Radical Democracy in the Time of Duterte: Its Emerging Impact on the Mindanao Question
Christopher Ryan Maboloc’s Radical Democracy in the Time of Duterte has had an impact that goes beyond the question of whether one agrees with its interpretation of Rodrigo Duterte. Its most important contribution is that it forced Philippine political philosophy to reconsider where democracy is theorized from, whose political experience counts, and what Duterte’s rise meant for the country’s democratic order. Maboloc introduced a distinctly Mindanao-centered interpretation of Philippine politics. The book challenged the tendency to interpret Philippine politics primarily from Manila and the political experience of Luzon. Maboloc approaches Duterte as a Mindanawon political phenomenon, connecting his rise to the historical marginalization of Mindanao, the Bisaya experience, colonial centralization, and the exclusion of peripheral communities from national political power. A 2022 review by Waseda University’s Juichiro Tanabe specifically praised the book for showing that Duterte’s radic...