Insuring Permanent Crisis: Postwar Fortresses and the Geopolitics of Dollar Diplomacy in the Philippines

Keywords: militarization, suburbanization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 52

Abstract

From military fortresses to company towns built to house an emerging managerial class, gated communities in the Philippines have long stood as elaborate monuments to political conflicts of their time. As much the product of social divisions as the reason for their intensification, these fortifications extend the military base framework, through which mutual defense is commonly understood, to the civilian context. But a closer look at the institutions which have underwritten their development reveals other interconnections between these two types of enclaves.

Taking the Philippine American Life and General Insurance Company as its point of departure, this paper charts how a firm established by two American military officers shortly after Philippine Independence became the country’s largest insurance company in terms of property assets and net worth. One of several companies that introduced to the Philippine landscape the securitized enclosures which now proliferate it, Philam Life had a notable stake in the geopolitical conflicts which justified their services and products. Through an account of the company’s inaugural years under the direction of noted C.V. Vander Starr, the paper examines how American finance not only shaped Cold War strategy throughout the region but the organization of political life in the Philippines. Drawing recent work on dollar diplomacy in conversation with development studies and military history, the discussion elucidates the continuities that bind postwar development to its colonial state predecessor.