Juliano co-presents Paper at Conference on Contested Access to Land in the Philippines and Indonesia

Mr. Hansley Juliano, a faculty of the Department of Political Science, presented a paper co-written with fellow Ateneo alumni, Mr. Jerome Patrick Cruz (Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Switzerland) and Mr. Enrico Antonio La Vina (Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan) in an international conference entitled "Contested Access to Land in the Philippines and Indonesia: How can the rural poor (Re)gain control?". The event was organized by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, as well as the Asian Center and the University of the Philippines-Diliman Third World Studies Center. It was held at the GT-Toyota Asian Center, UP Diliman, last 16-17 February 2015.

Paper presenters. Left to Right: Mr. Enrico Antonio La Vina and Mr. Hansley Juliano during the conference. (Photo courstesy: Gumamela Celes Bejarin)

The paper they presented was entitled "A Feast For Crows?: Probing Disaster-related Land-grabs In The Philippines," which intends to develop analyses on the occurrence of disaster-related land-grabbing in the Philippines and how it opens potential challenges to the recovery and long-term restoration of disaster-stricken communities. Their study documented the ongoing campaign of the rural communities of Casiguran, Aurora against the Aurora Pacific Economic Zone and Freeport (APECO), revealing how contingencies of natural disasters may actually open opportunities for rural social movements to make significant advances in overcoming dispossession efforts by entrenched elites in the name of “development.”