UP THIRD WORLD STUDIES CENTER: July 2018

KASARINLAN: PHILIPPINE JOURNAL OF THIRD WORLD STUDIES
TWSC AND FORTY YEARS OF CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP
VOLUME 32 NUMBERS 1–2
2017

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NOTES FROM THE EDITOR

1 TWSC at Forty: Multidisciplinary Research and the Challenges to the Center (CORRECTED COPY UPLOADED 31 AUG 2018)
Ricardo T. Jose

ARTICLES

7 Global Populism: A Lineage of Filipino Strongmen from Quezon to Marcos and Duterte (CORRECTED COPY UPLOADED 31 AUG 2018)
Alfred W. McCoy

ABSTRACT. The rising global phenomenon of populism has been framed as a reaction to the unmet promises of globalization in nominally democratic nations. Rodrigo Duterte has similarly been positioned along this trend. This article traces the lineage of Filipino strongmen from Quezon to Marcos and Duterte and shows that they emerged through juxtaposition of skilled diplomacy and local controls. This situates Duterte at an intersection of global trends and local political tradition, beyond the flat application of the term populism to the Philippines. Studying these Filipino strongmen reveals the role of performative violence in projecting domestic strength and a complementary need for diplomatic success to demonstrate international influence. These overlooked aspects of global populism can be used to speculate about the political fate of populist strongmen in disparate corners of the globe.

55 The Orient Express and Late Development (CORRECTED COPY UPLOADED 31 AUG 2018)
Johannes Schmidt and Jacques Hersh

ABSTRACT. The demise of the Soviet Union, which was celebrated in the Anglosphere as the triumph of US supremacy, gave rise to different paradigmatic interpretations of the evolution of the world. The bulk of the evolving mainstream discourse was agenda-driven and projected a continuation of the US hegemony of the global capitalist system. Two theses stood out in the context of the post-Cold War. The first was the optimistic assumption encapsulated in the notion of “the end of history,” which projected a world having arrived at the last station based on the victory of liberal democracy and continued US hegemony. The second was the counter-assumption of the thesis of The Clash of Civilizations, which rejected the harmony interpretation of international relations and considered the future contradictions and conflicts to be related to cultural, not to say civilizational, antagonisms. The evolution of the world order in the past few decades demands a theoretical shift explaining the transformation, which takes into consideration the geostrategic and geopolitical ascendency of Eurasia and the Eastern Asia-Pacific hemisphere as well as the relative decline of the hegemony of the Anglosphere. Understanding the process at work makes it imperative to include the historical perspective. In this context, the growth of China and India as powerhouses in the world political economy cannot be exclusively defined as exemplars of catching up or late development but by the notion of “return of history.” After a long period of self-centered development, they are gradually reinserting themselves in the world system and reemerging into their former dominant status prior to the eighteenth century and the Western imperialist intrusion in the East. The aim of this paper is to explore and explain the economic and political consequences this ongoing transformation will have for the future of geopolitical and geo-economic domination of the West.

81 Shortcomings of an Idealized Urbanity: Ghost Urban Areas and the Asynchronous Territorial Development of Hanoi
Olivier Jacques, Danielle Labbé, and Clément Musil

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the recent emergence, on the periphery of Hanoi, of large real estate projects that began construction during the 2000s but have now remained unfinished or, even when completed, largely uninhabited. These “ghost urban areas,” as the local press calls them, epitomize some of the problems which emerged in Hanoi when a model of urban development that aimed at realizing an imagined urban future, formulated by state planning agencies, encountered the highly speculative reality of Vietnam’s property market. Ghost urban areas reveal how the state’s planning orientations and discourse—conveying ideals of urban “modernity,” “civility,” and particularly “synchrony”—instead generated dysfunctional, incomplete, and disconnected places. Based on a survey of thirty-nine ghost urban areas, a cartographic analysis, interviews with key actors, and a critical study of policy documents, this paper reveals multiple scales and forms of what we call “asynchronous territorial developments.” Around Hanoi, these developments involve vast tracts of agricultural lands forcibly appropriated yet left fallow, planned infrastructure and amenities that stay unbuilt for indefinite periods of time, and housing units transacted multiple times among speculators but have remained largely uninhabited and out of reach for a majority of urban households. Ultimately, we interrogate how these various territorial asynchronies, both generated by and plaguing ghost urban areas, shape their livability and inhabitants’ experience.

109 Conflict Calamities: Natural Disasters and the CPP-NPA (CORRECTED COPY UPLOADED 31 AUG 2018)
Joshua Eastin

ABSTRACT. This study examines the effects of natural disaster inundation on the internal armed conflict waged by the Communist Party of the Philippines–New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) against the Philippine state. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data and employing insights from the literature on civil conflict, social movements, and environmental security, this study suggests that the Philippines’ vulnerability to disaster has provided the CPP-NPA with tactical opportunities to increase attacks against the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), and has enabled the group to penetrate affected communities to increase civilian collaboration and augment recruitment. In some cases, the Philippine state’s institutional architecture for humanitarian relief, which relies heavily on local government units, has abetted this process by enabling local politicians to distribute relief supplies according to political patronage. The effect marginalizes individuals and groups from the political process and enhances the receptivity of the CPP-NPA’s anti-state propaganda. The overall impact has been to prolong the CPP-NPA’s ability to maintain its revolutionary campaign and increase the group’s capacity to wage violence.