Post-Colonial Statecraft in South East Asia: Sovereignty, State Building and the Chinese in the Philippines.

• Author: Baviera, Aileen S.P.
• Position: Book review

Post-Colonial Statecraft in South East Asia: Sovereign04 State Building and the Chinese in the Philippines. By Pak Nung Wong. London & New York: I.B. Taurus, 2013. Hardcover: 326pp.

According to the author, Pak Nung Wong, this book is a historical ethnography, one that looks mainly at frontier "governmentality" (using a Foucauldian concept) as applied to the Philippines. He argues that "the gist of the Philippine post-colonial statecraft" hinges on how "frontier strongmen" are coopted into becoming the state's ruling instruments, particularly in serving or subverting the centralizing state in "hegemonic processes of monopolizing physical force and symbolic violence" (p. 25). Looking at the cases of three strongmen in the Cagayan Valley in the northern Philippines, he concludes that--perhaps contrary to expectations--strongmen are not necessarily a threat to state rule, but may be "successfully contained" as well as "caught in the centralizing state's governmental technologies and the ruled majority's countergovernmental technologies" (p. xxvi).

Frontier governmentality, Wong argues, involves diverse tugof-war processes and multiple areas of contestation where, across the Philippine archipelago, the sovereign state has decentralized to strongmen the authority to generate internal revenue, pacify unrest, and resolve disputes and conflicts. They do so--oftentimes successfully and to the benefit of the central government--through implementing state laws such as in counter-insurgency, land reform, elections, and education (p. 26). The process entails techniques described by Wong through his case studies as networking, identity-switching and brokering, among others (94).

In the case of the former military counterinsurgency expert-turned-governor-turned mutineer Rodolfo Aguinaldo, the strongman is co-opted and initially serves the objectives of the centralizing state, but he eventually does present a challenge to state-building when he declares secession of his province from the Republic. Revered as a legendary Robin Hood-like figure by the Cagayan populace when he served as governor from 1988-98, but loathed by others for his abuse of military power and then civilian authority, Aguinaldo exemplified both the local strongman's critical role in capacitating the state to conduct discipline and surveillance, but also its need to maintain a careful balance between central and local power. Wong further explores the theme of discipline and surveillance...