Resistance discourses construct an alternative analysis of society, critique the power relations that govern that society, and condemn the resulting oppression of the population that the resistance promises to liberate. They propose the ways and means social change can be done, and elaborate the shape of a new polity. While the dominant societal discourse reflects dominant power relations and helps reproduce the status quo, anti-state resistance movements and their discourses are counter hegemonic. They aim to realign state power and institutions by mobilizing people around their critique of the status quo and in support of their alternative vision.

In this book, I examine the resistance discourses within the Moro and Cordillera armed movements. ‘Discourses of resistance’ have been described as those that highlight difference and affirm ‘resistant space’ in opposition to the institutionalized frame. Critical discourse analysis is particularly relevant as a framework and method of analysis, given its concern with “the radical changes that are taking place in contemporary social life: with how discourse figures within processes of change, and with shifts in the relationship between discourse … and other social elements within networks of practices”. The narratives of the Moro and Cordillera armed resistance are basically narratives of difference from the Filipino majority population. Both the Moro and Cordillera identity entrepreneurs waged what we can call ethnopolitical mobilizations that were directed against the Philippine state.

Ethnopolitical mobilizations are movements whose discourses claim or reclaim ethnicity-based identities in order to advance a political project that will recognize and institutionalize their identity claims. In the Philippines, and probably in most other contexts, ethnopolitical mobilizations are distinct from, although related to, class-based and other ideological struggles. They are distinct because of the pre-eminence that the asserted ‘ethnic identity’ plays in their claims. Their construction of their ethnic identities and corresponding claims are embodied in their discourses, and their discourses in turn also set the direction of their struggle to constitute and create new socio-political relations. Thus, an analysis of the narratives and/or discourses of such movements is crucial to understanding the nature and trajectory of these movements.

Unlike in Mindanao, where the Moro population was overtaken by the influx of migrants from Luzon and the Visayas, the indigenous populations in the Cordillera remained the dominant populations in the region. Mining operations and government-led projects did lead to land-use conversion and changes in ownership in the more economically developed areas, but there was no massive resettlement of migrant populations. Relative deprivation and underdevelopment, a common context of many ethnopolitical mobilizations, are present within the region and vis-à-vis the national capital region. But several Cordillera provinces fare better in terms of income and other human development indicators than other provinces in the country. The region as a whole is better off than several other Philippine regions, especially Muslim Mindanao. The process of political and cultural differentiation also differed. Earlier initiatives of zealous Spanish friars from the Ilocos provinces failed. One Bontoc anthropologist wrote that “Christianity was established by the Spaniards on Igorot soil” only in 1893 when the first baptism was performed, but this event was allegedly never repeated under Spanish rule. But unlike in Muslim Mindanao, American Protestant and European Catholic missionaries made inroads in the region in the early twentieth century. They established churches and schools and generated conversions among the natives to Christianity.

Although control of the entire territory was uneven, the American colonial regime succeeded in ‘pacifying’ and incorporating the northern mountainous region under their rule, a feat unaccomplished by the Spaniards. Finin cited several reasons for the relative absence of resistance against the American administrators. One is what he described as the paternalistic and exoticized treatment that the Americans accorded the natives. They gave the Igorots — the collective name used by colonial officialdom for the natives in the region — a privileged status that was not extended to lowlanders in Baguio. Cultural performances and traditional feasts like the cañao were encouraged and supported. The American regime kept their hands off the rice fields and paid wages to the locals who were hired in the public works. Although the Philippine Constabulary remained the main tool of the state for subjugating resistance, local mediators were sought to settle conflicts and other forms of pressure were applied.

This analysis of the discursive practice of the Moro resistance movement uses the notion of intertextuality to illuminate discursive change as affected by and in turn affecting the social condition and politics of the Philippines. Intertextuality refers to how a text draws on other texts, such as by combining elements from different discourses. Such concrete language use “can change the individual discourses and thereby, also, the social and cultural world. By analyzing intertextuality, one can investigate both the reproduction of discourse whereby no new elements are introduced, and discursive change through new combinations of discourse.”

There are several ways to discern this intertextuality as practised by text producers-interpreters. Bakhtin differentiates between horizontal and vertical intertextuality. Of interest here is vertical intertextuality, which refers to intertextual relations between a text and other texts within it as they are historically linked within various timescales and along various parameters. In this regard, Fairclough introduced the related notion of interdiscursivity. In interdiscursivity, elements of orders of discourse, and not just other texts, are combined, resulting in heterogeneous texts. Heterogeneous texts may vary in the extent oftheir integration or accentuation of other discursive formations and practices. Consequently, intertextuality can be the source of much ambivalence in the texts. Such ambivalence has allowed our resistance entrepreneurs in this study to survive decades of protracted conflict and to overcome new global and domestic challenges and contexts.

Significantly, the producers of the resistance texts that will be examined here were part of a “chain of speech communication” or an “intertextual chain”. The “[d]iscourses and the texts which occur within them have histories, they belong to historical series.” They drew from existing discourses/texts and were influenced by dominant and alternative ideologies, paradigms and ideas that prevailed during their time, locally and globally. As competitors for leadership in the Moro ethnopolitical movement, they engaged each other and the state directly and indirectly in a power struggle, including the power to interpret and change social reality. They were interpreting and weaving texts as they simultaneously engaged in the acts of discourse production, membership base-building, and armed struggle. Put another way, their movement entrepreneurs used multiple positioning within their discourses to negotiate power relations. This dynamic process reflects the basic notion of critical discourse analysis that discourse is constituted by the social condition, as well as constitutive of society and its politics.

The chapters in this book came from my long engagement with the Cordillera and Moro movements. I recall vividly the articles that we, as editors of the Philippine Collegian, the student paper of the University of the Philippines, bravely published on the developments in the Cordillera and Mindanao at the height of martial rule in the late 1970s. One month after graduation, I joined an international delegation that travelled to the hometown of Macli-ing Dulag, the revered chieftain of the Butbut tribe in Kalinga and the face and voice of the opposition to the Chico River Dam. In April 1980, soldiers assassinated Dulag, and our group travelled to Kalinga to show solidarity with the local people's struggle against the dam. Writing for the Diliman Review in the late 1980s, I had the opportunity to interview, among others, Conrado Balweg of the Cordillera People's Liberation Army and famed American historian and long-time Mountain Province resident William Henry Scott. During this tumultuous period, I had met and had discussions with many cadres from the Communist Party of the Philippines; I have had an inside track.

My direct involvement with the Moro movement came later, as part of my peace advocacy and new academic interest in conflict resolution and peace studies after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. In the early 2000s I met Moro Islamic Liberation Front leaders Ebrahim Murad, the late Ali Lanang, and Mohager Iqbal as part of my advocacy work on the international campaign to ban landmines. In the Philippine Campaign to Ban Landmines, we urged different armed groups like the MILF to commit to a landmine ban. Little did I know that I would be thrust into a major role involving the MILF. In July 2010 I was appointed first as a member of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III's negotiating panel in talks with the MILF. From November 2012 to June 2016 I was the chair of the government panel that signed the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro in March 2014.

This appointment took place after I had completed most of the research and had written the chapters that make up the bulk of this book. I have updated the 2010 drafts to take account of recent developments and other materials that have followed over the last few years. My visits to the Cordillera region in 2019 for another project allowed me to revalidate my analysis.

Three different nomenclatures have been used to refer to our unit of interest in this chapter. These are Cordillera, Mountain Province and Igorot. We have already used Cordillera to describe either the resistance movement and the resistance discourses or narratives. The term, moreover, is used to refer to the mountain range, the people inhabiting the territory, and the imagined nation. The term Cordillera region is likewise being used in different ways. It can refer to the state-defined administrative region, the unrealized autonomous region, or merely used as a spatial reference that vaguely encompasses a presumed territorial entity.

The geographic location of the Cordillera discourse is the Gran Cordillera Central mountain range in Northern Luzon. As we shall see, boundaries of this homeland, ancestral domains and/or the roots or origins of what we call today the Cordillera people(s) and Cordillera region have not been fixed but were rather porous. They have been constructed and reconstructed over time, both by state fiat and societal processes.

Then and now, the term Igorot is a highly contested term. Briefly, the term originated during the Spanish times. It was used by the Spaniards and the lowlanders as a collective, undifferentiated identity marker for most of the inhabitants of the Cordillera range. Like the word Moro, Ygorrotes/Igorots (mountain people) came from outsiders, although the American historian and long-time resident of Mountain Province William Henry Scott wrote that it was derived from local languages. Igolot in Tagalog means “dwellers in/people of a mountain chain”. Golod or golor in Tagalog and golot in the language of the Bagos (descendants of Igorots who migrated to Ilocos) meant the mountain or a hill; and the prefix i- denotes place of origin. Prill-Brett offers another possibility — that the name came from the Ilocano word gerret, which means “to cut off”, and may have been inspired by the headhunting tradition among these mountain people. The label, along with its negative and positive attributes, was carried on to the postcolonial period.

Mountain Province originally referred to the politico-administrative unit established by the American colonial regime in 1908. It was made up of seven sub-provinces; namely, Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc, Apayao, Kalinga, Amburayan and Lepanto. In 1966 this unit gave birth to four provinces, including one that is also called Mountain Province. The other three were Benguet, Ifugao and Kalinga-Apayao.

The events and circumstances that gave rise to the armed conflict in Mindanao are multiple and complex. Some scholars, the popular media and protagonists alike have described the conflict as a “religious war”. This perception may have been fed by the way the Spaniards framed and justified their colonization campaign in the past that resulted in deeply ingrained prejudices held between the Christianized natives and the indigenous followers of Islam. The perception was bolstered with the rise of communal conflicts in parts of Mindanao in the early 1970s involving vigilante groups among the settler and indigenous communities, often arising from land-related disputes or contestation over political and/or territorial control.

Seeds of Discontent

The hostility draws on historical antecedents that saw the Islamic population in the south marginalized from the centre of politics and society located in the northern capital on Luzon island. Moreover, policies undertaken by the American colonial regime and the Philippine Republic significantly changed the demographic composition and social structure of Mindanao. Notably, the series of resettlement programmes of populations from Luzon and the Visayas to Mindanao initiated by the American colonial regime transformed many segments of the indigenous population into minorities. The succeeding Philippine government pursued the same policies. Mindanao thus developed into a settler colony from the early to the mid-1900s. Homestead arrangements for migrants and the infusion of American capital for the plantation economy in the region hastened the loss of control over land and tribute collection in the hands of the original inhabitants.

In this book we have examined the respective discourses of two armed ethnopolitical mobilizations in the south and north of the Philippines; namely, the Moro and Cordillera movements. We traced how some core elements of these articulations have become valorized and accepted as gospel truths by their respective politicized masses of adherents. At the same time, we saw how the movement organizations modified their framings and appropriated elements from global and other domestic discourses, showing how creatively and pragmatically movement intellectuals adapted to new ideas and the changed conditions over the forty-year period since their movements emerged.

We followed the MNLF intellectuals in founding their claim to a separate/autonomous Bangsa Moro and statehood. The MILF enriched this core Moro ethnonationalist discursive practice by further highlighting Islam as an organizational and ideological platform, effectively distinguishing itself from its more secular mother organization, the MNLF. In the 1990s the MILF complemented their two-axis discourse on nation and Islam with a third axis that maximized the language of ancestral domain and IP rights.

Meanwhile, we saw how the Cordillera struggle for regional autonomy emerged in the mid-1970s from the popular opposition to several development programmes instituted by the Marcos regime. The popular opposition was harvested and later led by the CPP operating in the region. The CPP-led CPDF, which became the underground organizational expression of the movement, espoused a Marxist ideology and dovetailed the popular opposition to support the national democratic revolution whose class-based struggle tended to subordinate ethnonationalist aspirations. The CPLA that split from the CPP was dominated by cadres who were natives of the Cordillera provinces. These leading cadres espoused a more decisively ethnonationalist platform that stressed the oppression of the Cordillera cultural communities by the Filipino majority. In this aspect, their discourse veered more closely to that of the Moro ethnonationalists. In the same vein, they elevated the notion of a Cordillera (administrative and political) region to a ‘nation’ and had irredentist claims to wider territories and ethnic groupings. They also favoured a federal state that drew features from their cultural practices and institutions such as the bodong (peace pact), as against a regional autonomy movement that was subordinated to the larger national democratic agenda of the CPP-CPDF.

INTRODUCTION

Vietnam is currently experiencing one of the most intensive urban transitions in the world. Its urban population doubled over the last thirty years (UN 2018). Since 2010, it has been growing at about 3 per cent per year, placing Vietnam’ urbanization rate above the Southeast Asian annual average (2.5 per cent) and very close to China's rate of 3.1 per cent (OECD 2018). According to latest UN projections, half of Vietnam's population will be urban by 2039 and that figure will reach 60 per cent by 2050 (UN 2018).

This shift from rural to urban society is closely associated with socio-economic reforms launched in the mid-1980s which progressively liberalized the economy and relaxed the grip of the state on population movements and activities. Known as Doi Moi (literally “new change”), these reforms removed constraints on the movement of people from rural to urban places and allowed occupational shifts away from agriculture. These policies later encouraged the physical expansion of existing urban areas and the creation of new urban-industrial space in densely settled rural communes (World Bank 2011).

As the nation's capital city and second largest agglomeration after Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi is one of the key sites of this urban transition. Vietnamese leaders acknowledge that the growth of Hanoi and other cities is crucial to the growth of manufacturing and higher-order services, as well as to the material well-being of the national population. At the same time, the rapid increase in populations and activities in and around cities placed intense pressure on local authorities to keep pace with the rising demand for infrastructure, social services, housing, environmental controls and public amenities. While there is consensus about the potential benefits of urbanization, concerns have also been raised by local and foreign academics, professionals and decision-makers about the importance of anticipating and addressing problems that flow from the urbanization process.

The mechanisms by which Hanoi authorities plan to ensure the sustainable growth and development of the city's territory, society and space are still in the making. While many problems remain to be addressed, the last two decades have seen the emergence of initiatives aimed at mitigating the negative impact of urbanization.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • Vietnam is in the midst of one of the world's most rapid and intensive rural-to-urban transitions.

• • In Hanoi, heritage preservation has gained significant policy attention over the last decades, but efforts continue to focus on the Old Quarter and Colonial City to the exclusion of collective socialist housing complexes and former village areas, and natural features such as canals and urban lakes.

• • Parks and public spaces are urgently needed to offset the high residential densities and to improve the quality of life of residents.

• • Motor vehicles continue to fuel the growth in transportation. Significant efforts were recently made to establish a mass transit system, but progress there is slow. More attention should be paid to improving the existing transportation system and to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

• • Investments in new housing estates have fuelled a speculative real estate market but failed to address adequately the needs of the vulnerable segments of the population.

• • Regional integration is a challenge as the city expands and swallows the peri-urban areas around the city