The most iconic moment in the history of Shark Tank is when Aaron Krause, the inventor of Scrub Daddy, waltzed into the tank to pitch a highly engineered polymer foam sponge with a smiley-face design. The male investors dismissed it. Lori Greiner, the sole woman on the panel, did not. She understood the household economy in a way the men at that table simply did not, invested $200,000 for a 20% equity stake, and secured the show’s most successful deal in history. Scrub Daddy has since crossed $1.4 billion in lifetime sales. Lori made over $100 million dollars.

When women are absent from the pitching room, entire economies get written off. For Southeast Asia’s booming startup ecosystem, keeping the investors’ pool a boys’ club means the region is blindfolding itself to its next economic giants.

Southeast Asia does not need more women to pitch. It needs more women to write the checks.

The status quo: Funding is going down, not up

Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem raised over $13 billion in venture capital in 2025, yet women-led ventures are receiving the thinnest slivers of that pie. All-women founding teams secured just 21 equity funding rounds in 2025, accounting for only 4.6% of total deal volume and a mere 3.2% of total capital raised, while all-male teams captured 83.7% of deal value. There is an obvious ceiling, and it is calcifying.

The popular rebuttal is that there are simply not enough women founders in the pipeline. Women own approximately a quarter of small and medium enterprises across the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, which puts that argument to rest immediately. The sharper question to ask is who sits on the other side of the table deciding whether they are worth funding. Only 17.9% of investment decision-makers at Southeast Asia-headquartered venture firms are women, and that figure has barely moved since 2023. A pipeline cannot fix itself when the gatekeepers are almost uniformly male.

I. Women investors invest more in women founders

A 2023 study by INSEAD Knowledge found that women venture capitalists are twice as likely to fund female-led startups compared to their male counterparts. That statistic is worth sitting with. Doubling the probability of investment is a structural advantage. For a female founder navigating a funding environment where all-women teams secured only 3.2% of total capital in 2025, having a woman on the other side of the table is almost a lifeline.

The reason for this gap in investment behavior goes beyond individual sympathy or shared experience. Investors evaluate founders through a process called pattern-matching: they fund what looks like what they have funded before. Historically, the archetype of a “successful founder” is a young male technologist who dropped out of an elite university, and male investors have been replicating that archetype for decades. The result is a self-reinforcing loop. Male investors fund male founders, male founders build the reference cases, and the reference cases tell male investors what success looks like. Women never enter the pattern, so they never enter the portfolio.

Women investors break that loop. They carry a different set of reference points, different market intuitions, and crucially, a different ability to recognize value in sectors that male investors have historically dismissed. Lori Greiner did not invest in Scrub Daddy because of its smiley-face appearance. She invested because she understood the household economy at a level of granularity that no one else in the room possessed. The same logic applies to every women-led healthtech, femtech, consumer wellness, and financial inclusion startup in Southeast Asia that gets passed over at pitch day because the men around the table cannot map it onto a prior win. Women investors often offer a market intelligence upgrade.

The argument that female founders simply need to perform better collapses under the data. Female-founded ventures perform as well as male-founded ones when controlling for sector, market, experience, and hours worked. The performance record is established. The funding gap persists anyway, which means the variable that requires correction is not founder quality but investor composition. In venture capital, recognition is determined entirely by who holds the pen. That’s why women investors need to be at the forefront of the pitching room.

II. SEA’s venture capital’s “bro culture” is economically costly

Southeast Asia’s VC ecosystem has a cultural problem it has not yet been honest enough to name. Among firms based in the region, the average women-to-men ratio in senior investment roles stands at 0.25, or one woman for every four men. That ratio means the person deciding which startups get funded, which founders get a second meeting, and which sectors get labeled “too niche” is almost always male. While that is a fact, it also has economic consequences.

Harvard Kennedy School research describes a hypermasculine “bro” culture in venture capital whose symptoms include extreme competitiveness, low psychological safety, a reliance on tight, insular networks, and a near-total absence of accountability around gender bias. For female founders, this culture functions like an invisible tax. Before they even deliver a pitch, they are already navigating an environment designed around the comfort of men. Research shows that female founders are evaluated through a gendered lens, assessed as higher-risk than equivalent male founders, and required to prove themselves to a standard their male counterparts are not held to. Due to this, female-founded teams have secured alarmingly low late-stage deals in the past two years across Southeast Asia^.. This is because no one with the power to fund them chose to champion them.

The cost of this culture extends beyond the individual founders it chooses to sideline. When an ecosystem systematically defunds women-led companies, it is eliminating a category of economic actors that has proven its value. Globally, female-led businesses generate higher revenue per dollar invested and reinvest more in their communities. In Southeast Asia, where the household economy is vast and underserved by formal finance, defunding women-led ventures is a category error that the data has been flagging for years

The counterpoint that sometimes surfaces is that gender-lens investing will eventually correct the problem on its own, without requiring women to occupy the actual seats of power. That misunderstands how investment cultures change. A male-dominated firm that adds a gender-lens policy without adding women to its investment committee is hanging a sign on a door while keeping the door locked. Culture in venture capital flows from who is in the room. If bro culture is the disease, male monoculture in the partnership is the condition that allows it to thrive. Dismantling it requires presence, not just intention.

III. Gender-lens investing needs women investors to survive

Gender-lens investing has built a compelling business case. Private equity firms with at least one woman in a senior investment role have raised $29.36 billion across 72 funds since 2020, capturing 67.8% of PE capital raised in the region. All-male teams, by comparison, captured just 32.2%. Gender-diverse investment teams have built a track record that outperforms. The financial argument for including women in investment decision-making has already been written by the data.

But here is what that track record cannot do on its own: it cannot survive without women in the rooms where decisions are made. Gender-lens investing is a strategy that requires its practitioners to see what others miss, to identify the market opportunity in a women-led healthcare platform or a femtech startup that male pattern-matching writes off as niche. That kind of sight is not guaranteed by policy. It is cultivated by experience, by having operated in markets that male investors have never had to navigate, and by understanding the consumer behaviors that women-led businesses are built around.

Consider what happens when a fund adopts gender-lens principles without diversifying its investment team. The deal sourcing still runs through male networks. The due diligence still applies male-centric benchmarks of what traction looks like. The board seats still go to candidates who fit a profile the male partners recognize. Gender-lens investing without women investors is a framework without a practitioner. The strategy exists on paper, yes, but the judgment required to execute it faithfully is missing. Research on investor behavior shows that women VCs are twice as likely to fund female-led startups, precisely because they possess that judgment organically. To want the outcomes of gender-lens investing while refusing to build the investor base that makes those outcomes likely is a contradiction the data refuses to sustain.

Every check written by an investor is a vote for what the economy prioritizes next. The sectors that women build, such as consumer health, financial inclusion, caregiving technology, and education, form the infrastructure of Southeast Asia’s economic future, even when they are treated as peripheral by the investors who should be competing for them. Women will own 75% of global discretionary spend by 2028. The companies serving that market will be worth trillions. The investors who recognize that value early will have outsized returns. The investors who do not will be funding the equivalent of a room full of men who passed on Scrub Daddy.

IV. Economic empowerment requires women to control capital

Entrepreneurship alone cannot close the gender wealth gap. A woman can build the company, assemble the team, grow the revenue, and still find herself structurally excluded from the networks that decide who gets funded at scale. The ceiling in women’s economic participation sits at the capital table, where the decisions about who gets to grow are made by people who were never taught to see her potential.

Capital is power in the most literal sense available to an economy. It determines which ideas survive, which markets get served, and which founders build the companies that define the next decade. When women control a proportionate share of that capital, the decisions that flow from it shift. The sectors that get funded expand. The founders who get championed diversify. The reference cases that investors use to pattern-match begin to include women. The loop, finally, runs in a different direction.

This is why increasing the number of women investors is as urgent as increasing the number of women entrepreneurs. A female founder who clears every hurdle and builds a successful company without a single female investor in her cap table has proven that individual excellence can survive a hostile system. But she has not changed the system. Changing the system requires women on the investment side, women who can redirect capital, build new reference cases, and make the next generation of female founders marginally less likely to spend their best years pitching in rooms that do not believe in them.

V. Limits: Women investors cannot do it alone

The case for more women investors is compelling, and the data that supports it is unambiguous. Intellectual honesty requires asking what this article does not resolve, because the structural barriers facing women in venture capital are not limited to the question of who writes the checks. They extend to who gets to build the career that eventually leads to writing them. Among Southeast Asia-based firms, 67.2% of regional venture investors still have no women in an investment decision-making role, a figure that has barely moved in three years despite mounting evidence that gender-diverse teams outperform. The persistence of that number points to a problem that sits upstream of the partner level: women are not entering the investment profession in sufficient numbers, and those who do are concentrated at junior levels with limited authority over final investment decisions. In many cases, women are the only female voice in predominantly male teams, with limited sway over investment decisions. Being present in a room and having the power to change its outcomes are two very different conditions, and conflating them flatters the progress that has been made.

The deeper problem is one of scale. Even where women investors exist and are actively championing female founders, female VCs do not yet control sufficient assets to continue investing in female-led firms as they scale. The concentration of women investors in early-stage and impact-focused funds means that female founders who clear the seed hurdle often encounter an all-male wall at Series A and beyond. That is precisely why all-women founding teams secured no late-stage deals across Southeast Asia in 2024 and 2025. The women investors who back them at the start do not have the fund size to follow through, and the male investors who do have that capacity remain unconvinced. According to a CrossBoundary analysis, Southeast Asia lags behind Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in adopting gender-lens investing at scale, despite having a larger and more developed startup ecosystem than either region. That gap is not explained by a lack of female founders or a shortage of financial instruments. It is explained by the absence of women at the senior levels of the funds, large enough to move the needle at the growth stage.

This matters for the article’s core argument because it means that calling for more women investors, without simultaneously addressing the structures that exclude women from investment careers in the first place, risks treating a systemic problem as though it has a compositional solution. More women at the table is necessary but not sufficient if those women remain outvoted, underfunded, or siloed in roles without full investment authority. Closing the gender finance gap requires a syndicated effort from investors, ecosystem builders, and policymakers working in parallel, not sequentially. The argument for more women investors is an argument for the transformation of the venture capital profession itself: in how investment careers are built, how fund managers are selected by LPs, how networks are accessed, and how the definition of a credible investor gets written and rewritten over time. Southeast Asia does not just need more women to enter the investment profession. It also needs the profession to change in ways that make women’s presence within it durable, powerful, and capable of compounding.

The way forward: The Philippines is already moving

The Philippines, long regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s more gender-progressive economies, is beginning to translate that reputation into infrastructure. Backed by Investing in Women, an initiative of the Australian Government that catalyzes inclusive economic growth through women’s economic empowerment across Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the Philippines, two Philippine-based initiatives are doing the structural work that the market has consistently failed to do on its own.

Kerubin Capital, founded in 2021 with the support of Investing in Women and the Manila Angel Investors Network, is building the Gender-Smart Investing Map of the Philippines, which is the first and only initiative of its kind in Southeast Asia. At the helm is Tina di Cicco, whose work as a gender-lens investor and leader exemplifies exactly what the data prescribes: a practitioner who can read a market that male pattern-matching has systematically undervalued. Under her stewardship, Kerubin operates as a living ecosystem tool designed to make visible, in granular detail, exactly where capital flows and which women-led businesses are positioned to absorb it. The map aggregates founders, investors, accelerators, intermediaries, and policy bodies into a single intelligence layer, which turns what is an invisible market into a legible one. That matters because the gender financing gap in the Philippines persists partly as an information problem: capital that would move toward women-led businesses cannot find them, and businesses that deserve capital cannot find the investors equipped to evaluate them. In a region where gender-lens investing has lagged behind the rhetoric supporting it, Kerubin is building the connective tissue the ecosystem has always needed.

Meanwhile, ARQ SME BDC has launched SheSecure, a private debt fund developed under the leadership of female investor Abigail Tan, that does more than lend to women-led businesses. It financially rewards them for deepening their gender equity practices, offering financing of up to PHP 30 million per enterprise with interest incentives tied to measurable improvements in workplace gender equality. The instrument is designed for the most neglected segment of the Philippine economy: businesses with assets between PHP 35 million and PHP 100 million, the range where women’s ownership drops sharply from a majority to just 16%. SheSecure is proving that gender-smart capital structures are commercially viable. The “missing middle” of women-led businesses has gone unfunded because the right financial instruments were never built for it, which is a design failure, not a market one, and one that Abigail Tan’s work at ARQ is now actively correcting.

Investing in Women is the common thread behind both initiatives, and that is precisely a point to note. Without catalytic public funding willing to absorb first-loss risk and underwrite the cost of building new models, neither Kerubin Capital nor SheSecure would exist. The market did not produce these tools on its own. They required a female investor and an organization with a vision broad enough to see the structural problem and patient enough to fund the solution before it was profitable. That is what Investing in Women provides, and why its role in the Southeast Asian gender-investing ecosystem is foundational rather than supplementary.

Southeast Asia has enough women building extraordinary things. What it lacks is enough women and enough men who see and understand the data in the rooms where those things get funded. The billionaire girls’ club is not a fantasy. The only question is whether Southeast Asia is willing to build the investment ecosystem that gets us there.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Author

Samantha Reese Han is an undergraduate Political Science student of Adamson University whose advocacy work spans youth civic engagement, legal literacy, and women’s empowerment in entrepreneurship. Professionally, she is a builder operating in the intersection of policy, capital, and advocacy. She serves as an Events and Partnerships Intern for the Senate of the Philippines, a Venture Capital Intern for Kerubin Capital, and a Deputy Director for Justitia Lab currently. She loves seeing ideas transform into social impact.

Across Southeast Asia, there is a kind of theft that does not appear in any ledger. It is committed daily, in the currency of hours, and on the very roads meant to bring order.

The mathematical understanding of time is its divisibility into units, such as years, months, days, and so on. Scientifically speaking, time is relative, depending on the speed of the subject or the strength of the gravitational pull it is moving in. But while these are all generally accepted truths, a less-examined reality of time is its dependence on the conditions through which it is lived. And in nations with poor transport infrastructures, the universal twenty-four hours are not felt uniformly.

Improvisation as infrastructure

Southeast Asia is characterized by close proximities, not only on the map but also on the clock, running on time zones that barely differ across borders. It also runs, quite literally, on similar wheels. Across the region, the same categories of informal, small-capacity vehicles operate, only under different names. There are shared minibusses like the Philippines’ jeepney, Timor-Leste’s mikrolet, and Thailand’s songthaew; motorcycle-based carriers like Thailand and Cambodia’s tuk-tuk, Cambodia’s remorque, Indonesia’s bajaj, the Philippines’ tricycle, and Vietnam’s xích lô; and bicycle-powered variants like Indonesia’s *becak* and **Malaysia’s beca, among others. Their similarities stretch even further in their cultural significance, each synonymous with the country that made it.

Though products of different circumstances, these vehicles also find common ground in the conditions they stemmed from: domestic instability caused by post-war destruction, colonial rule, or political upheaval that left formal infrastructure underdeveloped or in ruin. They were improvisations, evidence of each country’s capacity to adapt, and though they have outlasted the circumstances that created them and were not meant to be permanent fixtures, most continue to be in mass usage today.

Nevertheless, the persistence of these vehicles is not, in itself, the problem. They are tangible proofs of each country’s resilience, and have since become fixtures of cultural identity and tourism. Rather, the issue lies in the continued dependence on them to meet transportation demands for Southeast Asia’s rapidly growing urban populations. Instead of meeting those demands through the expansion of formal infrastructure, many cities have instead multiplied the vehicles themselves. And where even these informal carriers fall short, private vehicle ownership fills the gap, a response to the absence of reliable alternatives. Inadequate formal transit pushes commuters toward both small-capacity carriers and personal motorcycles and cars; volume, then, becomes the substitute for infrastructure, and volume, on roads inherited from an era that did not anticipate this scale of population, becomes congestion. While the degree of dependence varies across the region, the nations that do continue to heavily rely on small-capacity carriers and private vehicles, such as Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, rank among the most congested countries globally.

This reliance is less a matter of preference than of absence. Singapore, once dependent on the trishaw during the Japanese occupation, has since built a Mass Rapid Transit system dense enough that many residents live within walking distance of a station, complemented by bus networks that run on fixed schedules. For most of Southeast Asia, meanwhile, this level of efficiency remains out of reach. In many cities, trains and buses cover only so much ground, and everything beyond their reach falls to the informal carriers and the private vehicles that have quietly become the default.

The problem, then, is at a gridlock. The urban road networks across much of the region were largely shaped during an era of significant foreign influence, whether through direct colonial rule or the external political pressures that touched even those nations that retained formal independence, and naturally, the layouts that emerged from that reflected the needs and logics of their time. When that era ended, the physical skeleton of the city remained, but the sustained investment needed to evolve it did not follow. Cities grew around their inherited frameworks rather than beyond them, and those frameworks are now costly and complicated to restructure. Reform is not impossible, but congestion and the political and logistical weight it carries make it perpetually difficult to act on, and this inaction carries consequences that reach beyond inefficiency alone.

Time as a dimension of poverty

Poverty is most often described as a scarcity of resources. A resource far less discussed in that context, however, is time. Unlike food or shelter, problems that money can, at least in principle, solve, time cannot be bought or fully controlled, and in countries where transportation systems are not adeptly built for convenience, it cannot even be reliably managed. And this inefficiency is a paradox: on one hand, it is a symptom of bad governance, a consequence of poor economic handling and misplaced priorities. On the other hand, it is precisely what sustains the stagnancy it exemplifies. The hours spent by workers in transit are time spent not working, resting, or pursuing personal growth, which are all equally prerequisites for productivity.

Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, a labor economist at Rutgers University who has consulted for the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Asian Development Bank, writes that individuals may be “living above the official income-poverty line, but they do not have enough time to fulfill their unpaid work demands” — these are the “hidden poor,” whose deprivation only becomes visible once their time deficits are accounted for. A key determinant of this, she argues, is poor physical infrastructure.

While this dynamic can be observed across Southeast Asia, Metro Manila stands as one of its clearest illustrations. It is where the nation’s economic output is heavily centralized, and as the capital, the government’s ambitions are most visibly on display. Thus, there is the assumption that it would be the Philippines’ most developed city in every measurable sense, infrastructure included. Manila is no exception to that logic, but it does remain an exception to the result. The country’s best attempts at transportation development can be found here, yet they do not quite reflect the image of the robust economy that the Philippines projects on the global stage.

The existing rail network — the LRT-1, LRT-2, and MRT-3 — covers the city’s main arteries, but does not sufficiently absorb the volume of people moving through them daily. Operations cut off at around ten in the evening, which means the bulk of the city’s commuters are funneled into the same morning and afternoon windows. Breakdowns are also frequent, and the number of trains in service has consistently lagged behind ridership. When the rail system cannot be counted on, commuters spill into jeepneys, shuttle services, point-to-point buses, and ride-hailing platforms like Grab and Angkas, all of which compete for the same lanes as private vehicles and feed the traffic all the same. All forms of transit, therefore, exist in a sort of symbiosis, each compensating for the others’ inadequacies, while the commuters bear the cost of losing time.

The arithmetic of an ordinary commute

The lived reality of Manila’s commute cuts across economic lines. The inefficiency of public transit does not simply stay contained within the jeepney or the cars of the LRT or MRT, spilling onto the roads and causing traffic that burdens everyone who uses them, including those with the luxury of a private vehicle.

One such reality is my own. I reside in the heart of Manila, only an eight-minute walk from the nearest train station and three minutes from a jeepney terminal, so in theory, commuting should not pose much of a problem. Moreover, the university I attend is only around two kilometers away. If I take the train, the ride itself is only three to five minutes, but the interval between trains can stretch to ten, and with no fixed schedule, it all becomes a matter of luck. From the station, I would still need to board a tricycle to reach the university, adding another five to ten minutes. So, what should be a ten-minute commute ends up taking thirty.

The calculus worsens with distance. Getting to other, busier districts such as Makati, which is around eight kilometers away, takes roughly an hour: the walk to the station, twenty minutes to Cubao, ten minutes on foot to transfer lines, then another twenty to Ayala. All this, from someone who lives close to the city’s main transport systems. For those who must first take a jeepney or tricycle just to reach a station, or those who forgo the rail entirely, the time lost is worse still.

The collective cost of lost hours

Manila, of course, is only one city. And for all of the Philippines’ shortcomings, it is not the most underdeveloped country in Southeast Asia, yet the time consumed by such a system is already detrimental. So in countries where infrastructure lags further behind, where roads are fewer, and railways are less extensive, the hours lost to transit compound into something far more corrosive than inconvenience.

And the consequences of that are not felt by the individual alone. What is lost in transit is not only personal time, but collective capacity, the culmination of hours that, if redirected, could have compounded into skill, into output, and into the kind of sustained participation in economic life that development actually requires. Poverty, in this sense, feeds itself: the less time people have, the less they can do to escape the conditions that took it from them.

This is not to say that infrastructure reform alone resolves the broader conditions that produce poverty across the region — income inequality, wage stagnation, urban sprawl, and land use policy all determine whether development actually reaches the people it is meant to. But infrastructure remains the precondition that makes the rest of those efforts legible.

This is the contradiction at the heart of Southeast Asia’s “time race,” where nations spend decades positioning themselves as the next frontier of global growth while the very infrastructure meant to support that pursuit continues to erode the hours available for it. Development is not only a matter of output, but a matter of the conditions under which output is produced, and time poverty quietly undermines both. It does not appear in GDP figures, nor does it register as a policy emergency; it accumulates in the body and in the hours, its weight carried by even those least equipped to bear it.

Infrastructure, then, is not something to be sorted out once growth has arrived, but rather what growth arrives on. The road to development is, in a very literal sense, the road itself, and a nation cannot run a time race when its own systems are the ones setting the pace. Until that changes, the cycle does not.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Author

Jodi Chrystelle Robiños is an Asian Studies student whose interests lie in society, identity, and the forces that shape communities across Asia. Through research and writing, she explores diverse perspectives and seeks to contribute to informed and meaningful discussions on contemporary social issues. She currently serves as the Society and Identity pillar lead for the Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier.

When people call the Philippines a goldmine, they often think of its natural resources, 7,641 islands, vast coastlines, and rich biodiversity. That is true, but it is not the full picture. The more important goldmine for builders is the gap between what Filipinos need every day and the systems that still have not been built well enough to support them.

Those gaps are visible everywhere: uneven roads, flood-prone streets, unreliable infrastructure, slow public services, manual processes, and rising heat that makes daily life harder. These are not just inconveniences. They are signals of weak systems, poor data flow, and outdated infrastructure. From a developer’s perspective, that makes the Philippines a difficult but meaningful place to build. The opportunity is not to romanticize the country’s problems, but to recognize where technology is urgently needed and where better systems can create real public value.

As a computer science student learning artificial intelligence and machine learning, I see this clearly. Algorithms, data pipelines, and machine learning models are not just academic topics. At their core, they help make sense of messy information and support better decisions. In the Philippine context, that matters because many of the country’s hardest problems are also information and systems problems.

Digital access is one example. A PIDS broadband review notes that mobile network performance in the Philippines still lags behind ASEAN counterparts, with rural areas facing sharper drops in access and speed. In BARMM, the average mobile download speed is barely 10 Mbps. A World Bank-cited report also found that fixed broadband household penetration in the Philippines was only 33 percent in 2022, below Malaysia’s 50 percent, Thailand’s 58 percent, and Vietnam’s 76 percent. UNESCO’s Philippines AI readiness profile points to the same structural issue, citing poor digital infrastructure, siloed policymaking, bureaucratic inertia, and outdated frameworks as barriers to digital transformation.

Agriculture shows another gap. Farmers play a major role in the rural economy, but many still lack integrated weather, soil, advisory, and market tools that could help them make better decisions. PIDS notes that some digital agriculture tools are already widespread, but decision-support systems and data harmonization remain areas for expansion. In practical terms, this means the data exists in pieces, but it is not always connected in a way that helps farmers act with confidence.

Disaster response makes the need even clearer. PAGASA says an average of 20 tropical cyclones enter the Philippine Area of Responsibility each year, with around 8 or 9 crossing the country. The lesson from disasters like Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda is blunt: when roads, power, communication lines, and local coordination break down, aid and information move more slowly than people need. Predictive models, flood-risk mapping, localized warning systems, and better logistics platforms cannot stop typhoons, but they can help communities prepare and respond faster.

But infrastructure is only part of the picture. The people who would benefit most from these systems are often the least equipped to use them. PSA’s 2024 FLEMMS, as reported by GMA News Online, found that 93.1 percent of Filipinos aged 10 to 64 have basic literacy, but only 70.8 percent are functionally literate. The divide is sharper in some areas: Tawi-Tawi recorded a 33.2 percent functional literacy rate, while BARMM had the highest illiteracy rate at 14.4 percent. Digital readiness is also weak. UNESCO’s Philippines AI readiness profile cites a UNESCAP study stating that almost 90 percent of Filipinos lack basic ICT skills such as word-processing, internet, and email skills.

This is why AI and machine learning in the Philippines cannot be treated as tools only for the privileged. A technically impressive system is useless if the people it is meant to serve cannot access, understand, or trust it. Good solutions here must be designed around real conditions: uneven connectivity, multilingual users, underfunded institutions, and communities that are often left behind by technology.

The government has started moving in this direction. The National AI Strategy Roadmap 2.0, launched in July 2024, builds on the 2021 AI roadmap and focuses on Innovation and Implementation across research and development, digitization and infrastructure, workforce development, and AI governance and ethics. It also calls for data literacy, upskilling, support for AI startups, the Center for AI Research, and adaptive governance involving agencies such as the National Privacy Commission, Intellectual Property Office, and Philippine Competition Commission. Recent DICT planning around the Philippines AI+ Infrastructure Masterplan 2033 also points to AI-ready data centers, high-performance computing, digital connectivity, renewable energy, talent development, and regulatory reforms.

Still, roadmaps are not enough. The real test is whether builders can turn strategy into usable systems. Predictive flood tools, crop advisory platforms, public-service automation, traffic models, and decision-support systems for local governments are not distant possibilities. They are practical needs waiting for developers with the right skills, empathy, and patience.

This is why the Philippines can be seen as a developer’s goldmine. Its value is not only in natural resources, but in the space between what exists and what can still be improved. For developers willing to understand local problems deeply, there is no shortage of meaningful work to do.

This is an externally contributed piece. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, policymaker, or practitioner — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Antonio Axellance H. Paco III

Antonio Axellance H. III Paco is a Computer Science student at the University of Santo Tomas and a DOST-SEI Merit Scholar. He is currently an ML Engineering Intern at FlyRank AI and serves as Director for Sponsorships at AWS Learning Club–UST. His interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and building technology solutions that create real-world impact.

On 2 April 2026, the French National Assembly voted to reject the government’s proposal to reform New Caledonia’s status within the French state. This decision followed the signing of the Bougival Accords in July 2025 and represents the latest development in the protracted contest over New Caledonia’s right to self-determination, led by its indigenous Kanak population. The vote heightened tensions throughout the archipelago and highlighted persistent questions regarding sovereignty and identity.

The French Parliament voted 190 to 107 against proposed changes intended to replace the Nouméa Accord, which has governed New Caledonia for over 25 years. The Bougival Accords sought to establish a “State of New Caledonia” within France and introduce a “new Caledonian nationality” for French citizens. The proposal further included provisions to grant New Caledonia certain diplomatic powers previously reserved for the French state. This development marks another chapter of New Caledonia’s struggle for independence, following multiple referenda and peace agreements between the pro-independence camp and the French government.

New Caledonia’s Troubling Unrest

The Bougival Accords were signed after six months of unrest involving pro-independence Kanak protesters and French security forces. This period of instability occurred amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the 2021 New Caledonian independence referendum. The 2021 referendum was the last of three scheduled referendums under the 20-year transition period established by the May 1998 Nouméa Accords between the Kanak people and the French government. Referendums took place in 2018, 2020, and 2021. French loyalists narrowly prevailed in the first two referenda. In 2021, following a boycott led by Kanak leaders, 96.50% of voters opposed independence, with a turnout of 43.87%. The defeat intensified grievances regarding self-determination, culminating in six months of unrest in 2024.

The political deadlock resulting from the unrest has complicated negotiations between French loyalists and pro-independence factions. Some parties have refused to recognize the Bougival Accords, arguing that they fail to address longstanding grievances related to independence and concerns about voting rights for non-Kanak residents. The recent unrest signals the fragility of the political settlements established by the Nouméa Accord. Although peace mechanisms exist to de-escalate hostilities, the island’s political leadership cannot dismiss the possibility of future violent unrest.

New Caledonia’s Legislative Election

New Caledonia is scheduled to hold legislative elections before the end of June 2026. The Bougival Accords and the 2024 riots led to the postponement of these elections, which were originally planned for 2024. Authorities delayed the elections due to concerns about further unrest and societal division. This caused significant damage to businesses and perpetuated an atmosphere of fear among residents. The unrest contracted New Caledonia’s GDP by 13.5%, compounded by a drastic decline in Nickel prices and uncertainties caused by the unrest. The forthcoming elections represent a critical juncture between pro-independence and French loyalist factions, reflecting tensions inherent in New Caledonia’s distinctive voting system established by the Nouméa Accords.

The French government has proposed reforms to New Caledonia’s voting system under the Nouméa Accord. The proposal would extend voting rights to non-Kanak residents born in New Caledonia after 1998 who currently hold French citizenship, potentially enfranchising 10,000 individuals, as supported by the French Senate. This is contrary to the past voting system that favored Kanak people, who make up around 41% of the island’s population, as part of the Nouméa Accord’s agreement to preserve the political weight of the Kanak people and restrict voting rights for residents born after the accords. Kanak leaders have consistently opposed such reforms, arguing that they would diminish Kanak representation in the legislative body. Pro-independence Senator Robert Xowie (FLNKS) has stated that these changes could further radicalize provincial elections.

The Kanaks have maintained that the current voting system upholds the Noumea accords and remains a fundamental pillar of decolonization in New Caledonia. They argued that protection is still an important component because the French settlement and migration have altered New Caledonia’s demographic composition, reducing the relative political weight of the indigenous Kanak population. On 26 May 2026, the French Parliament approved voting rights for 10,500 “native” voters from all ethnic groups for the upcoming elections. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu stated that the voting reforms were made to rectify “growing distortions” in New Caledonia’s electoral roll.

However, the reform excludes spouses of native voters and French citizens who do not meet the criteria. At present, unilateral voting rights for recently arrived French citizens remain unattainable. This compromise may help ease political tensions between French loyalists and the pro-independence camp. It could reduce hostile rhetoric ahead of the provincial elections, which some view as a confidence vote for the pro-independence factions and their mandate for independence.

During French parliamentary debates, pro-independence FLNKS MP Emannuel Tjibaou voiced his party’s opposition to the Bougival accords and electoral reforms. He stated that “a sovereign state cannot exist within another. This is a model of internal autonomy, not external decolonization.” Tjibaou added his concerns over the risks of New Caledonia’s partition that would devolve further into growing divisions among the three provinces of New Caledonia.

What’s Next for New Caledonia?

New Caledonia’s independence movement remains stalled following a series of referendum defeats, violence associated with the 2024 unrest, and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the upcoming elections may alter mandates for independence, entrenched divisions over voting rights and representation persist. Loyalists argue that the current system marginalizes key stakeholders and risks deepening divides between Kanaks and non-Kanaks, casting doubt on the viability of such arrangements in a prospective independent state. In contrast, Kanak leaders maintain that the existing voting system safeguards decolonization efforts by preserving their political influence amid demographic shifts driven by French migration. These unresolved disputes over sovereignty and representation continue to impede progress toward independence or substantive devolution, leaving New Caledonia in a state of political uncertainty.

New Caledonia’s distinctive political status provides a model for other independence movements in the Pacific and informs global decolonization efforts. The archipelago’s trajectory is closely monitored by regional actors and major powers, particularly given the Indo-Pacific’s increasing significance in global geopolitics. The responses of France, Australia, and other stakeholders to New Caledonia’s demands will influence not only the territory’s future but also broader debates concerning sovereignty, resource management, and strategic influence in the region. Thus, New Caledonia’s ongoing struggle constitutes both a local and international issue, with far-reaching implications for self-determination movements throughout the Pacific and beyond.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Joshua Adrian Gumasing

Joshua Adrian Gumasing is a graduate of AB Asian Studies at the University of Santo Tomas. He previously worked at a security consultancy firm doing due diligence and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) research in Iraq and Syria. His special interests include field conflict resolution and peacemaking studies, geopolitics, and comparative politics.

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The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier

When global companies started looking for alternatives to China, Southeast Asia seemed like the obvious answer. It was close, cost-competitive, and ready. The region is now producing more, exporting more, and hosting more of the world’s supply chains than ever. But producing more and capturing value from what you produce are different things — and that gap defines SEA’s real challenge

This is the tension at the center of the so-called “China Plus One” strategy, the practice among multinational corporations of maintaining operations in China while establishing a presence elsewhere to reduce geopolitical exposure. SEA has become the “elsewhere”. But becoming the “elsewhere” is not the same as transformation.

The uneven windfall

Southeast Asia did not suddenly become a prime destination. The region had spent years building conditions that made it an attractive alternative to China. So when MNCs started looking for alternatives, the infrastructure, trade agreements, and geography were already in place. In a 2025 investment report by the Association of Southeast-Asian Nations (ASEAN), it was noted that investments have surged $226 billion annually.

In 2022, ASEAN created the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free trade agreement among all member states and dialogue partners, including mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. RCEP reduced costs for companies to establish production in the region by standardizing rules of origin, eliminating tariffs on most products, and liberalizing trade rules.

Moreover, RCEP deepened the integration between Chinese manufacturing and Southeast Asian production in ways that made the region more complementary to China than competitive with it. Much of the investment that followed arrived with Chinese inputs, Chinese capital, and Chinese supply chain logic embedded in it. SEA became a more efficient node in a China-centered network rather than an independent one. This matters for the value capture question because the terms of participation were largely set elsewhere.

Vietnam, in particular, has emerged as a major beneficiary in this expansion as it has captured investments amid economic transitions and disruptions in China. In 2025, the country recorded 8.2 percent GDP growth, the highest quarterly performance since 2011, excluding the post-pandemic rebound. According to investment consulting firm Dezan Shira & Associates, manufacturing drove the expansion, attracting over US$72.83 billion in newly registered foreign investment across 6,783 projects between 2019 and 2025.

“We are witnessing a clear strategic shift as global companies increasingly view Vietnam as a regional hub. We see more businesses relocating their supply chain focal points to Vietnam from other markets to handle export manufacturing and regional distribution services,” says Remco Enders, managing director of logistics company DSV Solutions.

Much of Vietnam’s expansion has concentrated on export-oriented assembly such as electronics, garments, and footwear. This is where the margins are thin, and the value flows back to the brand owners, the chip designers, and the IP holders elsewhere. Vietnam’s growth is also heavily tied to a handful of large anchor investors; Samsung alone accounts for a substantial share of Vietnamese exports, over 13% - 25%, which means the headline numbers may be masking concentration risk as much as they are reflecting broad industrial development.

Malaysia’s economy, on the other hand, accelerated to 5.2 percent growth in the third quarter of 2025 due to a strong performance in electronics. Investments, however, increased with data centers, advanced manufacturing, and semiconductors attracting more MNCs. Combined with Thailand, the two countries recorded approximately US$43.9 billion in reported investments, though Thailand’s economic picture was considerably less encouraging, growing at just 1.2 percent in the third quarter, its slowest rate in four years, as manufacturing contracted and export growth decelerated despite investments.

The Philippines is a stark contrast. In the same quarter, the Philippine economy expanded by just 4 percent, its slowest growth since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Foreign investment approvals fell by 48.7 percent year on year, extending a sharp decline that had run through all three quarters of 2025.

This was not for lack of trying. Philippine Economic Zone Authority Director General Tereso Panga reported fruitful investment meetings in Xiamen, Chongqing, Shenzhen, and Dongguan, pointing to concrete wins

”The Aoxing group, based in Dongguan, an OEM for projector equipment, projector screen, and audio-visual products for global brands like HP, Epson, and Skyworth, has chosen the Philippines for its redundant manufacturing facility intended for the US export market,” Panga said.

The causes were compounding as corruption scandals involving public infrastructure projects damaged investor confidence at precisely the moment the country needed to project stability, while a succession of typhoons disrupted harvests, consumer spending, and economic activity more broadly.

The limits of relocation

When a factory moves from Shenzhen to Ho Chi Minh City, the production moves. The next question is what follows after?

The honest answer, so far, is not much of the value. Much of the investment redirected into Southeast Asia remains concentrated in mid-level segments of global value chains such as assembly, component manufacturing, and testing. These are not trivial roles as they employ millions of people and generate real economic activity. But they are also the segments where the margins are thinnest. The segments where the highest returns are, such as research and development, remain elsewhere.

For example, Malaysia has carved out a genuinely significant position in the global chip industry, commanding 13% of the global market share and ranking as the 6th largest exporter. Yet the founder market, where chips are actually designed and fabricated at the highest levels of precision, remains dominated by the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, with over 63% of global market share. This is because semiconductor manufacturing has a distinct value hierarchy: design and IP at the top, fabrication in the middle, and assembly, testing, and packaging at the bottom. The firms that own chip designs, such as Nvidia, Qualcomm, and AMD, capture the largest margins because intellectual property is infinitely replicable at near-zero marginal cost.

Moreover, when it comes to who captures the revenue from semiconductor sales, the United States accounts for 46 percent of the global market, South Korea 21 percent, Japan 9 percent, Taiwan 8 percent, and China 7 percent. The rest of the world, Southeast Asia included, shares the remaining 9 percent.

This middle layer position offers opportunity but also limits, as it attracts capital, creates employment, and capacity that can serve as a base for upgrading. Economies that stabilize as assembly and intermediate manufacturing hubs without developing deeper technological capabilities can find themselves locked into roles that are difficult to escape.

Infrastructure has also compounded this constraint. Research on Vietnam and Malaysia’s seaports has noted that while there has been increased demand even during the pandemic, bottlenecks have stalled recovery due to inadequate infrastructure, equipment, and low loading/unloading productivity. Cat Lai in Ho Chi Minh City has faced severe congestion due to a 30% surge in cargo volumes.

According to research from the Universiti Teknologi in Malaysia, identified port congestion, hinterland connectivity, and uneven FDI distribution as systemic threats to the region’s competitiveness. The ASEAN secretariat separately noted that the member states have varying customs procedures and standards for warehousing, making cross-border logistics difficult.

Infrastructure matters because these constraints act as a ceiling on how much value the region can capture from the investment flowing in. A factory can relocate, but if goods cannot move efficiently, cost competitiveness can prove to be difficult. More critically, moving up the value chain requires attracting more sophisticated industries, and those industries are more sensitive to logistics reliability than low-cost assembly is.

Then there are the tariffs. Despite producing more, Southeast Asia has not been exempt from the US reciprocal tariffs. Major trading partners such as Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand have had tariffs set at 19 percent, and Singapore has 10 percent. Other products from the region, such as coffee and bananas, have been exempted because the US does not grow them.

“Southeast Asia’s tariff advantage over China persists for now, but depends on shifting US–China dynamics. Pending US Supreme Court rulings on tariff authority may further entrench uncertainty, leaving businesses to brace for continued trade volatility in 2026,” says John Goyer, Vice President for Southeast Asia and Oceania, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

What would a real benefit look like?

The middle position is not a permanent sentence. One could argue that it is a starting position, and a few states in the region have already decided they do not intend to stay there.

For example, Indonesia, being the world’s largest producer of nickel, had for years exported raw ore at low prices while the value-added processing happened outside the country. In 2020, the government made a deliberate and costly decision to ban the export of unprocessed nickel ore entirely, forcing companies to process domestically if they wanted access to Indonesian nickel.

Vietnam is taking a different path towards the same destination. Hanoi has aggressively been investing in workforce development to transition its electronics industry from low-cost assembly to higher-value-added activities, targeting a significant role in the global semiconductor and tech supply chain by 2030. In 2024, the Vietnamese government issued Decision No. 1017/QĐ-TTg, which outlines the Program on Semiconductor Industry Workforce Development to 2030, with a vision to 2050 to train between 30,000 and 50,000 engineers by 2030.

These are not guarantees. Indonesia’s downstream strategy depends on sustained political will and global commodity demand that can shift. Vietnam’s engineering pipeline will take years to produce results, and the gap between training engineers and building a domestic semiconductor design industry is significant.

Both countries are making bets. But the bets matter, because they mean that Indonesia and Vietnam are making active choices about what kind of economy they want to be on the other side of this disruption, rather than simply receiving whatever the disruption sends their way.

The rest of the region faces the same choice, with less time than it might appear. The tariff environment is volatile, and infrastructure gaps are becoming wider. And the window in which Southeast Asia can leverage its current strategic relevance to move up the value chain, rather than simply consolidate its position within it, will not stay open indefinitely.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nine of the ten most obese nations globally are in Oceania. Once a symbol of wealth, obesity here now starkly indicates the opposite: severe food insecurity and systemic poverty. This health crisis is the product of historical colonialism and modern economic structures failing island nations. The Pacific, once home to self-sufficient navigators, is now the epicenter of a metabolic crisis tied to structural dependency, reflecting a profound failure to respect Oceania’s fragile ecological and social balances.

A forced transition: From subsistence to dependency

Historically, Micronesians and Polynesians utilized advanced navigation techniques, subsisting on highly preserved, nutrient-dense foods like breadfruit and taro to survive arduous voyages. Their traditional diet and extreme physical demands favored a strong phenotype capable of efficiently storing nutrients—a survival mechanism for islands susceptible to food shortages. Islanders historically displayed high adaptability; in Tikopia, sustainable practices like rudimentary reforestation were utilized to maintain agricultural harmony, while strict social controls, such as Hawaii’s kapu system, regulated resource consumption.

However, colonial eras dismantled these sustainable systems. Colonizers repurposed islands for extractive industries—phosphate mining in Nauru, sugar in Fiji, and various cash crops—displacing local agriculture and turning fertile grounds into export-driven monocultures. This forced transition from subsistence to a cash-based economy stripped locals of their means of production. Furthermore, modern overfishing by international fleets has put 11% of indigenous fish species at risk, eroding traditional protein sources.

Lacking healthy staples, islanders are forced to rely on global markets for basic needs. Obesity in this context is a survival strategy of the poor, who must consume the cheapest, lowest-nutrient calories to stave off hunger, resulting in a population that is overfed but tragically malnourished.

Structural traps: Spatial poverty and food dumping

The root causes of this crisis are deeply embedded in modern Pacific infrastructure. Decades of resource extraction have left many islands agriculturally unviable. In Nauru, strip mining for phosphate has turned the island’s interior into a wasteland of jagged limestone, forcing the population into crowded coastal strips where traditional farming is impossible and automobile-centric infrastructure discourages walking. Similar spatial constraints in Tuvalu and American Samoa leave little room for agriculture or exercise facilities.

Compounding this spatial poverty is the systemic “dumping” of low-quality food imports. Countries like Australia and New Zealand export mutton flaps—sheep bellies that are nearly 50% fat and deemed unfit for Western markets—to Pacific nations at extremely low prices. These cheap, high-fat meats, alongside refined sugars and white flour, become the primary food sources for impoverished families. Even humanitarian aid often arrives as processed canned goods, reinforcing an obesogenic environment that traps the Polynesian build in a cycle of severe obesity and compounding poverty.

Cultural nuance and the limits of the colonial narrative

While the colonial and economic narrative is powerful, viewing Pacific Islanders solely as victims erases local agency and cultural nuance. Historically, many Pacific cultures associated larger body sizes with high social status and health—a standard predating colonial contact. Though modern food marketing weaponizes this preference, it remains a distinct internal factor complicating a purely economic analysis. Additionally, local governments have sometimes failed to prioritize public health during economic booms.

The crisis is also shaped by internal migration and the challenges of small-scale island governance. Severe obesity and limited local opportunities have forced many to migrate to the US mainland, Australia, and New Zealand, where they face discrimination and high rates of depression and alcoholism, straining already fragile medical infrastructures. Acknowledging these complexities provides a holistic view. Solutions require synthesizing traditional wisdom with modern public health, rather than blindly adopting Western medical models or simply romanticizing a pre-colonial past.

Charting a path forward: Sovereignty and sustainable health

Combating this crisis requires systemic change and localized empowerment. Countries that historically extracted wealth from these islands bear a responsibility to fund infrastructure, nutritional education, and healthcare initiatives. Simultaneously, there is a positive grassroots trend toward fitness and community sports, such as youth basketball leagues in the Marshall Islands, which must be expanded.

To reduce reliance on foreign aid and imported food, islands must develop sustainable, non-extractive revenue streams. Tuvalu’s successful leasing of its .tv internet domain stands as a prime example of innovative economic development. Furthermore, governance must involve the wider populace through deliberative democratic processes, allowing communities to collaboratively design culturally appropriate health solutions. While geopolitical tensions complicate these efforts, the global shift toward green and healthy initiatives positions the Pacific as a natural focal point for progressive change.

Reclaiming health in Oceania

The obesity epidemic in the Pacific is far more than a public health failure; it is a profound symptom of historical and economic poverty. By dismantling self-sufficiency and forcing a dependency on low-quality global markets, colonial and modern governance structures created a crisis that the islands were unequipped to handle. Until underlying economic structures—trade imbalances, extractive land use, and food dumping—are addressed, health initiatives will remain temporary fixes. Obesity is a visible marker of a region struggling to reclaim its sovereignty.

Critical questions remain: Can Pacific nations achieve food sovereignty while integrated into the global economy? How can Western powers support sustainable development without imposing paternalism? Ultimately, can Pacific Islanders leverage their adaptive heritage to redefine “wealth” and “health” on their own terms? The answers will determine the viability of their nations in the decades to come.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr.

Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr. is a graduating Asian Studies student at UST, specializing in history and geopolitics. A versatile generalist with internship experience spanning HR to Knowledge Management across corporate and NGO sectors, he is currently writing his thesis on intergenerational gaps in Thailand.

On April 21, Coins.ph announced that Filipinos could pay for Jollibee using USDT. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas had authorized the move, allowing the local cryptocurrency exchange to route dollar-pegged stablecoins through QRPh, the national QR payment system it created and manages. At checkout, stablecoins convert automatically to pesos. Merchants receive pesos. The transaction completes on the domestic payment infrastructure.

Coins.ph described it as “game-changing,” noting how 700,000 QRPh-enabled merchants are now reachable via USDT and USDC. The framing was correct as far as it went, but it missed the structural question underneath the announcement: what happens when foreign-currency instruments operate inside its own sovereign payment infrastructure?

Why the Philippines?

Overseas Filipino workers remit approximately $37 billion each year, accounting for about 8 percent of the country’s GDP. This sizable group regularly manages dollar transactions, compares transfer costs, and responds to fluctuations in the peso’s value. These conditions have made dollar-linked instruments practical for Filipinos, even before Coins.ph integrated with QRPh.

The announcement met an audience already familiar with digital finance. GCash and Maya have introduced many Filipinos to mobile-first payments, making them comfortable transacting outside traditional banks. Between 7 and 12 million Filipinos now use cryptocurrency, with stablecoins gaining popularity among families receiving remittances, freelancers paid in dollars, and traders moving funds between crypto investments. According to Coins.ph, families of overseas workers have begun using USDT to protect against peso depreciation and avoid high bank transfer fees.

When the peso reached a record low of PHP 61.72 to the dollar on May 15, its second consecutive record low, the incentive to retain dollars rather than convert to pesos increased significantly. These factors are not merely background conditions but active mechanisms. The integration did not create demand for stablecoins in the Philippines; instead, it provided an entry point into the formal payment economy.

The dollar question

The BSP has been operating under an explicit policy of non-internationalization of the peso. Without control over domestic currency circulation, a central bank’s ability to set monetary conditions and manage inflation is diminished. BSP Circular 922 (2016), which regulates cross-border currency transfers under the Manual of Regulations on Foreign Exchange Transactions, states that outward transfers of legal tender exceeding PHP 50,000 require prior BSP authorization to safeguard “control of liquidity and overall monetary conditions.”

Dollar use has always existed informally in the Philippines. But the BSP could tolerate informal dollar exposure because it was fragmented, structurally outside the official payment system, and therefore outside the liquidity dynamics it was actively managing. For example, In practice, traders use stablecoins to park funds between crypto positions.

However, the Coins.ph integration ends the BSP’s ability to look past informal dollar exposure. Dollar-pegged assets now flow through infrastructure that the BSP created, governs, and explicitly maintains as the mechanism for a “safe, convenient, and interoperable payment system” nationwide. That QRPh converts stablecoins to pesos at the point of sale is technically significant, but it does not resolve the upstream question: households and merchants now have an institutionally sanctioned pathway to hold, transact with, and in periods of peso weakness, prefer dollar-linked instruments within the formal economy.

This is the line the IMF has been tracking. It’s 2025 departmental paper on stablecoins identifies currency substitution facilitated by stablecoins as categorically different from informal dollar use. Traditional dollarization requires physical cash or bank accounts denominated in foreign currency, which entails opening a foreign-currency bank account that requires documentation, minimum balances, institutional access, and often physical proximity to a branch. But foreign currency-denominated stablecoins face none of those constraints as they reside entirely on smartphones and the internet, operate continuously, and settle near-instantly at potentially low cost. The IMF further notes that network effects accelerate the replacement of local currencies once adoption begins. Local alternatives struggle to compete unless they provide similar utility and integration, and if a significant portion of economic activity shifts to foreign-currency-denominated stablecoins, the central bank’s control over domestic liquidity weakens, and seigniorage income declines as demand for the local currency decreases.

BSP’s position

What makes the BSP’s posture particularly difficult to read is that five months before the Coins.ph integration went live, its own leadership was articulating exactly the opposite position. Speaking in Hong Kong in November 2025, BSP Deputy Governor Zeno Abenoja confirmed the central bank was maintaining a “cautious approach” to stablecoin proposals, that regulatory work remained at an “early stage,” and that the BBSP was limiting stablecoin entry to controlled channels, insisting on licensed intermediaries and regulated frameworks before permitting broader integration. Most of the proposals being reviewed, Abenoja noted, involved dollar-backed stablecoins rather than peso-backed alternatives.

The BSP’s regulatory record does complicate the picture somewhat. The BSP’s regulatory record does complicate the picture somewhat. Since Circular 944 in 2017, the BSP has pursued a consistent strategy of bringing digital assets inside the regulatory perimeter rather than pushing them out. Licensing requirements for virtual currency exchanges, expanded oversight of Virtual Asset Service Providers under Circular 1108 in 2021, and a regulatory sandbox for fintech and crypto pilots under Circular 1153 in 2022 all follow the same logic: if an activity is happening regardless, regulate it rather than ignore it. The Coins.ph integration fits that pattern. Stablecoin flows through QRPh are now subject to anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) requirements. The BSP gains visibility over dollar exposure it previously could not measure, which is a policy benefit in a country where informal dollar circulation has always outrun official data.

With 7 to 12 million Filipinos already using crypto and stablecoin adoption accelerating through informal channels, the BSP faced a choice between two forms of dollar exposure: unregulated and invisible, or regulated and observable. Controlled integration, on that logic, is preferable to an offshore ecosystem that grows without generating any domestic data, regulatory handle, or policy leverage.

What visibility does not solve

Visibility is not control, and the distinction matters enormously when the peso is under pressure. The BSP can observe USDT moving through QRPh, but observation ends at the blockchain. Tether makes its reserve decisions from El Salvador, and US monetary policy is set in Washington. And when the peso depreciates, adjusting BSP rates does nothing for the share of retail transactions settling in these financial instruments.

When a currency depreciates, the rational household response is to hold dollar-linked assets rather than convert back. In this context, the QRPh integration does not merely accommodate existing stablecoin holdings - it also creates an institutionally sanctioned mechanism for that holding behavior to persist through the formal payment system. Monetary policy can still affect peso-denominated credit conditions, but its transmission weakens at the margin as more of the retail transaction economy touches instruments that do not respond to BSP rate decisions.

The IMF’s April 2026 working paper on stablecoin stability notes this: when stablecoin issuers hold risky or illiquid reserve assets, confidence shocks can trigger runs originating entirely outside Philippine monetary conditions, on a blockchain in another jurisdiction, with consequences that land on QRPh-connected merchant terminals the next business morning. Moreover, once a sufficient share of retail transactions migrates to foreign-currency instruments, the central bank loses traction on domestic liquidity, interest rate decisions in Manila stop transmitting to the parts of the economy settling on dollar-pegged rails, and seigniorage income falls.

The BSP’s FX Manual grants broad authority over cross-border currency flows, but stablecoin transactions through QRPh convert to pesos at the point of sale, which likely places them outside the Manual’s existing definitional perimeter. This gap between what the BSP can observe and what its existing tools can directly address was always theoretical. Now it can be seen as practical, with the peso at an all-time low and dollar-linked instruments now embedded in the national payment infrastructure.

The harder question

What the Coins.ph integration into QRPh ultimately depends on a question the BSP has not publicly answered. By accepting some short-term monetary friction, the BSP gains long-term regulatory oversight over a trend it realized it could not prevent. Features like peso-at-checkout conversion, KYC requirements, and a traceable ledger give regulators policy tools that peer-to-peer stablecoin use never offered.

However, the IMF’s 2025 paper explains what happens next. Once stablecoins are widely used for domestic payments, local options have a hard time competing because network effects support whatever is already built into the system.

But this integration also brings up a question the BSP has not addressed yet. Can a central bank expand its payment system to include dollar-linked instruments without eventually encouraging dollarization?

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

The issue of Violence Against Women (VAW) is one that is pervasively unique, given that it requires an excessive amount of mental, physical, and emotional labor from its victims to prove that the crime committed is one that is valid in the first place. Based on statistics reported by UN Women (2021), Southeast Asia bears witness to a prevalence of 33% of married or partnered women between the ages of 15-49 experiencing sexual and/or physical violence at the hands of current or former male partners at least once in their lives. The ASEAN has established a specific plan of action, one that requires a multi-faceted and multidimensional approach that begins with addressing the root of the problem through implementing preventative measures that approach gender-based violence on a unit-level basis. Specifically, preventative measures against VAW focus on education and building on proven strategies of awareness and empowerment-building amongst both young men and women in how consciousness regarding VAW is framed, emphasizing the way cases significantly harm their victims. The development of protection services for survivors through improving post-harm support systems, including ones that go beyond medical and psychological services, as well as the strengthening of legal structures that provide an improved sense of justice for victims, including the institutionalization of quality assurance, are some of the other regional plans of action that tackle the elimination of VAW in Southeast Asia. While these frameworks present a comprehensive approach to eliminating violence against women, they often fall short in implementation, given that the burden of their execution falls on national governments, which often prioritize other countries’ interests, thus paying less attention to pressing VAW issues. This does not suggest that VAW is not considered a critical concern; rather, it indicates that recognition of a problem alone is insufficient without proper implementation tools.

Southeast Asia and violence against women, presented through statistics

To illustrate, Timor-Leste, as reported by CoWater International in 2024, reports a prevalence of 58.8% experiencing Intimate Partner Violence within their lifetime, reporting one of the highest frequencies of VAW globally. Comparatively, Indonesia reports a prevalence of 11.8%, with a study conducted in 2025 also recording a concerning number of reproductive-age women justifying marital violence, which is greatly influenced by educational attainment, socio-economic class, and cultural norms. These statistics do not imply that the women themselves are to blame for the perpetuation of such cultural norms, but are rather embedded in them in adapting to patriarchal norms reinforced by longstanding institutional structures.

In the cases of Vietnam and Cambodia, both boast an increasing decline in physical violence reports, but see a rise in sexual violence cases alongside it. This may be due to the fact that both countries have been somewhat successful in enforcing protections for victims of physical violence, due mostly to how visible a crime it is perceived to be, as opposed to how difficult it is to detect when sexual violence occurs. Rape kits are commonly utilized in the analysis of victims’ bodies to determine whether an assault has taken place, but these examinations also have their limitations in the way that samples are handled or retrieved. Specifically, there have been accounts of needed samples being collected from victims, but not being examined properly or at all.

In contrast, Malaysia reports significantly less cases when it comes to physical violence, but comparatively exhibits a higher prevalence of psychological and emotional forms of intimate partner violence, with these statistics relating significantly to lower educational background, lower socio-economic status, and exposure to substance abuse within the household. Similar to Vietnam and Cambodia’s rising sexual violence cases, emotional and psychological abuse are less detectable by a legal system, thus making it difficult to prove in open court, which goes along with socio-structural tolerance for gender based violence. Despite a lower prevalence in reported cases within Southeast Asia, Malaysia observes a concerning rise in reported VAW cases every year.

Thailand and Singapore, on the other hand, report a significantly lower prevalence in VAW — this, however, does not make them exempt from having any cases at all. In Thailand, despite extensive collaboration with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, data from the Ministry of Public Health’s One Stop Crisis Center indicates that out of approximately 30,000 reported cases of violence, only 5,000 proceeded to police investigation, and just 1,500 resulted in arrests—illustrating a significant drop-off between reporting and legal accountability. Similarly, Singapore reports comparatively low prevalence of intimate partner violence, yet recorded an increase in reported cases, rising from 1,741 in 2022 to 2,008 in 2023.

A more complex case comes from the Philippines, where the Republic Act 9262: Violence Against Women and Children Act of 2004, characterizes intimate partner violence into four specific categories: physical, psychological, economic, and sexual. For physical violence, victims are required to submit a medico-legal form, issued by a certified doctor, or at the very least, detailed documentation with the victim’s identifiable face and injuries sustained from the abuse. However, for most cases, filing a case for VAW under physical violence without a medico-legal will result in the evidence being less credible. Additionally, psychological violence also requires a psychological report from an accredited mental health facility, which states that the victim undoubtedly has sustained mental trauma from the abuse. 17.5% of Filipina women between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced intimate partner violence within their lifetimes, and even through addressing this concern, these numbers continue to grow.

What these patterns tell us

Finding the courage to report intimate partner violence cases is complex in its foundations. Considering the psychological turmoil that comes with retraumatization and a legal system that operates through patriarchal lenses, the process itself can be profoundly draining, both physically and emotionally. Often, the reporting of VAW cases to the proper authorities require complex processes that force victims to re-live some of the most devastating moments of their lives — these procedures include creating detailed written accounts of the abuse; rehashing these experiences verbally for law enforcement, lawyers, mental health practitioners, even before speaking before the court; and dealing with the risk of evidence not being sufficient enough on every level of the reporting process; to name but a few. In assessing the percentages presented above, one must take into account other limiting factors that contribute to the retrieval of this data, given also how not all cases of VAW are reported immediately or at all. This restricts accurate accounts for true frequency, as rampancy is, for the most part, higher than what is recorded. For lower-prevalence countries in VAW cases, their figures suggest that lower rates do not necessarily reflect lower incidence of violence, but may instead reflect variations in reporting mechanisms, institutional responsiveness, and survivor willingness to seek formal assistance.

Another element that complicates the reporting of these cases is how embedded modern society still is in patriarchal norms, which continue to show up even with significant development in women’s empowerment. These complications bleed into the way unit-level interactions address survivors, with subtle victim-blaming language being present even during the reporting process and earlier. Harmful questions such as “Why did you not choose a better partner?” or “Why did you not fight back?” place far too much responsibility onto the victim, overlooking the complexities of the abuse perpetrator and victim dynamic, which, most of the time, begin with the perpetrator projecting kindness before gradually displaying coercive and abusive tendencies. These small, subtle ways that victims find themselves discredited and shamed for actions that were committed toward them play a significant role in the dissuasion of participating in the reporting process, as survivors often anticipate further humiliation and fear that, despite engaging in formal mechanisms within the legal process, the outcome may still leave them vulnerable or at a disadvantage.

Additionally, the rampant rise of red pill content consumption amongst impressionable young men, on top of their engagement in actions that perpetuate rape and VAW culture through “locker room talk” and joking about domestic violence, plays a significant role in sustaining inequality and further victim-blaming behaviors. In this way, patriarchal norms are not only preserved but actively reproduced, undermining both prevention efforts and the effectiveness of existing legal protections.

What is the future of VAW policies in Southeast Asia?

The reality is, we can not reach the total elimination of Violence Against Women until society has reached a specific level of gender equality, where women’s issues are dealt with proper urgency and care. The issue with VAW frameworks does not just lie with policy, but a reflection of deeply entrenched social norms that continue to shape attitudes, behaviors, and institutional responses. The quest for eliminating all forms of VAW requires multiple phases of social reform, which should simultaneously proceed alongside sustained policy development. Significant effort must be directed toward challenging the normalization of abusive behaviors among women, while simultaneously reinforcing the unacceptability of such conduct among men.

This may be further advanced through strengthened policy measures, including the imposition of more stringent penalties for sexual violence and emotional abuse. Policymakers must also sustain collaboration with women-centered organizations to develop more responsive and adaptive frameworks, particularly those that address emerging forms of digitally facilitated abuse. These efforts should be complemented by the continued transformation of law enforcement institutions into safe, accessible, and survivor-centered spaces for reporting, grounded in sustained training that promotes trauma-informed and non-victim-blaming language. However, moving forward, a key question remains whether existing institutional reforms are sufficient to keep pace with the rapidly evolving methods of VAW. Equally pressing is the extent to which policy frameworks can meaningfully shift deeply embedded socio-cultural standards that continue to shape reporting behavior and institutional responses. As Southeast Asia continues to expand its legal and policy architecture on violence against women, future attention must be directed not only toward legislative strengthening but also toward assessing implementation gaps, vulnerabilities, and the persistence of cultural norms that mediate how violence is recognized, reported, and addressed.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Marianne Zabine Generoso

Marianne Zabine “Zabi” Generoso is a graduating senior under the Asian Studies program at the University of Sto. Tomas. She was the former Vice President for External Affairs at the UST Asian Studies Society, a position that allowed her to facilitate community development programs such as “Girl Talk,” and “Sagip Kita Kaibigan: A Disaster Risk Reduction Initiative.” She specializes in wartime feminist research, and has a special interest in the role of Gender in international politics.

As Kuala Lumpur prepares to host SEMICON Southeast Asia 2026, Malaysia appears positioned to lead the regional semiconductor industry. However, persistent structural wage challenges and the misconception of a surplus in STEM talent threaten to undermine this ambition. If these foundational issues remain unresolved, Malaysia risks losing the competition for elite talent to established centers such as Singapore and emerging, state-driven competitors like Vietnam.

Malaysia’s wage vulnerability

With Kuala Lumpur hosting SEMICON Southeast Asia 2026, the conference is more than an industry gathering — it is a declaration of Malaysia’s intent to dominate the regional semiconductor boom. The National Semiconductor Strategy (NSS) has already drawn a staggering RM59.85 billion, over USD 15 billion, in realized investments as of late 2025. Coupled with a bold target to cultivate 60,000 highly skilled engineers by 2030, the government is making a calculated push to shift Malaysia from “back-end” assembly to “front-end” high-value activities, such as integrated circuit (IC) design.

But behind the billions in capital influx lies a critical vulnerability: Malaysia is bleeding the very human capital required to execute this transition.

With the global semiconductor race is now about who can retain the smartest minds to run them, Malaysia’s ambition to ascend the technological value chain will fail unless it fundamentally dismantles its structural low-wage economy. By relying on a massive but severely underpaid STEM pipeline, Malaysia is attempting to build a high-tech future using a cheap-labor framework. If it cannot correct this wage mismatch, Malaysia risks losing its regional talent to aggressive, state-subsidized challengers like Vietnam and its heavily funded Strategy 1018.

The Malaysian reality: The illusion of the STEM surplus

On the surface, the national STEM talent appears robust. According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics data, Malaysia remains one of the world’s top STEM producers, with 40.2% of its tertiary graduates holding STEM degrees. This high yield is the legacy of long-term policy measures, most notably the government’s 60:40 initiative, which aims to steer the majority of students toward the sciences.

However, volume does not equal industry readiness, particularly for the rigorous demands of high-value IC design. Malaysia is suffering from the illusion of a STEM surplus. The domestic pipeline produces thousands of graduates annually, yet the semiconductor sector faces a crippling deficit of specialized talent. The shortage is so acute that the then-Investment, Trade, and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz publicly acknowledged the severity of the gap, going so far as to propose allowing foreign STEM graduates from local universities to work in the country to plug the immediate leaks.

The root of this disconnect is not solely educational; it is also fundamentally economic. While the government frequently highlights that salaries for senior tech and C-suite roles in Malaysia are now rivaling those in Japan, the entry-level landscape—where the talent begins—remains remarkably grim. A sobering metric from the Board of Engineers revealed that 35% of surveyed electrical engineers earned a starting salary of less than RM2,000 per month (roughly $450 USD).

This is an active deterrent. A multibillion-dollar technological pivot cannot be executed while offering top-tier technical minds wages comparable to the local gig economy. Consequently, Malaysia is caught in a persistent cycle of brain drain. Elite graduates either abandon the sector for more lucrative roles in finance and general software, or they simply cross the causeway to Singapore, where starting engineering salaries easily triple those offered in the tech hubs of Penang or Kulim.

A policy error or the “OSAT trap”?

Industry veterans might rightfully push back on this critique. One could argue that the depressed wage ceiling for electrical and electronics (E&E) engineers in Malaysia is not a sudden policy failure, but a deeply entrenched structural reality.

For the past forty years, Malaysia has built its technological empire on Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT). This is the “back-end” of the industry—essential, but notorious for its razor-thin profit margins. From an economic standpoint, the argument goes, local tech companies simply do not have the margin to pay Silicon Valley or even Singaporean wages for back-end packaging and testing. The low salaries are a feature of the OSAT economy, not a bug.

While this was true for Malaysia of the 1990s, it is a fatal mindset for Malaysia of 2026. The entire premise of the NSS is a pivot to “front-end” dominance—specifically IC design and advanced wafer fabrication, which carry massive profit margins. The crisis Malaysia faces today is that it is attempting to hire highly specialized, front-end IC design talent using legacy, back-end OSAT salary scales.

A paradigm shift cannot be executed while clinging to the economics of the past. Malaysia’s historic success as an assembly hub has become a trap; the legacy industry structure is cannibalizing the nation’s high-tech future.

The regional challenger: Vietnam’s strategy 1018

Malaysia’s hesitation to aggressively restructure its talent economics is particularly dangerous given the regional landscape. Southeast Asia does not exist in a vacuum, and the “China Plus One” strategy has emboldened aggressive new players—most notably, Vietnam.

In September 2024, Hanoi launched its own master plan, Strategy 1018. Vietnam’s target is nearly identical to Malaysia’s, aiming for 50,000 highly skilled semiconductor personnel by 2030. However, their approach to the quality problem is starkly different.

Malaysia has largely relied on broad-stroke educational policies, like the aforementioned 60:40 ratio, hoping that the free market and incubation initiatives like SemiconStart will naturally absorb and refine this raw talent pool. Vietnam, conversely, is treating semiconductor talent as a state-led infrastructure project. Hanoi is not just hoping students choose technical sciences; the state is actively subsidizing specialized faculties, building state-of-the-art national laboratories, and directly underwriting the training of elite IC designers to jumpstart its ecosystem.

By aggressively bridging the gap between raw graduates and industry-ready specialists, Vietnam is bypassing the free-market wage friction that is currently stalling Malaysia. If a global tech giant is looking to establish a high-value IC design center in 2026, they are weighing Malaysia’s experienced but underpaid (and therefore shrinking) talent pool against Vietnam’s state-funded, hyper-targeted engineering pipeline. In the battle for front-end dominance, Vietnam’s fiscal intervention may prove far more effective than Malaysia’s reliance on historical momentum.

Escaping the assembly line

The road to becoming a semiconductor superpower requires more than silicon and foreign direct investment; it requires the human capital to design the architecture of tomorrow.

Malaysia possesses the capital, evidenced by the NSS’s early victories, and it possesses the raw numbers, validated by its UNESCO-topping STEM graduation rates. But hardware cannot function without software.

If Malaysia cannot fundamentally restructure the wage ceilings created by its OSAT history and fails to adopt a more targeted approach to elite talent retention, the narrative will shift. SEMICON Southeast Asia 2026 will not be a celebration of Malaysia’s technological ascension, but rather a high-profile showcase of a nation destined to remain the world’s assembly line, while its neighbors design the future.

This is an externally contributed piece. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, policymaker, or practitioner — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Bijaksabara Hikmawan

Bijaksabara Hikmawan is an international human development specialist and regional education strategist with extensive experience across ASEAN’s higher education ecosystem. A former International Affairs Associate at Southeast Asia’s largest university, he currently consults for international development agencies on the intersection of technology, mobility, and inclusive governance.

Pax Silica is an unequal arrangement. The US gets supply chain security, mineral access, and a compliant jurisdiction insulated from the pressures of cross-strait uncertainty. The Philippines gets development infrastructure, foreign expertise, and a seat in the global tech ecosystem. That asymmetry is the architecture of the deal. And the Philippines has been here before.

On April 16, 2026, the US and Philippine governments announced the creation of an Economic Security Zone (ESZ) in New Clark City, Tarlac, centered on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to the US Embassy fact sheet:

“Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg today announced the United States’ and the Philippines’ plans to establish a 4,000-acre industrial hub to secure inputs vital to American and global supply chains. The site is located in the Luzon Economic Corridor of the Philippines. The site — the first of its kind — is being designated by the Philippines as an Economic Security Zone, a new model for AI-native investment acceleration hubs being developed under the Pax Silica Initiative.”

Current cross-strait tensions have made it vital for the US to look for alternatives in technological development. The Philippines, rich in critical earth minerals like cobalt, nickel, chromite, and copper, and home to a proven semiconductor workforce, fits. Policymakers like Philippine Department of Finance Undersecretary Frederick Go view Pax Silica as an opportunity to leverage domestic resources, secure critical nodes in global supply chains, and pioneer next-generation industries.

Domestic opposition, led by groups like the Makabayan bloc, views the alignment as a strategic liability by contending that tethering Philippine industrial policy to Washington’s defense sector risks Chinese economic or military retaliation, characterizing the move as a capitulation of state interests. The more productive question is: on what terms does the Philippines engage?

What the Philippines stands to gain

The Philippines is no stranger to semiconductors, with the sector making up 63–65% of its merchandise exports. However, because of corruption and insufficient power capacity, the industry has stagnated, focused on assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP) rather than fabrication. Pax Silica, if negotiated well, could be the mechanism that breaks that stagnation.

The ESZ would encourage international companies to establish operations in the Philippines, bringing expertise to advance and propel local industries. The Philippines would not only extract its critical mineral endowments but also process them domestically for semiconductor manufacturing — positioning itself as a vital hub in the global tech ecosystem. This would boost the national economy and expand job markets at a moment of rising unemployment, affecting even college graduates. Investments by the US and corporations could create infrastructure that can be taxed, and a wider job market for graduates in the IT and engineering sectors.

The US Embassy fact sheet notes this ambition:

“The Economic Security Zone is intended to fuse American expertise in institutions and legal regimes – internationally enforceable contracts, transparent regulatory standards, and expert dispute resolution – with enhanced access to the Philippines’ outstanding workforce and talent, mineral endowments, energy resources, and strategic position at the crossroads of Indo-Pacific trade.”

What the critics get right

Progressive and leftist groups, columnists, and everyday people online have raised legitimate concerns. Dan Somera has written that the US would have a two-year free lease of the ESZ, renewable for 99 years, as an “in-kind contribution” from the Philippines. The Makabayan bloc and Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, progressive groups, have compared the ESZ to America’s former military bases in Clark and Subic, pointing to its diplomatic immunity provisions and the practice of US common law within its boundaries.

They fear the amplification of unsustainable mining, land grabbing, and militarization within the Luzon Economic Corridor. Critical discussion online has also centered on the power and water consumption demands of AI infrastructure and the environmental costs of expanded mining. Some analysts warn that job creation could be minimal, with American experts filling skilled positions while Filipinos are left with lower-value work.

The precedent that matters

The Clark and Subic bases offer the most instructive and most complicated precedent. For decades, the US military presence generated significant local economic activity: employment, commercial ecosystems, and infrastructure that became structurally embedded in the surrounding communities of Angeles and Olongapo.

At their peak, the bases employed tens of thousands of Filipinos directly, with estimates of total dependent employment, including service industries, running considerably higher. When Mount Pinatubo accelerated the American withdrawal and the Philippine Senate voted against lease renewal in 1992, the economic dislocation was severe enough that both cities faced prolonged depression before reinvention as the Subic Bay Freeport Zone and Clark Freeport Zone eventually took hold.

The infrastructure the Americans left behind, runways, port facilities, and utilities, became the foundation for post-base economic development. The arrangement had been asymmetric throughout: the US got strategic Pacific positioning, the Philippines got an economy built substantially around foreign military expenditure. The harm was real. Documented labor exploitation, environmental damage, and the social costs of base economies are part of the historical record and should not be minimized.

The argument here is narrower. Asymmetric arrangements, even extractive ones, can deposit durable infrastructure and economic capacity that outlasts the arrangement itself. Pax Silica can operate on a similar structural logic. The question for policymakers and civil society is not whether the arrangement is equal, it isn’t, but whether the Philippines can negotiate terms that maximize what remains after the Americans’ strategic interests have been served.

The window that remains open

The ESZ’s legal framework is still a work in progress. According to the US Embassy fact sheet, the Philippine and American governments are still discussing and finalizing the legal and development framework for long-term development. That unfinished status is leverage, not a red flag.

Jurisdiction, local hiring requirements, mineral processing terms, and environmental standards are all still on the table. Civil society groups and policymakers who oppose the ESZ’s current trajectory would do more by engaging that process than by opposing the zone’s existence outright. Outright rejection risks foreclosing the development pathways the Philippines needs. Proactive negotiation for parity, even if it means allowing Washington to claim the political win, could be the more strategically sound position.

The Philippines is at a crossroads. Pax Silica could represent a meaningful step in its economic development, but only if the Philippines enters the arrangement with clear-eyed awareness of what it is, what it is not, and what still remains to be determined. The government and Filipinos just need to pay attention.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr.

Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr. is a graduating Asian Studies student at UST, specializing in history and geopolitics. A versatile generalist with internship experience spanning HR to Knowledge Management across corporate and NGO sectors, he is currently writing his thesis on intergenerational gaps in Thailand.

Southeast Asia’s security landscape has never been as simple as the US-China binary suggests, but for decades, that binary provided its dominant logic: Washington as the primary guarantor for maritime states, Beijing as the dominant partner across much of the mainland.

Alongside that competition, middle powers like Australia, India, South Korea, and, above all, Japan have been quietly deepening their security footprints in the region, mostly through non-lethal means. But that will soon change in April 2026, as Japan’s decision to scrap its ban on lethal weapons exports changes the terms of that involvement decisively.

For years, Tokyo had been building a quiet architecture of defense relationships across the region through two main instruments. The first was a series of bilateral Defense Equipment and Technology Transfer agreements with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This created the legal framework for non-lethal equipment transfers before the export ban was ever lifted. The second was the Official Security Assistance (OSA) program, introduced in Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy and launched in 2023, which enabled Japan, for the first time, to provide military aid directly to the armed forces of like-minded countries.

This was a meaningful distinction from its longstanding Official Development Assistance, which explicitly prohibited military use. OSA crossed that line, signaling that Tokyo’s conception of regional security cooperation was expanding. OSA’s first recipients were the Philippines, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Fiji, and the program has since expanded to include Indonesia, Thailand, and East Timor, with approximately $116 million budgeted in fiscal 2026. This was a 125 percent increase on the previous year. Through OSA, Japan delivered coastal radar systems and patrol boats to the Philippines, rescue boats to Malaysia, and, in 2024, signed a Reciprocal Access Agreement with Manila to facilitate joint exercises and logistics sharing.

However, in April 2026, the ceiling on the scope of that presence changed. Specifically, on April 21, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s cabinet approved scrapping Japan’s longstanding ban on lethal weapons exports. This decision opened the door to overseas sales of warships, missiles, fighter jets, and drones. However, exports remain limited to 17 countries with existing agreements, subject to National Security Council approval. Japan maintains a ban on transfers to countries at war, except in narrow cases affecting its own national security.

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have strained US weapon supplies and production, and stretched Washington’s commitments. Allies across Asia and Europe are diversifying as confidence in American guarantees wavers under the Trump administration. And Japan’s own defense industry, long limited to serving the Self-Defense Force, needed external customers to remain viable. As Takaichi put it: “No single country can now protect its own peace and security alone.”

From pacifist to arms supplier

The foundations were laid over a decade. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2014 reinterpretation of the Three Principles on Arms Exports allowed Japan to begin exporting non-lethal defense equipment to select partners. Early results were modest: patrol boats to Indonesia and Bangladesh, radar systems to the Philippines, and, in 2016, the leasing of five TC-90 trainer aircraft to the Philippine Navy.

This 2026 revision effectively removes five legacy export categories that had confined Japanese defense products to support roles: rescue, transport, surveillance, mine-clearing, and instead authorizes the transfer of complete weapons systems across air, land, and naval domains. This development is not a sudden break from pacifism, but rather the policy endpoint of a decade-long incremental shift.

The market Japan is entering

Japan’s biggest immediate deal is with Australia. On April 18, Tokyo and Canberra signed what is now Japan’s largest postwar defense export contract: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will build the first three of a planned 11-ship fleet of upgraded Mogami-class frigates for the Royal Australian Navy, with the remaining eight to be constructed domestically by Austal in Western Australia. The initial three-ship contract is valued at approximately A$10 billion (US$7 billion), with the broader program potentially reaching A$20 billion over the decade. Australia selected Mitsubishi Heavy Industries over Germany’s Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, not, as sometimes reported, over a South Korean bid. What made this deal incredibly unique was that, while it was agreed in 2025, the contract was only formally signed in April, signaling that the agreement was designed with Japan’s 2026 Arms export liberalization in mind.

In Southeast Asia, Japan is entering a market where South Korea already has a foothold. South Korea is the Philippines’ top defense supplier, with Korean-made systems including FA-50 light attack aircraft, frigates, and patrol vessels worth around $3 billion delivered over the past decade. Indonesia has purchased six Jang Bogo-class submarines from Korean shipbuilders and co-developed the KF-21 fighter with Seoul. Malaysia acquired 18 FA-50 aircraft in 2023. South Korea’s more explosive growth, though, has come from Europe, which includes Poland, Romania, Estonia, and Norway, driven by post-Ukraine demand. In Southeast Asia specifically, Japan is not displacing a dominant supplier so much as entering a crowded field that already includes South Korea, India, France, and the United States. That crowding matters for the alliance-management problem that arises later.

The growing division

The reception to Japan’s policy shift maps almost exactly onto Southeast Asia’s existing fault lines.

The impact of Japan’s policy shift is shaped by existing regional divides. Mainland states offer limited opportunities: Cambodia and Laos maintain close ties with Beijing. Thailand, though officially a US treaty ally, has been diversifying its arms purchases toward Chinese suppliers. Without serious maritime disputes, demand for Japanese naval platforms across most of the mainland is thin. Myanmar is excluded from Japanese arms transfers due to restrictions on exporting to conflict-affiliated areas.

Vietnam is the interesting exception. Historically reliant on Russian-origin equipment, it has been quietly diversifying toward Japan, India, South Korea, and the US as Moscow’s position weakens. A 2020 agreement for six Japanese coast guard-based patrol vessels was an early signal of that shift. But Vietnam’s Four No’s policy limits how openly it can engage with Japan, which is increasingly aligned with the US-led security architecture. Hanoi will take what it can get without being seen taking sides.

In contrast, maritime Southeast Asia is where Japan’s new posture will be most consequential. Indonesia is reportedly negotiating to acquire Mogami-class frigates, with four potentially constructed by state-owned shipbuilder PT Pal under a 2021 technology transfer agreement. Malaysia has deepened its defense partnership with Tokyo through bilateral agreements since 2018 and was among the first recipients of OSA. The Philippines has been the most openly enthusiastic: Defense Secretary Teodoro welcomed the policy change as a contribution to “regional stability through deterrence,” and Japan has already delivered 12 coastguard patrol vessels to Manila. Japan is also considering transferring decommissioned Abukuma-class destroyer escorts to the Philippines, though, as of late April 2026, no formal offer has been made, and discussions remain at the inspection stage.

Ultimately, maritime Southeast Asia, facing real Chinese pressure in the South China Sea, is gravitating toward a Japan-US security network. In contrast, mainland Southeast Asia, insulated from such pressures and economically integrated with Beijing, is not. Japan’s expansion of arms exports will not by itself create these divisions; they already exist, but the new export policy could deepen them, and ASEAN’s claim to regional centrality will bear the cost.

Market-alliance management

Japan is entering a market it helped build. A decade of quiet diplomacy, non-lethal transfers, and OSA grants has given it real relationships across maritime Southeast Asia. Now it arrives with far more powerful tools. The risk is proportional.

The instructive precedent is AUKUS. When the US, UK, and Australia announced their submarine partnership in 2021, France was not merely outbid; it was blindsided and shocked when Australia suddenly canceled the Submarine contract it had enthusiastically agreed to in 2016. Paris had treated its submarine contract with Canberra as the cornerstone of its Indo-Pacific strategy. What collapsed was not just a contract but a relationship that took years to rebuild. Paris recalled its ambassadors to Washington, London, and Canberra, an extraordinary diplomatic rupture between supposed allies. While diplomatic tensions were eased, the scars they left still affect confidence between France and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Japan faces an analogous risk. If Tokyo signs a defense deal with the Philippines or Indonesia that undercuts an existing arrangement with the US, a European partner, or South Korea, without prior consultation, it risks the same rupture. South Korea warrants particular care. It is simultaneously Japan’s most direct competitor in Southeast Asian naval and aviation markets and a critical security partner in any scenario involving China or North Korea. Their complicated bilateral history makes missteps here politically costly, extending well beyond the defense market. Whether Japan can compete with South Korea’s well-established export industry, which has a strong track record of timely delivery, remains to be seen. Japan must still demonstrate that it can be a dependable supplier as expected by its partners, especially given that delivery delays were among the key reasons Australia walked away from its submarine agreement with France in 2021, which triggered a diplomatic crisis.

US Ambassador to Japan George Glass called the export rule change a “historic step.” Washington’s enthusiasm is genuine. But enthusiasm from the top doesn’t automatically translate into coordination on the ground, and Japan’s defense ministry is now engaged in simultaneous discussions with multiple Southeast Asian partners. Managing those relations in market terms, without disrupting confidence among countries that rely on each other, will require diplomatic discipline Tokyo has not yet demonstrated at scale.

Japan spent a decade earning regional trust through restrained, non-lethal security cooperation. That credibility is now being staked on its transition to an arms exporter.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

In May 2022, one false claim on Facebook — that no critic of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was ever arrested during Martial Law — accumulated 187 million views and tens of thousands of likes before fact-checkers could mount a meaningful response. By then, it did not matter. The claim had already circulated through thousands of partisan feeds, reinforced by algorithmic recommendations, and absorbed into a political reality that many Filipinos experienced as simply true.

What made this episode significant was not only its scale, but what it revealed about the changing conditions under which political truth is produced and recognized. In this context, information no longer moves through a shared public arena where claims can be openly contested and evaluated. Instead, it circulates through segmented, algorithmically curated networks that privilege engagement over accuracy, allowing falsehoods to harden into belief before they can be meaningfully challenged.

Decades before social media platforms existed, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was already asking the question that now sits at the heart of politics across Southeast Asia — what happens to democracy when the space where citizens form public opinion is captured, fragmented, or manipulated? This is no longer just a theoretical concern but a lived reality, as contemporary electoral politics increasingly unfold within digitally mediated environments shaped by algorithmic amplification, strategic communication, and unequal distributions of power.

Habermas and the public sphere

To understand what is at stake, it is necessary to first understand what a functioning public sphere is supposed to look like and why Habermas spent his intellectual life defending it.

In his landmark 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that democracy is not simply about elections or formal institutions. It depends on the prior existence of a communicative space where citizens can freely assemble, debate issues of shared concern, and form public opinion through the force of reasoned argument rather than money, power, or coercion (Habermas, 1962/1989). He traced this ideal to 18th-century European coffeehouses, literary salons, and the early press: spaces where social rank was, in principle, set aside, and what mattered was the quality of an argument. His term for this was the “public sphere” — the arena between the state and private life where citizens constitute themselves as a political community through rational-critical debate.

For Habermas, this sphere operates on three fundamental conditions: open accessibility to all citizens, the bracketing of social status in debate, and the orientation of discussion toward common concerns rather than private interests (Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox, 1974). When these conditions hold, deliberatively formed public opinion becomes democracy’s check on power. When they collapse, what remains is what Habermas called “staged public opinion” — the manufactured appearance of democratic consensus masking its actual absence (Habermas, 1962/1989).

Habermas was already pessimistic by mid-century. Commercial mass media, he argued, had colonized the public sphere, replacing substantive political discourse with entertainment and ideological packaging and turning citizens into passive audiences rather than active deliberators. His most pointed warning, however, came much later. In his 2022 essay “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere,” he identified platform media as the critical new threat: algorithm-driven platforms generate “centrifugal forces” that fragment public discourse into self-enclosed bubbles, making it structurally impossible for “competing public opinions which are representative of the population as a whole” to form. His most recent work, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (2023), extended this diagnosis: the digitalization of media is “radically altering” the structure of the public sphere, fragmenting it into countless “pseudo-publics” — communities of shared belief incapable of generating the cross-cutting deliberation on which democratic legitimacy depends (Habermas, 2023).

Southeast Asia is where this diagnosis has become most visible and most consequential. The region’s cases are not interchangeable; each illuminates a distinct way in which the Habermasian public sphere is being deformed.

When the algorithm chose a president

The 2022 Philippine presidential election was the fullest expression of what Habermasian fragmentation looks like when deployed by a single, well-resourced political machine. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s victory was not built primarily on policy platforms. It was built through a years-long, coordinated social media operation spanning Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, which had approximately 35 million Filipino users by early 2022. The campaign constructed a singular historical narrative — that the Martial Law era of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was a “golden age” of discipline and prosperity rather than one of authoritarianism and documented human rights violations — and seeded it systematically across non-political pages, entertainment accounts, and fan pages, reaching users with no prior reason to apply political skepticism to what they consumed.

Habermas theorized this dynamic, where well-resourced actors convert “social power” into political influence through professionalized communication strategies, thereby structurally disadvantaging ordinary citizens. Analysts at ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute described the result as “digital autocratisation” — the systematic undermining of democratic norms through digital technologies. Fact-checkers from the Tsek.ph coalition described the disinformation environment as a “firehose of falsehood” — designed not to convince but to overwhelm, collapsing the very possibility of shared factual ground.

By 2025, the disinformation machinery had fractured along with the Marcos-Duterte political alliance, turning inward ahead of the midterms. AI-generated deepfakes and coordinated bot networks amplified competing partisan narratives, while a record seven in ten Filipinos reported being more concerned about disinformation than at any previous point. As the 2028 election cycle approaches, the structural vulnerabilities that made this possible remain unresolved, including low digital literacy, with 51 percent of Filipinos struggling to identify fake news as recently as 2022, weakening independent journalism, and ongoing platform deregulation.

The cute grandfather

Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election offers a variation on the same Habermasian theme, but with a crucial distinction. Whereas the Marcos campaign deployed disinformation to rehabilitate a tarnished legacy, Prabowo Subianto’s campaign employed a different strategy, using emotional spectacle to render accountability effectively irrelevant.

Prabowo, a former general credibly accused of human rights abuses during the Suharto era, rebranded himself through TikTok into “gemoy” — Indonesian slang for “endearingly cute.” Viral videos of him dancing, playing with children, and engaging in light-hearted performances were amplified by TikTok’s engagement algorithm, generating 376 million interactions in a single week in January 2024. The correlation between platform exposure and voting behavior was significant: of Indonesians who accessed TikTok daily, 61.6 percent reported they were likely to vote for the Prabowo-Gibran ticket, reflecting the platform’s structural capacity to convert emotional resonance into political preference.

In the foregoing, the gemoy campaign represents a textbook instance of what Habermas described as the decline of rational-critical debate in a commercialized public sphere. It did not suppress competing viewpoints through disinformation; it bypassed the conditions for rational deliberation entirely. As one analysis concluded, the result was a public sphere dominated by “performative populism and sentiment-driven support,” in which emotional appeal, digital virality, and symbolic branding often outweigh historical accountability and policy platforms. Prabowo secured a first-round victory with approximately 58 percent of the vote.

The Indonesian case then produced what is perhaps the region’s most instructive Habermasian reversal. The same algorithmic platforms that served as Prabowo’s campaign infrastructure became, months later, the organizing infrastructure for mass civic opposition. When the Prabowo administration imposed sweeping budget cuts in early 2025, the hashtag #IndonesiaGelap (“Dark Indonesia”) mobilized hundreds of thousands of students into the streets in what became the largest sustained protest wave since the Reformasi era.

The government’s response was to flood the same digital space with counter-narratives, principally under the hashtag #IndonesiaTerang (“Bright Indonesia”). Research by the Monash University Data and Democracy Research Hub found that #IndonesiaTerang generated only 2,209 tweets compared to approximately 3 million under #IndonesiaGelap, drawn from fewer than 2,000 unique accounts versus 104,000 for the protest hashtag. This is precisely the communicative pathology Habermas described: a state deploying strategic communication to manufacture the appearance of public consensus while civil society actors attempt to sustain an autonomous deliberative space against it. The disparity in numbers suggests the state lost that particular exchange; the structural conditions enabling such manipulation, however, remain fully intact.

When the feed was not Enough

Thailand’s 2023 election presents a third and perhaps most sobering case. It shows what happens when a demonstrably robust digital public sphere generates clear democratic legitimacy, yet offline institutions refuse to recognize or uphold it.

Move Forward’s campaign was, by measurable standards, an instance of what an inclusive digital public sphere can achieve. Its organically driven social media operation dominated electoral discourse across Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The party accounted for 56 percent of the most popular posts under the election hashtag #election23 on Facebook, generating more than 10 million interactions with over 80 percent positive sentiment. Its leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, grew his Facebook base by more than 200 percent in 60 days; each post averaged 59,000 interactions, 99 percent of which were positive. Move Forward won the popular vote, becoming the largest single party in the lower house with 151 seats.

In hindsight, the movement never formed a government. Under a military-drafted constitution that granted an appointed Senate a role in selecting the prime minister, Move Forward was blocked from assuming power despite its electoral mandate. The Constitutional Court subsequently ordered the party dissolved and banned its leaders from politics for ten years, ruling that its campaign to amend Thailand’s lèse-majesté law constituted an attempt to “overthrow” the constitutional monarchy.

Thailand’s case illustrates the sharpest possible gap between communicative power and political power. Move Forward successfully constituted itself as the dominant voice in Thailand’s digital public sphere, achieving in the online arena precisely the kind of open, accessible, cross-cutting deliberation Habermas describes as the normative ideal. It was shut out regardless. As one academic analysis concluded, the Thai case “demonstrates powerfully how autocrats might lose an election due to social media, yet still manage to hang on to power through entrenched authoritarian institutions.”

This represents the outer limit of the problem in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines and Indonesia, the public sphere is being reshaped from within by disinformation, algorithmic spectacle, and manufactured consensus. In Thailand, it was overridden from without. Both dynamics lead to the same conclusion. A functioning digital public sphere may be necessary, but not sufficient, for democratic outcomes.

Looking ahead

In retrospect, Habermas’ theory does not require every citizen to be trapped in a filter bubble to carry analytical weight. It requires only that the structural conditions for shared, cross-cutting deliberation be meaningfully weakened. Across these three national cases, the evidence suggests they have been, in three distinct ways: through coordinated disinformation that dissolves a common factual ground in the Philippines; through algorithmic emotional spectacle that bypasses the conditions for rational deliberation in Indonesia; and through institutional suppression of a public sphere that functioned largely as intended in Thailand.

However, Habermas argued that democracy’s deepest precondition is not a constitution or an election commission. It is a public sphere in which citizens can reason together, across difference, toward a shared political will. That precondition is under stress across Southeast Asia — not uniformly, but structurally, and in ways that are intensifying as AI-generated content, weakening institutional safeguards, and entrenched political disinformation networks reshape the terrain ahead of upcoming election cycles in the Philippines and beyond.

The algorithm does not care about democracy. And for now, those who understand that best are using it most effectively.

The question for policymakers is whether regional responses — cross-border platform accountability, independent media investment, and digital literacy infrastructure — can outpace the technology before the next election cycle forecloses the possibility of a shared public sphere. But the harder question, the one that no institution can answer on our behalf, is whether we as citizens are still capable of the critical distance that democracy asks of us: whether we can pause before sharing, question what we feel certain about, and hold open the possibility that the feed we scroll through is not the whole of political reality.

Habermas believed that rational-critical debate was not merely a procedural nicety. It was the act through which a society constituted itself as free. Across the region, the next elections will be, in part, a test of whether that belief still has any purchase here.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Timothy John Santiago

Timothy John Santiago is a graduate of BA in Philosophy from the University of Santo Tomas. Professionally, he works in risk intelligence AI, leveraging DaaS and SaaS platforms alongside open-source intelligence to support data-driven research. He is also active in public service, serving in various youth and policy initiatives.

The United Nations Security Council has shaped the fate of global peace, but Southeast Asia has rarely had a front-row seat in the council. The Philippines’ bid for a non-permanent seat in 2027-2028 is not just a national ambition; it is a rare opportunity to bring ASEAN’s growing voice into the room where the world’s most influential security decisions are made.

The Philippines’ UNSC bid through an ASEAN lens

The Philippines’ renewed bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for 2027-2028 is not just a domestic diplomatic project; it is an opportunity to amplify ASEAN’s voice inside the world’s most powerful security organ. Manila’s campaign explicitly links its candidacy to the Association’s collective interests, such as peaceful dispute settlements, climate resilience dialogues, and post-conflict peacebuilding. This positions the Philippines as a regional conduit rather than a lone nationalist actor. If elected to a non-permanent seat, the Philippines would become the first ASEAN member state to sit on the Council in years, underscoring the bloc’s underrepresentation in a Council that shapes global security while ASEAN remains largely absent from the permanent table.

From an ASEAN viewpoint, a Philippine seat would greatly strengthen the region’s leverage in debates over maritime disputes, climate-related security, and as well as its expertise in post-conflict governance. The Philippines’ experience with the Bangsamoro peace process and its participation in UN peacekeeping operations gives it practical lessons in conflict resolution and regional stability that are directly relevant to ASEAN’s own security challenges. When ASEAN’s Foreign Ministers and the Philippines coordinate their positions, the impact is clear. The bloc reaffirms its commitment to multilateralism and the UN Charter, and the Philippines, in turn, projects ASEAN’s concerns and views, such as the need for climate-security integration and inclusive peace processes by delivering it in the Security Council deliberations.

The Philippines’ bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council faces both domestic skepticism and as well as a tight international competition, complicating the regional representation. Domestically, some Philippine officials and commentators raise questions to the narrative of prioritization of the UNSC campaign amid pressing socioeconomic and governance crisis within the nation, arguing that resources and diplomatic capital could be better allocated toward domestic reforms or for more concrete regional security mechanisms like the ASEAN rather than multilateral prestige. Internationally speaking, the Philippines is not alone in bidding for a non-permanent seat for one of the Asia-Pacific seats in the council. Central Asian nation Kyrgyzstan also vies for a 2027-2028 non-permanent seat, and has already secured backing from several UN member states and regional blocs, sharpening the race for the limited spots and raising the risk that the Philippines could be out-organized or out-mobilized in behind the scenes diplomacy. These dual pressures, as well as domestic criticisms about the cost-benefit and external competition for thin quotas of support, could mean that Manila must not only justify the bid in ASEAN-centric terms but also demonstrate that the Philippines’ presence in the council is a strategic regional necessity, not just a symbolic national aspiration.​

ASEAN-centric observers also note that Manila’s campaign is framed as a “pathfinder and peacemaker” role, not as a platform for narrow bilateral disputes. The Philippines have emphasized that for decades, the Philippines bring experience in multilateralism and readiness to listen, engage, and represent the broader Asian and global interests, including ASEAN’s own priorities. Having an UNSC Seat means ASEAN would have a voice in the global security architecture.

​Domestically, the bid is often read through a national pride viewpoint where the Philippines could take advantage of prioritizing the south china sea disputes alone. Yet from a regional standpoint, the more compelling argument is that ASEAN is needed in global representation. In a body where the Asia-Pacific is chronically underrepresented, the Philippines can serve as a regional bridge, especially on issues like maritime disputes, climate-related displacements, and post-conflict governance. This then aligns with ASEAN’s doctrine of centrality and multilateralism, and if the bid succeeds, it signals that a dynamic and middle-power ASEAN member can project the bloc’s values into the center of global security decision-making.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Tim Asturias

Tim Asturias is an undergraduate at the University of Santo Tomas and a Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

When the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed in late February 2026, four ASEAN members - the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia - negotiated with Iran for safe passage of their vessels.

The Philippines was the first among these four, negotiating on the 2nd of April with Tehran to be recognized as a non-hostile country and to ensure the safe passage of Philippine-flagged vessels. Malaysia followed five days later, securing safe passage and reiterating its commitment to freedom of navigation and the safety of maritime passages. Indonesia and Thailand are currently in the midst of their own negotiations with Tehran to secure the safe passage of their ships.

While the region seems to be inching toward dialogue, Singapore refused to do so. Singapore’s Foreign Minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, stated, “As a matter of principle, and not because we’re taking sides, I cannot engage in negotiations for safe passage of ships or negotiate on toll rates.” Malaysian politicians were quick to respond to Singapore’s stance. Nurul Izzah Anwar, Deputy President of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), asserted that Malaysia would not be lectured on its engagement with Iran, defending the country’s preference for dialogue over disengagement.

This exchange was presented as a principled disagreement. But it revealed that during crises, states prioritize the protection of their economic foundations and subsequently invoke principles to justify their actions. The country able to maintain the strongest principled stance did so because neighboring states absorbed costs it did not incur, costs that ultimately became irrelevant when Washington imposed its own blockade on the strait weeks later.

Three economic structures, three responses

The Philippines had the least room to maneuver in this crisis. Importing 98 % of its crude oil from the Middle East, with confirmed fuel reserves of roughly 51 days at the point of crisis, Manila’s negotiation was less a foreign policy decision than a fiscal emergency. Manila had already declared a State of National Energy Emergency on March 24, making negotiating with Tehran paramount.

Malaysia’s situation was also similar. Despite being an oil-producing country, it still imports 70% of its crude oil to meet domestic demand. However, Kuala Lumpur presented the security of safe passage as the outcome of high-level diplomatic engagement, emphasizing its commitment to freedom of navigation in accordance with international law. The underlying circumstances mirrored those of Manila, but the official narrative differed.

Singapore’s refusal was based on fundamentally different considerations. Unlike its neighbors, Singapore’s economy relies on the uninterrupted movement of ships through the Strait of Malacca rather than on oil imports. The maritime sector contributes approximately 7 % of Singapore’s GDP, and its trade-to-GDP ratio is about 320 %, among the highest globally. When Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan stated in Parliament that transit passage “is a right, not a privilege,” he was correct in legal terms and was also safeguarding a critical national asset. For Singapore, the legal framework supporting freedom of navigation is not abstract; it is essential to the port economy.

Thailand and Indonesia are also in negotiations, making Singapore the sole outlier against a near-unanimous regional response. Every country whose economy depended on energy imports reached the same conclusion, and the one whose economy depended on something else reached a different one.

What was actually being paid

Reports of confirmed toll payments for the Philippines or Malaysia were never substantiated, and Manila’s foreign department explicitly denied that any fees were paid to Iran. However, the absence of a financial transaction does not imply that no cost was incurred. Each country implicitly accepted that passage through the strait required negotiation rather than being exercised as a right under international law. Every government that entered negotiations treated access as conditional, a legal position that Singapore refused to validate.

The objection here, of course, is that negotiating under duress, without formally acknowledging Iran’s legal right to condition passage, doesn’t constitute legal precedent in any strict sense. International law requires both state practice and opinio juris, the belief that the behavior is legally required, before a norm shifts. Countries like the Philippines, which are acting in an emergency, don’t necessarily signal legal acceptance.

But of course, legal norms don’t only erode through formal acknowledgment. They can also erode through accumulated behavior. When enough states treat passage as something to be negotiated rather than exercised as a right, the reality shifts regardless of what anyone formally concedes.

Singapore recognized this cost explicitly. The Philippines and Malaysia were unable to do so, not due to flawed reasoning, but because their circumstances precluded long-term considerations. A government facing only 51 days of fuel reserves lacks the capacity to prioritize the erosion of behavioral norms over immediate supply security. And with the Philippines already became the first country globally to declare a State of Emergency, the calculus is inherently asymmetric: the consequences of fuel shortages are immediate, tangible, and politically severe for these states. In such a context, the cost of contributing to a shift in the treatment of maritime passage under international law becomes secondary and is not reflected in any single national account.

This perspective was available to Balakrishnan, whereas his counterparts in Manila and Kuala Lumpur could not afford such clarity. However, this insight does not equate to moral superiority. The point is not that Singapore acted in bad faith, its position is consistent with decades of historical doctrine, but that consistency is far easier to maintain when the costs are diffuse and borne by others.

Singapore’s position also contains an unacknowledged contingency. Its principled refusal to negotiate with Tehran remained viable because neighboring states adopted pragmatic approaches. Had every ASEAN member maintained the legal position, the regional energy crisis would have intensified, and Singapore’s principle would have entailed significant costs. Singapore benefited from both legal consistency and regional energy stability without incurring the associated costs. Its unblemished stance was, in part, sustained by the compromises of its neighbors.

Then Washington did the same thing

Following the failed negotiations by the United States (US) and Iran in Pakistan, US President Donald Trump announced a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, targeting vessels entering or departing Iranian ports. By April 16, US Central Command confirmed that the blockade was fully implemented and that no vessels had passed in the first 48 hours.

The Philippines maintains that its agreement with Iran remains in effect. Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro publicly confirmed the arrangement, noting that coordination with Iranian authorities continues and that the Iranian ambassador personally contacted her regarding Philippine-flagged vessels scheduled to transit the strait. Manila is thus simultaneously upholding its agreement with Iran while operating under the military protection of the United States, its treaty ally, which is now enforcing a blockade on the same waterway.

Moreover, in the same negotiations, the US and Iran brokered a 10-day ceasefire, with Iran recently announcing that the Strait would be open to commercial vessels for the remainder of the ceasefire.

The blockade rendered the bilateral agreements operationally moot, but the accumulated behavior of states treating passage as conditional rather than inherent will persist beyond this crisis, available as precedent the next time a chokepoint closes (Singapore’s Strait of Malacca, for example). By the time Iran declared the strait open and Washington maintained the blockade, diplomatic assurances secured by the region had become irrelevant in the face of a situation far beyond the influence of any Southeast Asian country.

This was always the deeper truth of the episode: small states do not set the terms of access to global chokepoints. Rather, they negotiate within the margins that great powers leave them - and when those powers act, the margins disappear.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

In 2024, Asia and the Pacific recorded a staggering 24 million disaster-related displacements—accounting for over half of the global total. This figure, highlighted during the March 2026 International Organization for Migration (IOM) dialogue, is often framed by states as a logistical nightmare or a failure of border security. However, viewing these millions through the lens of cold statistics conceals a deeper, more corrosive crisis of human dignity. When migration is treated merely as a panicked flight from rising tides or scorched earth, the agency of the individual is erased.

While international bodies like the IOM provide the necessary high-level platforms for cooperation, they often operate in a vacuum of abstraction. The true “reality check” resides within the region’s (Civil Society Organization) CSOs, which are actively reclaiming the narrative of climate mobility. By grounding policy in frontline experience and indigenous customary systems, these organizations argue that migration should not be a desperate last resort of the vulnerable, but a proactive, dignified strategy for adaptation. Ultimately, the path to regional resilience lies in moving away from top-down management toward a framework in which the right to move—and the right to stay—are defined by the communities themselves.

The temporal gap

The climate crisis in Asia and the Pacific is not a single event but a spectrum of hazards that demands a sophisticated, dual-track response. On one end are sudden-onset disasters—the flash floods, heatwaves, and droughts that triggered over 24 million displacements in a single year. These are the headline-grabbing shocks that typically command state attention. On the other end, however, lies the more insidious threat of slow-onset processes: the creeping sea-level rise, shifting rainfall patterns, and gradual environmental degradation that erode the very foundation of habitability.

The structural tension within the region arises from a fundamental mismatch between political “short-termism” and cumulative reality. Government disaster responses are largely reactive, designed to manage the immediate logistics of temporary evacuation and emergency aid. Yet, for millions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, climate mobility is a long-term, cumulative process in which the point of “no return” is reached well before a storm hits. When policy remains fragmented—focusing only on the next monsoon or fiscal cycle—it fails to address the permanent loss of ancestral lands and the total restructuring of local economies.

This creates a profound “top-down” disconnect. International frameworks and national mandates often prioritize bureaucratic efficiency over the indigenous customary systems that have governed mobility and land use in the Pacific for centuries. In nations like Fiji, these traditional systems are not merely cultural artifacts; they are the primary mechanisms through which communities negotiate risk and define belonging. When regional policies overlook these local realities, they inadvertently strip agency from the displaced. The analytical problem, therefore, is not a lack of data but a lack of integration. By ignoring frontline insights from civil society, top-down strategies risk treating climate migrants as passive victims of a “natural” disaster rather than active participants in political and social transformation. The stakes are clear: without aligning formal policy with indigenous resilience, the region’s response to migration will remain as dangerous as the coastlines it seeks to protect.

Practice-based resilience

The intellectual heart of the climate mobility debate is not found in the displacement statistics, but in the concept of “Dignified Livelihoods.” For too long, regional policy has viewed migration as a binary: a person either stays and suffers or leaves and survives. CSOs are dismantling this reductionist view by arguing that true dignity is rooted in choice. If a community is forced to move because of a total collapse of local opportunity, that is not “adaptation”—it is a failure of the state.

A primary example of this is seen in the work of Mars Ashir, Project Coordinator at the National Workers Welfare Trust in India’s Narayanpet district. By securing 125 days of guaranteed rural work annually, local initiatives have transformed the “Right to Stay” from a theoretical hope into an economic reality. This is a critical intervention against urban vulnerability. When rural workers are not forced to migrate to cities to work in often exploitative informal economies, they retain their social capital and community ties. Dignity, in this context, is the financial and structural power to resist unwanted displacement.

Simultaneously, for those who must or choose to move, the narrative is being rewritten through digital sovereignty. In Vietnam, Khanh-Linh Ta’s “Green Path Migrants” project demonstrates that the modern climate migrant is not a silent victim, but a digitally connected agent. With over 80% of its engagement coming from youth aged 18–34 and a significant majority of users being women, this platform uses “youth-focused language” to navigate the complexities of mobility. This digital shift allows vulnerable groups to share practical solutions and peer-to-peer insights, effectively bypassing top-down information systems that often fail to reach those most affected by shifting rainfall or saline intrusion.

The reasoning for this shift is that CSOs provide the “practice-based knowledge” that high-level frameworks lack. International agencies can model sea-level rise, but they cannot model how a mother in a rural household negotiates the risk of a drought against the risk of sending her child to an unfamiliar city. They cannot map the “informal and collective action” that sustains a community when a storm passes. Because CSOs operate at the household level, they understand that mobility decisions are deeply gendered and generational. By centering the experiences of women and youth, these organizations ensure that “resilience” is not just a buzzword in a synthesis brief, but a lived reality that prioritizes the dignity of the person over the efficiency of the policy. In the end, a dignified move is one made with a clear map, a full stomach, and a protected identity.

The limits of localism

While the argument for grassroots agency is compelling, it must be tempered by the sheer magnitude of the coming crisis. By 2050, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and Asian Development Bank project that up to 48.4 million people in East Asia and the Pacific could be forced to move. Critics of the decentralized approach correctly ask: Can a network of relatively small CSOs truly manage a human migration of this scale? The necessity of state-led intervention and massive top-down infrastructure—ranging from planned city expansions to international visa frameworks—cannot be ignored. Local resilience projects like those in India or Vietnam are vital, but they cannot build the cross-border legal protections or the multi-billion-dollar sea defenses required to protect tens of millions.

Furthermore, intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge the inherent limits of “localism” and indigenous customary systems. While these systems provide deep cultural continuity, they often lack the sustainable resources and formal legal standing in international law to protect migrants once they cross a sovereign boundary. A traditional land-tenure system in Fiji, for instance, offers little protection to a family that has relocated to an urban center in Australia or New Zealand. Without a high-level policy bridge, the “dignity” of local systems risks being lost in the friction of international bureaucracy.

Finally, we must confront the internal complexities within these communities—specifically the persistent gender gap. As Mars Ashir noted, migration decisions are still largely dictated by male household members, often sidelining the needs and voices of women and youth. If CSOs are to be the true “reality check” for regional policy, they must also act as internal disruptors of the patriarchal structures that silence vulnerable members within their own ranks. The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between top-down and bottom-up, but to create a symbiotic governance model where the state provides the massive structural “canopy” under which local, dignified, and inclusive agency can actually flourish.

The legislative litmus test

As the March 2026 IOM dialogue concludes, all eyes turn toward the forthcoming synthesis brief—a document that must be more than a record of shared grievances. For this dialogue to transcend mere rhetoric, its “Common Principles” must undergo a rigorous transition from high-level advocacy into the hard reality of national budgets and international law. Analysts and citizens alike should watch closely: will the proactive strategies be codified into state-funded resilience planning, or will they remain marginalized as “best practices” while top-down infrastructure continues to dominate the fiscal landscape?

The true test of regional cohesion lies in whether governments can move past reactive disaster management toward a framework of Climate Sovereignty. This requires a fundamental shift in how we define success in the face of environmental collapse. In an era where 48 million lives hang in the balance, we must confront a final, existential provocation: does the future of the Pacific and Southeast Asia depend on the height of the sea walls we build, or on the strength of the legal and social protections we afford to those forced to move beyond them? The answer will define the dignity of the region for generations to come.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Cyril Karl Carandan

Cyril Karl Carandan is a dedicated humanitarian worker with a bachelor’s degree in Diplomacy and International Affairs from De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. He formerly served as the Secretary-General of the 1st Benilde Model ASEAN Meeting. Cyril specializes in MEAL frameworks, research, and ASEAN.

Restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz have exposed the structural dependence of the Philippines on oil imports. In response, the administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. recalibrated into a pragmatic approach in the South China Sea (SCS)–a joint oil and gas exploration with China. Analysts believe Trump is making China win, who only needs to watch its rival collapse from within without firing a single shot. A joint oil and gas exploration in the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), or within the West Philippine Sea (WPS), is indeed transformative for Filipinos, but it would also hand another win for China. Viewed historically, it is a reactive fallback, not a strategic choice for the smaller country trapped in asymmetric relations and a global energy crisis. Although triggered by a 21st-century war, the eventuality of this move is path-dependent on decades of institutional paralysis and underinvestment in a unified maritime strategy that integrates resource use.

This is the third time since the 2005 Tripartite Agreement for Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU) between the Philippines, China, and Vietnam, and the 2018 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Cooperation on Oil and Gas Development between the Philippines and China, that the two countries are exploring the possibility of a hydrocarbons cooperation in disputed waters. In 1994, a consortium among the Philippines, China, and the United States was also proposed but never pushed through.

Each attempt fails for the same reasons. The ownership and exploitation of natural resources by wholly-owned foreign corporations is unconstitutional. More importantly, the legal and political implications of joint exploration remain deeply contentious.

While UNCLOS allows joint exploration in contested waters, the 2016 arbitration’s nullification of the nine-dash line makes the WPS legally undisputed. To enter a “joint” arrangement would imply that the waters are disputed after all, undermining Manila’s own legal victory. Domestic politics compounds the dilemma. No administration wants to be remembered as the government that compromised sovereign rights in favor of accommodation with Beijing, particularly when anti-China sentiment remains a matter of political legitimacy.

From China’s perspective, “setting aside disputes and pursuing joint development” has been a constant call in its dispute settlement since the 1980s. In principle, it promises mutual economic gains for both sides. However, it comes at the cost of accepting China’s sovereignty, binding smaller states into its laws that must govern operations, and thereby normalizing its status quo presence, albeit illegal. Furthermore, there is a trust deficit in China’s commitment to comply with rules and agreements.

There are both risks and opportunities in pursuing joint exploration with China in the WPS. However, what is often missing from public discourse is a deeper scrutiny of the prevailing assumption that compromise is the only way to harness the energy sources sitting in the WPS, and that China’s aggression is the only thing that has been stopping the Philippines from doing so independently. This is not to critique joint exploration itself; if carefully structured and aligned with legal grounds and developmental objectives, a negotiated arrangement may indeed prove to be the most practical move. Rather, the more important question is how the Philippines arrived at a point where such a compromise is perceived as the only path forward.

Other Southeast Asian claimants have not accepted this option.

In the history of SCS disputes, multiple claimants have employed several approaches to assert territorial claims. These are not limited to China’s active maritime enforcement and militarization of the features, or the Philippines’ media transparency, defense alliances, and international law. Vietnam and Malaysia’s strategies, despite China’s protests and periodic harassment, also include economic integration in sectors such as hydrocarbons and fisheries. Arguably, sovereignty must not be asserted merely through legal rhetoric or militarization, but through sustained physical and economic presence. After all, territorial demarcations in contested areas are also driven by the need to determine who gets access to which resources.

Historically, the Philippines pursued hydrocarbon exploration in the WPS since the 1970s. It was also one of the early movers in Southeast Asia to occupy several features in the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG) and legalize the claims. But rather than a politically sustained strategy of physical assertion, occupied islands never truly expanded, and oil and gas explorations remained an economic activity separate from sovereignty and discouraged by weak enforcement, years of stalled operations, and risk aversion or defensiveness.

Today, the Philippines stands as the only major Southeast Asian claimant not actively developing new hydrocarbon resources in waters contested by Beijing. And this was not always due to China.

Successful extraction has been conducted with state-owned and private service contractors in safer, nearer oil and gas blocks in offshore Palawan, outside core contested areas. This includes the almost-depleted Malampaya, the decommissioned Nido-Matinloc Complex, and ongoing exploration and production in the Galoc, Malampaya-East (extension), and Calamian oil fields, among others. Limited deepwater drilling technology, geological uncertainty, and commercial viability concerns that require years of exploration before production largely constrain operations. It was only in the 2010s that security concerns became a decisive factor in hydrocarbon operations. The 2011 Reed Bank incident involving MV Veritas Voyager and the 2019 Reed Bank collision involving the Filipino vessel Gem-Ver conducting survey work for Forum Energy were turning points.

Yet by then, the Philippines had already lost valuable time on an investment that takes years to generate returns.

This reflects a deeper institutional weakness in Philippine maritime policy and the persistent tendency to oscillate between legal-diplomatic and military approaches instead of employing a broader statecraft, one that integrates a market-centric lens.

Philippine exploration at Reed Bank (Recto Bank) was halted for decades by both Manila’s legal moves and fear of Beijing’s retaliation. In 2014, the government banned oil and gas activities in the WPS while the arbitration trial was ongoing. Even after the ruling and calls from contractors to lift the moratorium in Reed Bank, persistent Chinese aggression prevented companies from consistently exploring the WPS. Reed Bank is believed to be almost on par or even greater than the Malampaya gas field, which has been supplying 30% of Luzon’s energy until its expected depletion by 2027.

Following the 1995 Mischief Reef incident, Fidel Ramos responded by modernizing the armed forces. The incident caught the Philippines off guard, exposing maritime incapacity due to its delayed discovery of China’s construction activities. Although Ramos already ordered the expansion of facilities, including the construction of lighthouses in 1994 to reinforce claims and expand petroleum exploration, major renovations only began in 2018, largely due to institutional paralysis. In the end, the only “solution” that materialized at the time was the signing of the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States, which at the time was looking for an alternative military base in Southeast Asia after it left Subic in 1991.

In 2011, before the Scarborough Shoal standoff in 2012, and the filing of the arbitration case in 2013, Benigno Aquino III created the Zone of Peace, Freedom, Friendship and Cooperation (ZOPFF/C) to separate non-disputed and disputed waters based on international law. The goal was to determine areas for marine conservation and national development, where a “Joint Cooperation Area” may be conducted under applicable laws. Central to this approach is the Philippine Coast Guard’s role in upholding the “white-to-white, gray-to-gray” principle, where civilian vessels (“white hulls”) should enforce civilian law, and reserve military assets (“gray hulls,” such as naval ships) for military encounters to prevent escalation. It did not last long when the Philippine Navy arrested Chinese poachers, which then escalated into a military standoff with China that most likely saw this as an opening to seize control of the Scarborough Shoal. In 2013, this forced the government to pursue arbitration. Since then, fishers and enforcement authorities have been restricted from the area.

These present a pattern: initiatives were never institutionalized into a long-term, unified maritime doctrine. There is evident fragmentation across maritime institutions and non-state actors that have stakes in the dispute. Philippine policy remained reactive, responding to crises after they emerged rather than shaping facts before they did. The sudden revival of joint exploration talks with China triggered by the war in Iran is the price of a state confronting the consequences of having waited too long to invest in oil and gas exploration as part of its maritime policy. Not to mention underlying structural vulnerabilities caused by an overreliance on oil liberalization and imports.

Now, years of strategic failures leave Manila cornered. With Malampaya nearing depletion, energy supply vulnerable to geopolitics, and a Filipino public demanding tangible actions from the government, the pressure to exploit WPS is intensifying. But after decades of delay, the Philippines now confronts that imperative under far worse conditions as China’s physical presence becomes more entrenched than it was in the pre- to early 2000s.

There could be more than just institutional (in)competence why the Philippines has been less willing than its Southeast Asian counterparts to pursue unilateral, high-risk exploration in contested waters. There is a need for more public data and scholarship to conclusively attribute legal, geographic, commercial, or alliance-related considerations in shaping Manila’s calculus in the WPS. This includes deepwater drilling costs, investor risk tolerance, uncertainty over reserve viability, and the differing intensity of Chinese presence across claimant states. In this light, the Philippines’ repeated linkage of offshore development to joint exploration with China may also reflect a broader recognition that unilateral development has become politically and operationally difficult under present conditions.

If joint exploration is the way forward, the debate should not be simply whether it should proceed, but how it should be pursued. Any future arrangement must be anchored in full transparency to ensure public trust and avoid the secrecy that undermined previous initiatives such as the JMSU. Negotiations should clearly affirm that any agreement remains subject to Philippine laws. Equally important is the inclusion of non-state stakeholders that have long been left out in WPS policies in overall consultative processes, not only in matters of energy resources, to ensure that strategic decisions are not made solely within closed political channels.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Shane Yumikura

Shane Yumikura worked at the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of National Defense, and served as the Philippines’ Media Liaison Officer at Expo 2020 Dubai. She studies China at the University of the Philippines and majored in Consular and Diplomatic Affairs at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde.

The United States’ Artemis program is more than just NASA’s traditional scientific mandate; the Artemis program is a pivotal move of Western power through the multinational alliance aimed at countering China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) ambitions. This space rivalry marks the beginning of the global power marathon to set the next domain for global and space dominance, the lunar race between the US and China presents profound implications for Southeast Asia and the Pacific as both regions are involved in both powers’ alliances. Far from a mere discovery race, the new space race signals a new era of space warfare, where lunar footholds dictate the pace for future Mars missions, resource control, and terrestrial influences. Policymakers must view it as such to safeguard strategic equities. The new era for the space race is no longer a showing of scientific innovation prowess of the two sides, but it transcends space exploration as the next battlefield for global and space power.

The US’ Artemis program was launched in 2017, in close collaboration between the United States of America, Japan, Canada, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the United Arab Emirates under the Artemis Accords, which now has 45 nation signatories. Artemis targets a sustainable lunar presence by 2028, including a Lunar Gateway station and south pole bases that are believed to be rich in water ice for rocket fuel and life support to test humanity’s capabilities before taking on the next step, going to Mars.

This is no isolated NASA ingenuity, but a deliberate counter to China’s ILRS that aims to put the first non-American foot on the moon by 2030 with international partners like Russia, Pakistan, and others through the “Group of Governmental Experts.” China’s Tiangong station and Chang’e missions have demonstrated rapid progress, aiming for lunar helium-3 mining and military tech like precision landing. Artemis positions the US to enforce the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 norms, such as the peaceful use and no sovereignty claims. While China denies unilateral dominance. Think of it as NATO for space, wherein shared infrastructure secures US leadership in cislunar space (Earth-Moon sphere), where it is vital for satellite defense and supply lines.

In the context of the Southeast Asia region, the region’s chokepoints amplify lunar stakes as US allies like Japan, Australia, Singapore, and the Philippines, which is an active signatory of the Artemis Accords, bolster its program with tech and basing rights, this move counters China’s existing Belt and Road space ties with Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia.​

The Philippines hosts US rotational forces under its Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the United States. This enables Pacific launch monitoring, like Australia’s Harold E. Holt station, which tracks lunar trajectories, and Japan’s H3 rocket, which supports Artemis cargo.

Other Southeast Asian nations are also active on China’s bid on lunar missions, as Indonesia is eyeing ILRS radar tech. Thailand, on the other hand, is a signatory of both the Artemis Accords and China’s space alliance with Thailand, which trains Chinese astronauts. Malaysia is also an active agent as its space agency partners with China’s Chang’e mission data.

Its implications are that lunar success yields pacific leverage, the United States bases could track hypersonic threats from lunar relays, which China could weaponize lunar south pole helium-3 for fusion energy, tilting ASEAN energy security that is currently in a volatile state. Tensions mirror the current South China Sea disputes as space assets could jam regional GPS or enable surveillance, forcing SEA nations like Vietnam (US partner) or Laos (China partner) into alignment dilemmas.

This scientific race for a breakthrough also echoes a race for new global and space power. Take a closer look, as this is a hybrid warfare in orbit. Lunar bases enable persistent presence for kinetic anti-satellite tests, cyber ops on rival sats, or even resource denial, which both sides have done in the past. This 21st-century space race echoes Cold War proxy battles but with trillion-dollar economics at stake as the lunar economy is projected at least $100 Billion by 2040.

China’s 2024 anti-satellite test debris has endangered the International Space Station. Artemis envisions armed defense under the US Space Force. It is not just a race for discovery, but a race for domain control. The winners claim regolith rights, propellant depots, and Mars gateways, heavily marginalizing the loser of this race.

Lunar victories precondition future missions to Mars. Artemis’ Gateway tests deep-space habitats, while China’s ILRS prototypes nuclear propulsion. By 2039, which is NASA’s Mars goal, lunar helium-3 could fuel reusable Starships, while ILRS enables rival landers. A US-led Moon secures Pacific Mars trajectories. China’s race for dominance invites exclusionary blocs, risking arms races. For Southeast Asia, Mars tech spillovers promise economic growth, but alliance choices lock in dependencies, as the US is for open access, while China is for closed tech transfer.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Tim Asturias

Tim Asturias is an undergraduate at the University of Santo Tomas and a Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

In the humid, bustling common areas of the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), the premier university of the Pacific, I stood as a young woman commanding a crowd of hundreds from diverse backgrounds. I was not just speaking; I was articulating a vision for student welfare and national development that cut through the noise of corruption, culturally ingrained mindsets, and the repeated systems that constitute a disease affecting our people.

In that moment, I felt like a confident and capable leader until I was hit by a sad reality that broke my confidence as a female and had me question my passion for leadership in my future endeavors the very moment I stepped my foot in the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea (PNG) - the largest Island Nation in the Pacific and the world at large home to thousand tribes, diverse cultures and more than 800 languages.

This experience reflects what can be described as the “Pacific Paradox”: our universities are laboratories for female leadership, but our national parliaments remain guarded fortresses of patriarchal political culture.

My visit to PNG’s National Parliament should have inspired hope, but instead, it revealed a gap that demands urgent attention. I expected to witness leadership in action, but instead, I was confronted with a silence that spoke volumes. In 15th of December 2025 after contesting for 2026 UPNG Female Vice Presidential seat, I was selected as one of the top 60 successful Youth applicants among 430 applicants across PNG for an annual event known as the PNG National Mock Youth Parliament Program (NMYPP) - a weeklong event fully sponsored by international institution such as United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA), European Union (EU), United Nation Development Program (UNDP), and United Nations Human Rights in partnership with National institutions like PNG National Youth Development Authority (NYDA), National Capital District (NCD) Commission, and PNG National Parliament.

It was an eye-opening experience and a wake-up call for me during our tour of the PNG National Parliament as a female student, exclusively involved in student politics, pursuing my passion for leadership. Many thoughts and questions ran through my mind as I studied the building structures, artifacts, the hidden meaning behind the symbols, the number of seats, and the elected members of parliament who represent us as the voice of our people in PNG.

It was a sad reality check for me to learn that, out of 118 seats in Parliament, only 3 were represented by women. I sat there hopelessly imagining my future fast-forward some years later, working a quiet desk job with my political ambition discouraged by a reality I did not face on the school campus, while my male peers were contesting provincial seats with massive war chests. The near absence of women in the space meant to represent us all forced me to question the true inclusivity of our nation’s leadership and whose voices are truly being heard when women (half of the population) are underrepresented.

Student politics to national governance

The transition from student politics to national governance is a broken bridge. Across the Pacific region, Women remain significantly underrepresented in political leadership. According to UN Women, women hold less than 8% of parliamentary seats across the Pacific, the lowest regional average globally. Pacific countries are grouped into three main regions - Melanesia (Black Islands such as PNG, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji), Micronesia (small Islands including Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Kiribati) and Polynesia (many Islands namely Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands and Niue) because of our geography, culture, language and history.

In PNG, the situation is even more concerning: as of early 2026, only 3 women sit in a 118-member parliament. Since PNG’s national independence day on 16 September 1975, only 10 women have been elected to parliament. This represents our current average for women’s representation at 2.7%, which is far below even the Pacific region’s already low average of 8-9%, placing PNG among the countries with the lowest representation of women globally.

While countries like Fiji and Samoa have made progress, the broader region, including Vanuatu and Tuvalu, continues to struggle with near-zero or single-digit representation, with the overall trend reflecting persistent gender inequality in political leadership. This suggests that while the Pacific accepts women as student leaders in academic settings, it rejects them as legislative authorities in the national arena.

Thus, the gap between student leadership and national governance raises an important question: “Why does this disparity exist?” The answer lies in the merit-based environments rather than the culture-based “Big Man” politics. In student politics, leadership is often judged on communication skills, ideas, competence, policy, and the ability to unite diverse student bodies. However, national elections in PNG and the wider Pacific are governed by the “Gift Economy” and deeply rooted Patriarchal norms, traditional beliefs, or mindsets that often position men as natural leaders, while women are expected to take on supportive or domestic roles. These perceptions influence public attitudes and voting behavior, making it difficult for women candidates to gain trust and support.

Women also face other underlying factors or barriers, such as financial limitations, political violence, intimidation, harassment, and lack of institutional support. On the school campus, debate is regulated, while in national elections, women face psychological and physical violence. A 2025 study found that over 75% of female politicians in the Asia-Pacific reported experiencing psychological abuse. Also, national general elections campaigns require immense capital for gift giving, “mumu” feasts, compensation, and logistics—resources women rarely control compared to their male counterparts. Moreover, the Student leadership is often seen as a “learning phase”, but national leadership is viewed as a “customary” domain for men. These challenges create an uneven playing field, limiting women’s participation in national politics.

Beyond student politics

The issue is not about women’s lack of ability to lead, but rather the structural barriers, cultural expectations, patriarchal systems, lack of resources, trust, and financial support for women. Student leadership provides the skills but fails to offer the institutional support or a safety net pipeline needed for women to transition from student politics into the “real world”. Addressing these challenges requires collective effort from government, institutions, communities, and individuals to challenge existing norms, thereby creating opportunities and conducive environments where women can thrive as leaders.

Also, to change this, the Pacific region must move beyond Temporary Special Measures (TSMs) and implement them by reserving seats for women in Parliament to bridge the gap between the school campus lecture hall and the floor of Parliament, enabling women to equally participate in national decision-making processes and politics.

We also need to start asking questions like: “Is student leadership a pipeline or a ceiling?” We must reflect and ask ourselves: “If we trust women to lead our students today, why do we fear them leading our nations tomorrow?” Ultimately, true representation in parliament should reflect the nation it serves. Until women are equally represented, the question remains—whose voices are truly being heard in our national parliaments?

This is an externally contributed piece. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, policymaker, or practitioner — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Alice Francis

Alice Francis is a final-year Business Management student at University of Papua New Guinea, driven by leadership, gender advocacy, and empowering Pacific youth. She has held key roles including SBPP Female Representative, BMSU Vice President, and Welfare and Gender Officer for the Komo Mt. Sisa Nationwide Tertiary Student Association. Alongside her leadership journey, she contributes to youth career development through PNG Career Development Inc.

The irony of speaking English in the Philippines is that proficiency only gets you in the door, but sounding a certain way grants you access to the room.

The Filipino accent has long occupied an ambiguous cultural space. For one, the Philippines has been consistently ranking among countries having the most proficient English speakers in both the world and the region - a distinction that has naturally brought upon Philippine English, complete with its own vocabulary and inflections. From this emerged a distinct Filipino accent, and with it, an identity marker that travels with the diaspora.

However, recognition has not meant acceptance. Unlike hierarchies based on name and wealth, the Filipino accent is subject to a different system—one rooted in pride, humor, shame, and discomfort in sounding distinctly Filipino. This tension is perhaps most visible when comparing Filipino-American comedian Jo Koy’s use of the accent to English teachers’ experiences in the Philippines.

Jo Koy built much of his early career on the impression of his Filipino mother. The structure of his sets follows a familiar and simple diasporic formula: He would start with a childhood anecdote, his mother’s “Filipino-ness” set against American norms, and a punchline that lands on the exaggeration of her accent. What is worth observing here is not just that the jokes worked, but who they worked for. His special Coming in Hot holds a 7.4 on IMDb, and the material was received warmly by both American and Filipino audiences as a form of representation. But representation of what, exactly? The accent in Jo Koy’s sets becomes a comedic shorthand that is legible, repeatable, and affectionate on the surface, especially in callbacks to his mother, but it still positions the Filipino accent and “Filipino-ness” as the thing being laughed at. He is not alone in this; creators before and after him have built punchlines on the same foundation. It’s important to note that the humor is rarely cruel, but it consistently frames the accent as a deviation from an unnamed norm.

English educators in the Philippines, however, tell a different story from a different pressure point. Research from the International Journal on Multilingualism found that English teachers in the Philippines feel increasingly compelled to suppress their Filipino accent in favor of a more “neutral” tone. Notably, the teachers in the study did not deny the cultural significance of their accent, as many acknowledged it as a part of their identity and their teaching of Philippine English. Yet their professional and social networks consistently pushed them toward a more “neutral” register, treating their natural accent as something to be managed.

These two examples reveal the complex negotiation at the center of this piece. Filipinos themselves actively participate in and shape this dynamic — the accent functioning simultaneously as a vehicle for self-deprecating humor, a marker of cultural identity, and a source of professional shame. What makes this particularly difficult to untangle is that it operates on the same axis as English proficiency itself, a skill long measured against standards of class, intelligence, and social worth.

That is why, for Filipinos, speaking English with an accent is not merely about pronouncing words differently, but about being located within hierarchies of value and credibility.

English in the Philippine social order

When the Americans replaced Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines, one of their first steps was to institutionalize English. In 1901, over 600 American teachers and volunteers, boarding the USAT Thomas, arrived in the Philippines and established a public educational system with English as the medium of instruction.

This effort extended beyond the capital Manila to far-reaching provinces throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, and its effects on the country were sweeping. English came to occupy almost every aspect of Filipino life, from governance to science, mass media, and more.

Filipino media reflects this hierarchical sorting. The familiar “rich versus poor” narrative in Filipino dramas frequently assigns more English lines to wealthy characters, while working-class characters speak predominantly in Filipino or broken English. Consider Bobbie Salazar in Four Sisters and a Wedding: her polished English, professional demeanor, and New York cosmopolitan confidence are not presented as incidental details. They function as signals of education, of refinement, of a certain kind of belonging. Characters who are less cosmopolitan, by contrast, are written with heavier local accents and less code-switching. The message consistently pushed forward in these dramas is that English, and a particular kind of English, marks who has arrived.

This association does not stay on screen. It also shapes how English is spoken in real spaces, including among young people. The “conyo” accent, a Filipino English heavily inflected with a Western tone, has become closely associated with elite universities like De La Salle and Ateneo de Manila. While it has drawn its share of mockery, it has also solidified into a distinct sociolect, a recognizable register of inflection that signals class affiliation as much as it does language preference. To speak conyo is, in part, to signal where you studied and with whom you belong.

In professional settings, this logic becomes formalized and even an economic decision. In the business process outsourcing industry, where 1.3 to 1.8 million Filipinos work today, accent training is standard practice. “Neutralization” programs aim to minimize the natural features of the Filipino accent and replace them with an American English register, specifically to appeal to North American clients. The demand for this kind of training has become an industry in itself, with American English training centers operating across Manila and on online platforms. Here, the pressure to sound a certain way is literally written into the job.

Over time, these patterns, habits, and professional requirements do change, but continue to have consequential cultural work. They reinforce the idea to associate English, and often a certain kind of English, with intelligence, refinement, and authority. And they also reinforce its complete opposite: that sounding distinctly Filipino when speaking in English is, at best, charming, and at worst, a liability.

The pressure here is not merely to speak English, but to sound a certain way while doing so.

The politics of belonging

Linguist Braj Kachru mapped English into three concentric circles. The inner circle comprises countries where English is historically native - the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The outer, expanding circles represent countries where English functions as a second language or as a global lingua franca.

Notice that Kachru’s model was descriptive, not hierarchical. It was meant to explain how English circulates globally, not to rank its speakers. Yet in the Philippines, these circles operate as if they were ranked. Proficiency matters, but so does the accent you use to speak the language. Where you fall in this framework, or how closely you mimic the inner circle’s “standard”, determines your place in the social order and your prospects for mobility.

Rosina Lippi-Green, in English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, argues that the so-called “standard” is simply the accent of a white, upper-middle-class, educated speaker. She argues that no variety of a language is inherently superior to another. Institutions that push for a “standard” do not merely teach a register. They construct a hierarchy, one that sorts English speakers by perceived intelligence, professionalism, and belonging. This happens in schools where students are pressured to conform, in workplaces where employers use accents as a proxy for competence, and in media where “non-standard” accents mark the villain, the comic relief, or the uneducated supporting character. The analysis is uncomfortable precisely because it describes the Filipino setting with such accuracy.

But the persistence of this hierarchy raises a deeper question. It is not an argument against learning, adapting, or code-switching. Language is fluid, and people shift registers for practical reasons every day. The issue is not the act of modification but the expectation underneath it. The expectation that professionalism, class, and intelligence must sound a particular way reveals a hierarchy of legitimacy, one that the Philippines did not author but has nonetheless internalized.

For many Filipinos, modifying their accent is an economically rational decision. Migration, outsourcing, and transnational labor markets reward this kind of adaptability, and the incentive is real and material. It would be too easy, and frankly unfair, to frame every instance of accent modification as capitulation. People navigate systems they did not design, and doing so skillfully is its own form of agency. But there is a difference between adapting strategically and adapting because no other version of yourself feels credible. Again, the deeper issue is not accent modification itself. It is the absence of a framework that allows Filipinos to define legitimacy on their own terms.

The global hierarchy of accents did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed economic and political power. For decades, the United States set the standard not only in markets and media, but in sound. To speak like the center was to signal proximity to it, and proximity to it meant access. That logic made sense when American cultural and economic dominance went largely unchallenged.

But power shifts. Southeast Asia is no longer peripheral to the global economy. It is central to supply chains, manufacturing networks, and long-term growth projections in ways that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago. The geography of influence is changing, but the geography of linguistic legitimacy has not caught up. Until the Filipino accent is treated as fully legitimate on its own terms, sounding “standard” will continue to function as a shortcut to credibility.

On whose terms?

The same study that documented Filipino English teachers’ pressure to adopt a neutral accent also documented their response to it. Neither teacher simply complied. Over time, both adapted their classroom practice to incorporate other varieties of English. Their classrooms became small sites of negotiation, and then of redefinition.

The Filipino accent does not need rehabilitation. What it needs is for the structures around it to stop treating it as a problem to be corrected and minimized. That means policy in how schools train teachers, in how BPO companies use accent neutralization, in how Philippine media writes its characters. It means being honest that the pressure to sound neutral for legitimacy is not neutral. It is a pressure with a deep history.

But legitimacy is not only granted from above. It can also be claimed. And the decision to keep a Filipino accent in certain spaces can, in itself, be a deliberate act.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.