Thousands of American and Philippine troops, joined for the first time by a significant contingent of Japanese forces, began annual military exercises Monday set against the backdrop of the Middle East war.

The war games will feature live-fire exercises in the north of the Philippines facing the Taiwan Strait, as well as a province off the disputed South China Sea, where Philippine and Chinese forces have engaged in repeated confrontations.

In one drill, the Japanese military, which is contributing about 1,400 personnel, will use a Type 88 cruise missile to sink a World War II-era minesweeper off the coast of northern Luzon island.

More than 17,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors are taking part in the 19-day Balikatan, or “Shoulder to Shoulder,” exercises — about the same number as last year’s edition, including contingents from Australia, New Zealand, France and Canada.

Balikatan comes as Iran and the United States, along with Israel, edge towards the end of the two-week ceasefire that halted the Middle East war, ignited by surprise US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic republic.

“Regardless of the challenges elsewhere in the world, the United States’ focus on the Indo-Pacific and our ironclad commitment to the Philippines remains unwavering,” US Lieutenant General Christian Wortman said at Monday’s opening ceremony.

Without providing precise numbers, Wortman, commander of the Marine Expeditionary Force, later told reporters that approximately 10,000 US personnel would take part in the exercises.

Philippine military chief General Romeo Brawner added that US Indo-Pacific Command chief Admiral Samuel Paparo had assured him at the war’s outbreak that this year’s Balikatan would be “the biggest ever”.

Among the high-end weapons expected to be used is a US Typhon missile system that has been in the archipelago since visiting US forces left it there in 2024, provoking outrage from Beijing.

“We anticipate that it will be incorporated at some level during the course of the exercise,” Wortman said.

‘Playing with fire’

While both militaries insisted that no exercises would take place “near Taiwan”, coastal defence drills are set fewer than 200 kilometres (120 miles) from the island’s southern coast.

Beijing has ramped up military pressure around self-ruled Taiwan, which it considers part of its territory and has threatened to use force to seize.

China slammed the joint exercises on Monday, saying the United States, Japan and the Philippines were “playing with fire”.

“What the Asia-Pacific region needs most is peace and tranquility, and what it needs least is the introduction of external forces to sow division and confrontation,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a news briefing.

“We wish to remind the countries concerned that blindly binding themselves together in the name of security will only be akin to playing with fire — ultimately backfiring upon themselves,” he added.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos warned in November that given his country’s proximity to the island democracy, “a war over Taiwan will drag the Philippines, kicking and screaming, into the conflict.”

See also: Philippines accuses China of cyanide poisoning in contested waters

In February, US, Japanese and Philippine aircraft patrolled over the Bashi Channel that separates the Philippines from Taiwan to test what Manila called their “ability to operate seamlessly together in complex maritime environments”.

Japan’s first Balikatan as a full participant follows the signing of a reciprocal access agreement approved by the Japanese Diet last June.

Colonel Takeshi Higuchi of Tokyo’s joint staff told Japanese media the drills would “contribute to creating a security environment that tolerates no attempt to unilaterally change the status quo by force”.

Marcos has been building up security ties with Western nations to deter China. Over the past two years, Manila has also signed visiting forces or equivalent agreements with New Zealand, Canada and France to facilitate joint military exercises.

Outside the Manila base where Monday’s opening ceremony was held, a group of about 50 people protested against the exercises, holding aloft signs branding US President Donald Trump an “imperialist terrorist” and demanding US forces leave the country.

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Recent years have seen the sad passing of leading lights in the study of Southeast Asia: James C. Scott in 2024, Anthony Reid in 2025, and now, most recently, Vicente – or Vince – Rafael in February 2026. Born in 1956 in the Philippines, Vince Rafael exemplified the onset of a long overdue shift in the intellectual centre of gravity in Southeast Asian Studies to new generations of scholars hailing from the region. Thus even as we mourn the terrible loss that comes with Vince’s passing, we should also commemorate and celebrate the huge contribution that he made to the study of the Philippines and of Southeast Asia and beyond.

Vince conducted his doctoral studies and received his PhD at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and he lived and taught in the United States – at the University of Hawai’i, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Washington – for the remaining years of his life. But he continued to focus his attention and his affections on the Philippines, without really committing himself to the field of Asian-American Studies despite its strong relevance and resonance among so many students in Honolulu, southern California, and Seattle. His research, his writings, his travels, his family, and, in due course, a deep romantic attachment brought him back to the Philippines over the long and very productive years of his life.

Vince first came to prominence – in the study of the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and beyond – with his brilliant first book, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, which was first published in 1988 by Ateneo de Manila University Press and again by Duke University Press in 1993. The book’s insights on the importance of language – and translation – in both colonialism and religious conversion were highly original, eye-opening, and illuminating, and it is no exaggeration to say that the book was, is, and will long remain one of the most interesting and important books ever written about Philippine history and about Southeast Asia more broadly.

In fact, Contracting Colonialism easily ranks among the most influential books ever written about colonialism in general, as is evident in bibliographies, footnotes, and reading lists with coverage extending far beyond Southeast Asia. To take one notable example, Edward G. Gray’s classic New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton University Press, 1999), treating linguistic encounters between Native Americans and European colonial settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries along the eastern seaboard of North America, cited Contracting Colonialism in its very first footnote, fulsomely acknowledging the author’s indebtedness to this earlier volume for inspiring him in the research and writing of the book.

Vince Rafael was exceptionally talented as a thinker and a writer, as a speaker and as a teacher and supervisor, as his many former students can attest. Working at the fertile intersection of history, anthropology, comparative literature, and social theory, his writings explored and extended the insights of his former teachers and mentors – Ben Anderson and James Siegel – to previously unexplored aspects of the history of the Philippines. His brilliant first book was followed by several subsequent highly original and interesting volumes, notably including White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Duke University Press, 2000), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Duke University Press, 2005), and Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Duke University Press, 2016) bringing his account of Philippine history from the sixteenth century all the way up through the final years of Spanish colonial rule, the Revolution, and on onwards into the twentieth century, treating American colonial rule, and the Marcos and post-Marcos eras in highly original and illuminating ways.

Rafael complemented other historians’ analyses of economic and social change, and of the interplay of institutions and interests in the field of politics, through close attention to questions of nationalism, communication, and representation – and the limitations and failures of communication and representation – through language and beyond language. Moving beyond materialism and muckraking, his work was distinctive in its close attention to identity, ideology, and experience from a vantage point inspired by various strands of critical social theory rather than cultural essentialism.

Rafael’s last book, The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke University Press, 2022), offered a characteristically original and eye-opening account of the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022). Building on the works of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe, and drawing on recent research by his partner Lila Shahani, he coupled his close, careful analysis of the grotesque ‘necropolitics’ of Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ with a commensurately critical account of the seemingly more benign ‘biopolitics’ of the conditional cash transfer (CCT), education, health care, and other social welfare programs advanced and expanded under the Duterte administration.

A distinctly gendered divide between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor citizens of the country, Rafael suggested, was produced and reproduced in ways which served to discipline and divide the population. Under Duterte, good-for-nothing un(der)employed Filipinos susceptible to drinking and illegal drug consumption were pathologized and punished through arbitrary violence and incarceration, even as overworked – and often overseas – Filipinas were enlisted as primary caretakers and custodians of the production and reproduction of the family and the household as an economic and social unit.

The Sovereign Trickster thus showed how biopolitics, necropolitics, and widespread precarity combined to create what Nicole Curato termed a ‘politics of anxiety’, enabling Duterte’s election in 2016. Viewed from this perspective, Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ – and its earlier iterations dating back at least to the 1990s in the Philippines and much earlier elsewhere – represent not (only) the idiosyncratic obsession of a single (psychopathological) president, but (also) the deeper structural logics of neoliberal governance in the contemporary Philippines and elsewhere.

Vince Rafael’s long and highly productive scholarly career was thus quite literally ‘bookended’ by two highly original and important books, beginning with Contracting Colonialism and ending with The Sovereign Trickster. But over the intervening years and beyond, he also touched the lives of countless family members and friends, students and supervisees, colleagues, readers, and others whom he encountered on the way. He was effervescent if not positively electric in his enduring intellectual appetite, interest, and curiosity, highly inquisitive, eager to engage, to listen, and to learn about the world. He was extremely gifted and extremely generous, giving so much of himself to those who had the pleasure and privilege to know him in person and to those who knew him through his writings and teachings over the years. He led a rich and rewarding life. He was deeply loved, and he will be sorely missed.

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*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

*Banner photo by Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash

The post Vicente L. Rafael (1956-2026) in Memoriam first appeared on LSE Southeast Asia Blog.

The 2025 SC-80 and SC-81 gas contracts in the Sulu Sea mark historic Bangsamoro participation in resource management, promising revenue and energy security. Yet without transparent oversight, community consent, and ecological safeguards, these agreements risk reproducing elite capture, undermining true Muslim self-determination and the long-fought sovereignty of the southern Philippines, writes Elroi Son Oller Panganiban.

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In October 2025, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr signed two petroleum service contracts, SC-80 and SC-81 (formerly PDA-BP-2 and PDA-BP-3), covering 1.31 million hectares of the Sulu Sea in the Sandakan Basin, ancestral waters of the Tausug, Sama, Yakan, and other native peoples of the southern archipelago. SC-80 includes the Dabakan-1 and Banduria-1 gas discoveries, with estimated 2C contingent resources of 4.7–5.7 trillion cubic feet, while investor disclosures project roughly 10 TCF in prospective mean resources comparable in scale to the Malampaya gas field that once supplied about 40 per cent of Luzon’s electricity. Yet between 2009 and 2012, ExxonMobil spent nearly $400 million drilling three wells in the same basin, encountered gas, and ultimately withdrew, citing non-commercial quantities.

The officials were not wrong to call it historic. Because for the first time in Philippine history, a Bangsamoro governmental authority, the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), co-signed petroleum contracts as an equal partner with the national government.

The BARMM Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources, and Energy said, “Who would have thought that the Bangsamoro could reach this level of autonomy, allowing us to actively participate in the decision-making process and, more importantly, to have a share of resources and revenues? ”

Yes, it looks promising. It is indeed the fruit of a Muslim struggle that stretches back to the arrival of the Spaniards in the archipelago. But let us look back to uncover the core questions this moment raises. These petroleum contracts could represent genuine sovereignty, or they could reproduce elite capture unless transparency, consent, and governance safeguards are enforced immediately.

It is cruel to offer a people centuries-late justice through a slice of the very resources that were once taken from them. The Philippine Muslim struggle, a fight carved from fire, with soldiers torching villages, laws declaring centuries of habitation “unowned”, and settler colonials occupying a homeland where sovereign sultanates once stood, was long denied. The spark of the Bangsamoro Revolution was inevitable, for one cannot reasonably bargain with a newborn republic that carries only a narrow vision of nationhood that centres only on lowlander Christians and Tagalog-Catholic nationalism.

The Philippine Muslims have been waiting for this moment for centuries. The Sulu Sultanate, formally established in 1457, taxed foreign traders and managed royal monopolies over pearls, sea cucumbers, and beeswax, where the sea was not a barrier but a highway that interconnected the islands under an Islamic civilisation that predated the Philippine Republic by more than four hundred years.

Then Spain arrived, criminalising Muslim traders as “barbarians” and waging more than a hundred campaigns against people who refused subjugation. It hardened social divisions across the archipelago: Christianised and Hispanised natives were classified as Indio, Muslim natives were stereotyped as Moro, and those outside both categories were labelled Infiel. The United States followed by annexing Mindanao into the Philippine Archipelago and institutionalizing these three labels through the Public Land Act of 1905, shaping how Muslims and Indigenous Peoples would be governed and perceived by the Republic

Applying the doctrine of terra nullius, “land belonging to no one,” to Mindanao, and since then, it has neglected and bypassed the ancestral domain and Islamic customary tenure. Within a single generation, an estimated 2.5 to 3.5 million hectares of Muslim lands were transferred to American corporations, Japanese agribusiness, and Christian settler families. Muslim communities shifted from majority to minority in their own homeland, and titles were prioritised for corporations and settlers; disproportionately larger portions were granted to Christian settlers compared to Muslims.

Then came the timber economy, extracting sixty to seventy per cent of Philippine log exports from Mindanao’s forests in the 1960s and 1970s, while revenues bypassed Muslim communities entirely. Then came the Agus River Hydroelectric Complex, harnessing sacred Maranao waters to generate nearly 900 megawatts of electricity for the national grid for over 50 years.

So, when BARMM officials speak of these petroleum contracts as “fruits of a long and painful struggle”, they are not romanticising the past. They are describing a balance sheet of dignity finally restored, right where it belongs, in honour of the martyrs.

In October 2025, the Philippine government awarded Service Contracts SC-80 and SC-81 in the Sandakan Basin of the southwestern Sulu Sea to an Australian-British-Filipino consortium. One block alone is estimated to hold natural gas resources comparable in scale to the Malampaya field, which supplied roughly 40 per cent of Luzon’s electricity for two decades. The urgency behind these contracts is national energy insecurity: the Philippines imports nearly all of its petroleum, and Malampaya is projected to be depleted by 2027. With Chinese aggression stalling development in the West Philippine Sea, now, neoliberals have eyed going southward into the Philippine map into uncontested internal waters that have turned Bangsamoro waters not merely into development zones but into an energy security safety net. Hence, when President Marcos Jr said that “we have a sufficient supply of oil…So, we are okay for that period of time,” he meant the unexplored oil beyond the contested waters beyond the West Philippine Sea, as oil prices threaten to go up amidst the Israel-US military’s continuous meddling and aggression in the Middle East.

Under the Bangsamoro Organic Law of 2018, the Bangsamoro government is entitled to 50 per cent of the government’s petroleum revenues, a historic fiscal stake. However, this 50-50 split applies only to the government’s share of “profit petroleum”, not to gross production. Under the Philippine production-sharing model, contractors may recover 60–70 per cent of gross revenues as costs before profits are divided. Of the remaining petroleum profit, around 60 per cent goes to the government, and only then is that portion split equally between Manila and BARMM.

Consider Aceh. The Indonesian province’s 2005 Helsinki Peace Agreement, which ended a thirty-year separatist war, granted Aceh up to 70 per cent of its oil and gas revenues, more generous than BARMM’s 50-50 arrangement. Yet two decades later, Aceh remains among Indonesia’s poorest provinces. What bullets failed to capture, patronage quietly absorbed. Studies of the Special Autonomy Fund points to elite concentration and limited poverty reduction. Revenue sharing alone does not dismantle patronage; it can just as easily institutionalise it.

Across the world, post-conflict autonomy settlements increasingly hinge on resource extraction from Aceh to South Sudan to Iraqi Kurdistan. The promise is simple: peace will pay for itself. But without transparent institutions and community consent, resource wealth consolidates power rather than redistributes it.

The current Bangsamoro Transition Authority should also be understood within the context of the peace process itself. Transitional periods carry layered responsibilities, reflecting the movement from armed struggle to social movement to civilian governance. As established in the Bangsamoro Organic Law, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) leads the Bangsamoro Transitional Authority (BTA), tasked with steering democratic institutionalisation until the Bangsamoro Parliament elections, while remaining partners in the peace process. The success of the Bangsamoro project is thus inseparable from the success of the peace process itself.

As Patricio Abinales argues, Mindanao is stable when the central state leaves it alone and erupts in conflict when the state intervenes aggressively. Whenever Manila imposes itself aggressively, Sulu resists; when Manila negotiates and retreats, Sulu is peaceful. Nassef Adiong has pointed out that the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao has been channelling billions of pesos into Sulu for infrastructure, health, education, and social services, contributing to a drop in poverty from 64 per cent to 14 per cent. And the Supreme Court ruling on the Sulu exit from BARMM has reset the conditions that historically determine whether the periphery consents or resists. Severing Sulu from this framework threatens to unwind those gains. Beyond fiscal loss, Sulu forfeits preferential fishing rights in regional waters, participation in maritime governance arrangements, and the political weight of belonging to a constitutionally recognised autonomous region.

In most post-conflict situations, former revolutionary leaders who achieved power during their revolution will stay in their dual political and security positions until their government needs to protect its unity and prevent internal splits. The same military leaders who used to command their troops now handle the negotiation process for development projects, which include resource exploration agreements. The existing situation functions as a practical solution that protects stability during an unstable transition period that needs delicate institutional management until normalisation reaches its full state.

The question, therefore, is not one of impropriety but of trajectory. The current stage of this process determines whether it serves as a key step for establishing peace through controlled power distribution to developing civilian governance systems or whether it requires improved power separation systems for upcoming political development in the region. The peace process will remain sustainable through former combatant leaders who govern because institutional safeguards will develop to protect transparency, accountability, and public participation rights at all times.

No community consent mechanism for the affected Sulu Sea communities, such as the fishing families of Tawi-Tawi, the often stateless Sama sea nomads, and the Liguasan Marsh farmers, who inhabit one of the Indo-Pacific’s most ecologically significant wetlands, has been publicly documented. The Sulu Sea is a lifeline sustaining the ways of life of these communities, but it is now viewed by neoliberals as an energy frontier. The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act mandates Free, Prior, and Informed Consent for activities affecting ancestral domains. No public evidence indicates that such consent was sought before the contracts were signed.

The Sulu Sea is the central area of the Coral Triangle, the world’s most important region for marine biodiversity, which contains more than 600 coral species and over 2,000 reef fish species that currently face severe threats from climate change, dynamite fishing, and overfishing. The first phase of offshore petroleum exploration, which uses seismic airgun surveys, has been shown in worldwide research to disrupt cetacean navigation, fish spawning cycles, and the structural integrity of coral reefs. Public access to baseline biodiversity surveys and Environmental Impact Assessment scoping documents for SC-80 and SC-81 has not occurred because all documents remain undisclosed.

The Liguasan Marsh, a 288,000-hectare wetland and critical Indo-Pacific bird sanctuary, is the last refuge of the Philippine crocodile. Its survival was ironically ensured by decades of armed conflict, which deterred industrial development that could have destroyed it. Designated a game refuge in 1941, the marsh now faces proposals for horizontal drilling outside sanctuary boundaries. While these may limit surface disruption, wetland hydrology and methane seepage systems are interconnected, so subsurface extraction does not guarantee ecological neutrality.

The Bangsamoro Organic Law’s co-management framework is a genuine and hard-won advancement of constitutional rights. A 50/50 revenue split is better than what came before. These things are true. However, the real test of self-determination is not the ceremony where contracts are signed, but the questions of when gas is extracted, who controls how revenues are used, who ensures environmental commitments are honoured, and who represents the fishermen in Tawi-Tawi whose livelihoods can vanish when seismic ships arrive.

The Philippine Muslim people did not endure five centuries of dispossession, the Spanish galleons, the American land acts, the Marcos militias, the Ilaga massacres, and the decades of armed conflict to become co-managers of their own extraction. They endured it for sovereignty, not merely a percentage of profit from petroleum, but the power to design institutions that prevent the repetition of colonial extraction under greater autonomy. The Bangsamoro peace agreement created a milestone of how far we can stretch the 1987 Philippine Constitution. However, sovereignty is not yet guaranteed by any contract signed in October 2025. It must be demanded, structured, monitored, and protected. Not later. Now. Before the drilling starts.

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*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

**Banner photo by Joedith Lego on Unsplash.

The post Peace Dividends: The Philippines’ Southern Gas Gamble first appeared on LSE Southeast Asia Blog.