Bangsamoro Community Security Toolkit

The Toolkit serves as a guide for peacebuilders, local government units, and policymakers to carry out Community Security actions particularly in the Bangsamoro areas facing a myriad security challenges, particularly in this period of transition. It is designed to provide guidance on how to organize and mobilize Community Security Working Groups (CSWGs) in varying stages while providing inputs on what success looks like for each stage: criteria, underlying principles and assumptions, approaches, values, and actions. The CSWGs are the fore and centre of Community Security actions.

While the governing principles and values of Community Security actions set in this Toolkit are likely to remain essential in various settings, this Toolkit is not set in stone. On the contrary, it is envisioned as a living document that requires adaptations and retooling depending on the evolving security context of the Bangsamoro. This version of the Toolkit is one that best reflects the current security challenges and the ways communities are addressing them at this time. Hence, to use this Toolkit in other Bangsamoro communities will require a reflective re-thinking of some of its analysis, approaches, and steps while keeping at heart the lessons it provides.

While a number of security-related toolkits exist, what makes this Toolkit unique is its grounded approach that draws from home-grown experiences and lessons of Bangsamoro peacebuilding organizations as they designed and implemented the only known project of this kind in the region and the country. Placed in the canvass of the political, security, and social transformations brought by the Bangsamoro peace process, the Toolkit reflects the indigenous creativity and possibilities that community peacebuilders and local government units have devised over the last five years to prevent and mitigate violent conflicts at the barangay level whilst the positive impact, and the resistance and discontents too, of the Bangsamoro normalization are starting to be felt.