After democracy returned to the Philippines in 1986, the Moros and the Philippine state entered into multiple phases of negotiation. The 1996 peace agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) was seen as a landmark, yet its reach and effectiveness were very limited. Subsequent attempts to reach a new peace agreement, this time with the rival Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), proved particularly difficult as the MILF sought even deeper concessions. The MILF finally reached in 2014 a peace agreement with the Philippine government, yet it took four more years before the Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro was enshrined as the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) and ratified by parliament in 2018.

At each stage of negotiation, past commitments were deemed insufficient and lacked credibility. It is characteristic of commitment failures, by which the state obtained written agreements but either failed to implement them or sought to undermine its own commitments through other means.