  We survey the problem of separation under conjugacy and malnormality of the
abelian peripheral subgroups of an orientable, irreducible $3$-manifold $X$. We
shall focus on the relation between this problem and the existence of
acylindrical splittings of $\pi_1(X)$ as an amalgamated product or
HNN-extension along the abelian subgroups corresponding to the JSJ-tori.
