Dr. Sol Iglesias, “Subersibo (Subversive): Martial Law Memory, Coercive Revisionism and Academic Freedom in the Philippines”

Abstract: The 2022 national and local elections in the Philippines returned the Marcos dynasty to power, decades after a popular revolt ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won as president with 31.6 million votes (58.77 percent of ballots cast), along with his running mate, Sara Duterte Carpio, who is the daughter of Marcos Jr.’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. How has a Marcos return affected Philippine politics? This lecture explains the impact thus far of the Marcos restoration, focusing on academic freedom. I examine selected episodes in which academic freedom was threatened in the past 18 months, drawn from monitoring I conducted as an academic freedom activist and in cooperation with Scholars at Risk and the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom. These incidents exemplify growing trends in censorship, intimidation and violence that constrain free expression within an environment of coercive revisionism, especially about facts pertaining to martial law and the legacy of the elder Marcos. In one case, a few weeks after President Marcos was inaugurated in July 2022, the board of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission for the Filipino Language) terminated the publication of five books it deemed as having “subversive themes, explicit Anti-Marcos and Anti-Duterte contents” inciting terrorism. Since then, three out of five commissioners have withdrawn their support for censoring the books yet the works remain unpublished. Still, as the incumbents sponsor popular movies and generate online content to support the myth of a “Golden Age” under Marcos Sr., they have provoked a renaissance in art, literature and Marcos era studies. I will show that important new books, solidarity initiatives among academics, and scholars’ heightened public engagement to resist revisionism are also among the legacies of martial rule in the Philippines.

Speaker Bio: Sol Iglesias is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, having joined the faculty in 2021. She has a PhD in Southeast Asian Studies and an MA in Political Science from the National University of Singapore, as well as an MA in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a BA in Public Administration from the University of the Philippines. She won an American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Asia Program fellowship in 2021 and had been selected as an emerging scholar on democracy and autocracy by the APSA Democracy and Autocracy Committee in 2020. She was selected as a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Fellow in 2017. She is a core group member of the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom and lead author of the Philippine case in the 2022 Free to Think report of Scholars at Risk. She has published extensively on political violence in the Philippines, as well as on Philippine politics and current affairs. She is currently writing a book, How a Weak State Governs: The Dynamics of Violence in Philippine Politics, on the central-local interactions that produced violence in the democratic interregnum between the Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. dictatorship and authoritarianism under Rodrigo Duterte.

This online lecture is part of the  THINKING RIGHTS, WRITING JUSTICE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA series, which is a project of the Justice in Southeast Asia Lab (JSEALab). The JSEALab is part of a five-year initiative on Social Justice housed in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Human Rights Program at UW-Madison. Idea exchange and public-facing events aim to foster collaboration in and beyond the university.