Violent enclosures, violated livelihoods: environmental and military territoriality in a Philippine frontier

Background

Historically, agrarian change in the Philippines involved shifts in land enclosure, from colonial and church usurpation to capitalist intensification and protected areas, sparking peasant resistance and the rise of insurgent groups like the New People's Army (NPAs). Currently, in Palawan, military operations against the NPA often conflate peasants and insurgents. These military actions converge with conservation in national park buffer zones, creating restrictive and politically charged spaces for indigenous groups like the Tagbanua. Authorities frequently stigmatize their traditional land use as criminal, such as swidden farming.

Goals and Methods

This research analyzes how the Tagbanua community, indigenous resource users, navigate the discursive and material consequences of converging environmental governance and militarized spaces as overlapping enclosures within a Palawan protected area, specifically focusing on the buffer zone of Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. The study aims to demonstrate how the co-emergence of conservation and military territories establishes a governance model rooted in fear and intimidation, often associating local farmers with insurgents and criminalizing them. An important objective is to illustrate how these converging enclosures' structural and discursive dimensions restrict possibilities and intensify livelihood vulnerability through increased surveillance and control. The authors use qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, oral histories, observation, and surveys, to assess whether converging military and park enclosures exacerbated livelihood vulnerability for Tagbanua swiddeners.

Conclusions and Takeaways

The convergence of military actions and park buffer zone management negatively impacts the Tagbanua community's livelihoods. These intersecting governance regimes create discursive and structural violence, redefining land use norms and equating Tagbanua farmers with insurgents, thereby criminalizing their traditional swidden farming and forest resource extraction. Military forces and park managers, acting as state extensions, restrict access and reclassify resource use, worsening existing inequalities. This results in reduced swidden yields, increased non-timber forest product harvesting under poor conditions, rising debt, and overall marginalization, potentially increasing vulnerability to insurgency recruitment.