“Even at its twilight, the Duterte regime continued to espouse debates from various positions within the political spectrum. Indeed, the Philippines has never known a president as atypical as Duterte, and attempts to analyze him and his governance have produced a slew of literature from different vantages.
“Christopher Ryan Maboloc’s Radical Democracy in the Time of Duterte is an impassioned analysis that depicts the gradual political ascent of Duterte from the perspective of a fellow Mindanawon. A similar opinion piece from the same author, titled “Radical Democracy in the Time of Duterte,” was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer in December 16, 2016, and one can surmise that suchopinion is in need of further elaboration, which could have been the very motivator of this work.
Maboloc succeeds in presenting a historical exploration on the root of sociopolitical and cultural divide between the Mindanawons and the rest of the Philippines. Suffering from centuries of institutional neglect and oppression, the people of Mindanao sought to fight back against a system which relegated their struggle as unsightly and barbaric.