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Two decades of American global war on terror: temporality and counterterrorism in the Philippines

Two decades after the September 11 bombings and the consequent declaration of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), challenges characterised by the culture of bureaucracy, inter-agency conflict and lack of interorganisational trust, among others, continue to hinder efforts to address the threat of terrorism in the Philippines. These are nonmutually exclusive and are directly or indirectly associated with the understanding and construction of the threat. Mustapha’s observation (2011) that the Bush administration’s GWOT is both “a set of policies and a powerful narrative” (488) still aptly captures the socially constructed aspect of countering terrorism. Accordingly, this elicited “terrorist activities aimed at Western targets, rising levels of anti-American sentiments, and repressive behaviors by Southeast Asian governments under the guise of anti-terror measures” (488). In the case of the Philippines, Fabe (2013) contends that both terrorist operations and state-military counter-measures have put a significant toll not only in the economy, but also on the society because of the “lives lost, damage to property, business opportunity losses, negative travel advisories, and deepening religious and ethnic tensions between Christian and Muslim Filipinos” (229). Counterterrorism remains an ongoing process that is written by complex dynamics at play in various levels. The Copenhagen school’s securitisation theory, which is concerned with understanding the process of the construction of security issues, “finds immediate application in cases in the Philippines where the security agenda had been subverted by political maneuvering” (Peleo 2015, 7). Balzacq’s recent work (2019) presents the concept of regimes of practices to complement the research agenda. He maintains that “securitization is co-constituted by the audience and securitizing actor”, and that this channels attention “towards concrete ways through which regimes of practices acquire a security saliency and shore up their legitimacy” (347). Here, the inherent centrality of temporality is observed not only in making sense out of relevant actors’ imaginations of past, present, and future but, more importantly, in trying to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of security as in its creation, maintenance, and/or transformation, including the challenges that arise from its particular claims.