In February 2021, Myanmar’s generals ended their own experiment with electoral democracy and staged a coup against the re-elected civilian government. Since then, violence has engulfed a country that is already home to the world’s longest ongoing civil war between ethnonational rebel movements – known as Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) – and the military of an ethnocratic state – the Tatmadaw. As the conflict is largely confined to the country’s far-flung peripheries, observers and policymakers alike have often relegated it to a second order priority. In the wake of the coup, however, EAOs have come into the spotlight in Myanmar politics.

After years, sometimes decades, of civil war, the temptation to treat the formal signing of peace agreements as the culminating endpoint in the struggle for ‘just and lasting’ peace has often, and for good reason, proved strong. The tendency to view the handshake moment also as a watershed moment has only been reinforced by the high-flown language and grand promises contained in the agreements themselves. When it comes to the actual afterlife of peace agreements, however, the contrast between promise and reality has often been stark. The truth is that peace agreements reached following civil wars over the past thirty years have rarely lived up to the promises enshrined in the agreements, let alone the hopes for societal transformation and ‘positive peace’ adumbrated at the time of their signature.

Over the last decade we have witnessed a sharp increase in due diligence legislation for the minerals supply chain, codifying higher company performance requirements when it comes to the sourcing of gold. This is not the place to list all soft and mandatory legislation on supply chain due diligence; however, should the reader so desire they are welcome to take a look at this brief article by Camila Gómez Wills. For now, it is sufficient to note that civil society’s and customers’ expectations on responsible sourcing are progressively being embedded in law, as the European Union Conflict Minerals Regulation and the upcoming European mandatory human rights and environmental supply chain due diligence law demonstrate.