Langkit : Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities

Knowledge, Meaning-making, and Resistance

A journal of the Global South, Langkit has published articles on the history of colonialism, economic dependency, and development challenges, as well as on self-determination and autonomy. Structured in the shadows of the theories of dependency, postcoloniality, and decoloniality, discussions focus on defining the colonial, the foreign, and what is discriminatory to argue that whatever is learned and imitated, hegemonic or otherwise, during the colonial encounter results either in continual misery, in the democratization of agency, or in the attempt to journey back to pre-colonial. The articles in this volume could not veer far. They contain the same libertarian sentiments for exploring the vestiges of colonialism.

Rivera and Llido took on a critical stance in their examination of the Philippine state's program Balangkas ng Nagkakaisang Sambayanan (BANSA) in their article, entitled The Language of Peacebuilding: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Philippine's Department of Education Peace Framework. This program is managed by the Department of Education, and teaches basic education students the rudiments of peacebuilding. By analyzing the translanguaging of the document, the authors discovered how the state is top-down, paternalistic, apolitical, and authoritative in its views of peacebuilding: first, peacebuilding eliminates or reduces conflict; second, conflict threatens national security, requiring the state's bureaucratic apparatus to suppress it; third, while the state controls it, peacebuilding is learned and inclusive. These findings reiterated the lingering experience by citizens, not just Filipinos, of the state's immense power to define, contain, curb, and discriminate knowledge, beautifully explored in the books of James C.Scott and Patricio N. Abinales.

Emerging literature points to the changing form of the state, from being a government to becoming a governance. Participatory, inclusive, and people-centric are the primary approaches observed by leaders influenced by the governance perspective.  However, the literature stresses the importance of leaders' leadership styles in influencing governance.

Barbosa, Balawag, and Balgoa provided insights into this matter. In their article, entitled Constructing or Disrupting Peace through Language: A Peace Linguistics Analysis of the Trump-Zelensky Diplomatic Discourse, they examined in detail the transcripts of the meeting between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025. Aware of his subordinate position in the negotiation compared to the president of the most powerful nation, Zelensky's texts were observed to conform to peace linguistic principles. However, Trump's controlling behavior manifested in his use of evaluative language, transactional framing, interactional control, self-promotion, and adversarial discourse. Zelensky was ushered out early before his main interest, the natural resource agreement and security assistance, could be signed.

Perhaps, one interesting concern for peace scholars is Trump's utterance of "gambling with World War III."  For Trump to worry about the repercussions of a possible war is doubly interesting, considering America's joint forces with Israel in the Middle East.  Did Trump differentiate "regional war, "global war," "little war," and "big war" to visually characterize the flimsy divide, yet bulges with interests,  to define what actually is peace and conflict?

These subjectivities resonate with another article in this volume. Alvarez and Alovera in An Epidemic of Stigma: The Stigamatization of COVID-19 First Responders in Pagadian City, Philippines brought back earlier preoccupation with the cultural "Other." Using mixed-methods design, the article scrutinized how othering came about during one of the most depressing global periods. The finding was straightforward: health workers in the hospital and community health centers who are in close contact with COVID-infected patients were more stigmatized compared to the police and firefighters. However, it explored the transposition of public stigma and self-stigma which, at the outset, appears a territory of psychology. Initially, what is exhibited during contact with health workers, such as fear of infection or fear of the unknown, eventually becomes the self-stigma of health workers. The authors stressed that stigma is a sociological concern and during the pandemic  facilitated by the identification of individuals closest to risk, perception of risk, and  mistrust of health institutions. 

Javier's To Be Born Native Is to Be in the Wrong: Nyai Ontosoroh, Double Colonization, and Subaltern Contestation explores her own feminist and postmodern musings on Indonesia's foremost novelist and activist Pramoedya Ananta Toer's This Earth of Mankind.  The novel, set at the peak of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia, revolves around Minke, a writer romantically involved with the mixed-blood Dutch and Indonesian Annellies, and Annellies' mother, the native Nyai, a concubine to a Dutch master. The article echoed Ananta Toer's presentation, using Javier's own words: the "inescapable logic of colonial and patriarchal power." However, to clearly articulate this logic, Javier repositioned Nyai as the center of attention. A concubine of a Dutch master and mother of a mixed-blood daughter yet stripped of all legal and human rights, Nyai characterizes intelligence and abilities but hustling it out within the disempowering colonial period.

This form of resistance to oppressive and restrictive power is shared by the religious sect Moncado Alpha and Omega, the focus of Gomez and de la Peňa in their article, "Leadership Succession and Authority Legitimation in the Moncado Alpha and Omega, Cotabato, Philippines." The article examined the changing forms of legitimacy authorization exercised by the leaders. Initially, Moncado created the precursor group as a mutual-help association in the 1920s to help Filipino plantation laborers resist impoverishment and discrimination in America. Eventually, the association integrated religious and supernatural elements, which succeeding leaders adhere to until now to legitimize authority. Aside from being divine, these leaders exhibited leadership characteristics required of their times, such as Guibernas's pioneering efforts to open the Cotabato colony and his successor's ability to connect the colony to the government politically. The article showed that the religious sect was built and maintained not by the leader alone but by followers attracted to both their divine and leadership abilities. 

All five articles connect with each other in their explorations of the hegemonic relations of society and state and the powerless and powerful. While these unequal relations are attributed most of the time as vestiges of colonialism, these articles revealed that the structures and attitudes maintaining these unequal relations and inequality are now cultural, that is lived and experienced. 

Aside from the articles, this Volume 15, Issue 1 of Langkit Journal of the Social Sciences and Humanities contains two book reviews, first, Kloyde A. Caday’s review of Bringing the Bones Home: A Postcolonial Reading of the Philippine Novel, 1887-2018 by Jaime An Lim published in 2024; and, second, Riza Ramos-Consad’s review of The Routledge Handbook of English Language Education in the Philippines edited by Julius C. Martinez and Isabel Pefianco Martin which came out in 2025.

Lilian C. de la Peňa, PhD

Associate Editor