  High-energy hadronic collisions are dominated by soft interactions with low
momentum transfers. The description of these processes typically relies on
phenomenological models. The soft QCD measurements, such as characterisation of
the underlying event (UE) and study of light flavored hadrons, provide
important constraints on the model parameters. They also provide additional
insights into the recent measurements at the LHC where features normally
attributed to QGP formation in Pb-Pb collisions have been observed even in pp
and p-Pb collisions. Here, we present an analysis based on UE measurements
applied to p-Pb collisions for the first time at the LHC to test the
similarities between pp and p-Pb collisions. Furthermore, it is shown that the
UE at midrapidity is correlated with the energy measured at forward rapidity by
ALICE zero degree calorimeters (ZDC). Using ZDC, a multi-differential study is
shown to disentangle initial and final-state effects on strange hadron
production in pp collisions.
