RESEARCH
The TWSC has a long tradition of research on critical political economy, development issues, democratization, and governance. Research is focused on the search for progressive discourses and alternative paradigms. Guided by the principles of participatory research, the main objectives of the Center's researches are to develop Third World perspectives on various issues and to translate knowledge generated in order to promote actions for change or to improve existing local actions. Central to this process of knowledge transformation is the role of social movements and civil society, which the Center works closely with.
The TWSC's research agenda for the next three years is to document and analyze resistance and alternatives to neoliberal globalization in Southeast Asia and to locate spaces for policy intervention.
Current Research Projects
Mendiola Narratives: Memories of Mobilizations and Confrontations with the State
In this research, a biography of a site and a collection of narratives of social movement actors serve as the infrastructure of social memory. This research surfaces and records in audiovisual format the personal narratives of those who were once witnesses and participants to protest actions in Mendiola. Mendiola is the name of the street that leads directly to the Malacañang Palace, the seat of the Philippine presidency. Since the 1960s, Mendiola continues to be the foremost site of physical confrontation between social movement actors waging protests and the state. Generations of social movement actors have braved bullets and barricades in the street of Mendiola just to be able to put forward their grievances within shouting distance of the Philippine president. Mendiola then is a palimpsest on which many stories and deeds of activism, of the Filipinos untiring quest for justice, have been inscribed─some of which in blood. It is the task of this research to encourage social movement actors to articulate their stories of Mendiola. The proposed research makes visible their refusal to forget the injustices suffered by the Filipinos at the hand of their own government and the resolute stance that the Filipinos have taken to speak truth to power.
For more information, please contact the coordinator.
The Decade-Long Membership of the Philippines in the World Trade Organization
It has been more than ten years since the Philippines signed into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade-Uruguay Round. Yet, there has been no objective, systematic assessment on what the country has achieved in the multilateral arena of international trade. This research-publication on the decade-long membership of the Philippines in the World Trade Organization intends to fill gaps in research on the implementation of WTO-based policies by offering political economy perspective to the discourse. With heuristic tools drawn from different social science disciplines, the research reinforces the position of the university in trade policymaking issues.
For more information, please contact the coordinator.
Global Civil Society Movements: Dynamics in International Campaigns and National Implementation
This study of select civil society movements is part of the larger project of United Nations Reasearch Institute for Social Development for understanding the dynamics of social movements in both international and national level contexts. Such dynamics is examined not only in terms of actual initiatives and campaigns but also of the structures and processes underlying the interactions at local, national and transnational contexts of the movements. [ more ]
Marxism in the Philippines
The TWSC has always been associated to Marxist theorizing. This concern is motivated, among other things, by the question of radical perspectives as framework for analyzing Philippine political economy and its relevance to political praxis. Sixteen years after its seminal Marxism in the Philippines second series, the TWSC returns to this concern once again against the backdrop of severe economic crisis, politics of polarization, and neoliberal project of economic globalization. Revisiting Marxism is likewise an occasion for scholars and activists to re-examine Marxism (and its Filipino variant) in light of the growing importance of competing views–notably gender, nation, ethnicity, and religion.
For more information, please contact the coordinator.
Since its establishment, the Center has completed 13 major research projects on different aspects of Philippine and Third World societies and states.