New Phil. Revolution (NPR)

ICC vs. Rodrigo Duterte: How International Criminal Court Rules Challenge the Defense Claim That “Kill” Speeches Prove No Grand Plan

By now, the cadence is familiar: deny the existence of a “grand plan,” recast incendiary rhetoric as metaphor, and insist that any violence was...

EDSA@40: The Revolution’s Heirs Could Not March Together

By afternoon, the stretch of asphalt that once carried tanks now carried tension. Forty years after millions of Filipinos flooded Epifanio de los Santos Avenue...

The Duterte Drug War: Spectacle, Selectivity and the Political Economy of Death

When Rodrigo Duterte announced in 2016 that he would be “happy to slaughter” some of the Philippines’ drug addicts, it sounded like crude political...

EDSA@40: From Crony Rule to Elite Capture

In February 1986, Filipinos gathered along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue to topple a dictatorship that had fused state power with crony capitalism. The...

Sara Duterte is Future Philippine President–if things would not change

Stop dreaming about a one-on-one. That’s how Sara Duterte wins. There is a comforting fantasy making the rounds again in Manila: that the surest way...

Duterte ICC Trial, Arrests of Duterte Allies & VP Sara Impeachment: The Marcos Administration’s February Spectacle Will Decide 2028

Philippine politics has always been theatrical. But this February, the situation is different. The Marcos administration organizes a concentrated political season this month, and...

Fire the Microphone: Why Commodore Tarriela must go

The Philippines is in a high-stakes maritime confrontation with a superpower. And we are letting a uniformed official behave like a Facebook heckler. If the Marcos...

Philippine politics is turning personal–and Beijing is loving it

There is a kind of political conflict that democracies can survive. And there is the kind that hollows them out from the inside. The Philippines...

Xi Jinping’s Military Purges–and the Risks Beneath Absolute Control in China

In Beijing, political power has always flowed through the barrel of a gun. What is different today, according to analysts who track elite Chinese...