Foreword v purposely designed as a way of leveraging economic resources in order to wean local elites away from the crushed Revolution. The solution therefore, is to push for the development of alternative political forces, representing distinctive social constituencies rather than entrenched interests, as the driving force behind a full-functioning system of open, protected and protracted conflict. Malaya Ronas carefully scrutinizes the institution of the Presidency and sees it for what it has always been from the beginning: a human institution bogged down by its own humanity, or rather the humanity of its present and previous occupants. Ours is veritably an imperial presidency whose origins may, on the surface, be traced to its older American cousin, but on closer inspection actually stops midway, on institutions that grew out of the American Civil War and which had provided firepower to the colonial enterprises that followed after. Ronas suggests the restoration of the powers the Executive arrogated to itself from the Legislative and Judiciary by way of cooperative mechanisms like the LEDAC and the JELACC, respectively. Rather conspiratorially however, I suspect a more radical motivation behind Ronas' seemingly innocuous proposal, wherein horizontal accountability will be facilitated not just through the expansion of the deliberative space, but by the dispersal of decision-making from one monolithic center to peripheral spaces where civil society organizations and reform institutions such as the Commission on Human Rights and Ombudsman can have a greater say. This I welcome with much excitement. Civil society receives greater attention in Ronald Holmes' essay on decentralization. Local governments, he posits, provide natural environments for civil society organizations to thrive in a more sustainable way than does the National Government. But these comfortable environments can actually serve to limit the capacity of civil society in general “to shape political events”, hence care must be taken by civil society not to build their lives too parochially. The Commission on Human Rights' own institutional experience with decentralization, in the area of reproductive health, provide ample support to this proposition. Whereas reproductive health bills have languished in five consecutive sessions of Congress and counting, local measures mirroring them have fared much better in sanggunians all over the country, thanks to the vigorous presence of non-governmental institutions on the ground. On the other hand, the same institutional experience may highlight one pitfall of decentralization – the dichotomization of the responsibility of ensuring that the State performs its human rights obligations – especially in relation to economic, social and cultural rights. One need not look beyond the understaffed, unsupplied and rotting hospital facilities run by provincial governments, or the