Mesrob Vartavarian, Visiting Fellow, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University

Title: "A Special Relationship: the United States and the Philippine Military"

This lecture emphasizes the influence of underlying structures over discreet events. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the United States has shaped and interacted with coercive institutions in the Philippines in pursuit of its own strategic interests. Although the primary brief of the Philippine military has been internal repression, American officials repeatedly modified its coercive praxis during the colonial and postcolonial periods. This has allowed for flexible responses to mutating political contexts. While civilian oligarchs have received much attention from scholars, military officers, often closely linked to their American counterparts, have also been deeply involved in politics. Philippine military professionalism, praetorianism, and de facto autonomy were all encouraged by the United States to either facilitate or place limits upon political change.