Randy David | PUBLIC LIVES

When President Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte met Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo at the recent Asean Summit in Laos, they evidently took an instant liking for one another. Sharing a reputation for decisiveness, both basked in the same populist adulation that has become the hallmark of weak democracies. But, more than this, they projected the same … Read more

In everyday life, we tend to assign less weight to oral speech than to the written word.  The spoken is presumed to be “ephemeral,” liable to be misheard, reinterpreted, or denied.  The written word, in contrast, is thought to be “indelible,” its meaning cast in stone. But, the literary scholar Roland Barthes, in his classic … Read more

There’s one topic on which President Duterte has admitted censoring his normally uninhibited language: China. “I’m sure, as your President,” he told his audience the other day at the inauguration of the new Davao International Container Port, “I would not lead you to trouble, or I would not cause you shame. There will be a … Read more

ULAANBAATAR—Invited to participate in a forum in Mongolia this last week of August, I instantly said yes, motivated mainly by a wish to experience what it is like to stand on the main capital square of this vast landlocked Asian country, sometimes called the Land of the Eternal Blue Sky.  Known for its cloudless skies, … Read more

In its first 50 days in office, the Duterte presidency has explicitly identified two targets for destruction. The first: the drug lords and their henchmen and protectors; the other, the oligarchs. The war against these two declared enemies is as complex as it can be. It generates new problems that the government may not be … Read more

We should have seen it coming when, after then President Fidel V. Ramos allowed the dictator’s remains to be repatriated and buried in the Ilocos in 1993, the Marcos family announced that the Marcos Museum and Mausoleum in Batac, Ilocos Norte, would be but a provisional resting place for the former president. Insisting that this … Read more

Scan the Constitution and you will find the concept of human rights at the center of that expansive document—a veritable fixed compass that orients citizens to the limits of governmental power.  When it was ratified, no one asked if these rights are inherent in all human beings, or whether, for example, criminals can be considered … Read more

In the first half hour of last Monday’s State of the Nation Address, President Duterte’s voice was nowhere to be found. The man at the podium was struggling not just to read the text on the teleprompter, but also to own it. The prepared speech had some finely crafted phrases that elicited earnest applause. But … Read more

As we go through the motions of another State of the Nation Address (Sona), it is important to remind ourselves that, although we live in a country bounded by the sea, everything that we do or fail to do takes place in the context of a bigger and more troubled world.  No elected government directs … Read more

The South China Sea controversy is wrapped in paradoxes that are symptomatic of the tension between the practical realities of the geopolitical system of unequal nation-states and the universal norms of an emergent global legal order. China is part of the world system of nation-states, yet it acts like a regional hegemon standing above international … Read more