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Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South
"Walden Bello's memoir 'transports the reader from street battles in Salvador Allende’s Chile to the deepest recesses of the World Bank’s document vaults, the din of Seattle’s anti-globalization protests, clandestine meetings with Hamas and Hezbollah,' and inside the long struggle against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines...experiences recounted in Global Battlefields and their lessons for today.” — Max Elbaum, American author, historian, and activist
356 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2025
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April 25, 2025mise en abyme; Reflections on Walden Bello’s memoir, Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love. Many thanks to Ateneo Press for a review copy! Global Battlefields is out now.
When I was first offered the chance to review this book, it excited me as a student usually is, about the prospect of getting into the mind of an intellectual she admired. My first real encounter with Walden Bello was when he ran for the Philippine senate in 2016, back when I’d been radicalized just enough to interrogate freshman pronouncements of being a liberal. It won’t be until years later—Duterte and the pandemic and blood everywhere—that I would truly engage with his work as a political figure. It won’t be until grad school—the emergent interest in political economy—that I’d engage with his scholarship. The memoir, I thought, came at the right time: my politics is surer, though not entirely sophisticated, and my academic persuasions, defined. But I wasn’t quite ready for how incredibly reflective it was going to be. A memoir within a memoir, though on this, I dither so as to not appear presumptuous.
Global Battlefields doesn’t start at the beginning. It starts with the reluctance to begin. Bello was reluctant to start a memoir because, he writes Caroline Hau, he felt like a failure: “I was fully involved in two movements that failed.” The reassessment that preceded this book’s eventual publication is articulated as “a more fundamental consideration [that these two movements were] not so much failures as setbacks in a longer-term enterprise, with flaws that need to be addressed and corrected.” These two things—statement and rebuttal—point to the tension as if framework that Bello writes within, what he calls ‘a tense relationship’ between “the demands of truth-telling and the demands of action.” Obviously informed by the Marxian thesis on philosophers interpreting the world in various ways when¹ the point is to change it, inherent to this autobiographic exercise is Bello’s positionality as intellectual and activist both. Failure is both a statement, and something to be acted upon.
The tension of which he writes is something I responded to, in part, because of the context in which this book is released: sites of knowledge production seem to me either toothless, or functioning exactly as they should, ideological apparatuses of the state. Of course, Bello is more specific about this contradiction, informed by his experience in Allende's Chile, but the general contours of it were so easy to recognize.
The easy recognition is something that surprised me, too, though obviously, the (perceived) parallels were more explicit in chapters on his early life and more abstract in the later chapters. For one, he wrote of status dissonance as a true blue Atenista: the constant exposure to privilege and the image conjured by his family ("Others might have large houses or Mercedeses, but no one owned a whole island—one of the country's 7,100 islands!") served to highlight class differences. Ateneo is implicated here—though I've taken the Ateneo parallel to reflect pseudo-progressive religious institutions—as approaching inequality from the lens of compassion—or noblesse oblige—rather than justice. He also wrote of his time in Jolo, which served to paint an all too familiar picture of the hubris of youth.
Bello's accounts of his youth, even his time as an activist in the States, is colorful. It's funny. Sometimes crude (and I say this with a grin. How refreshing!) But the further into the present he departs from this reflections, the more his accounts become cerebral. His writing reflects loving familiarity with its intellectual underpinnings, and it's not uncommon for this personal accounts to segue into more academic tangents. In parts, he replicates previously published work. This isn't to say that the memoir loses its appeal; on the contrary, it's the aforementioned tension in praxis. These are the facts, what now? From him to you.
One last personal thing: Bello never shies from discussing his flirtations and romances, even writing of how he, like many of his classmates, lost his virginity to a sex worker. But it was the chapter on his third wife, Ko Thongsila, that made me pause. Upon learning that she had cancer, Bello writes, she told him that he was under no obligation to stay, to which he replied, "silly girl, did you think I would be that easy to shake off?" It struck me as understatedly profound, silly girl. This is a man who's faced down dictators and thugs and opposition, everything in his life occasionally funny but more often grave. To leave is untenable. Worse, silly. The distant personal is as heartbreaking as the immediate social.
In all, a very exciting read—something, I think, I'd benefit from going back to in the future, just to confirm points of confluence or departure. It's such a dense book that I wasn't sure what approach to take, writing this review: the political route, maybe, or the more academic route. In the end, I chose to write about the contradictions I wrestle with. In any case, I hope you pick this up. Global Battlefields is out now from Ateneo Press in the Philippines.
When I was first offered the chance to review this book, it excited me as a student usually is, about the prospect of getting into the mind of an intellectual she admired. My first real encounter with Walden Bello was when he ran for the Philippine senate in 2016, back when I’d been radicalized just enough to interrogate freshman pronouncements of being a liberal. It won’t be until years later—Duterte and the pandemic and blood everywhere—that I would truly engage with his work as a political figure. It won’t be until grad school—the emergent interest in political economy—that I’d engage with his scholarship. The memoir, I thought, came at the right time: my politics is surer, though not entirely sophisticated, and my academic persuasions, defined. But I wasn’t quite ready for how incredibly reflective it was going to be. A memoir within a memoir, though on this, I dither so as to not appear presumptuous.
Global Battlefields doesn’t start at the beginning. It starts with the reluctance to begin. Bello was reluctant to start a memoir because, he writes Caroline Hau, he felt like a failure: “I was fully involved in two movements that failed.” The reassessment that preceded this book’s eventual publication is articulated as “a more fundamental consideration [that these two movements were] not so much failures as setbacks in a longer-term enterprise, with flaws that need to be addressed and corrected.” These two things—statement and rebuttal—point to the tension as if framework that Bello writes within, what he calls ‘a tense relationship’ between “the demands of truth-telling and the demands of action.” Obviously informed by the Marxian thesis on philosophers interpreting the world in various ways when¹ the point is to change it, inherent to this autobiographic exercise is Bello’s positionality as intellectual and activist both. Failure is both a statement, and something to be acted upon.
The tension of which he writes is something I responded to, in part, because of the context in which this book is released: sites of knowledge production seem to me either toothless, or functioning exactly as they should, ideological apparatuses of the state. Of course, Bello is more specific about this contradiction, informed by his experience in Allende's Chile, but the general contours of it were so easy to recognize.
The easy recognition is something that surprised me, too, though obviously, the (perceived) parallels were more explicit in chapters on his early life and more abstract in the later chapters. For one, he wrote of status dissonance as a true blue Atenista: the constant exposure to privilege and the image conjured by his family ("Others might have large houses or Mercedeses, but no one owned a whole island—one of the country's 7,100 islands!") served to highlight class differences. Ateneo is implicated here—though I've taken the Ateneo parallel to reflect pseudo-progressive religious institutions—as approaching inequality from the lens of compassion—or noblesse oblige—rather than justice. He also wrote of his time in Jolo, which served to paint an all too familiar picture of the hubris of youth.
Bello's accounts of his youth, even his time as an activist in the States, is colorful. It's funny. Sometimes crude (and I say this with a grin. How refreshing!) But the further into the present he departs from this reflections, the more his accounts become cerebral. His writing reflects loving familiarity with its intellectual underpinnings, and it's not uncommon for this personal accounts to segue into more academic tangents. In parts, he replicates previously published work. This isn't to say that the memoir loses its appeal; on the contrary, it's the aforementioned tension in praxis. These are the facts, what now? From him to you.
One last personal thing: Bello never shies from discussing his flirtations and romances, even writing of how he, like many of his classmates, lost his virginity to a sex worker. But it was the chapter on his third wife, Ko Thongsila, that made me pause. Upon learning that she had cancer, Bello writes, she told him that he was under no obligation to stay, to which he replied, "silly girl, did you think I would be that easy to shake off?" It struck me as understatedly profound, silly girl. This is a man who's faced down dictators and thugs and opposition, everything in his life occasionally funny but more often grave. To leave is untenable. Worse, silly. The distant personal is as heartbreaking as the immediate social.
In all, a very exciting read—something, I think, I'd benefit from going back to in the future, just to confirm points of confluence or departure. It's such a dense book that I wasn't sure what approach to take, writing this review: the political route, maybe, or the more academic route. In the end, I chose to write about the contradictions I wrestle with. In any case, I hope you pick this up. Global Battlefields is out now from Ateneo Press in the Philippines.
March 2, 2025
Wow, what a journey! Friend and comrade Walden Bello recounts his lifelong international involvement in the fight for democracy, social justice, and human rights. Must read.
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