Over the past twenty years, increasing attention – and alarm – has been focused on Chinese assertiveness and aggression in the South China Sea and in the territorial waters of the Philippines in particular, provoking diplomatic and military responses from the Philippines and the United States and rendering the country a ‘front-line state’ in the ongoing ‘new cold war’ between the two global superpowers. But the maritime and military dimensions of this ‘new cold war’ have been accompanied by escalating competition for control over the transportation and telecommunications infrastructures of the Philippines in particular and Southeast Asia in general, with Japan playing a crucial – and in transportation, a dominant – role long ignored and overshadowed by analysts’ abiding focus on US-China rivalry in the region. Drawing parallels with ‘railroad imperialism’ and ‘telegraph imperialism’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this seminar will show how competition between the US, Japan, and China over telecommunications and transportation infrastructure has unfolded and escalated over the past twenty years in the Philippines and other countries in Southeast Asia.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).
Dr Sharmila Parmanand is Assistant Professor in Gender, Development and Globalisation in the Department of Gender Studies at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳. Her research examines the colonial histories and gendered logics that underpin development and humanitarian interventions in the global south, with a focus on the politics of knowledge production and feminist entanglements with the state on issues such as migration, gender-based violence, precarious labour, economic restructuring and social protection. She is currently working on her first book, titled Saving Our Sisters: The Politics of Anti-Trafficking and Sex Work in the Philippines, which uses the Philippines as a case study to show how anti-trafficking invokes the language of development and human rights to entrench border control practices and the gendered policing of precarious workers.