On the night of 22 September 2024, Alberto Cuartero was gunned down while attending a celebration in Madrid, Surigao del Sur Province, southern Philippines. Observers linked this murder with Cuartero’s opposition to Tribu Manobo Mining Corporation (Mangadlao, 2024). This case underscores how, for over a decade, the Philippines has been the most dangerous country in Asia for environmental defenders (Global Witness, 2024). Notably, the statistics on which this statement is based probably errs on the conservative side because killings of environmental defenders are mostly underreported (Sinclair, 2020: 102–103) and because other non-lethal yet repressive human rights violations (HRVs) suffered by such defenders, their families, or communities are largely ignored or underappreciated (Wilson, 2009). This situation reflects the inadequacy of legal protection for environmental defenders in the country (Commission on Human Rights, 2020). I suggest that the long-standing failure to protect environmental defenders in general and to provide adequate legal recourse in particular is an implicit bias in favor of mining and other extractive industries as well as against the defenders campaigning against them.

This does not imply that environmental defenders in the Philippines have no legal protections whatsoever. The defenders may file criminal, civil, or administrative charges against the people responsible for violating their rights. Unfortunately and despite continuing efforts at reforms, much of the Philippine judicial system is perceived by the public as slow, complex to the point of opacity, costly in financial and other terms, inaccessible to victims in remote areas, and eminently corruptible. Indeed, my interviews with lawyers handling cases for defenders reveal that rather than relying on these remedies, the “go to” recourse is the Writ of Amparo, which is a summary judicial relief copied from Mexico in 2007 in response to the rise in extrajudicial killings across the country (Supreme Court of the Philippines, 2007). This writ has been successfully invoked in several cases, though it is not without its critics (NUPL, 2011). My interlocutors note that its effectiveness depends partly on the political or legal views of the concerned judge and that it is vulnerable to future constriction of the procedural rules. Given these conditions, it is a small wonder that existing legal protections do not deter the commission of HRVs against defenders.

Fortunately, progressive legislators or blocs have pushed legislative bills for the increased protection of environmental defenders since the 2010s. Indeed, Philippine legislators might be laboring under the belief that the law is a “magic charm” (Von Benda-Beckmann, 2002) that somehow solves all social problems, to which we will return below. At this point, I outline the key findings of my review and analysis of these legislative proposals.

A few bills address issues affecting environmental defenders as well as other actors working on other issues. For example, there are proposals to criminalize “red-tagging” (publicly labeling actors as communists/terrorists and marking them for surveillance, harassment, or violence) and the filing of strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), which would benefit not just environmental defenders but also activists advocating against other issues. There are also bills seeking to amend the country’s mining laws by providing specific protections for actors opposing the encroachment of mining operations. This would be beneficial to defenders working against mining issues but not those working, for example, on fisheries or plantations.

To date, none of these proposals have been promulgated into laws. The fact that more than a decade of legislative initiatives and struggles have borne so little fruit underscores the disinterest, if not hostility, of the legislature as an institution, and by extension, of the Philippine state itself. Moreover, this delay in addressing the issue represents denial of justice to those defenders who have suffered HRVs as a result of their advocacy.

I argue that the punitive approaches of these bills at protecting defenders carry the risk of decontextualizing the violence inflicted upon them. Framing the legislative response in terms of criminal prosecution shifts the focus onto identified individual perpetrators of seemingly isolated criminal acts and away from the presence and machinations of extractive industries and their allies in the government who underwrote or otherwise enabled the violence in the first place. Thus, any violence is minimized in the sense that the broader and deeper political and historical contexts of conflicts over resource rights are rendered irrelevant in all cases involving HRVs; further, legal protection is reduced to the question of whether or not a specific defendant committed a specific criminal act.

Here, we observe from literature that killings of defenders are linked to the wider context where threats are made against them, such that taking action against vilification and threats that render the defenders vulnerable to attacks would help prevent killings (Lawlor, 2020: 20). Thus, killings and threats—or reprisals and intimidation in the language of the MLRPHRD—should not be considered in isolation from each other but as the synergistic actions of a “security architecture” (Baron et al., 2019; Huff and Orengo, 2020: 4), which features varying combinations of both “hard” (e.g., surveillance, threats, and violence) and “soft” (e.g., corporate social responsibility and public relations) approaches to obtaining consent to extraction (Dunlap, 2020: 11–14). Indeed, Brock and Dunlap (2018) speak of “corporate counterinsurgency” in their discussion on the “techniques and strategies deployed against [defenders],” calling for a “practical and analytical reassessment of corporate and governmental activities that aim to socially ‘engineer’ political terrain to manufacture consent.” Phenomenologically, the impact of this counterinsurgent security architecture is experienced by defenders as a “deep sense of insecurity” resulting from constructed “atmospheres of violence” or the “assemblages of actors, institutions, logics, processes, and materialities characterized by pervasive and persistent forms of violence” deployed by extractive enterprises in their contests with environmental defenders (Menton et al., 2021: 51).

The key insight drawn from these studies is that some mining and other extractive corporations, under specific contexts and conditions, emplace and use this architecture, infrastructure, machinery, or atmosphere of violence to engineer local consent. It is this counterinsurgent architecture that establishes a broad pattern of surveillance and intimidation, within which the dire possibility and probability of violent reprisal is folded into local daily life. Based on this insight, seemingly isolated acts of violence against environmental defenders are relocated within a broader analytical context that links them together and with the corporate and governmental actors that directly and indirectly benefit from such a program of intimidation and reprisal. Thus, instead of addressing violence against defenders as individual and separate cases of intimidation or reprisal, this criminal conspiracy to construct consent through threats and violence should be the focus of sociological analysis, public dialogue and debate, and political engagement.

To this end, bills seeking to protect defenders of human rights and other causes could be amended to include criminalization of the establishment, maintenance and implementation of a security architecture intended to engineer consent through violence and intimidation via “hard” approaches with or without accompanying “soft” approaches. One possibility is adapting the concept of criminal conspiracy or organized crime to contexts involving resources or other social conflicts. Another possibility is to flip the script, as it were, and treat the “corporate counterinsurgency” described by Brock and Dunlap (2018) as corporate terrorism. It is hoped that there are other possibilities that can be explored. Concretely, everything begins with lobbying legislators and their staff, so that they can integrate the ethnographically grounded learnings from social science cited above (Verweijen and Dunlop, 2021; Granovsky-Larsen, 2023; Selby, et al., 2024; Jespersgaard et al., 2025) into their efforts to extend legal protections for defenders.

In a sense, this measure sidesteps the debate over the economic, regulatory, and ethical dimensions of mining. Although all mining companies seek to win the “hearts and minds” of local communities and thus secure their consent, not all of them deploy violence to do so. It is only a given company’s resorting to intimidation and reprisal—whether complemented by “soft” measures like scholarships or livelihood projects or not—that should invite prosecution; it is not the mining industry itself but its use of violence that is the focus of this proposal.

It may be useful to conduct comparative studies of violence against environmental defenders in other countries in Southeast Asia and beyond, assess the viability of criminalizing the use of violence in corporate counterinsurgency therein, and explore the legal mechanisms by which these ends may be achieved. The conversations this may engender could reinforce or modulate the idea of criminalizing corporate counterinsurgency.

This is not to say that legislative initiatives, such as those described above, have no use for environmental defenders. Certainly, the enactment of additional legal grounds for prosecuting HRV cases can only diversify the judicial options available to victims, which in turn could enhance tactical adaptability and resiliency in the face of threats and violence. Having said thus, criminalization and legislation by themselves will not resolve the issue. They should be seen as as just one component of a larger program of reforms that would redefine the economic and environmental policies of the Philippines and the position of extractive industries within this system; institutionalize the rule of law and eradicate legal impunity; and wrestle control of the legislative and executive branches of government from the elite, who continue delay and deny justice to victimized environmental and land defenders.