On what basis may the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) exercise its jurisdiction over States that have withdrawn from the Rome Statute? Is it enough that the alleged crimes occurred before the State withdrew from the treaty? When acting proprio motu, does the Prosecutor have to seek authorization from a Pre-Trial Chamber before they are allowed to proceed with the criminal investigation post-State withdrawal? This issue has received only cursory attention from the ICC and the academic community but the lack of clarity around the Court’s post-withdrawal jurisdiction is a serious concern, and not only for States that have withdrawn their membership (such as the Philippines). It is important because, as things stand, and given what the Court has said so far, States parties cannot be sure of the parameters of the Court’s temporal jurisdiction, nor of the legal effects of a State’s withdrawal.

In this paper, I marked the critical alter-political works of urban scholar-activists in the Philippines. Slums are at the heart of capitalist dispossessions. Slumdwellers live, survive, negotiate, and resist on an everyday basis. In the Philippines, the struggles of slum community organisations are strongly influenced, formed, and pulled in divergent ideological trajectories by contending larger political formations.

I draw on my own experience and that of 20 Filipino urban scholar-activists with varied political commitments, reflecting on decades of community work, to highlight the alter-works and challenges of navigating the web of political heterogeneity within urban poor organisations and movements. By scholar-activists, I do not refer solely to those who are based in universities, but to the many who struggle every day to unearth subaltern political knowledges and collectively fight for the right to adequate housing, as well as, for some, the right to the city. I enumerate the multiple functions and necessary labours of being 'embedded' in these complex politics. We engage in political advising, framing, networking, organizing, translating, and capacity-building. Caught in a complex web that may necessitate strategic essentialisation, silencing, and foreclosures, scholar-activists play a crucial role of strategic facilitation that connects collective forms of living among urban surplus lives and corrodes neoliberal urban dispossessions. These alter-works are continuous efforts towards situated solidarities, where urban scholar activists critically draw from and reshape ‘inherited’ social movement frames and strategies grounded on actually existing subaltern realities, capacities, and political opportunities.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused massive disruptions in the job market. It also put the gig economy in the spotlight since many workers began seeing it as a viable career option to their 9-to-5 jobs. Even before the pandemic, the gig economy was forming a significant portion of the workforce in different countries. In light of these changes, this paper has sought to understand the journey and experiences of both location-dependent and purely online gig economy workers in the Philippines. We conducted focus group discussions (FGDs) to explore the experience of those working in the gig economy in the Philippines, with two out of the four groups working as location-dependent gig workers while the remaining two groups working as purely-online gig workers. The study revealed that while gig workers appreciated the flexibility of managing their own time, they also expressed the need for greater government support and regulation to ensure that their welfare is protected. Moreover, while gig work has created additional opportunities for many, certain drawbacks have also emerged over time. It is essential for the government to intervene to safeguard the well-being of these workers, and ensure that labour laws and regulations are adapted to these new circumstances.

Biodiversity knowledge gaps and biases persist across low-income tropical regions. Genetic data are essential for addressing these issues, supporting biodiversity research and conservation planning. To assess progress in wildlife genetic sampling within the Philippines, I evaluated the scope, representativeness, and growth of publicly available genetic data and research on endemic vertebrates from the 1990s through 2024. Results showed that 82.3% of the Philippines’ 769 endemic vertebrates have genetic data, although major disparities remain. Reptiles had the least complete coverage but exhibited the highest growth, with birds, mammals, and amphibians following in that order. Species confined to smaller biogeographic subregions, with narrow geographic ranges, or classified as threatened or lacking threat assessments were disproportionately underrepresented. Research output on reptiles increased markedly, while amphibian research lagged behind. Although the number of non-unique authors in wildlife genetics studies involving Philippine specimens has grown steeply, Filipino involvement remains low. These results highlight the uneven and non-random distribution of wildlife genetic knowledge within this global biodiversity hotspot. Moreover, the limited participation of Global South researchers underscores broader inequities in wildlife genomics. Closing these gaps and addressing biases creates a more equitable and representative genetic knowledge base and supports its integration into national conservation efforts aligned with global biodiversity commitments.

This article uses non-literary essays that appeared in the Peruvian press during the Oncenio period in Peru (1919–30) to nuance our understanding of Latin American Orientalism. Critical study of the extant material shows that there were at least three strands of Orientalism circulating among Peruvian readers, with the presence or absence of Asian communities in Peru and the larger history of Spanish imperialism and Spanish-language Orientalism acting as their conditions of possibility. While the large Chinese community in Peru triggered an Orientalist backlash akin to modern Anglo-French Orientalism, the absence of Southeast Asians in the country allowed for a more medieval-colonial Orientalism to persist, one that focused more on wonder for and exoticisation of Asian cultures. The exception would be the Philippines, which due to its previous history as a Spanish colony, was presented as a ‘modern’ country comparable to any in Latin America. Given that representations of Southeast Asia are often overlooked in the study of Latin American Orientalism—which in turn tends to focus on literary representations by writers from countries like Argentina or Mexico—this article fills these gaps and contributes to the global histories of Latin America and of Orientalism.

Ever since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn into office in 2016, until the end of his term in 2022, his so-called “drug war” has claimed 12,000–30,000 lives. Over 150 victims were children. Seventeen-year-old Kian de los Santos, mistakenly identified as a drug addict, was gunned down on the evening of 16 August 2017. His death prompted a group of teachers and students to express themselves through empathic creative writing. What started as an assignment grew into a community of writers, activists, artists, journalists, and curators from diverse disciplines, generations, and social classes. Four years later, the project found a name: Triggered: Creative Responses to the Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines—an illustrated young adult fiction collection with a dimension of outreach towards an orphanage. The Triggered project illustrated three key features of public humanities, especially during a time of impunity: first, an imperfect but self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration between the academe and the field; second, the book’s non-elitist accessibility in both content and material; and third, the funds of the book went to an orphanage.

The scholarly and popular commonsense about corruption in the Philippines is that the country has always been corrupt. Seventy-eight years of corruption as an independent state (1946–2024) may as well have been a thousand. Lay and scholarly accounts explain this continuity with respect to traditional values and premature democratization. In both accounts, corruption is all but genetic to Philippine culture or politics. To be sure, continuity is self-evident if we are looking only at corruption scandals—but scandals have been accompanied by anti-corruption movements, broadly speaking. The two have gone hand-in-hand historically, suggesting that we need to understand them together. Taking them together, that is, focusing on their dialectic, produces, as I will show, a history of change. Specifically, how Filipinos relate to corruption has changed. They have become less tolerant of it in general and learned to embrace an anti-corruption model of politics. How scholars and policymakers conceive of corruption has changed. They have come to adopt a view of corruption as a generic social problem, effectively disembedding it from society. These developments have enabled a more intolerant approach such that, today, the greater danger lies in an anti-corruption “fundamentalism” leading to the rejection of politics altogether. Viewed as a whole, the history of corruption/anti-corruption has been a popular struggle over what politics should look like, and thus we might read their dialectic as driving the progress of political modernization from below.

In understanding the authoritarian character of Rodrigo Duterte's rule followed by the return of the Marcoses to power, it is important to situate both within the context of ‘electoral dystopias’ in the Philippines: the colonial and postcolonial history of democratic institutions deployed by rulers to produce undemocratic social effects. Elections thus look two ways: they seek to mobilise popular expectations for change even as they become instruments for reproducing hierarchy and reinforcing the power of elites. It is within this paradoxical conjunction of popular desires for radical change and elite attempts at containing and channelling those desires for conservative ends that we can see the rise of authoritarian figures such as Duterte. This essay is based on the first chapter of the author's The Sovereign Trickster: Death ad Laughter in the Age of Duterte, published by Duke University Press in 2022.

Despite one of the world's strictest and longest lockdown policies, the Philippines' securitized approach to containing the COVID-19 pandemic has led to unnecessary suffering, especially in poor communities. This article explores how the Philippine government's prioritizing of punitive policies such as detaining quarantine violators or attempting to decongest Manila by sending poor families to neighbouring provinces, magnifies existing socio-spatial inequalities and further spreads disease. In many of these communities, poverty is a co-morbidity. As local governments struggle to provide frontline health and social welfare services, high-profile arrests, media shutdowns, and the proposed Anti-Terrorism Bill spark concerns about restrictions on free speech while movement is curtailed. Nevertheless, community and private sector efforts around localized healthcare, food security, and inclusive mobility indicate potential paths towards a ‘better normal’ that goes beyond just survival.

In this paper, I look into the lesser-known history of “comfort women” in the Philippines. I engage with the following questions: how did the trafficking and sexual exploitation of Filipino women emerge as part of state policy in the Japanese Empire? How was it dealt with in the aftermath of the war, especially in the face of shifting post-war alliances and the changing place of Japan in the geo-politics of the Cold War? How did events in the international arena, in turn, affect diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Japan, specifically with respect to aid and trade? Finally, how did the market forces at play affect state policy in the Philippines?

This essay, adapted and expanded from an article published in Foreign Affairs, explores the origins of the legend used by Donald Trump to justify torture and war crimes against terrorists that Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing had Muslim prisoners in the Philippines shot with bullets dipped in pigs' blood. While the story is patently false, it is worth revising Pershing's knowledge that his men attempted to terrorize Philippine Muslims with pigskin burials, while asking what widespread American beliefs about Islam the story traded in. Approached in this way, the Pershing legend emerges not just as Trumpian fabrication, but as an archetypal parable of the “war on terror.”

This paper explores the politics of Asia-Pacific War memory and memorialization in Southeast Asia, evident in the production context and visual semiotic resources of Thailand's Victory Monument, a generic memorial to Thai war heroes, and the Philippines' Shrine of Valor, a historical shrine complex dedicated to Filipino and US soldiers of the Asia-Pacific War. These heritage structures represent two divergent memorialization practices that demonstrate how the commemoration or suppression of war memory is influenced by politics, agendas, and the benefits it brings to the state. In Thailand, the inward justification and outward restraint stem from the difficult choices the state had to make during the war. In the Philippines, while war memorialization was pronounced and served state aims, it was initially undermined by President Ferdinand Marcos, who wanted to bolster his fraudulent war heroism claims. The cases illustrate how diverging national memorial practices surrounding the war's contested past achieved similar aims and how memorial sites become repositories of meaning potentials through which we could make sense of the nation and its international entanglements.

Japan is the only place in the world where bananas are marketed and priced by cultivation altitude. In the late 1980s, plantation managers sourcing the fruit from the southern Philippine region of Mindanao discovered a paradigm-shifting formula: the higher up one grew, the sweeter the bananas became. And the sweeter the bananas were, the closer they were to replicating the taste of colonial Taiwanese bananas, lost in the switch to Philippine supply. This paper offers the first transnational history of the banana’s transition along the spectrum from a fungible commodity to a nonfungible product in the Asia-Pacific region. Engaging critical studies of commodities and plantations, it takes fungibility as the characteristic that makes goods interchangeable and as the principle that renders landscape and labor as empty vessels open to the projection of others’ desires. The paper argues that the introduction of kōchi saibai banana or “highland cultivated bananas” for the Japanese market brought not the reversal of fungible life to the Philippine highlands but rather its continuation. In so doing, this work critiques conceptual frameworks that understand fungibility through the idioms of liquidification and immateriality. Instead, it proposes a topographical approach, which sees processes of fungibilization as operating through the profoundly material rearrangement of human and environmental communities. By focusing on the tensions between fungibility and differentiation, this paper offers an account of both an idiosyncratic marketing strategy particular to the Philippines and Japan, and a dynamic that pervades the creation of all commodities under capitalism.

COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness (VE) studies are limited in low- and middle-income countries. A case-control study was conducted among COVID-19 and other pneumonia patients admitted to a hospital in the Philippines during the pre-Omicron and Omicron periods. To elucidate factors associated with in-hospital death, 1782 COVID-19 patients were assessed. To estimate absolute VE for various severe outcomes, 1059 patients were assessed (869 [82.1%] COVID-19 cases; 190 [17.9%] controls). Factors associated with in-hospital death included older age, tuberculosis (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.45 [95% confidence interval {95% CI} 1.69–3.57]), HIV (aOR 3.30 [95% CI 2.03–5.37]), and current smokers (aOR 2.65 [95% CI 1.72–4.10]). Pre-Omicron, the primary series provided high protection within a median of 2 months (hospitalization: 85.4% [95% CI 35.9–96.7%]; oxygen requirement: 91.0% [95% CI 49.4–98.4%]; invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV): 97.0% [95% CI 65.7–99.7%]; death: 96.5% [95% CI 67.1–99.6%]). During Omicron, the primary series provided moderate-high protection within a median of 6–9 months (hospitalization: 70.2% [95% CI 27.0–87.8%]; oxygen requirement: 71.4% [95% CI 29.3–88.4%]; IMV: 72.7% [95% CI −11.6–93.3%]; death: 58.9% [95% CI −82.8–90.8%]). Primary series VE against severe COVID-19 outcomes was consistently high for both pre-Omicron and Omicron in a setting where approximately half of the vaccinees received inactivated vaccines.