Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: An election in the Philippines’ Bangsamoro Autonomous Region was supposed to settle a decades-old conflict; Singapore defends high ministerial salaries; and app drivers in Vietnam assert their growing political importance with a strike.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: An election in the Philippines’ Bangsamoro Autonomous Region was supposed to settle a decades-old conflict; Singapore defends high ministerial salaries; and app drivers in Vietnam assert their growing political importance with a strike.

The Philippines’ Bumpy Peace Election

This week in the southern Filipino archipelago of Mindanao, an election in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region was supposed to settle a decades-old conflict.

In Cotabato City, one of the region’s larger cities, I served as an election observer, accompanying a team from the International Republican Institute. Unfortunately, things were bumpy. And whether this election is the next step toward peace or the starting gun for more conflict is yet to be determined.

At least five people were killed and 18 injured over the election period, despite the heavy presence of security forces. Decades of conflict and an internal split between rebels evidently amplified tensions.

First, though, some context. Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest island, has a long history of struggle against national authorities. Spanish and then American colonialists struggled to subdue the majority-Muslim islands.

In the 1960s under President Ferdinand Marcos, an influx of Christian settlers from other islands sparked another round of conflict. In 1996, a rebel group called the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) struck a peace deal with the government that held despite imperfect implementation. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), an Islamist splinter from the MNLF, kept fighting until it struck a deal in 2014.

On the political track, the agreement had two key components. First, the establishment of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), an autonomous parliamentary government straddling numerous Muslim-majority areas in Mindanao with wide-ranging powers to raise revenue and legislate. Second was an election, to choose delegates for the parliament to replace its initial appointees.

The politics have been tricky, though. After BARMM formed in 2019, its first election was initially scheduled for 2022 but then subsequently delayed four times.

In the past year, the Islamist MILF has also split politically. MILF Chair Al Haj Murad Ebrahim leads the United Bangsamoro Justice Party, the organization’s political arm. Last year, he was displaced as chief minister by Abdulraof Macacua, former chief of staff for the MILF’s armed forces. Macacua subsequently joined the........

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