Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: In a political crisis, under what conditions will militaries comply with an authoritarian regime’s order to suppress demonstrations? This paper analyzes the cases of military non-compliance to the task of regime maintenance during the May 1998 Indonesian and February 1986 Filipino political crises during which major political demonstrations led to the collapse of the Suharto and Marcos regime respectively.
This paper argues that military insubordination of an authoritarian regime’s orders to suppress popular demonstrations occurs: (1) when there is intense intra-military conflict; and (2) arising from this contestation, the politically marginalized officer(s) gains domestic and foreign support for the non-compliant act against the authoritarian regime. The military’s non-compliance of orders to suppress political protests against authoritarian rule is the politically marginalized officer(s)’ response to eliminate the authoritarian regime and their rival(s) within the armed forces.
To provide a robust test of the intra-military conflict argument, I examine this proposition with an alternative explanation based on principal-agent models––militaries (agents) are likely to be subordinate to orders to use force on protestors if authoritarian regimes (principals) possess the institutional capacity to detect malfeasance and punish recalcitrant officers through personnel changes within the military organization.
The paper is organized in three parts. The first outlines the two theoretical arguments, and the second assesses the empirical evidence of the two cases vis-à-vis the two theories. The final part assesses the implications of the intra-military conflict proposition for the study of civil-military relations in authoritarian regimes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the “governmentalization” of the Philippine state and the ways in which it is ‘managing’ and sustaining a culture of labor migration. I examine the strategy of worker empowerment as a way of governing the conduct of its citizenry and generating a specific type of worker/citizen who embody the neoliberal market rationality of economic competitiveness and entrepreneurship. In particular, the forms of worker empowerment I will analyze are the ways in which the state is: 1) designating Filipino workers as the modern day heroes and ambassadors of goodwill; 2) upgrading their work skills; and 3) promoting a culture of entrepreneurship. This paper shows that these strategies combine not only to sustain a culture of labor migration but to reframe the meanings of social citizenship for overseas Filipinos. As part of a multi-site ethnography of the recruitment business in Manila, Philippines which focuses on state-licensed private employment agencies brokering nurses and household workers conducted between September 2001-June 2002 , this paper is based on in-depth interviews with government officials involved in the labor recruitment business and participant-observations of pre-departure orientation sessions conducted by NGOs for Filipino workers.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores American conceptions of race, citizenship and national identity against the backdrop of the US colonial project in the Philippines c. 1898-1910. This article locates the racialization of Filipinos within the geo-politics of the capitalist world economy, exploring how intersecting discourses of national and racial supremacy bolstered colonial power relations between the United States and the Philippines. I argue that the politics of racial formation in the United States was dialectically linked to the process of nation building, demonstrating how the rituals of boundary construction and social closure inherent to both phenomena were mutually constitutive. This paper examines how racial ideology was mobilized by supporters and opponents of the American colonial project in the Philippines. The final section of the paper looks at attempts by American colonial officials to develop a rational system of racial classification in the Philippines based on American racial categories.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper focuses on the institutionalization of labor export and the state’s response to the market failure in higher education. It argues that the Philippine state built the labor export industry as it sought to appease the interests of the business elites who owned many of the private higher educational institutions while creating jobs to ease the political pressures coming from the educated unemployed. The Marcos regime passed the 1974 Labor Export Policy and established the Overseas Employment Development Board in order to alleviate these pressures. The Philippine state not only became active in creating the labor export industry, but it also expanded its capacity in education by developing more public universities and vocational schools that would produce graduates who would be absorbed into the domestic labor market. As labor export grew, business interests in private overseas recruitment agencies, the remittances industry, households, and the government became dependent on the foreign exchange from migrant remittances for their financial survival.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed