【by Sol Iglesias, June 2025】
This essay aims to offer insight into the impact of democratic backsliding on the academe. The Philippine case offers an urgent impetus and opportunity for such a study, given heightened tensions around the 2022 election of president Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., facilitated in large part by online historical revisionism and distortion of the legacy of his father. Marcos Sr. had declared martial law in 1972 and ruled in a dictatorship until he was ousted in 1986.[1] Is academic freedom consequently constrained in the Philippines, and in what manner? I argue that there have been serious risks to academic freedom in the country uniquely pertinent to Marcos, Jr. administration, with some continuing from a prior period of autocratization under former President Rodrigo Duterte (in office from 2016 to 2022). This essay offers preliminary findings from on-going incident monitoring dataset that I have undertaken as part of the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom, a group of scholars, researchers and educators brought together by the election of Marcos, Jr. to the presidency.
Free expression, encompassing academic freedom, is the oxygen of democracy. A decline in the quality of democracy can thus be expected to track with controls over academic freedom. Levitsky and Way consider the Philippines as a new competitive authoritarian regime.[2] Diamond likewise observes that Philippine democracy had fallen into regime ambiguity, noting the imminent (at the time) election of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.—son and namesake of the deposed dictator—and speculated that “perhaps then (the Philippines would) complete its slide back into autocracy”.[3] The V-Dem annual reports consider the Philippines an autocratizing regime, falling from the ranks of democracies as an electoral autocracy by 2020.[4] Similarly, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) 2021 report on democracy considers the Philippines as a backsliding democracy, or experiencing autocratization from a position of relative democratic weakness.[5] Democratic backsliding differs from more abrupt processes of democratic collapse. Bermeo considers the process of democratic backsliding as the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy.[6] Waldner and Lust argue that democratic backsliding is distinct from regime transitions, particularly since processes like backsliding are aimed precisely at occluding moves toward authoritarianism.[7] Crucially, the ambiguity of democratic backsliding leaves room for resistance. Laebans and Luhrmann show that in more consolidated democracies, accountability mechanisms may respond faster to autocratization. In weak democracies however, a feeble institutional environment allows incumbents to evade accountability unless popular support wanes and protests swell, boosting efforts to constrain autocratization.[8]
We have monitored over 20 incidents of such historical distortion and attacks on academic freedom since the start of the Marcos Jr. government from July 2022 to September 2023. This data come from our on-going work in monitoring and advocacy of academic freedom in the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom, formed by educators and researchers in response to concerns raised during recent presidential elections. Our initial monitoring of academic freedom threats and risk incidence complements existing monitors of academic freedom globally, and in Asia, including the annual Free to Think incident monitoring by Scholars at Risk itself (to which I had previously co-authored a Philippine case study).[9] The inclusion of incidents generally conforms to the Scholars at Risk definition in its own global incidence monitoring, but includes such additional categories as historical distortion/revisionism, repressive policy, red-tagging, surveillance, and harassment among others.[10]
Two patterns emerge. The first, academic freedom risks in the Philippines are a direct consequence of state-sponsored historical revision and distortion of public memory of the Marcos dictatorship. For instance, the Department of Education (DepEd) issued a 2023 directive to erase references to the Marcos name, in relation to the Marcos dictatorship, on the eve of the commemoration of the Martial Law declaration.[11] The directive sought to strike references to “Diktadurang Marcos” (Marcos Dictatorship) instead referring to just “Diktadura” (Dictatorship). Similarly, in August 2022, the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF or Commission on the Filipino Language) banned five books on ludicrous charges that they encouraged terrorism and the destabilization of the government. The books were censored for containing “Anti-Marcos and Anti-Duterte contents”.[12] A sign of the times: the resolution did not even bother to specify to which Marcos or Duterte they were referring. Despite the withdrawal of a majority of KWF commissioners from the original order, the books have yet to be published or distributed. Furthermore, historians speaking against historical revisionism benefiting the Marcos government have been vilified, attacked online, and threatened with harm.[13]
The second pattern in the academic freedom risks and threats data include McCarthyist red-tagging, primarily from state institutions that are then amplified by less identifiable sources online, social media in particular. While not originating from Duterte—red-baiting, red-tagging and similar vilification is practically as old as communism itself after all—pervasive red-tagging opposition and dissent as communist has continued from the Duterte administration. International governmental bodies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Parliament, have recognized the practice of red-tagging as a particular threat to civil society and freedom of expression in the Philippines.[14] The academic community’s concerns over red-tagging are in response to violent attacks and even extrajudicial killings as well as targeted harassment and intimidation that members of the education community have suffered. For instance, in February 2022, soldiers killed two volunteer teachers Chad Booc and Jojarain Alce Nguho along with three others at a school for lumad (indigenous peoples) children. Booc had been red-tagged in the past and had been a petitioner in a challenge to the constitutionality of the Anti-Terrorism Act filed with the Supreme Court. There are many such instances linking a communist label to lethal violence in the post-dictatorship period.[15]
Red-tagging in the education sector intensified under the Duterte government and continues under the present administration. Vice President Sara Duterte herself, Duterte’s daughter, Marcos Jr.’s running mate in the 2022 election, as well as concurrent Secretary of Education and co-vice chair of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), has singled out teachers and their unions.[16] Red-tagging, which has led to profiling, monitoring, harassment, disappearance, and violence against in many cases, has targeted universities as well as their faculty, students, and officials in the first 14 months of the Marcos, Jr. administration.
Compounding concerns over red-tagging is the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 that was largely upheld by the Supreme Court in December 2021 following multiple legal challenges. Members of the higher education community argue that the law contains vague and overly broad provisions on the definition of terrorism and related acts, inimical to academic freedom and human rights. For example, Section 9 provides a 12-year prison sentence for anyone deemed to be inciting others to commit terrorist acts through such means as speeches, writings, or banners even “without taking any direct part in the commission of terrorism”. Thus, teaching about dissent, activism, and revolution may be considered incitement to terrorism under the new law. Scholars are also concerned about the inclusion of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), which regulates all public and private institutions of tertiary education, and the DepEd in the Anti-Terrorism Council that the law creates. Risks are increased considering the concurrent appointments of Ms. Duterte at DepEd and the NTF-ELCAC. Given the current climate of red-tagging and other campaigns vilifying academics as terrorists or traitors, state security forces may be emboldened to charge scholars and students under the Anti-Terrorism Act. The involvement of education authorities is an unprecedented inclusion of the academe and schools into the security sector’s purview, creating a chilling effect on teaching, research, and activism.
In other cases, law enforcement officers have harassed students and university faculty, including Dr. Raquel Fortun whom police visited at her University of the Philippines Manila office in August, 2023, following her examination of 17-year-old Jemboy Baltazar, killed by police in Navotas City. Professor Melania Flores, former president of the University of the Philippines All Academic Employees Union had been arrested earlier in February, 2023, on campus, a violation of several provisions regulating the conduct of police action on any UP campus agreed in 1992 between UP and the Department of the Interior and Local Government. The military has surveilled, harassed, and forcibly removed students from research and community sites, as in the case of UP Manila students in faculty in early July, 2023. Former students and activists have been forcibly disappeared, like Dexter Capuyan and Gene Roz Jamil “Bazoo” de Jesus, who went missing in April 2023 after, according to witnesses, being taken by men introduced who themselves as operatives of the police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group.
Is academic freedom more constrained in the Philippines today? The Marcos incumbency attenuates and accentuates state repression targeted at left-wing groups or individuals, as well as perceived regime opponents and dissidents, broadly speaking. Much of the escalation of repressiveness occurred under the Duterte administration. The contestation over martial law memory creates new and pronounced risks for academic freedom because the truth about martial law and dictatorship is what is at stake. State-sponsored revisionism is asymmetrically more powerful and better resourced, repressive in its effect. Historical distortion has unfolded within an increasingly coercive political environment that has targeted “communists” with lethal violence, while elections remain somewhat competitive and free. The decline of democracy’s liberal aspects while its electoral dimensions remain intact needs further study. Still, academics are increasingly among those in the crosshairs. This essay has offered an analysis of trends in the repression of academic freedom and dissent based on on-going data collection and monitoring. Future research on democratic resilience in academic freedom advocacy will help us better understand resistance to autocratization in weak democracies like the Philippines.
AUTHOR
Sol Iglesias is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines-Diliman, Philippines. Email: [email protected]
NOTES
[1] Aries Arugay and Justin Keith Baquisal, “Mobilized and Polarized: Social Media and Disinformation Narratives in the 2022 Philippine Elections,” Pacific Affairs 95, no. 3 (2022). Also see Maria Elize Mendoza, “Philippine Elections 2022: TikTok in Bongbong Marcos’ Presidential Campaign,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 44, no. 3 (2022).
[2] Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The New Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 31, no. 1 (2020): 52-53; 59.
[3] Larry Diamond, “Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled,” Journal of Democracy 33, no. 1 (2022): 168-69.
[4] Nazifa Alizada et al., Autocratization Turns Viral: Democracy Report 2021 (Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, 2021), 31. See also V-Dem reports for 2019, 2020 and 2022.
[5] International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, The Global State of Democracy 2021: Building Resilience in a Pandemic Era (Stockholm: International IDEA, 2021), 8-9.
[6] Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016): 5-10.
[7] David Waldner and Ellen Lust, “Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding,” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018): 95.
[8] Melis Laebens and Anna Luhrmann, “What halts democratic erosion? The changing role of accountability,” Democratization 28, no. 5 (2021): 921.
[9] See Dimitar Gueorguiev, ed., New Threats to Academic Freedom in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023). See also Katrin Kinzelbach et al., “Academic Freedom Index Update 2022,” (2022). https://www.pol.phil.fau.eu/files/2022/03/afi-update-2022.pdf. See Sol Iglesias and Gerald John Guillermo, “Philippines,” Free to Think 2022: Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (November 8, 2022).
[10] See https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/methodology-of-the-academic-freedom-monitoring-project/.
[11] Jairo Bolledo, “Educators slam DepEd’s plan to change ‘Diktadurang Marcos’ in new curriculum,” Rappler (September 9, 2003 2023). https://www.rappler.com/nation/educators-slam-deped-plan-change-diktadurang-marcos-new-curriculum/.
[12] “Statement of Condemntation on the Illegal Acts of the Chairman of Komisyon sa Wikang Filipno, Arthur P. Casanova on Endorsement, Publication, and Proliferation of Subversive Books. Resolution NO. 17-8 series of 2022. Signed August 10, 2022,” (Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino).
[13] “‘He deserves respect’: Educators back Ambeth Ocampo amid online attacks,” Philstar.com (July 11, 2022). https://interaksyon.philstar.com/trends-spotlights/2022/07/11/221892/educators-ambeth-ocampo-online-attack-history/.
[14] “Philippines: UN rights office appalled over simultaneous killings of ‘red-tagged’ activists,” UN News (March 9, 2021). https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1086782.
[15] See Peter Sales, “State Terror in the Philippines: the Alston Report, Human Rights and Counter-insurgency under the Arroyo Administration,” Contemporary Politics 15, no. 3 (2009).
[16] Gaea Katreena Cabico, “ACT stressses DepEd memo compromises safety, privacy of teachers,” Philstar.com (June 25, 2023). https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2023/06/25/2276470/act-stressses-deped-memo-compromises-safety-privacy-teachers.
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