Research Areas
Agrarian Political Economy; Agroecology; Anticolonial and Decolonial Theories; Anti-Systemic Movements; Critical Agrarian Studies; Critical Development Studies; Critical Security Studies; Development Geographies; GIS, Global Political Economy; Historical Sociology; Imperialism; Migration; Militarism and Counterinsurgency; Mixed Methods; National Liberation Movements; Philippine Studies; Political Ecology; Southeast Asia; Third World Marxism; Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL); World-Systemic Historical Materialism; World-Systems Theory
Dissertation
Fields of Struggle: The Agrarian Question and National Liberation in the Philippines, 1968-2024
Abstract:
For over five decades, the National Democratic Movement (ND Movement) in the Philippines has waged one of the longest-running wars for national liberation in modern history. Despite this persistence, the movement remains largely absent from academic discourse, existing in a state of theoretical and historical erasure. Through the case of rice production and agrarian transformation in Central Luzon, this dissertation examines how counterinsurgency operates at multiple levels—military, legal, and ideological—to preserve neo-feudal land relations, to prevent revolutionary change, and to transform political imagination away from revolutionary theory toward fragmented struggles and abstract worldmaking. The study analyzes competing visions of development crystallized in two frameworks: the government's market-led Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) and the ND Movement's Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (CASER). By examining the Philippines' transformation from rice exporter to the world's largest importer, this research demonstrates how the interplay between rural dispossession, failed urban absorption, and labor export reveals the contemporary relevance of the ND Movement's theoretical analysis. Through extensive fieldwork in Central Luzon, innovative methodological approaches that combine Filipino indigenous frameworks (kapwa, pakikiisa, and kwentuhan), GIS mapping, archival research, and quantitative methods, this project contributes to debates on contemporary national liberation movements, the state as a terrain of struggle, and the continuing relevance of dependency and world-systems theories for understanding agrarian transformation in the Global South. Through this multi-method approach, the dissertation treats movement activists and farmers as knowledge producers, challenging both the scholarly erasure of national liberation movements and conventional research paradigms. Drawing on world-systems theory, critical political ecology, and critical development studies, I develop my theoretical framework of world-systemic historical materialism, an approach that grounds theory in history to illuminate how specific social formations manifest the concrete totality of imperial power, revealing the mechanisms through which imperialism structures (de)development in the Global South.
My Research Questions
How has counterinsurgency practices in the Philippines since EDSA shaped the evolution of political resistance in the Philippines and the very conception of political change?
What do competing development visions for agrarian reform between the government and the National Democratic Movement reveal about the state and development?
How has the National Democratic Movement's theoretical analysis evolved to explain the Philippines' transformation from rice exporter to importer, and what insights—as knowledge producers—does this offer for updating dependency and world-systems theories for the twenty-first century?.
Methodological Training
My research engages with agrarian political economy, critical development studies, and world-systemic historical materialism (WSHM), focusing on the contemporary agrarian question in peripheral social formations. My methodological approach combines:
Indigenous Filipino methods and Ethnographical Methods (Multi-sited, Participatory Action Research; Qualitative, NVivo, ATLAS.ti)
Spatial Analysis and GIS (ArcGIS, Story Maps)
Historical and Archival Methods
Political Science Methods, Quantitative Political Analysis (SAS, STATA, SQL)
Data Visualization and UX Design (Illustrator, Tableau)
Professional Associations
American Anthropology Association
American Association of Geographers
American Sociology Association
International Studies Association