The Social Ethics Society (SES) is a philosophical and academic organization that emerged from Mindanao, particularly Davao City, and has become an important intellectual network for philosophy, ethics, and social thought in the southern Philippines. Fr. Dexter Veloso is the current president of the organization. It has a total nationwide membership of 130. Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc acts as Chair of its Board of Directors. Origins and identity The SES was founded in 2010 in Davao City by the late Dr. Romulo Bautista and Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc. It grew out of the need for a philosophical community in Mindanao at a time when the island did not yet have its own major philosophical association. Its early membership consisted largely of philosophy teachers, researchers, and graduate students from Mindanao. Its intellectual character was shaped partly by the complementary interests of its founders: Bautista's engagement with Marxist philosophy and Maboloc's work in applied...
Christopher Ryan Maboloc’s Radical Democracy in the Time of Duterte examines Rodrigo Duterte’s rise through the historical, political, philosophical, and cultural experiences of Mindanao. Rather than treating Duterte as a pro- or anti-democratic figure, Maboloc interprets his ascent as a radical challenge to an elite-centered, Manila-centric political order. Drawing from Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic conception of radical democracy, the book emphasizes contestation, resistance, power, exclusion, and the voice of marginalized communities. It argues that Duterte’s popularity cannot be understood apart from colonial legacies, regional inequality, oligarchic politics, and Mindanao’s exclusion. The book invites readers to reconsider Philippine democracy from its margins. Christopher Ryan Maboloc’s The Politics of Peace and the Mindanao Problem: Tracing the Roots of a Historical Injustice examines Mindanao’s enduring conflict through the lenses of political theory, applied ethics, a...