Paper short abstract:

The reconstitution of informal land rights prevalent in the Philippine Muslim autonomous region not only by state and non-state intrusions but through struggle is examined.Reaffirmed is the view on plural legal orders as 'interactive' and an apt approach to the region’s recurring resource disputes.

Paper long abstract:

With a view to redress loss of land rights, past inequities, disempowerment, and lately, environmental degradation, the Philippine state continues to embark on a broader range of policy-and-law reforms. The recent production of new legal frameworks covering agrarian reform, ancestral lands, indigenous/local governance, among others, aims at ensuring resource tenure and property rights especially in more vulnerable communities in contested domains yet undergoing changes with the constant incursions of capital, state-centric projects, and other external influences. Visible is the substantial erosion of pre-existing notions of landholding based on community access rules and the alteration of hitherto village authority structures (as the "datu"/sultanate and kinship-based systems) and jural practices (e.g., "adat", " agama") regulating the locality's common resource spaces, and the conflicts ensuing from the process. While this is well expounded in earlier literature, there remains a dearth of studies explaining the people's ways of resistance, the "disorderly" social practices, and maneuvering within coexistent legal systems to one's advantage (some driven by the nature of the community's internal social and power relations than by the state's behavior or incapacity) challenging new rules informing property rights. Drawing from valuable work by scholars and data from our case studies, the paper explores the reassertions and reconstitution of informal land rights prevalent in the Philippines' Muslim autonomous region not only by state-market and outside intrusions but as reshaped through struggle; reaffirming the view on plural legal orders as "interactive", hence a more suitable starting point towards resolving Mindanao's long history of recurring land disputes.