By By Caitlyn Lee-Mei-Jin Merry
As the United States and “israeli” entities escalate their illegal war on Iran, the effects are being felt beyond West Asia. In recent weeks, the Philippines was the first nation to declare a state of emergency in response to surging fuel prices, as global oil markets react to this imperial aggression (Reuters 2026). In an economy that imports nearly all of its fuel—with up to 95 percent originating from the Persian Gulf (International Energy Agency 2023; Philippine Department of Energy 2025)—oil price spikes transmit rapidly: transport costs rise, food prices follow, and pressure moves directly through everyday life.
The Philippines has long been positioned within a global system in which crises generated in centers of power are displaced outward through trade, energy, and financial dependence. As Samir Amin argued, processes of unequal exchange are embedded within a broader structure of unequal development through which global hierarchies of production and value transfer are reproduced (Amin 1976). Within this system, shocks to the global economy — whether through war, sanctions, or market volatility — are not absorbed at the point of origin, but displaced outward, taking the form of rising costs of living, downward pressure on wages, and intensified strain on households in the periphery (Amin 1976; Bello 2009).
The Philippines has repeatedly absorbed the effects of external shocks; from the oil crises of the 1970s to the Asian Financial Crisis, and to more recent surges in global prices (Bello 2009; Balisacan & Hill 2003). In each crisis, disruptions generated by imperialism have been transmitted through fuel dependency, trade exposure, and currency pressures, with the effects resolved domestically through rising transport costs, food inflation, and declining real wages (Asian Development Bank 2022; World Bank 2023).
These pressures intersect with another form of structural exposure: the Philippines is among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, routinely subjected to typhoons and environmental shocks (Germanwatch 2021; World Risk Report 2022). As scholars of imperial ecology such as Jason W. Moore have argued, the same systems that extract value also displace environmental risk, concentrating both economic and ecological crisis in the periphery (Moore 2015; see also Kadri 2015). These economic and ecological pressures accumulate, taking form as poverty, disaster, and destruction, while obscuring systems that generate, structure, and sustain them. Yet these conditions are not simply endured. They are lived, contested, and resisted — even where that resistance remains unseen within the very systems that produce this obscurity.
The Philippines sits along some of the world’s most heavily trafficked maritime corridors, linking West Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific (UNCTAD 2023). These routes are the infrastructure through which both trade and crisis move. The current fuel crisis in the Philippines is therefore not simply the result of price volatility; it reflects the Philippines’ position as a frontline node of imperial circulation.
To name the Philippines’ position as a frontline node of imperial circulation requires confronting the historical conditions that produced it, and also the conditions under which resistance has taken shape. This article traces the tension between imperial incorporation and the persistent, often obscured forms of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle that emerge within it.
A long history of imperial incorporation shaped both the structure of the Philippine political economy and the conditions under which resistance has emerged. As scholars of US empire have shown, the Philippines was not simply colonised but actively remade as a strategic and economic outpost of American power in Asia (Capozzola 2020; Fast 2013). This is a position that, as Walden Bello has argued, continues today, with the Philippines functioning as a key strategic platform for US military projection in the Asia-Pacific (Bello 2009). Following the Spanish-American War, the United States consolidated control through a brutal counterinsurgency campaign, killing hundreds of thousands and restructuring political and economic life to serve imperial interests (Kramer 2006; Linn 2000). As Christopher Capozzola argues, this period established the Philippines as both a laboratory and a logistics base for US imperial expansion—a role that would endure long after formal independence in 1946 (Capozzola 2020).
This restructuring was not limited to military control. It involved the systematic reorganisation of the Philippine economy around external dependence: export-oriented production, import reliance, and integration into US-dominated trade networks (Bello 2009; Balisacan & Hill 2003). As Jonathan Fast notes, the postcolonial Philippine state emerged not as an autonomous national project, but as a bourgeois order deeply entangled with US power, in which domestic elites functioned as intermediaries within a wider imperial system (Fast 2013). This alignment was consolidated during the Cold War, when the Philippines hosted some of the largest US military bases outside the continental United States, embedding the archipelago within the infrastructure of American strategic dominance in the Pacific (Vine 2015; Capozzola 2020).
These dynamics persisted beyond the formal end of colonial rule. As Bello and others have argued, the Philippines became a paradigmatic case of dependent development: an economy shaped by external debt, structural adjustment, and trade liberalisation, in which domestic production was subordinated to global market demands (Bello 2009; Boyce 1993). Labour export, now a central pillar of the economy, emerged as part of this restructuring, with millions of Filipino workers sustaining economies abroad while the domestic economy remained exposed to external shocks (Rodriguez 2010; World Bank 2023).
From this perspective, one can see how the Philippines is not a developing economy experiencing volatility, but a frontier zone of global capitalism; a site where imperial power, economic dependence, and strategic utility converge. As Amin’s framework of unequal development suggests, such regions are not marginal to the system but actively integrated into it in ways that ensure external shocks are absorbed through everyday life rather than contained at their source (Amin 1976). The present fuel crisis is therefore a continuation of this historical pattern; a system in which war, market volatility, and ecological risk are transmitted through engineered structures of dependence and resolved through the labour and oppression of the same populations.
If the Philippines was incorporated into an imperial system as a strategic and economic outpost, this process also foreclosed alternative regional trajectories. In the early 1960s, efforts to articulate a different political horizon emerged through the proposal of Maphilindo, a loose confederation linking Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, grounded in shared anti-colonial aspirations and regional affinity (Tarling 1994; Leifer 2013). While short-lived, Maphilindo represented an attempt to imagine Southeast Asia beyond the fragmentation of postcolonial nation-states and outside the direct alignment of Cold War blocs.
This moment was not isolated. It formed part of a broader wave of Third Worldist and anti-colonial internationalism which was visible in formations such as the Bandung Conference, where newly independent states sought to assert political and economic autonomy within an unequal global order (Prashad 2007). These projects attempted to reconfigure internationalism—grounding solidarity in shared conditions of colonial domination and uneven development.
Yet these trajectories were systematically disrupted. Across Southeast Asia, the consolidation of Cold War alignments, counterinsurgency campaigns, and internal elite interests worked to fragment regional solidarities and reorient political economies toward external dependence (Robison & Hadiz 2004; McCoy 2009). In the Philippines, this took the form of deepening military integration with the United States, alongside economic restructuring that further embedded the country within global circuits of trade, finance, and labour.
The result was not simply the failure of regional unity, but its active dismantling. Instead of developing forms of collective autonomy, Southeast Asian states were consolidated as separate, nationally bounded economies, each integrated on unequal terms into the same imperial system. While these countries remain exposed to the same pressures—war, market volatility, ecological crisis—they confront them in isolation, without the coordinated structures that might have resisted or redistributed those pressures.
This fragmentation remains central to understanding the present. The Philippines’ position as a frontline node of imperial circulation is not only the product of its incorporation into global systems, but also of the erosion of alternative regional formations that might have redistributed or resisted these pressures. Crisis, in this sense, does not only travel through supply chains. It travels through the absence of solidarities that might otherwise have resisted it.
The absence of regional solidarities does not mean the absence of resistance. Across the Philippines, forms of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle have endured with an exceptional continuity. From historical uprisings against Spanish and American rule, including the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine-American War against US occupation, to later insurgencies such as the Hukbalahap Rebellion and contemporary movements organising around land, labour, and sovereignty, the archipelago has long been a site of sustained political struggle (Ileto 2021; Linn 2000; Abinales & Amoroso 2020).
Most notably, the communist movement in the Philippines—centred around the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA)—constitutes one of the longest-running insurgencies in the world, active since 1969 and continuing to operate across large parts of the country (Weekley 2001). Despite decades of counterinsurgency, repression, and shifting geopolitical conditions, it has maintained organisational continuity, territorial presence, and political relevance. Women have played a central role within this movement, with substantial participation in both leadership and armed struggle, reflecting a broader integration of gendered political agency within resistance formations (Hilao-Enriquez 2007; Rocamora 1994).
The persistence and strength of resistance in the Philippines reflects the severity of the conditions under which resistance has taken shape, and the extent to which those conditions continue to generate organised opposition. In the Philippines today, this is visible across movements organising around labour, land, and sovereignty, including groups such as Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), and international organisations of solidarity such as Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle (FFPS), which continue to mobilise against foreign military presence, land dispossession, and economic dependency despite sustained repression. What distinguishes the Philippines is its profound durability under imperial pressure.
What defines these struggles, however, are the conditions under which they are forced to operate. Counterinsurgency campaigns, legal regimes, and international alignments have worked systematically to contain and fragment organised resistance. In recent years, this has taken the form of widespread “red-tagging”—the labelling of activists, unionists, and community organisers as communist insurgents—alongside the use of legislation such as the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 to expand surveillance, criminalisation, and state violence (Human Rights Watch 2022; Amnesty International 2023). These practices have contributed to arrests, disappearances, and killings of activists, particularly those involved in land and labour struggles.
Under these conditions, political life is not eliminated but reorganised. Resistance does not always appear as consolidated movements or formal political projects; it persists through dispersed networks, localised struggles, and forms of organisation that operate under constraint. As Benedict Kerkvliet and Vincent Boudreau show, sustained repression does not eliminate resistance, it alters its form. It pushes political action away from visible, centralised movements and into more dispersed, cautious, and locally embedded practices that are less easily recognised within dominant frameworks of analysis (Kerkvliet 2005; Boudreau 2004).
To return to the present, the long history of resistance in the Philippines reveals that it is not simply a site where crisis is absorbed. It is also a site where pressures — economic dependency, rising costs of living, land dispossession, and militarisation — are actively contested through labour strikes, land occupations, environmental defence, armed struggle, and anti-militarisation campaigns that continue despite systemic repression. The same structures that produce dependency and exposure also generate the conditions for resistance even where that resistance remains uneven, fragmented, and deliberately obscured.
Recent months have seen a resurgence of organised activism across the Philippines, as rising fuel costs, inflation, and governance scandals intensify pressure on worker communities. Labor organisations such as KMU have mobilised around wage stagnation and the cost-of-living crisis, while transport workers have staged strikes and protests demanding the removal of fuel taxes and an end to deregulation, particularly in response to the sharp increase in fuel prices linked to global instability, war, and the genocide in Palestine (BBC 2026; Global Witness 2023). These mobilisations have converged with broader anti-corruption protests, including large-scale demonstrations in Manila over public spending scandals. At the same time, peasant movements such as the KMP continue to organise around land struggles through practices such as bungkalan, resisting land conversion and dispossession across regions including Bataan and Mindanao, where the highest concentration of land conflicts persists. These struggles intersect with intensifying opposition to military presence, as national democratic coalitions such as BAYAN have mobilised against joint US-Philippines military exercises and the expansion of foreign military presence (International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines ICHRP 2026; Reuters 2026). Human rights organisations continue to challenge red-tagging, surveillance, and the criminalisation of dissent (ICHRP 2026; Amnesty International 2024). In this context, contemporary class struggle in the Philippines is not only a response to domestic conditions, but to the global circulation of crisis itself, as war, energy shocks, and imperial alignment are directly mediated through peoples’ lives and resisted across multiple fronts.
In this view, the Philippines is a node of empire; a strategic frontier where the costs of imperial domination are reverberated through everyday life, through repeated exposure, and through structures designed to displace and contain them. And it is also a place, like other frontiers, where those conditions are continuously contested.
To stand with the Philippines in this contemporary period means seriously confronting how crisis is produced, distributed, and absorbed, and how the fragmentation of solidarities is built into that process. The same imperial circuits that transmit and benefit from war, energy shocks, and economic instability also divide the conditions under which they can be resisted. This is how imperial power sustains itself.
As Amílcar Cabral insisted, the task is to “tell no lies” about how the imperial system operates, and to “claim no easy victories” in confronting it. That means refusing the fragmentation that obscures these connections—and recognising that the Philippines is not separate from the struggles unfolding in West Asia, in Nuestra América, or elsewhere, but part of the same system, and the same field of struggle. To stand with the Philippines is an act of clarity and a recognition that the frontiers of empire are also the frontiers of resistance, and that solidarity must follow them.
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