The Maguindanao Massacre, critical elections and armed conflict in the Philippines

The Maguindanao Massacre has sent shock waves through the Philippines and beyond. A convoy of cars was caught in an armed ambush on Monday 23 November, leaving at least 57 persons dead, with mutilated bodies and crushed vehicles found buried in large pits. The convoy was destined for the Commission of Elections office in Shariff Aguak town, Magindanao Province in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). The purpose was to file local vice mayor Esmael Mangudadatu’s certificate of candidacy to run for the governorship of Maguindanao province in the May 2010 Philippine elections. Among the victims of the massacre were at least 30 journalists, more than 20 women, including the wife and two sisters of Mangudadatu

The right to return: IDP's in Aceh

Political changes are underway in Aceh but only a small fraction of those displaced by the December 2004 tsunami or by earlier conflict with insurgents have returned home

The politics of ‘public opinion’ in the Philippines

In May 2010, national elections in the Philippines saw front-runner presidential candidate Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III win a landslide victory which set the stage for an orderly transition of power from the administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. This article argues that Aquino’s victory, rather than signalling a clear departure from the old ways of doing politics or the mere reproduction of established patterns of oligarchical politics, points towards a more gradual and limited change in the mobilisation of voters in the Philippines. This change, it is further argued, reflects in part the rise of “public opinion” as a social fact in Philippine politics and society in the period since the resurrection of formal democratic institutions and regular elections. The article identifies the broad parameters of the rise in polls and surveys in the Philippines, and, drawing on the critical insights of Pierre Bourdieu, examines the nature and significance of “public opinion” itself. However, the argument advanced here is a cautionary one, indicating that, while the emergence of public opinion as a social fact alters political calculations and dynamics associated with voter mobilisation, the politics of public opinion may only have limited transformative potential for democracy in the Philippines

East Timor in transition: sovereignty, self-determination and human rights

This journal is the student publication that preceeded the Human Rights Law Review published by Oxford University Press which started in 2000. See comment below