Dr. Renato de Castro, Trustee and Convenor of the National Security and East Asian Affairs Program of the Stratbase ADR Institute After more than two years of waiting, Chinese President Xi Jinping will be visiting the Philippines in November. President Rodrigo Duterte invited him to the Philippines when they first met in Beijing in October… Read More

Dr. Renato de Castro, Trustee and Convenor of the National Security and East Asian Affairs Program of the Stratbase ADR Institute In August 2018, President Duterte conveyed to his countrymen that he expected China would be fair on the South China Sea dispute and that they should accept Beijing as a good neighbor. He told… Read More

Claudette Guevara, Deputy Executive Director for Programs of Stratbase ADR Institute and Secretary-General of Democracy Watch Philippines We have a deeply rooted, overwhelming governance problem. What surveys show as the citizen’s waxing and waning support for the national leadership has a continuously dark undertone — the people have a generalized distrust of government. This is… Read More

Dr. Patrick M. Cronin, Senior Director, and Kristine Lee, Research Associate, with the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, D.C. In the Philippines, nearly a year after President Trump first sketched his Free and Open Indo-Pacific policy at the 2017 APEC CEO Summit, uncertainty about how the… Read More

We are pleased to share with you our Occasional Paper for October, written by our president, Dindo Manhit, entitled “The Politics of Institutional Reforms: Promoting Economic and Electoral Democracy.” Reforming institutions is a colossal task. The history of institutions in different societal settings is admittedly challenging and at the least entails a larger political will… Read More

Dindo Manhit, President of the Stratbase ADR Institute We reform institutions to make them (more) inclusive and distributive. These reform efforts, composed of complementary piecemeal and wholesale actions and programs, should start at the very core of the body politic. The issues of inclusion and poverty, and the role of institutions, are tacked in Raul… Read More

Claudette Guevara, Deputy Executive Director for Programs of the Stratbase ADR Institute and Secretary-General of Democracy Watch Philippines Within the next few months, the streets, television and social media will be filled with political posters and advertisements of candidates running for different positions. Every three years, we elect local and legislative officials, and although the… Read More