Center for Southeast Asian Studies Friday Forum

From the first hours of the U.S. occupation in August 1898, the Philippines served as the site of a protracted social experiment in the use of police as an instrument of state power. Indeed, America's ad hoc innovation with colonial policing was mutually transformative, central in both the transformation of the Philippine polity and the formation of an American internal security apparatus, creating supple private-public covert nexus central to U.S. political life for much of the 20th century.