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Transcending borders: alternative approaches to territorial disputes

The rapidly unfolding reconfiguration of societies in the world today brings into question long-held systems of thought and action with respect to international relations, state-citizen interactions, concepts of national identity, territoriality, and national sovereignty.  States are becoming less and less able to assert their notions of national sovereignty in the face of globalizing actors and...

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Asian Development Bank has a chance to get the ‘do no harm’ principle right

The board of directors of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is currently reviewing the draft of a proposed Environmental and Social Framework (ESF), which outlines new operational policies to better address environmental and social risks in the bank’s projects.  This proposed framework seeks to update ADB’s 15-year-old Safeguard Policy Statement to ensure the relevance of...

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Sara Duterte’s breakaway

Vice President Sara Duterte telegraphed her imminent pullout from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s Cabinet on June 12 in as succinct a declaration as could be desired in response to reporters’ questions about the state of the UniTeam. In saying that their alliance was formed only for the 2022 elections and that they are no longer...

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Lines and limitations

Time was when lines were clear. Like the lines between right and wrong, man and woman, God and the Devil. But now it is all about ambiguity, gray zone tactics, the hybrid world of virtual and real reality combined. Where are the lines? Some are purely illusory, like the infamous 10-dash line drawn by halfwits...

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How to take back what’s ours

Surely many Filipinos were startled by footage shown on ANC last week of a Chinese Navy helicopter hovering perilously low over Sandy Cay last March 23.  On the ground were Filipino marine scientists doing research on biodiversity and inspecting the apparently poor state of the corals at the sandbar about two nautical miles from the...

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Is the American empire unraveling?

We are not witnessing the last days of the American empire. Its crisis is real, but its trajectory of decline is likely to be protracted and uneven. After the fall of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, the United States stood at the apex of the unipolar world, unrivalled both politically and economically. Some...

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Guns snuff out lives and hinder national development

Civilians will now be allowed to own semiautomatic rifles as a result of the amendment of the implementing rules and regulations of Republic Act No. 10591 (or the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act), the Philippine National Police has announced.   According to Britain’s The Guardian in 2012, citing data from the United Nations Office on...

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Are we related to Donald Trump?

The human genome is very close to those of other creatures like the rat or the dog even if they look very different from us. We humans also belong to different races although we all sprang from one source (Africa). Learning these, you appreciate and feel more deeply the connectedness among all the earth’s peoples...