20/07/2026
Call for Papers: The Memory and Afterlives of Conflict in Mindanao
Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints
In 1968, Moro recruits in Corregidor were killed by their own military handlers in an episode that came to be known as the Jabidah Massacre. Conventionally read as the catalyst for the modern Mindanao conflict, its approaching sixtieth anniversary in 2028 offers an occasion to take a wider view. Over the ensuing decades, how has Mindanao remembered its long century of war, displacement, and contested peace? This special issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (PSHEV) gathers scholars and practitioners to map that memorial terrain.
Mindanao is a place where several histories overlap on the same ground. Moro, Lumad, Christian settler, and state communities carry distinct and often incompatible accounts of the same events, formed through commemoration and silence; through official memory and vernacular transmission; through monuments, rituals, archives, and textbooks; and increasingly, through digital media. This special issue asks how those memories are made and unmade, who is authorized to remember and who is compelled to forget, and what is politically at stake in the answers. Jabidahโs anniversary arrives at a charged moment, with the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region past its first electoral transition and a generation with no direct memory of the war now coming of age, which makes the question of what gets transmitted, ratified, and left to lapse an urgent one.
Memory studies and the scholarship on the Mindanao conflicts have each expanded over recent decades, yet they rarely intersect. The critical frameworks of memory studies have seldom been applied comprehensively across Moro, Lumad, settler, and state registers in Mindanao, even as the archival and ethnographic materials to do so are increasingly available. Bridging this disciplinary divide is the animating aim of this special issue, which seeks to draw the fieldโs disparate strands into a unified conversation.
We invite abstracts that engage the memorial dimensions of conflict, peace, and dictatorship in Mindanao from across the humanities and social sciences. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
โข Transitional justice and the memorialization of conflict-related massacres, among them Jabidah, Manili, Tacub, Patikul, Palimbang, Maguindanao, and Mamasapano
โข The afterlives of the Marawi Siege and the memory of post-2017 displacement
โข Martial Law and the making of Bangsamoro political memory
โข Lumad and Indigenous memorial registers between Moro and state narratives
โข Gendered memory of the conflict and womenโs practices of transmission
โข Digital and platform memorialization of the Mindanao conflicts
โข Generational transmission and the inheritance of conflict memory
โข The memory of insurgency and counterinsurgency
โข Rido and the vernacular transmission of vengeance and reconciliation
โข Private armies, paramilitaries, and the memory of strongman violence
We particularly welcome contributions from early-career scholars and practitioners from or based in Mindanao, as well as work that bridges academic and community registers of memory to surface new insights into how the region remembers its long century of conflict.
This special issue will be guest coedited by John Lee Candelaria (Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University), Primitivo III Cabanes Ragandang (College of Arts and Social Sciences, Mindanao State UniversityโIligan Institute of Technology) and Ariel C. Lopez (Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman).
Prospective authors must submit extended abstracts of up to 500 words by 30 September 2026 along with their brief biographies in a combined Word (.docx) document. All submissions should be sent to the PSHEV Editorial Team ([email protected]), with guest editors ccโed. Contributors will receive feedback by 15 October 2026.
Contributors of accepted abstracts will be invited to participate in either of two hybrid developmental workshops, to be held in Quezon City and in Iligan in November 2026, to refine and further develop their papers prior to final draft submission. Working drafts will be circulated among participants in advance, and selected participants may join at whichever location is more convenient, or online, subject to their own availability. Full drafts will be due by the first quarter of 2027.
For inquiries, please contact:
John Lee Candelaria ([email protected])
Primitivo III Cabanes Ragandang ([email protected])
Ariel C. Lopez ([email protected])
