The Geopolitics of Foreign Land Acquisitions in the Philippines

Abstract

The thesis examines how foreign acquisitions of land in the Philippines is made possible by Filipino policymakers’ geopolitical reasoning based on the opportunities in the Philippines’ geopolitical context, and the geopolitical representations that both legitimize their policies, and also affect their cognition. The thesis argues that duplications and contradictions in the Philippines’ legal context, the normalization of extralegal practices in Philippine politics, as well as colonial mentality have together led to opportunities for foreign corporations to acquire land in the Philippines. The thesis argues for the inclusion of domestic geopolitical relationships to studies of Geopolitics, since, as the case of the Philippines demonstrates, not only global geopolitical relationships made foreign acquisitions of land in the Philippines possible, but also the domestic geopolitical relationships through the dominance of elite Filipino families in the Philippines. Although foreign land deals appear to potentially erode national sovereignty, land deals in the Philippines take place at a scale that policymakers’ control, so land deals endanger the territorial control of rural communities living on lands targeted for land deals and not national sovereignty.