The talk covers both the structural and contingent factors that presaged the meteoric rise of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who not only upended Asia's oldest democracy, but has also stood as the ultimate embodiment and purveyor of a more macabre and intransigent version of the so-called "Asian values": The self-serving political myth, first propagated by Asian autocrats in the 1980s and 1990s from Singapore to Malaysia, which claimed that liberal 'enlightenment values', namely civil liberties and individual political rights, are both alien to and subordinate in 'Asian' societies, where 'communitarian' values, most especially 'law and order', take precedence under a paternalistic state, which recognizes no independent civil society, first proposed by the likes of Aristotle and G.W.F. Hegel in the West. More broadly, it's a macro-geopolitical analysis of how neoliberal globalization has sprung a new 'double-movement', which has produced a reactionary, far-right backlash against a deracinated liberal elite and decades of non-inclusive development, as opposed to earlier more progressive deglobalization movements in the 1990s following the establishment of the WTO as well as in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Great Recession. Looking forward, the talk also provides a progoniss of long-term trends for besieged post-colonial democracies from the Philippines to Indonesia, Brazil, India and beyond.
Richard Javad Heydarian is an Asia-based academic and policy adviser, currently a Professorial Chairholder in Geopolitics at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He has delivered lectures at the world’s leading universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia universities, and previously was a Visiting Fellow at National Chengchi University (Taiwan), and an Assistant Professor in political science at De La Salle University. As a columnist, he has written for the world’s leading publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and is a regular contributor to Aljazeera English, Nikkei Asian Review, South China Morning Post , and the Straits Times He has written extensively on Philippine politics, populism and Asian affairs. His latest books are “The Rise of Duterte: A Populist Revolt against Elite Democracy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and “The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Global Struggle for Mastery” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Among his latest academic works are, “Penal Populism in Emerging Markets” (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and “The Ascent of Asian Strongmen: Emerging Market Populism and the Revolt Against Liberal Globalization” (Springer 2020); "Philippine Politics: From Rizal to Duterte" (Oxford University Press, 2020), "Subaltern Populism: Dutertismo and the War on Constitutional Democracy" (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
The webinar will have one short presentation followed by a Q&A session, moderated by Eviane Leidig.
The Global Perspectives on the Far Right webinar series
The webinar series Global perspectives on the Far Right is co-hosted by C-REX and ICCT (International Centre for Counter-Terrorism - The Hague), and takes place every first Wednesday of the month in the period August 2021-January 2022. The webinars last for one hour from 15:00-16:00 CET, unless indicated otherwise due to speakers’ time zone differences. This webinar series is a continuation of the C-REX hosted webinars that took place from February-July 2021.
The regions covered are largely inspired by the new Manchester University Press book series, ‘Global Studies of the Far Right’, co-founded and co-edited by C-REX affiliate scholar Eviane Leidig.
The webinar will have one short presentation followed by a Q&A session, moderated by Professor Cas Mudde or Eviane Leidig.
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