sense of solidarity. Recently, we have begun to see the breakdown of such conception of conflict resolution. When the Bangsamoro peoples do not ‘fit’ the role set out for them by the national government, they are labelled as betrayers of the peace process or worse, as terrorists. The problem here is not that the Bangsamoro peoples are failing in fulfilling their end of the bargain, but that they are framed as such. This framing and positioning of the Bangsamoro people has real on-the-ground implications which, in turn, raise crucial questions on how relationships between the national government and the Bangsamoro peoples, the modern and the ethnic, the ‘I’ and the other, should be conceived in the practice of conflict resolution. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutic experience, this paper explores the hypothesis that genuine conflict resolution can be better achieved not through changing the power dynamics between two conflicting groups, but through a hermeneutic dialogue that aims at understanding and learning from the other. A proper model or paradigm for conflict resolution is a hermeneutic one that recognizes the differences of two-conflicting groups—working out these differences to come up with a resolution that will not only benefit one party, but would benefit both parties involved.