I believe my curiosity and commitment to possibilities led me to Reimagine.

I grew up with my lola in the eastern region of the Philippines. We lived in a small farming town with towering coconuts, giant taro leaves, and golden rice fields, where the perfect cone of an active volcano loomed in the background. Our town lies in a region where, on average, twenty typhoons a year pass by, and where the world’s longest-running communist armed insurgency rumbles. Growing up amidst deeply embedded patronage and policing, I have long been curious about how else my community and our future can look like.

What does security and safety look like when it’s not determined by our elites and men in uniform? What does it look like when they are rooted in the capacity of communities to protect and nurture one another? These were some of my anchors through the different roles I took on through the years.

For around a decade, I anchored the program strategy and learning of Mindanao-based Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID) and of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC)-Southeast Asia. After the 2021 coup in Myanmar, I initiated and co-coordinated the backstage and coordination platform of Milk Tea Alliance, a loose network of pro-democracy and anti-militarism movements in Asia. In 2024, I co-founded Security Intersections and Alternatives (Southeast Asia), a regional collective responding to the urgent need for new paradigms of security. Our work seeks to shift policy and practice away from frameworks of punishment, exclusion, and control toward approaches grounded in mutuality, community, and care.

What began as imaginings and questions inspired and haunted by flooded rice fields and bloodied pavements in a small town off a peninsula by the Pacific has become a lifelong work: a search for meanings and practices of security that emerge when the well-being, dignity and autonomy of those pushed at the periphery are instead at the center.

In “Resistance and Alternatives to the ‘Wars’ on Civic Space in the Philippines” (2023), we sought not only to document the shape, causes, and impact of the War on Drugs, War on Terror and War on COVID19. We wanted to spotlight how communities under repression and conflict view and shape security differently. Such as, how mothers organized their own night watch to protect their own communities, during the height of Duterte’s War on Drugs. Or how indigenous peoples in Mindanao insist on their own husay (indigenous peace making practices) to push back against the “divide and rule” tactics amidst the armed violence and War on Terror brought to their ancestral domain. Or how urban poor communities and allies mobilized to set up community pantries, as if arguing that the pandemic should be approached through solidarity, not discipline. That security is community, not isolation.

This is what I wish to continue doing in this space called Reimagine Peacebuilding: not to reimagine peace and security from our secluded ivory towers or as saviors of communities, rather to unearth and celebrate the alternative futures already being lived in the corners and cracks of this broken system.