Abstract
This article examines the social and spatial dimensions of civilian agency amid violent conflicts, specifically focusing on the daily work required from indigenous community members in the upkeep of a peace zone as a space of peace and self-protection amid insurgency and counterinsurgency. Using the concept of indigenous geopolitics as an analytical framework, it argues that indigenous spaces of self-protection require the simultaneous processes of collective refusal of state or non-state violence toward indigenous peoples and the re-inscription of indigenous sovereignty within the nation-state. Through case study vignettes, it illustrates the agentive capacities and power of indigenous peoples as geopolitical actors. Rather than viewing indigenous communities as ‘passive victims’ of violent conflicts or excluded from state-centric geopolitical discourses and processes, this article reveals that indigenous agency transforms spaces of conflict and violence and generates and creates new or alternative spaces of unarmed civilian protection and peace outside of the purview of state and non-state armed actors. At stake is a re-thinking or destabilizing of dominant state-centric geopolitical processes that govern contemporary understanding of civilian protection, war, conflict, and peace.
Introduction
For “Greg”,1 a community elder from the Kankana-ey indigenous peoples community of the municipality of Sagada in the Philippines, one of the puzzles he grapples with in his daily negotiations with state and non-state armed actors concerns the tension between community efforts in maintaining their community as a “peace zone” in relation to the competing geopolitical projects of insurgency and counterinsurgency: “It’s hard for the Philippine government and the military to accept the peace zone. They say that Sagada is part of the country and therefore they are free to conduct military operations here. The npa (New People’s Army) also claims that their cause is national in scope and that it’s not localized, so they cannot engage in dialogue at the local level” (personal interview 2014). A common yet often overlooked dilemma faced by civilian communities, particularly indigenous and other marginalized communities, who create and maintain community-led spaces, infrastructures, or architectures of self-protection, safety, or peace amid violent conflicts concerns the challenges in negotiating with state and non-state armed actors who argue that counterinsurgency and insurgency are national in scope and therefore cannot make exemptions to any local community.
This article examines the social and spatial dimensions of civilian agency amid violent conflicts, specifically focusing on the daily work required from indigenous community members in the upkeep of a peace zone as a space of unarmed community self-protection and peace amid insurgency and counterinsurgency. Proposing the concept of “indigenous geopolitics” as an analytical framework to capture the social and spatial features of indigenous agency in the context of violent conflicts between state and non-state actors, it argues that indigenous spaces of unarmed community self-protection and peace require the simultaneous processes of first, the collective refusal of violence toward indigenous peoples and, second, re-inscription of indigenous spatiality within the nation-state. This article illustrates the agentive capacities and power of indigenous peoples as geopolitical actors, drawing from qualitative research focusing on the maintenance of a peace zone in the Philippines (Macaspac 2018, 2022). At stake is a re-thinking of the kinds of work required of indigenous peoples in protecting their own lives amid active conflicts between state and non-state actors as geopolitical processes that fundamentally challenge dominant national or state-centric frameworks of civilian protection, peace, peacebuilding, and geopolitics.
Globally, indigenous peoples, specifically indigenous women and children, are among the marginalized communities most affected by violent conflicts. United Nations (UN) experts report that many indigenous communities who straddle national borders often experience violent inter-state conflicts across border regions while others navigate the perils of low-intensity conflicts between state or non-state armed actors (unpfii 2022). While indigenous peoples around the world often face violent conflicts, their approaches and responses to conflicts are complex, mixed, and uneven. Some indigenous peoples are sympathetic to revolutionary armed movements while others strive to maintain a level of neutrality from both state and non-state armed groups (Tauli-Corpuz 2017). This article explores the latter to better understand how indigenous peoples navigate conflicts between state and non-state actors while promoting community self-protection.
This article is organized into three sections. In the first section, I propose the framework of indigenous geopolitics to better understand the social and spatial processes required of indigenous peoples in creating peace zones as spaces of community self-protection and peace amid conflict. I integrate key contributions from the transdisciplinary literature on critical geopolitics, wartime civilian agency, new social movements, and indigenous sovereignty to build a framework that foregrounds the geopolitical work of indigenous peoples in creating alternative political spaces of community self-protection and peace. In the second section, I examine the phenomenon of community-led or local peace zones in relation to competing geopolitical processes of non-state insurgency and state counterinsurgency drawing from the experiences of the indigenous peoples community of Sagada in the Philippines. Using the framework of indigenous geopolitics, the third section illustrates how the upkeep of the community-led peace zone by the indigenous community relies upon two geopolitical processes: on the one hand, refusing state and non-state violence toward indigenous peoples and, on the other hand, re-inscribing indigenous space within the nation-state. In the conclusion, I underscore the implications of indigenous geopolitics as an analytical framework in revealing the geopolitical processes of creating alternative spaces of community self-protection and peace amid active violent conflicts between state and non-state actors.
Towards a Framework of Indigenous Geopolitics
Indigenous geopolitics refers to a set of social and spatial practices enacted by indigenous peoples in refusing state and non-state violence toward indigenous communities and re-inscribing indigenous space within the nation-state and global geopolitical order. In this article, I propose the concept of indigenous geopolitics as a framework to better understand the ways in which indigenous peoples navigate violent conflicts between state and non-state armed actors. I argue that the daily work required of indigenous peoples in protecting their own lives during violent conflicts is geopolitical work, drawing from a set of indigenous practices of carving out alternative spaces of community self-protection and peace that disrupt or challenge the respective spatial logic of non-state insurgency and state counterinsurgency, specifically, and the geographic or territorial imaginations of state and non-state armed actors, more broadly.
Re-casting the efforts of indigenous peoples in creating spaces of self-protection amid violent conflicts as geopolitical work is important. As indigenous peoples promote their survival and protection amid violent conflicts between state and non-state actors, they question, challenge, and circumvent geographic imaginations, geopolitical projects, and claims about peace, national security, revolution, and nation-state. Indeed, indigenous peoples are much more than simply being active agents. Fundamentally, the upkeep of indigenous spaces of self-protection and peace is geopolitical work that re-works the power relations between indigenous, state, and non-state actors. Furthermore, efforts of indigenous peoples in carving spaces that allow them to constantly refuse state and non-state violence toward their communities and re-inscribe indigenous space within the nation-state illuminate what sovereignty means beyond the dominant framework of nation-state sovereignty.
Decolonizing Geopolitics
The framework of indigenous geopolitics draws from critical approaches to geopolitics and is inextricably linked to postcolonial and decolonial approaches to politics and sovereignty. First, scholars make a distinction between “classical geopolitics” and “critical geopolitics”. Classical geopolitics refers to early definitions and applications of geopolitics that emerged in the late 19th century, which centered upon the idea of the violent control of extrastate territory and people as a source of global power. This line of thinking was pursued and promoted by academics with militarist mindsets including British imperialist Halford Mackinder, Nazi expansionist Karl Haushofer, and Dutch-American Cold War strategist Nicholas Spykman.
Legacies of classical geopolitical thinking continue to influence and animate contemporary realist international and national policies and policymaking, particularly pertaining to peace and conflict. Critical geopolitics pertains to critiques of the ideological dimensions of the geopolitical representations and realist claims pursued and promoted by practitioners of classical geopolitics. As an epistemology, critical geopolitics de-centers states and state territories as the default unit of analysis to move away from a “god’s view” of geopolitics “from above” toward revealing processes of making geopolitics beyond the purview of the state (Dalby 1991, 1996; Dalby & O’Tuathail 1996; O’Tuathail 1996).
In the last 30 years, many scholars have re-oriented geopolitical theory and research from classical geopolitics toward critical, anti-colonial, or anti-imperial approaches that examine and critique normative and dominant geopolitical imagination and practices (Dalby 1991; Dalby & O’Tuathail 1996). Scholarly efforts to reveal other geopolitical processes outside the spaces of state hegemony yielded knowledge focusing on feminist geopolitics (Staeheli, Kofman & Peake 2004; Hyndman 2004; Massaro and Williams 2013), subaltern geopolitics (Sharp 2011, 2013), home geopolitics (Brickell 2012), altergeopolitics (Koopman 2011), popular geopolitics (Dittmer & Gray 2010), and abolitionist geopolitics (Wilson-Gilmore 1995; McKittrick 2006; Heynen & Ybarra 2021). This article does not summarize the contributions of critical geographic literature in illustrating a wide range of geopolitical processes outside of the purview of the state. Rather, I highlight how efforts in rethinking geopolitics critically offers valuable insights into foregrounding the geopolitical work of indigenous peoples as political actors.
Second, the framework of indigenous geopolitics draws from the literature on postcolonial approaches to politics, geopolitics, and sovereignty. In a survey of geographic research focusing on the engagements of indigenous peoples with geopolitical issues concerning territory and identity, geographer Chris Gibson (2013) underscores the ways in which the political engagements of indigenous peoples throughout colonialism have deeply shaped and continue to shape our contemporary world. Rather than viewing indigenous peoples as “niche” geopolitical actors whose political struggles are contained within the spaces of colonial or settler-colonial states they engage with, Gibson (2013) argues that indigenous politics are woven into global geopolitics.
Indeed, historical and contemporary processes through which colonial and settler-colonial states racialize and minoritize indigenous peoples have shaped and continue to shape global geopolitical relations structured around racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and the marginalization of groups of peoples perceived to be culturally or geographically different. Furthermore, centuries of ongoing indigenous people’s struggles in refusing colonial, settler-colonial, and state-led violence and dispossession of indigenous peoples of their land, territories, and resources continue to pose a critique of a global geopolitical order structured around the hegemony of Westphalian principles of territorialized state sovereignty and disavowal of indigenous sovereignty.
Viewed from this perspective, indigenous geopolitics is in dialogue with decolonial geopolitics. Geographers Adam Moore and Nour Joudah (2022) define decolonial geopolitics as an ongoing project of re-making the global geopolitical order beyond the persisting structures of global racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Moore and Joudah (2022) draw from the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois in critiquing a global geopolitical ordering rooted upon the “color line” while promoting transnational solidarity among marginalized peoples. In parallel with decolonial geopolitics, the framework of indigenous geopolitics offers valuable insights and approaches to creating alternative geopolitical relations that challenge present-day structures of domination, marginalization, or erasure of indigenous peoples under colonialism, settler-colonialism, or the contemporary state system. Furthermore, in re-casting the social and spatial processes through which indigenous communities maintain spaces of self-protection and peace amid violent conflicts as geopolitical work, the framework of indigenous geopolitics foregrounds efforts of indigenous peoples in creating or re-imagining an alternative geopolitical order beyond the dominant state system.
The central aim of this article is to think alongside indigenous peoples on how to grapple with the puzzle wherein efforts of indigenous communities in creating and maintaining alternative spaces of self-protection amid violent conflicts are often delegitimized by state or non-state armed actors. It is important to underscore that the set of theoretical and analytical perspectives and approaches articulated in this article does not seek to speak on behalf of any or entire communities of indigenous peoples. The article also does not aim to propose, offer or “scale up” a specific approach or “policy recommendation” on how indigenous peoples can better protect their communities during violent conflict. Many indigenous peoples communities around the world are already doing this work as they continue to engage with states and governments in their efforts in creating and maintaining spaces of self-protection against violence toward indigenous peoples. Rather, the intention of this article is to build an analytical framework of indigenous geopolitics to better understand the geopolitical dimensions of indigenous agency amid violent conflicts that foregrounds the contributions of indigenous scholars and integrates key ideas from the transdisciplinary literature of wartime civilian agency, social movements, and indigenous sovereignty.
Wartime Civilian Agency
The literature on wartime civilian agency establishes the active role of ordinary people amid violent conflicts. Even within a violent or closed context where repression, direct violence, or impunity restrict social movements, limit certain political actions or shrink civic spaces, many civilian communities remain agentive, primarily because they want to be safe and they care about how they are governed (Arjona 2016; Gowrinathan & Mampilly 2019; Kalyvas 2006). Three key processes are fundamental to civilian agency in violent conflicts: community cohesion, political infrastructure, and ideological or emotional motivations.
First, in a study on why some rebel groups allow for civilian input in managing local affairs in territories under rebel influence while others exclude civilians from local governance, Jori Breslawski (2021) underscores that the extent of cohesiveness of a civilian community determines the type of rebel governance and whether rebels would include or exclude community members in rebel governance or control of a particular community. Oliver Kaplan’s (2017) investigation of peace communities in Colombia reinforces the importance of community cohesion and autonomy as sources of civilian agency amid violent conflict. A second dimension of civilian agency in violent conflicts concerns the range and inventiveness of ordinary people in designing political and organizational mechanisms of protection and survival. Erin Baines and Emily Paddon (2012) argue that ordinary people in Uganda use local knowledge to configure whether to protect their own lives by staying “neutral” or by either avoiding or accommodating armed actors. Felicity Gray (2022) also emphasizes how local communities in South Sudan enact self-protection through familial and neighborhood relationships.
The third set of processes that animate wartime civilian agency consists of ideological or emotional motivations of ordinary people. Ideological or emotional motivations also drive the ways in which civilian communities participate in insurgency or counterinsurgency or create different mechanisms or infrastructures that bolster community self-protection from conflict-related violence and harm. Juan Masullo (2021) argues that a set of normative commitments internal to a community explains why some civilian communities overtly oppose non-state armed groups while others demonstrate opposition through nonviolent means. Elisabeth Jean Wood (2003) reveals that emotional and moral motivations, a level of refusal to acquiesce to state power, and a sense of authorship and pride—Wood refers to this as the set of emotions and feelings around the “pleasure of agency”—are potent drivers of high-risk collective action and civilian participation in an insurgency.
New Social Movements
New social movements literature proposes alternative ways of analyzing civilian agency outside established or mainstream practices or notions of resistance or political participation. Anthropologist James Holston (2008, page 263) proposes “counterpolitics” to capture new forms of civic participation among socially excluded or marginalized communities not through a systematic usurpation of political power from ruling elites, but through the “autoconstruction” of the self and citizen. Anthropologist Asef Bayat (2010, page 14) refers to the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” in studying how ordinary people resist autocratic regimes and how these collective actions of “nonmovement” are distinct from organized social movements such that they are “action-oriented, rather than ideologically driven.”
Meanwhile, theorists Chantal Mouffe (2005) and Jacques Rancière (1999) recast what politics mean outside of what they view as narrow, technocratic, and pragmatic practices confined within the technical and bureaucratic deliberations that characterize representative liberal democracy. They argue that formal or technocratic politics can be better understood as “post-democracy” or “post-politics”, depoliticized processes of managing populations and taming social and political contradictions (see also Barnett 2004). Furthermore,Rancière (1999) argues that the aim of democratic movements must be to “return or retrieve” the political away from traditional or hegemonic frameworks and practices of politics.
The literature on new social movements allows us to re-consider not only what is agentive but also what might be considered politics outside formal or state-centric politics or beyond political struggles led by organized social movements. As Clive Barnett (2004, page 504) argues, “one of the most important contributions of various new social movements has been to help redefine what counts as politics, by making visible new objects of public contention, as well as by developing new practices through which to pursue political objectives.” Drawing from these contributions, we can re-think wartime civilian agency toward two directions. First, we can attend to the processes through which marginalized communities who are mostly unorganized are engaged in politics that aim toward fundamental inclusion into society as political actors, re-inscribing their sovereignty or autonomy in relation to political elites. Second, we can examine how marginalized communities who are often portrayed as passive actors in need of humanitarian assistance as actively and directly transforming society beyond the familiar terrain of organized protests or social movements yet effectively re-working power relations.
Indigenous Sovereignty
Quechua national and scholar Sandy Grande (2015) argues that indigeneity is inherently radical in that it transcends the nation-state. In the contemporary world where nation-states are the main organizing framework for global geopolitical order and power, indigenous peoples are compelled to both resist and insist that their communities and their lives matter and that their ties to, and control of, their land and territory are acknowledged and accorded respect by nation-states. However, from the perspectives of nation-states and other state-centric political forces, the assertion of political autonomy, neutrality or self-determination among indigenous peoples destabilizes the political order and geopolitical imagination that reproduce the nation-state. Indeed, contemporary efforts of indigenous peoples in exercising agency in defense of their land, communities and futures underscore the persisting contradictions between indigenous sovereignty and the hegemonic territorialized sovereignty of the nation-state (see Agnew 1994).
While there are varying and contrasting perspectives among indigenous scholars concerning the pursuit of indigenous sovereignty as the main political objective or political project of indigenous peoples’ movements, indigenous communities demonstrate and bolster indigenous sovereignty in everyday life. Scholars debate whether sovereignty, as a fundamental aspect of Western and colonial political order and a source of violence to many indigenous communities, represents the comprehensive agenda of indigenous peoples’ movements toward autonomy, self-determination, justice, or peace (see Deloria & Lytle 1984; Alfred 1999; Lyons 2000).
However, as Kahnawà:ke Mohawak scholar Audra Simpson (2014) argues, it is also possible not to fully discount indigenous sovereignty as a site of indigenous struggles and politics. Indigenous peoples, Simpson (2014) reminds us, navigate a political order with a “nested form of sovereignty” wherein indigenous sovereignty co-exists with nation-state sovereignty and other sovereignties. Rather than distancing from the concept of sovereignty, Simpson (2014) points out that indigenous peoples invoke the experience of sovereignty and nationhood that preceded colonial or settler-colonial state sovereignty, allowing them to maintain and sustain indigenous lives and worlds within contemporary settler societies or nation-states.
Indigenous Geopolitics as Integrative Socio-Spatial Analysis of Peace
Within the transdisciplinary literature on peace and conflict, scholars are attending increasingly to an integrative socio-spatial analysis of peace and conflict dynamics. In the last decade, scholars of political geography have established the subfield of “peace geographies” to foreground the reality that peace, like war, must be understood as a set of relational, place-specific, and dynamic processes (Loyd 2012; Koopman 2011, 2020; Williams & McConnell 2011). Rather than viewing peace as “a point of reference, an empty ‘other’ defined by an absence of violence”, as geographers Philippa Williams and Fiona McConnell (2011, 928) remind us, geographers re-orient peace as a set of relational, place-specific and dynamic processes.
Geographers examine peace as a set of social and spatial processes that can be better understood as “situated knowledges” rooted in specific historical and cultural contexts (McConnell and Williams 2011, 929). In re-thinking peace as place-specific processes, geographers suggest that peace geographies are uneven, multiple, and constantly changing across time and space (Koopman 2011a, 2020). Thus, recent research on peace geographies focuses upon the unique and meaningful material constructions and co-productions of peace and place, from studies concerning peace parks (King 2010), peace communities (Courtheyn 2016, 2022), and peace zones (Macaspac 2018, 2022).
A related and parallel shift toward spatial approaches is happening in peace and conflict studies. Annika Björkdahl and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (2016a) mobilize spatial concepts including space, place, scale, and sites to better understand the transition from war to peace. Drawing from the “spatial turn” in the humanities, social sciences, and feminist approaches to space and place, the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies examines the relationality between space, conflict, and peace (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016b, 2022; Brigg and George 2020; Carabelli 2018; Engel 2020; Forde 2019a; Gusic 2019; 2022). At the same time, the emergent scholarship on “everyday peace” focuses on the local scale to better understand grassroots or bottom-up peacebuilding practices, instead of top-down, state-centric, technical, or expert-driven peacebuilding projects (Firchow 2018, MacGinty 2021).
Building upon the “local turn” in peace and conflict studies, scholars of everyday peace focus upon the agentive capacities of ordinary people to better capture a range of social practices of peacebuilding “from below” drawing from James Scott’s (1985) notion of “hidden transcripts” and “weapons of the weak”. Elsewhere I have proposed the analytical framework of spatial practices as a set of intentional and routinized actions that are shaped by, and in turn shape, the social and material world to bring together scholarly conversations in the transdisciplinary field of peace and conflict studies that are emerging in parallel yet siloed from each other despite shared spatial perspectives (Macaspac and Moore 2022).
An empirical focus on indigenous spaces of community self-protection and peace amid violent conflicts highlights the analytical limits of the literature of wartime civilian agency in attending to the geopolitical impact of the social and spatial practices required of indigenous peoples in the upkeep of these spaces. As I illustrate above, integrating the contributions of wartime civilian agency with the literature on new social movements, critical and decolonial geopolitics, and indigenous sovereignty offers a more capacious approach and orientation in understanding the political, geographic, social, and spatial registers of the dynamics that animate the maintenance and production of indigenous spaces of community self-protection and peace.
Peace Zones as Spaces of Community Self-Protection and Peace
Peace zones are contentious spaces. As spaces of community self-protection and peace amid violent conflicts, peace zones underscore the geopolitical tensions between, on the one hand, efforts of civilian communities in refusing conflict-related violence, and on the other hand, the geopolitical state-centric projects of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Scholars have traced the emergence of the first set of local or community-led peace zones in the late 1980s in the Philippines including in the municipality of indigenous peoples of Sagada and other municipalities in Mindanao (Avruch & Jose 2007; Engelbrecht & Kaushik 2015; Garcia 2007; Hancock & Mitchell 2007; Santos 2005).The practice of designating civilian communities as peace zones has circulated globally in the last three decades. Many civilians have transformed their communities into peace zones or peace communities, including in Colombia (Courtheyn 2016; Kaplan 2017; Masullo 2021), the Caucasus, particularly in Georgia (Aslanov et al. 2017; Kakabadze 2010), Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically in Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone (Allouche & Jackson 2019), and in Northern Ireland (Hancock 2012).
The scholarship on peace zones examines the phenomenon primarily through the framework of civilian agency. Scholars foreground different forms of collective actions that are required of civilian communities in maintaining the peace zones including writing petitions, negotiations with state and non-state armed actors, or protests. Scholars interpret the peace zones as expressions or products of civilian autonomy (Kaplan 2017), civilian noncooperation (Masullo 2021), civil resistance (Allouche & Jackson 2019), solidarity (Courtheyn 2016), and constant refusal of violence (Macaspac 2018). Recent scholarship seeks to capture not only the social but also the spatial processes that animate peace zones. Elsewhere I have examined the multiple spatialities of peace zones required in making the peace zone work (Macaspac 2022). Rather than privileging singular spatial concepts, I have proposed that peace zones can be better understood through the related spatialities of scale, space, and place as socio-spatial processes mobilized simultaneously by community members.
Notwithstanding these scholarly contributions to our understanding of the peace zone, we know very little about the geopolitical work required of civilian communities in the upkeep of the peace zone in the context of violent conflicts between state and non-state armed actors. Furthermore, while scholarly analyses examine the social interactions between local peace zones, national peace processes, or international humanitarian projects (Hancock 2017; Hancock & Iyer 2007), there is less work that unpacks the geopolitical dimensions of peace zones as spaces of community self-protection and peace in relation to insurgency and counterinsurgency. In what follows, I provide an overview of the dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the Philippines. I give particular attention to the implications of the armed conflict for indigenous peoples to foreground the geopolitical tensions between efforts of indigenous communities in carving out peace zones as alternative spaces of community self-protection and peace and the respective geopolitical projects of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines
For over half a century, a violent conflict between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (grp; also referred to in the article as the state) and the Communist Party of the Philippines (cpp; also referred to as non-state actor or communist movement) transformed many civilian communities into battlegrounds. Since 1968, cpp has been waging an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-feudal grassroots movement framed as a “national democratic revolution” following Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought (Guerrero 1970; 1971; Imbong & Sison 2020; Sison 1995).2 Through its armed organization, the New People’s Army (npa) formed in 1969, cpp maintains its presence primarily in agricultural or indigenous communities in mostly remote, rural, or highland areas across the country.3
The npa’s overall goal is to build political power “from the countrysides to the cities” and organize civilian supporters into a “revolutionary people’s government” that functions as alternative political governing units, including administering “revolutionary justice” at the village level (Jopson 2014). Arguably the longest ongoing communist insurgency in the world, the cpp and npa sustain civilian support and participation through socio-economic and political programs. In rural areas, the npa mobilizes participation from farmers and indigenous peoples through agrarian reform, provision of basic health and educational services, and building grassroots political power amid decades of persisting state neglect and military abuses in the country.4
Over five decades of state counterinsurgency have failed in eliminating communist insurgency in the country. In 2002, drawing on the post-9/11 framework of the U.S.-led “global war on terror”, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (afp) “re-engineered” its counterinsurgency strategy including direct targeting of what the military claims as “front organizations” or civilian support networks of the npa (Chua 2006). Recently, the state and military adopted a “holistic”, “whole-of-nation”, or “people-centered” counterinsurgency approach that mandates and mobilizes civilian agencies of the entire state bureaucracy to participate in counterinsurgency efforts (Andreopoulos, Macaspac and Galkin 2020). In the Philippines, state counterinsurgency strategies are designed as an “end-game strategy” of eliminating the communist movement definitively. However, ending guerilla-style communist insurgencies is a complex process that requires systemic changes (Imbong 2019).
Both state and cpp, through the latter’s political organization, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (ndfp), with the mediation of the government of Norway, have signed on a few landmark documents, including the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (carhrihl).5 Signed in 1998, carhrihl obliges both parties to observe the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on the protocols of war based upon the recognition of the cpp as a belligerent sovereign actor in conflict with the Philippine state.6 Under the carhrihl, the government and cpp co-established the Joint Monitoring Committee (jmc), which is tasked to ensure compliance to international protocols of war (opapru 2023).
Notwithstanding these efforts and achievements within the formal peace negotiations between the state and cpp, the formal peace process has been largely intermittent and inconclusive in the last three decades (Bell and Farahnoosh 2015). Conflict-related human rights violations also continue. Over the last two decades, human rights defenders in the country have demanded state accountability over hundreds of cases of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and political vilification or “red-tagging” of activists, human rights defenders, journalists, members of civil society organizations or religious communities, farmers, and indigenous peoples who are often labeled as cpp or npa members (Karapatan 2008, 2012, 2017, 2022). International human rights experts and UN rapporteurs have also published extensive findings of human rights violations related to counterinsurgency campaigns in the country (Alston 2007, 2008; Bachelet 2020).
Impact of the Conflict on Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous peoples communities in the Philippines are highly contested spaces fought over by state and non-state armed actors. The Commission on Human Rights (chr), a national human rights institution in the Philippines, reports that both state security forces and the npa are recruiting combatants actively within indigenous peoples or “Lumad” communities in Mindanao. chr also documented that a total of 10 and 8 alleged cases of extrajudicial killings of Lumad peoples were committed by the military and npa, respectively, between 2001 and 2015 (Balagtas & Yap 2015).
Furthermore, state counterinsurgency practices have directly impacted indigenous peoples’ communities. In 2002, the Philippine government, by virtue of Executive Order No. 21, initiated the National Internal Security Plan (nisp), also called Oplan Bantay Laya (Operation Freedom Watch) (Chua 2006). A core feature of nisp is its application on indigenous peoples (nisp-ip) that aims to focus counterinsurgency operations within indigenous peoples’ communities, which military officials identified as “hotbeds” or “stable base areas” of the npa. In his official visits to the Philippines, Rodolfo Stavenhagen (2003a; 2003b), former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples, recommended to the Philippine state that military units and paramilitary groups be withdrawn from indigenous areas and to demilitarize indigenous peoples’ territories. Stavenhagen (2003b) also criticized the government’s decision to revoke a policy that would have required “free, prior, and informed consent” from indigenous peoples communities prior to any military operations within indigenous communities.
International and local human rights experts also criticize state counterinsurgency practices that target indigenous community leaders and human rights defenders. Philip Alston (2007; 2008), the former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, emphasizes several cases of political vilification, labeling, or guilt by association, also known as “red-tagging” where human rights defenders and indigenous peoples grassroots or activist organizations are identified by state security forces as “communist fronts”. Many indigenous leaders, activists, and rights defenders, including Kankana-ey leader, international people’s rights activist, and former UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, have been accused by the government of terrorism and being npa members (UN News 2019). In many parts of the country, indigenous peoples often have to rely upon community practices to protect themselves from the consequences of both communist insurgency and state counterinsurgency.
Indigenous Geopolitics and the Making of Peace Zones
The framework of indigenous geopolitics, specifically the attention to indigenous agency, territoriality and sovereignty in relation to the state and national and global geopolitical processes, is generative in drawing out the kinds of social and spatial practices required from indigenous peoples in the upkeep of peace zones as processes of community protection and peace amid active violent conflicts. In the Philippines, the emergence of community-led peace zones underscores efforts of civilian communities in carving alternative political spaces of community self-protection and peace in the context of insurgency and counterinsurgency particularly when both state and non-state armed actors fail to protect civilian lives or are the source of violence, harm, and civilian deaths. Yet community efforts of making the peace zone work often face contention or delegitimization from state and non-state armed actors.
Sagada Peace Zone
In the northern part of the Philippines, community members of the indigenous peoples municipality of Sagada strive to maintain their municipality as a peace zone despite constant attempts or practices of the military and npa in undermining community practices of self-protection (Macaspac 2018). State and non-state armed actors often frame their opposition to the peace zone in Sagada through an assumed geopolitical imagining of the “national processes” of national security or counterinsurgency on the part of the state or national democratic revolution on the part of the npa.
Sagada is one of ten municipalities of Mountain Province in the Cordillera Administrative Region (car).7 In October 1989, a member of the military opened fire in the public market, leaving two children dead. By November of the same year, npa members attacked the military encampment in the elementary school, and the ensuing battle left one child dead. In response, municipal officials and community leaders called for Sagada’s demilitarization. Thomas “Champag” Killip, Sagada’s vice mayor at that time, led the Municipal Peace Committee (mpc),8 an ad hoc group composed of lallakay (tribal elders), municipal officials, and select community leaders including women, teachers, activists, and members of the local Episcopal Church.9
However, compliance among the military and npa is mixed. Both state and non-state armed groups flout constantly the set of community rules and policies against armed operations in the municipality (Macaspac 2018; see also Dizon 2011). On the one hand, some officials of the military referred to the peace zone as a ‘sanctuary’ for the npa (Mallari 2007). On the other hand, the npa leadership criticizes the peace zone as part of the military’s counterinsurgency tactic of ‘hamletting’ where military units limit access to civilian communities to deny rebels of access to food, resources, or civilian support (Udyaw 2014). Community members negotiate constantly between the military and npa to make the peace zone work (Macaspac 2018).
The Peace Zone as Indigenous Geopolitics
Viewing the peace zone through the lens of indigenous geopolitics allows us to acknowledge that the peace zone in Sagada presents itself as a geopolitical dilemma to state and non-state armed actors. For instance, both the military and npa have claimed consistently that the peace zone in Sagada came from either side as a strategy to mobilize the community in support of, or to oppose, either insurgency or counterinsurgency. “The military says the peace zone was a communist initiative and the npa says it’s a cia-initiative,” “Greg” (personal interview 2014) explains, “and we assert that, no, it’s not an ideological thing. The peace zone is a sentiment of the people because of what had been happening within the community. That was the only reason we gave.”
Both remarks from state and non-state actors reflect a common tendency among the military and rebels to associate the tactics and actions of community members in Sagada with either insurgency or counterinsurgency. For the military, the peace zone facilitates insurgency or encourages rebel presence, particularly since community members often refuse military operations within the community. Meanwhile, among the rebels, the peace zone restricts rebel operations and mobilization and therefore lends itself toward counterinsurgency or counter-revolution. As a result of these assumptions by the military and npa that confines the peace zone strictly within the opposing projects of insurgency or counterinsurgency, Killip (personal interview 2017) explains that both sides could not see the rationale of the peace zone from the community’s perspectives:
Both would not accept the peace zone. The left did not like the peace zone—they imply that it is an ‘outside’ idea. The military thinks the peace zone means not letting them enter the community. The community has to prove that this mechanism is mainly for our survival, simply so that people can continue to do their livelihood. This is the simple and straightforward reason behind this concept. It has nothing to do with any ideology. What the community wants is not to be disturbed by armed conflicts. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
While community members view the peace zone as a mechanism for survival rather than an ideological project, the military and npa view the peace zone as a break from, or interruption of, the spatial processes of insurgency and counterinsurgency. For example, under the premise of the npa’s “national democratic revolution”, marginalized communities that compose the majority of the country’s population, particularly farmers in the countryside including indigenous communities, are assumed as part of the political community or subjective forces that must be organized and mobilized to participate in the insurgency. Meanwhile, the military’s “whole-of-nation” approach to counterinsurgency mobilizes all citizens and local communities to participate in the making of national security particularly in eliminating internal threats of insurgency within the national territory.
These spatial assumptions by the state and communist movement structure the responses of the military and npa toward the peace zone in Sagada. As Killip (personal interview 2017) illustrates, both armed actors minimize or delegitimize community efforts of self-protection by presenting the peace zone as a project imposed upon by “outside” or external actors:
The peace zone continues to evolve and we have to show them (military and rebels) that this is not being introduced from the outside. This is their only reason: that we are serving the interest of “outside” forces. The term peace zone has been the most understood by many. If we change that to something else, for example, “demilitarize” or other terms, it’s still the same purpose that we’re trying to promote. The most important thing for us is that it comes from us. It has evolved through community dynamics and it was not meant to be biased against the left or the right. It was meant to protect the community and its inhabitants from any armed incidents whether ideological or tribal or other things. It’s a citizen’s right to decide their own way to protect themself. The peace zone may sound controversial depending on one’s ideological point of view. But at the same time, we can not confine the definition of the peace zone in one framework.
In this interview, Killip underscores self-determination as a key dimension of indigenous movements toward sovereignty or autonomy, which both state and non-state armed actors minimize by either categorizing indigenous communities in the country as ‘national minority’ or subsuming indigenous communities within the national projects of insurgency or counterinsurgency.
Refusing Violence
For “Greg”, one of the sources of the community members’ capacities in negotiating with armed actors is grounded upon the community’s grasp of the geopolitics of community self-protection in the context of insurgency and counterinsurgency. “There are npa who would be roaming around with their firearms”, “Greg” recalls (personal interview 2014). “People will tell them to leave their arms before they could enter the town. They have to abide (to the community policy) because they will be isolated (from community members) if they do not. Even the military, if they set up camp within the town, people will say camp somewhere outside the town because you might be inviting your enemy and we will be at risk. The supremacy of the civilians over the military: we have to invoke that.” I highlight this interview to underscore that the community’s collective refusal is spatial in ways that it generates and produces a space of self-protection that contends against the conflict environment that armed actors create through their respective armed presence and operations.
Re-casting indigenous refusal of state and non-state violence as a key geopolitical process is important because it orients our attentions not only to the concept of civilian agency, but more specifically, to the social and spatial practices that civilian communities do in transforming spaces of conflict toward spaces of peace or civilian protection. Jutta Bakonyi and Berit Bliesemann de Guevarra (2009) illustrate how violence assumes specific logics and spatial patterns. As spatial processes, insurgency and counterinsurgency create and reproduce an environment of fear, anxiety, danger, and urgency and place civilian lives at risk of deaths and harm. Armed actors plan and carry out their respective operations unilaterally, entering and moving through communities often without the community’s consent. In Sagada, armed encampments, patrols, ambushes, and other armed activities of the military and npa are spatial processes that transform the daily life of community members. In response, community members refuse the spatial practices of armed actors in occupying and transforming community space into a conflict environment.
Re-Inscribing Indigenous Space
“Armed groups,” Killip (personal interview 2017) argues, “ should respect the peace zone. We should be able to develop our peaceful way of living. We have been doing this even before ‘government’ came. How come you (government) come and dictate the way things must be for us?” In this statement, Killip emphasizes two key geopolitical concerns in the upkeep of the community peace zone. On the one hand, each of the armed actors delegitimize or undermine community efforts with the shared argument that the collective efforts of the community to protect themselves from conflict-related violence and harm are imposed upon by the opposing force. On the other hand, both the npa and military view the concept and practice of community self-protection outside the purview of the frameworks and goals of insurgency and counterinsurgency as unacceptable. In both perspectives, armed actors view the peace zone as a spatial anomaly that disrupts each of their respective maps of real or imagined geopolitical control across the space of the nation-state.
As the peace zone in Sagada illustrates, state and non-state forces fail to understand and acknowledge the multiple and co-existing sovereignties within the nation-state. In fact, as a material expression of indigenous space and sovereignty, the peace zone is a source of anxiety for both state and non-state forces. Indigenous resistance to state counterinsurgency or non-state insurgency is often represented as going against the “national interests” of the nation-state or the Filipino people, whether pertaining to national security or a national revolution. As Lenape scholar Joanne Barker (2021) argues, the nation-state often presents indigenous resistance as a process that hinders or delays national stability.
However, the geopolitical tensions around the peace zone are not because of the continuous assertion of the community of the legitimacy of their efforts but rather, due to the limits or failure of state and non-state forces in understanding and acknowledging indigenous sovereignty within the nation-state. Barker (2021, page 2) posits that indigenous territorial or place-based practices of shared governance, cooperation, reciprocity, and genuine equity inform and form alternative social worlds. In many ways, the peace zone represents an alternative social order of peace, security, and civilian protection that is distinct from the geopolitical imagination of the state and non-state armed actors.
While some indigenous peoples’ movements and struggles for sovereignty or autonomy are framed directly as struggles for secession from the nation-state or taking back indigenous land, some are focused more toward indigenous governmentality, territoriality or self-determination. For example, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, where indigenous peoples declared autonomy unilaterally after the Mexican state failed to implement indigenous rights accords, frames autonomy less as direct claims toward control of their territory and more toward indigenous critiques of globalization and global capitalism (Speed & Reyes 2002).
In Sagada, community efforts to maintain the peace zone amid the competing territorialities of the state and the communists are aimed not toward disintegrating or breaking away from the spaces and spatialities of the state or a spatial project imposed upon by actors external to the indigenous community. Rather, the daily work of carving a space of self-protection can be better understood as geopolitical work of the indigenous community in refusing the spatial assumptions and logics of state and non-state forces in mobilizing the indigenous community into the projects of insurgency and counterinsurgency. The indigenous community’s capacity to refuse the spatial logics of insurgency and counterinsurgency embodies and illustrates the work of indigenous sovereignty in parallel to nation-state sovereignty.
Conclusion
In this article, I have sought to establish the ways in which indigenous agency transform spaces of conflict and violence into spaces of community self-protection and peace. I have proposed that the framework of indigenous geopolitics foreground indigenous peoples as geopolitical actors, emphasizing that the upkeep of the peace zone relies upon the simultaneous processes of refusing state and non-state violence and re-inscribing indigenous space within the nation-state. Future research may focus on indigenous peacebuilding practices as an alternative framework to dominant Western peace approaches (Mac Ginty 2008) and the interactions between indigenous community self-protection and unarmed civilian protection practices (Bliesemann de Guevarra, Furnari & Julian 2021; Julian 2020). Both indigenous peacebuilding and unarmed civilian protection challenge taken-for-granted assumptions that civilian protection and peace can only be guaranteed or provided by the state. The framework of indigenous geopolitics could contribute toward scholarly efforts to decolonize dominant theories and practices of civilian protection, peacebuilding, and peace. Finally, this article has sought to think alongside indigenous peoples in re-casting peace zones as geopolitical spaces and processes of indigenous peoples’ refusal of state or non-state violence and the re-inscription of indigenous space within the nation-state.
Notes
Name and personal identity of research interlocutors included in the article have been anonymized and indicated with quotation marks, except for an interlocutor who is a prominent government official and who provided consent to release their name.
For scholarship examining the historical, anti-colonial, political, and economic sources of the emergence of the communist movement or national democratic revolution in the Philippines, see San Juan (2007) and Tadiar (2009).
For research on npa’ s territorial control, see Rubin (2019). For an empirical case study of the communist movement in rural Philippines, see Holden (2013).
For a discussion of the comprehensive social, political, and economic programs in consideration for the peace talks between the state and cpp, see the Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines: ndfp Draft as of January 12, 2017 (ndfp 2017).
The carhrihl obliges both parties to observe the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on the protocols of war based upon the recognition of the cpp as a belligerent sovereign actor in conflict with the Philippine state. It is the first of the four substantive agendas of the peace process between the government and cpp, which includes human rights, socio-economic reforms, political and constitutional reforms, and the end of hostilities and disposition of forces (carhrihl 1998).
The signing of the carhrihl is historic as it is the first of the four substantive agendas of the peace process between the government and cpp, which includes human rights, socio-economic reforms, political and constitutional reforms, and the end of hostilities and disposition of forces (carhrihl 1998).
Sagada has an estimated population of 11,000, predominantly of the Kankana-ey ethnolinguistic group and indigenous community who also self-identify as Igorot, iSagada, Kankana-ey, and i-Applai. This article does not examine the historical, colonial, or political-economic sources of the formation of indigenous identity among the Kankana-ey or Igorot peoples of the Cordillera region. For a historical overview of Sagada and the Cordillera region, see Finnin (2005); Fry (2006); Scott (1988, 1974).
The mpc wrote a “12-Point Town Resolution and Plea for the Demilitarization of Sagada” that lays out the set of community regulations over the conduct of armed conflict in Sagada including a ‘total pull out’ of all armed groups within the geographical jurisdiction of the municipality, guarantees of safe conduct or passage for all wounded or killed on either side and medical rescue teams, and designating Sagada as a venue for peaceful negotiations.
Majority of the indigenous community of Sagada are members of the Episcopalian Church, which was established in 1904 led by Rev. Father John Staunton (1864-1944), an American missionary from Michigan (see Scott 2013).
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