The decline of the Sulu sultanate as a political player ― A Filipino Anthropologist

What the Sultan of Sulu is trying to do now is negotiate a place for his pre-modern conception of his power within the modern setting. I believe he has failed.

The violence reminds me of the massacre of the followers of the millenarian cult with which Rey Ileto opened his classic book “Pasyon and Revolution.” Whereas that event marked the decline of peasant millenarianism as a force in politics, so do the recent events mark the decline of the Sultanate of Sulu as a political player of significance. Not only is the Sultanate ever more clearly a marginal player in politics in Sulu, let alone the Philippines, it has just lost the bulk of its “army” and armaments.

Quite simply, the Sultanate is unable to leverage pre-modern clientistic bonds into votes that allow it to sustain pre-modern forms of power alongside, or underneath, modern political office, the way the Ampatuans do quite successfully. Which only underscores the Sultan’s basic lack of “clients” for which it can play “patron.”

In a sense, this lack of supporters is the ultimate mark of the Sultanate’s loss of power, because the indigenous conception of power in insular Southeast Asia is of a person who draws supporters with her/his presence, vitality, success, charisma and seeming indestructibility. Which is why our heroes get all tangled up with talk of anting-anting, prayers and cults; why Marcos cultivated the myths he did; and why some people speak of St Cory Aquino. Showing that the Sultan needs dialysis did not help him, especially in Sulu.

The asymmetry between the failed Sultanate and the modern Malaysian state it is challenging could not be more stark. What is interesting is that, confronted by a challenge to its sovereignty, Malaysia has revealed the true basis of a state’s power. Not democracy, not a social contract, not the rule of law, not the recognition of the international community of states – which are the myths, the lies the state tells about itself – but violence.

Sabah belongs to Malaysia because they can hold on to it, and neither the Philippines nor the Sultanate can take it from them. So the Sultanate fails in modern, “statist” terms as well, in that it cannot match Malaysia’s capacity for violence.

What I would like to understand, and so far nothing I have come across has been helpful, is what precisely is a “sultanate.” Is/was it a state, the way we think of states today? Could it exercise sovereignty? If so, how? I suspect that it could, once upon a time, but its sovereignty was premised on the allegiance of supporters, rather than control of territory. That is to say, the Sultanate once had power in Sabah because the more prominent leaders there were supporters of the Sultan, and they themselves had supporters among lesser local leaders and communities, and so on.

No supporters, no allegiance, no sovereignty. Which makes the question about whether anyone bothered to ask the local indigenous groups or communities how or by whom they wanted to be governed very meaningful. I think it is safe to say they don’t want to be governed by the Sultan, a bit player in its own homeland and tethered by his kidneys to Manila.

The fact that the Sultan has had to resort to the use of arms is significant in this regard. Without local allegiance, the Sultanate has no sovereignty. So even if the Sultan once enjoyed sovereignty in the area, that too is well and truly gone.

Perhaps the Sultan no longer has sovereignty, but he may well have property or property rights in Sabah. But having property in another country is not tantamount to sovereignty over that property. And, in any case, the Sultanate cannot (or can no longer) assert sovereignty in either pre-modern (no local allegiance, no supporters) or modern (no established military dominance) terms.

The Sultan is an absentee landlord, yearning nostalgically for his ancestors’ long-gone days of glory. ― gmanetwork.com

* The writer is a Filipino anthropologist who, due to his sensitive position, chooses to remain anonymous.