Settler Colonization and the Blurry Lines between State-Sanctioned and Extra-Legal Violence

In this paper, I examine how states use seeming challenges to their monopoly on the use of legitimate violence to help spur the expansion of projects that may undermine the stability of the rule of law, but support the expansion of states’ interests. I focus on Melquiades Fellores, who moved in 1941 from Panay, a sugar-plantation region in the Philippines’ Visayan Islands, into what is now the municipality of Norala, a majority-Muslim area in South Cotabato on the island of Mindanao. Since early in the century, colonial administrators were attempting to spur transfers of populations from areas already dominated by imperial capitalism into indigenous-controlled spaces. They wanted to build a national political economy organized around commercial agriculture and mining that expanded into what they saw as the periphery. Upon arrival, Fellores was issued a plot of land that had been deemed “public” early in the century, a designation that dismissed the sovereign claims of its indigenous inhabitants. The Philippines’ National Land Settlement Agency, responsible for migration into Cotabato at the time, also provided him with a rifle, a hoe, a level, and two saws, retired American-military supplies. Manufactured in 1900, the rifle was a tool for empire-building. It had been brought to the islands to prosecute the US military's brutal counterinsurgent war against Filipino sovereignty early in the century. In 1941, it was being redeployed as an instrument of conquest. Issued for hunting, these rifles contributed to the expansion of settler holdings on land confiscated from indigenous populations. They were also part of settlers’ extra-legal arsenal for the consolidation of their power through intimidation, bullying, eviction, and the subjugation of the area’s most vulnerable Muslim inhabitants. While they contributed to explosive unsanctioned violence, these weapons upheld the state’s investment in settler colonization and its disinterest in Muslim lives.