In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

One of the interesting things about team-teaching a course on “The Domestic Politics of Southeast Asia: The Philippines and Thailand” is that I myself have never taken a course on Southeast Asia. I was an American politics specialist as a graduate student, with a dissertation on “Interpretation and American Electoral Studies.” On the Philippines in particular…

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No sooner did I warn in last week’s blog on my way to Washington, D.C., that there is “a danger that U.S.-Philippine relations will be viewed entirely through the lens of ‘the rise of China’” than I was greeted upon arrival by the morning front-page story in The Washington Post entitled, “Philippines may allow greater U.S. military presence in reaction to China’s rise.” The article stated that “the sudden rush by many in the Asia-Pacific region to embrace Washington is a direct reaction to China’s rise as a military power and its assertiveness in staking claims to disputed territories, such as the energy-rich South China Sea.”

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It would be a gross exaggeration to say that panic swept the development community in Manila when word spread that after 12 years on the scene as country representative of The Asia Foundation I was disappearing into a 4-month teaching sabbatical at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies…

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One of the virtues of a regular exercise at peering into a new year is that you can check your own predictions from the past year. My predictions that I made here for the Philippines in 2011 were correct in three of four instances: Peace talks did begin (those with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front had more progress than those with the National Democratic Front)…

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Over the past 90 days, the peace process between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has been through the best of times and the worst of times. At the beginning of August, President Noynoy Aquino met…

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The Philippines long had a terrible reputation for telecommunications, with Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew famously saying that in 1992, 99 percent of the population in the Philippines was waiting for a phone and 1 percent was waiting for a dial tone. However, beginning with the administration of Fidel Ramos (1992-1998) and followed by President Estrada (1998-2001), the telecoms industry was liberalized, and phone ownership skyrocketed.

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On August 3, in a nationally televised speech, Senator Juan Miguel “Migs” Zubiri resigned his seat in the upper house of the Philippine Congress. While he stated emphatically that he did not cheat, or ask anybody else to cheat, when he ran in the 2007 election, Zubiri said that rising speculation and publicity about fraud…

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Many are wondering what lessons the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, which ousted Ferdinand Marcos after 14 years of strongman rule (which followed two terms as elected president), might hold for the current “fourth wave” of democratization sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East.

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On February 10, The Asia Foundation hosted in Washington, D.C., a public event on “The Philippines: Challenges and Opportunities for the New Aquino Administration,” as part of the Foundation’s long-running “Asian Perspectives” series.

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In my decades in the Philippines, I have traveled from one end of the country to the other – ranging from Basco in the northern province of Batanes to Bongao in Tawi-Tawi in the south. But until now I had never been on the Pacific Ocean coast of Mindanao. Here I was, though, in a calm cove on White Sand Beach, walking along the shore at dawn.

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