| Summary: | Over the last three decades, the Philippines has grappled with challenges to its sovereignty, security, and prosperity in response to China’s claims in the South China Sea (SCS) based on historical rights. This thesis explores the Philippines’ strategy for managing what it perceives as persistent threats from China’s maritime assertions. Notably, mainstream IR theories (un)consciously overlook the dynamic interplay between international and internal politics shaping Philippine strategy. In response, the research adopts the Copenhagen School’s Securitization Theory, offering an alternative social constructivist approach to understanding global affairs.
The study analyses maritime incidents from 1995 until 2022, focusing on how the perceived existential dangers led to securitizing Philippine policy discourses. Employing process tracing, the project further examines one specific case – the alleged ramming, sinking, and abandoning of a Philippine fishing boat near the Reed Bank in 2019. Only in this incident did the Philippine response deviate by favouring China as it opted to “de-securitise” the issue. The thesis claims that underlying patron-client relations among actors facilitate the mechanism derived from the securitisation framework. The thesis concludes with an assessment of the theoretical framework, the methodology and methods employed, and the empirical data analysed throughout this research.
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