My undergraduate roommate at Brown University was Filipino and he encouraged me to study in the Philippines which I did by enrolling in a master’s program at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman courtesy of Rotary Foundation Scholarship. It was just after the Aquino assassination and shortly before the fall of Marcos, Sr. – needless to say a very interesting time politically! Besides political science, I also studied Filipino (and German) at UP, took an intermediate Filipino course at the University of Hawaii and returned to the Philippines for two more years of fieldwork (where I was affiliated with the Ateneo de Manila Institute of Philippine Culture). This was the basis for my dissertation which was later published as a book, The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalist Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines (Yale 1995).

I then did what I assumed would be something completely different by moving to Germany. But the Wall fell there soon after which led me to switch my research focus and write about the East German uprising. I stretched my friends/colleagues’ credulity with the idea that despite all cultural, historical, and socio-economic differences, the uprisings of Eastern Europe resembled in significant ways, as political events, Philippine “people power” and other such peaceful protests in Asia (which led to the publication of another book, Democratic Revolutions: Asia and Eastern Europe, Routledge 2004).

I then became increasingly interested in Singapore where I was a Lee Kong Chian distinguished fellow at the National University of Singapore in 2008. I had earlier written about the “Asian values” discourse of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), but became focused on how mainland China after Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour” and until Xi Jinping consolidated power saw the city state as an ideological and policy model, however implausible that may seem. This led to a series of co-authored articles and a co-edited volume (China’s ‘Singapore Model’ and Authoritarian Learning, Routledge 2020) and also a single authored book, Authoritarian Modernism in East Asia (Palgrave 2019) which discussed how Singapore (and before that Japan) had served as a model for regimes in the region attempting to rapidly develop their economies while remaining resilient against democratizing pressures.

I began to do research on Philippine politics again during the presidency of Joseph Estrada – a self-styled pro-poor populist who sidelined “liberal reformists” stressing “good governance” often seen as out-of-touch with the plight of the economically disadvantaged. I also became interested in “hyper-presidentialism” in the Philippines and co-edited a book Presidentialism in Southeast and East Asia (Routledge 2023). I have written about Estrada’s overthrow, how his would-be successor and even better-known movie star turned politician, Fernando Poe, Jr., was cheated in the 2004 presidential election, and how former vice president Jejomar Binay’s presidential bid in 2016 was torpedoed by a selective senate investigation. Duterte’s dark politics of the bloody “war on drugs” filled this populist vacuum.

My most recent book, The Philippines: From ‘People Power’ to Democratic Backsliding (Cambridge 2023) attempts to put Duterte’s rise and rule in historical perspective. I am developing this line of thinking at CSEAS by examining how historical interpretations have influenced paradigms of contemporary Philippine politics. Pointing to the limitations of culturalist continuity or path dependent perspectives, I stress how in recurrent patterns of “political time” aggrandizing presidents have alternated with elite-led “democratic crusades” for nearly a century. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s landslide victory in the 2022 presidential election with a campaign invoking nostalgia for his father’s authoritarian rule can be viewed as part of this cycling as a counter-narrative of a developmental “golden age” after Marcos, Sr. declared martial law in 1972 rule eclipsed the tale of how EDSA “people power” uprising in 1986 “miraculously” freed Filipinos from dictatorship.

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