Maria Carmen (Ica) Fernandez
@icafernandez.bsky.social
Pseudoacademic, int’l devt/gov escapee. Works on what hurts: governance, peace processes, displacement, land rights, memory and contestation. Pilipinas/SEA. PhD University of Cambridge.
Sharing a short discussion paper in this monograph released by UP CIDS on navigating multiple contesting land claims under a peace deal. Nothing new for communities confronting these painful questions for decades, but one of the many difficult conversations needed. Download: lnkd.in/gQu5yhqR
A years-in-the-making piece with Tirmizy Abdullah and so many co-conspirators: on collaborative mapping and memory work in the post-siege Marawi padian (market district). Out in a new volume on Visual Culture in the Philippines edited by Veronica Gregorio link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
Woke up with my heart pounding in my chest. Unusual. Checks phone and scrolls news. “Oh, that’s why.”
Belfast folks: will be at #BISA2025 at a panel sponsored by the Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group. Swing by on June 20 if you want to hear about customary land rights in peace process implementation and other geekeries. indico.bisa.ac.uk/event/474/ti...
There must be a word for the survivor’s guilt one feels when the material conditions of your research partners have not improved (and in fact a few barely survived physical and mental breakdowns) despite everything you’ve done and written together. And you’re still writing.
The last months of a PhD, in four gestures
Spring blooms in the prettiest maximum security prison in the world, and we’re plotting a jailbreak
"With so much of Philippine power concentrated in the capital with varying degrees of devolution to local vassals, Malacañang’s hand is never truly hidden."
Maria Carmen (Ica) Fernandez@icafernandez.bsky.social · last yr.In case of interest: notes on Duterte Magic, Sub-Saharan Mindanao, and various political ghosts, wildcards and trickster spirits in a post-3/11 Philippines. Up at @aiianational.bsky.social www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianou...
Rest in Peace Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o #BlackSky #Blackademics
Renowned Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o is dead
His family confirms his death saying, he “lived a full life, fought a good fight.”
the-star.co.ke
Citizen.Coping@propcazhpm.bsky.social · last yr."What nourishes the imagination? It is the arts, the songs, the culture. The problem with repressive regimes is that they like to starve the imagination. So only making literature available in English, you are starving the imagination of a majority of people…" 1/ - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o #LangSky
In case of interest: notes on Duterte Magic, Sub-Saharan Mindanao, and various political ghosts, wildcards and trickster spirits in a post-3/11 Philippines. Up at @aiianational.bsky.social www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianou...
Exorcising Rodrigo Duterte and the Ghosts of Mindanao Secession: Notes from a Post-3/11 Philippines - Australian Institute of International Affairs
internationalaffairs.org.au
Belfast folks: will be at #BISA2025 at a panel sponsored by the Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Human Rights Working Group. Swing by on June 20 if you want to hear about customary land rights in peace process implementation and other geekeries. indico.bisa.ac.uk/event/474/ti...
*NEW ARTICLE*: What do #journalists think of the international media freedom campaigns that aim to support them – like the #MediaFreedomCoalition - and how might their perspectives help us better understand the impacts of such initiatives? We try to answer here... ijoc.org/index.php/ij...
Featured on a TV segment in the Philippines yesterday talking about the Bangsamoro Peace Process and why it matters. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UBZ...
Engelbrecht: Disarmament in BARMM remains a problem | The Big Story
YouTube video by One PH
youtube.com
An updated version of my usual planning and peacebuilding rant was published as a chapter of Vibal’s latest. Sharing late since it's 2025 and yet the social scientists and engineers still think that culture has no bearing on the built environment, + vv. icafernandez.com/2025/04/26/m...
every day my brain is just "goddamn these stupid goddamn motherfucking fucks"
Not the easiest week in the Philippines.
I expected the hardliners in the early days of the administration to try to slow walk people from "why do we need to know about Harriet Tubman?" to "how bad is extrajudicial killing really?" but they have opened the bidding at "how bad is cancer really?"
Whoa, we just PNG’d the South African ambassador for pointing out *to a South African audience* that members of the US admin are mobilizing white identity both in the US and abroad. apple.news/AMxF_uMQUSLe...
U.S. to expel South African ambassador — The Washington Post
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called South Africa’s U.S. ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, “a race-baiting politician who hates America” and declared him persona non grata.
apple.news
The pain of working on justice and rights issues with people and groups who think that other people and groups do not deserve rights and justice. I don’t think I like humans very much today.
Wrote this in 2017 with the assumption that some form of reckoning would come in 2023, as an act of wishful thinking. Some of these things are still wishful thinking. (Now paywalled by Rappler, so) icafernandez.com/2017/01/11/t...
The costs of memory: options for transitional justice and reconciliation, ten years after Tokhang
Note: Shorter versions were published on Rappler.com and as part of the Resbak zine released in February 2017. — Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor a transitional justice expert. This was not…
icafernandez.com
Today’s simple act of celebration: duck wraps and spinach soup while crying uncontrollably in relief. Complicated politics be damned. Now we wait for that damned plane to take off and bring that monster to The Hague.
Video shows former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte being arrested on a plane at Manila airport on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant over alleged crimes against humanity during his crackdown on drugs.
