iv Foreword Foreword The struggle for democracy and human rights [in Burma] is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations. - Aung San Suu Kyi I have been working for the cause of human rights for over five decades. It began with a burning passion and a certain feeling of restlessness to correct what I saw were the gross inequalities of human societies where the rights of every person have been – and, as I now realize without overly being cynical, will always be – determined by the prevailing relationships of power. Having come full circle in this work only to see the same equations result in the same exclusions the solutions proposed by countless scholars notwithstanding, I can say that I have seen enough to conclude that a “career” in human rights is much better spent actually working to unravel exclusions embedded in the power relationships that enmesh society rather than on dismantling it within the safe confines afforded by academic freedom. I say this not to denigrate in any way the value of scholarly works, but to underscore their critical function in all struggles for liberation, which is to ensure that participants never lose sight of the fundamentals even in the thick of fighting. The essays in this book collectively serve this purpose not only by mapping both conceptually and empirically the deficit and growth areas of Philippine democracy since 1986, but by presenting it using four institutions serving as proxies: multiparty elections, the Executive, local governments and civil society. Thus, they are all able to move the discourse forward, and draw action from out of its depths. In his piece, Temario Rivera describes the paradoxical impact on Philippine democracy of multiparty politics, but solves it almost immediately by re-tracing its origins back to the American colonial order where electoral politics, the most prominent organ of the fledgling Philippine democracy, was