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This is an excerpt from the MEGA August 2025 MEGA Matters Feature
We all know how this joke goes. A person asks someone what they want, and they respond with “world peace” while waving like a beauty queen. It is supposed to make fun of the emptiness of that answer. Sure, everybody wants peace, but no one is going to get it anyway. Just land that punchline, laugh it off, then say what you actually want are the fries. Whatever.
But then, there are those who actually take peace quite seriously. For Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, peace is not just a concept but a part of her daily life. In fact, she built a decades-long career over it.
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Coronel-Ferrer is a peace negotiator. Currently, she is a board member of the International Crisis Group and Interpeace, a peace-building organization based in Geneva. She is a part of the advisory bodies of several organizations, like the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders and Harvard University’s Negotiations Strategies Institute.
In 2020, she co-founded the Southeast Asian Women Peace Mediators, a group of Southeast Asian women involved in mediating, negotiating, and facilitating peace processes. Her work has taken her to places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Of course, her achievements are most pronounced in her home country. She was the chief negotiator of the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
It has been more than 10 years since then, so it can feel like just another date to memorize for a test in school. But political events like these have real-life effects. According to the 8th Public Report Release of the Third-Party Monitoring Team, released in 2023, an independent group that oversees the implementation of the peace accord between the government and the MILF, more than 20,000 rebels have already been decommissioned since the agreement was signed.
“It settled an armed conflict that has raged for almost half a century. Forty years of conflict and 17 years in negotiation. It was a real breakthrough in that sense,” says Coronel-Ferrer.
It is important to give credit where credit is due. CAB was in the works for years, and many people were involved in the process. But when it was signed, Coronel-Ferrer was recognized as the first woman in the world to sign a peace agreement with a rebel group. Surely, that feels like the ultimate achievement.
“This one really took a long time and was also a very difficult process. Is it a feather in my cap? Maybe not,” Coronel-Ferrer says. “I am still active. We are still doing a lot of work now, and not necessarily just inside the country.”
Wikipedia says Coronel-Ferrer is 63, but it is wrong. “I’m 65, not 63. I have not bothered to edit it,” she says. “65 is not old. A lot of presidents, for better or worse, are really very senior people. A lot of leaders, good professors, and farmers are very senior people. It is not like it is the end of the rope for you just because you are entering this senior stage.”
Peace takes time, so age comes across as an advantage. “There are ups and downs. Even if you make progress, violence still erupts. You need a long-view perspective on this, otherwise you get frustrated and impatient.”
Her years working in this field have also given her a laser-sharp focus. While talking about her work, she makes sure that the terms are precise. She is clear in this: don’t call CAB a treaty. She explains that treaties are between states, and this is an agreement between the government and a segment of the population.
She also says not to use the term peacekeeping for her work because peacekeeping forces usually refer to troops sent to areas of conflict. “Peacemaking probably is the more appropriate word for doing negotiations and dialogues.”
But why does it matter? Because this is what it takes for such a nebulous concept, like peace, to become something manageable. The parlance matters in the same way a surgeon will not use any random words to describe the organ about to be operated on. The work Coronel-Ferrer does is the real thing.
Read more and get to know Miriam Coronell-Ferrer and her work as a peace negotiator in MEGA’S August 2025 issue now available on Readly, Magzter, Press Reader and Zinio.
Photographed by SELA GONZALES. Art Director TROY NONATO. Sittings Editor STEF JUAN. Stylist QUAYNE PEDROSO. Makeup and Hair ARIA ORTEGA. Photography Assistant ROJAN MAGUYON. Shot on Location at PILI PANINAP FARMS
