Backlash and Beyond: The Criminalization of Agrarian Reform and Peasant Response in the Philippines
Keywords:
Peasants rights, land rights, land redistribution, agrarian law, agrarian conflict, agrarian changeAbstract
In the 35 years since the end of the dictatorship in the Philippines many rural poor Filipinos have been caught up in a political battle over the pace and direction of agrarian change. This paper focuses on the political-legal dimension of agrarian conflict in one region, exploring how it has fueled and been fueled by criminalization, particularly the indiscriminate filing of criminal charges against share tenants struggling for recognition as legal land rights holders under the 1988 agrarian reform law. Here, criminalization is a form of landlord retribution against tenants who dare to defy the status quo. The case demonstrates how tenants get “bound by law” – e.g., caught up in inconsistencies in state law and ensnared in costly legalist traps set by powerful landowners threatened with redistribution, but then also leading to innovative collective efforts to activate state officials to step in on the side of peasants to make state law authoritative in society.
En los 35 años transcurridos desde el final de la dictadura en Filipinas muchos filipinos pobres de zonas rurales se han visto atrapados en una batalla política por el ritmo y la dirección del cambio agrario. Este artículo se centra en la dimensión político-jurídica del conflicto agrario en una región, analizando cómo ha impulsado y ha sido impulsado por la criminalización, especialmente la presentación indiscriminada de cargos penales contra los aparceros que luchan por que se les reconozcan los derechos de tierra legales, bajo la ley de reforma agraria de 1988. En este caso, la criminalización es la forma que tienen los terratenientes de responder contra los aparceros que osan desafiar el status quo. El caso demuestra cómo los arrendadores están "obligados por ley" - por ejemplo, están inmersos en incoherencias en la ley estatal y atrapados en costosas trampas legalistas puestas por los poderosos terratenientes amenazados con la redistribución, pero al mismo tiempo lideran esfuerzos colectivos innovadores para hacer que los funcionarios estatales se muevan a favor de los agricultores, y conseguir que la ley estatal sea autorizada en sociedad.
DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2278497
Downloads
Downloads:
PDF 141
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.
