The Postcolonial Condition of East Asian International Relations: Mindanao, Okinawa and the United States Hegemony

Drawing from the cases of Muslim Mindanao and Okinawa and their involvement in the U.S. foreign policy in East Asia, this research argues that internal colonial relations are constitutive components of American hegemonic order and transitions in East Asia. It claims that re-thinking East Asian international relations (IR) from the perspective of the subaltern shows how the reactivation of the colonial condition of subalterns Mindanao and Okinawa are linked to the construction and reproduction of the American hegemonic order in East Asia. Challenging the state-centric approach of prevailing IR literature on East Asia, I propose the framework of double-sided triptych of hegemony that comprises of the actors hegemonic core, ally states, and the subaltern on one side, and the processes of colonial entanglements, politics of subalternity and hegemonic transformation on the other. This framework addresses what I construe as the two-fold colonial amnesia that prevails in disciplinary East Asian IR: first, the forgetting that Okinawa and Mindanao’s subalternity was not their natural status, but a product of historical necessity brought about by their external relations with China, Japan and the U.S. (Okinawa), and with Spain, the Philippine North and the U.S. (Mindanao); and second, the forgetting of the hegemonic core of its indebtedness to the subaltern, that is, without the subaltern, the American hegemonic system would not have been functional.


Entitled the “Postcolonial Condition of East Asian International Relations”, this dissertation deems the postcolonial in two ways. First, the postcolonial as temporal, that is, after the period of colonialisms, which the American hegemonic system was built upon (after the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, and after Japan’s colonization of Okinawa). In this sense, the postcolonial condition denotes the character of relations between the U.S.-Philippines-Mindanao and U.S.-Japan-Okinawa when previous colonization ends, and the American hegemonic system begins. Second, the postcolonial denotes a commitment towards fragmenting hegemonic structures and retrieving subaltern histories, where the postcolonial condition becomes a struggle against subalternity, and a struggle to form a counter-hegemonic structure.

This study combines a comparative approach with a Gramscian interpretation of hegemony. It employs a methodological “imperial turn” as a disruptive device that borrows from various disciplines and knowledge sources (archival materials, interviews, literature and secondary literature). Through comparing Okinawa and Mindanao, two subalterns that rarely appear together in a single study, I analyse how bifurcated U.S. colonial policies in the Philippines and Mindanao and military occupation of Japan and Okinawa reinforced the existing unequal relations in the Philippines and Japan. It concludes that a viable post-hegemonic, decolonized order in East Asia relies not on hegemonic transitions between states or on strengthening the American alliance system in the region especially with Japan, but from overturning the subaltern’s subordinate status and rendering them as relevant international actors in their own right.