Chasing Freedom

Chasing Freedom
Author: Adele Webb
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2021-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782846913

How did Rodrigo Duterte earn the support of large segments of the Philippine middle class, despite imposing arbitrary authority and offering little tolerance for dissent? Has the Filipino middle class, heroes of the 1986 People Power Revolution, given up on democracy? Chasing Freedom retells the history of Philippine democracy, employing a genealogical approach that makes visible the forms of power that have shaped and constrained understandings of democracy. The book traces the attitudes of the Filipino middle class from the beginning of American colonization in 1898, to the present. It argues that democracy in country has been, and continues to be, lived in an ambivalent way a result of the contradictions inherent in Americas imperial project of democratic tutelage. Humiliation of the colonial past fuels the imperative to search for more authentic self-determination; at the same time, Filipinos are haunted by self-doubt over the capacity of its people to correctly manage the freedom that democracy provides. This simultaneous yes and no has persisted after independence in 1946 until today; it is the masterful mobilization of this democratic ambivalence by authoritarian populists like Rodrigo Duterte that helps to explain the effectiveness of their political narratives for middle-class audiences. The Philippines is a bellwether case with lessons of global importance in an age when disenchantment with democracy is on the rise. While ambivalence may result in failure to meet a democratic ideal it may, nevertheless, be one of democracy's safeguards. This work is at the forefront of recent debates about middle class-led democratic backsliding, with scholars unable to reconcile the appeal of authoritarian populists amongst those who have historically been expected to be democracy's vanguard.

Freedom Incorporated

Freedom Incorporated
Author: Colleen Woods
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501749153

Freedom Incorporated demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era. In this broad historical account, Colleen Woods demonstrates how, in the mid-twentieth century Philippines, US policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Officials at Malacañang Palace and the White House touted the 1946 signing of the liberating Treaty of Manila as a testament to the US commitment to the liberation of colonized people and celebrated it under the moniker of Philippine–American Friendship Day. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted US hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order. Woods finds that in order to justify US intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources, like the Hukbalahap Rebellion in central Luzon, to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, in Freedom Incorporated Woods illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.

Philippine Independence

Philippine Independence
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Philippines
Publisher:
Total Pages: 158
Release: 1919
Genre: Philippines
ISBN:

American Imperialism and the State, 1893–1921

American Imperialism and the State, 1893–1921
Author: Colin D. Moore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-04-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108211054

How did the acquisition of overseas colonies affect the development of the American state? How did the constitutional system shape the expansion and governance of American empire? American Imperialism and the State offers a new perspective on these questions by recasting American imperial governance as an episode of state building. Colin D. Moore argues that the empire was decisively shaped by the efforts of colonial state officials to achieve greater autonomy in the face of congressional obstruction, public indifference and limitations on administrative capacity. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book focuses principally upon four cases of imperial governance - Hawai'i, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic and Haiti - to highlight the essential tension between American mass democracy and imperial expansion.

Digest

Digest
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 950
Release: 1904
Genre: American wit and humor
ISBN: