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Introduction
Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. (born 1986) is a tenured Associate Professor of International Relations at the History and International Studies Section, Institute for History, Leiden University in the Netherlands. Born in the Philippines and educated in Germany and the United States, he is a Dutch scholar focusing on international human rights norms, North-South relations, global security issues, and contemporary United States foreign policy.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2020 - January 2020
April 2015 - December 2015
August 2013 - July 2014
Education
October 2011 - February 2015
October 2009 - August 2011
Publications
Publications (113)
Is American power in decline? What is the relationship between the perceived decline of American power and the rise of Donald Trump and authoritarian politics elsewhere? Understanding the puzzle of American decline and the world order requires the recognition of how capital and wealth are unjustly distributed, entrenched, and sustained across the s...
Does foreign aid promote human rights? As the world’s largest aid donor, the United States has provided foreign assistance to more than 200 countries. Deploying global numerical data on US foreign aid and comparative historical analysis of America’s post–Cold War foreign policies in Southeast Asia, Aid Imperium provides the most comprehensive expla...
China is emerging as a key state actor in international development – a sector that has been dominated by the United States for decades. US and Chinese foreign aid programs can be compared on the basis of several benchmarks: 1) official state definition and accounting of foreign aid programs; 2) historical foundations and origins; 3) sectoral distr...
How and to what extent do ideas and political discourses shape bilateral cooperation between a powerful state and its weaker ally? Why do weaker states act in ways that diverge from the expectations and preferences of the powerful state despite the contractual agreement borne out of bilateral cooperation? Drawing perspectives from constructivism an...
The COVID-19 global pandemic is understood to be a multidimensional crisis, and yet undertheorised is how it reinforced the politics of dehumanisation. This article proposes an original framework that explains how dehumanisation undermines the human dignity of individuals with minoritised socioeconomic identities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The f...
Pathogens move faster than diplomatic negotiations, and their social and political consequences outpace slow, fragmented governance. In the face of such a shared existential threat, the world urgently needs robust international cooperation rooted in human rights, equity, and solidarity. Yet a close reading of the ongoing WHO pandemic treaty negotia...
As former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte faces justice at the ICC, the Philippines confronts a broader struggle against impunity. Duterte’s war on drugs exposed deep institutional failings, from judicial weaknesses to unchecked police power. While his trial represents a milestone for international law, genuine accountability requires domestic...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often heralded as a force of progress, driving innovation, economic growth, and unprecedented efficiency. Tech giants boast of AI’s potential to revolutionize industries, boost productivity, and even tackle pressing global challenges like climate change. But beneath this utopian narrative lies a darker reality—one wh...
Extreme and growing material inequalities are a quintessential concern among scholars, particularly within international relations, global governance, and global public health, and they are increasingly recognized as urgent issues by policymakers and activists alike. Socio-economic inequality not only undermines health outcomes and individual well-...
This article addresses an important but understudied puzzle in European Union Studies: the super-rich's influence on domestic and transnational discourses, policies and institutions for wealth defence, security and legitimacy. It examines the super-rich's impact on democratic governance and human rights claims of marginalized groups, and how states...
How do competitive authoritarian regimes in the Global South respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? How do these policy responses facilitate human rights deterioration in societies that are already facing democratic regression during the pre-pandemic period? Examining evidence from the Philippines and Nicaragua during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article...
The artificial intelligence (AI) industry, expected to reach $1.81 trillion by 2030, is revolutionizing sectors and economies worldwide. Its growth, however, intensifies global disparities and contributes to human rights abuses. This study explores two key questions: How does AI development lead to human rights violations, particularly in labor exp...
The intersection of public health and International Relations (IR) has increasingly become a focal point of academic inquiry, driven by the recognition that global health outcomes are profoundly influenced by geopolitical dynamics. A recent article in this journal aptly underscores this nexus, particularly by highlighting how natural hazards and ar...
This introductory chapter sets the stage for a comprehensive and multidisciplinary exploration of the challenges and opportunities in the promotion of children’s rights in the 21st century. In 2023, UNICEF's estimate of over 1.9 billion children worldwide, constituting a significant quarter of the global population, underscores the immense demograp...
More than three decades have passed since the United Nations' adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, yet children's rights and dignity still confront profound challenges worldwide. This book delves deep into this complex issue, meticulously examining the causes and consequences of contemporary crises in children's rights and welfare...
This introduction discusses the analytic premises of the book’s core puzzle: the variation across territories and regions of great power rivalry and cooperation in the 21st century, focusing on US–China bilateral relations. China and the US are the two most powerful state actors in the post-COVID-19 world order, with China challenging the US econom...
This chapter summarizes the volume’s findings concerning US–China bilateral relations and its varying impacts on various regions of the world, amidst crisis-ridden world politics. This chapter highlights several conclusions. First, the need to accumulate capital and crucial resources for continued economic growth are crucial factors in shaping the...
This chapter examines the enabling factors that facilitated the increasing militarization in the South China Sea (SCS), and argues that it is driven by strategic material interests in the context of US–China rivalry and changes in domestic politics in Beijing. Smaller Asian states have renewed their military ties with the US in response to China’s...
This book provides a multifaceted and spatially oriented analysis of how China's re-emergence as a global power impacts the dominance of the United States as well as domestic state and non-state actors in various world-regions, including the Asia-Pacific, Africa, South America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe and the Arctic.
This book provides a multifaceted and spatially oriented analysis of how China's re-emergence as a global power impacts the dominance of the United States as well as domestic state and non-state actors in various world-regions, including the Asia-Pacific, Africa, South America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe and the Arctic.
This book provides a multifaceted and spatially oriented analysis of how China's re-emergence as a global power impacts the dominance of the United States as well as domestic state and non-state actors in various world-regions, including the Asia-Pacific, Africa, South America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe and the Arctic.
Why is contemporary United States foreign policy systemically hypocritical? This essay offers a legal realist perspective, which considers human rights and democracy-oriented narratives as morally appealing meta-discourses that are subject to reframing, weaponisation, and instrumentalisation by a wide variety of contending political actors in pursu...
In times of war, is it permissible under the law to deliberately take someone's life, or to apprehend and detain them? Ka Lok Yip's book examines the international legal norms for using force against individuals in war. The book employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining law, social theories, and empirical case studies to offer a many-sided an...
This reflection piece sheds light on expanded state violence in global narcotic governance, offering valuable insights to perpetrator studies. It expands the focus by acknowledging the state as a collective perpetrator within the framework of global narcotic regulation. With its near-monopoly on the use of force, the state possesses significant res...
The literature on dignity in international politics can be analytically evaluated based on three key themes: (a) historical, conceptual, and political underpinnings; (b) international law and global governance; and (c) the global political economy. Although discussions of human dignity within these three themes draw on varied disciplines (philosoph...
Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century. The volume is organized based on three overarching themes that highlight the challenges and risks in international human rights: international institutions and globa...
Has U.S. foreign aid led to advancements in rights or increased repression in Southeast Asia?
This article addresses two key questions concerning US foreign aid under the 45th US President, Donald Trump (2017–21): Did the Trump administration radically restructure the foreign aid apparatus of the US government amid the recent reemergence of China as a key state actor in international development and global governance? If so, how and under w...
The widespread use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in United Nations peacebuilding missions often undermines the effectiveness of these missions. PMSCs tend to encourage, in unnecessary ways, what is called security risk management and promote the militarization of humanitarian efforts. They encourage humanitarian aid organizatio...
The concept of right to human dignity refers to the proposition that all human beings possess an inherent and inalienable value and deserve utmost respect and protection from all forms of institutionalized and individual acts of exploitation.
The global moral appeal of human rights and democratic governance appears to be in severe crisis. In both the Global North and the South, many countries have witnessed the rise of racist, sexist, and illiberal politicians into the highest positions in the government. As one of Asia's oldest electoral democracies, the Philippines is not an exception...
What is peace? In the age of decreasing global appetite for liberal democracy, how does the notion of peace prefigure in the political discourse of emerging far-right politicians? The concept of peace constitutes one of the most contentious discursive tools in modern politics. Peace is a fuzzy meta-discourse, which means that its discursive invocat...
Why does an increase in foreign aid from the United States appear to correlate with a rise in human rights abuses in recipient countries, Salvador Santino Fulo Regilme of Leiden University asks. In a forthcoming book, he argues that in Southeast Asia the converging interests of donor and recipient, together with the domestic legitimacy of the benef...
Despite the consolidated body of public international law on children’s rights and armed conflict, why do armed rebel groups and state forces deploy children in armed conflict, particularly in Somalia? First, due to the lack of alternative sources of income and livelihood beyond armed conflict, children join the army due to coercive recruitment by...
In the post-9/11 context, citizenship in the global North has been reoriented towards the concept of public security. Much of this lay in political rhetoric definitions of who is a threat to the security of a nation state, with a particular emphasis on the 'threat-ening Other'. The 'war on terror' motivated governments to revoke the citizenship of...
Why did the use of drone strikes proliferate during the first term of the Obama administration? This paper espouses two key preliminary and exploratory arguments. First, deploying theoretical insights from historical institutionalism, we argue that the Obama administration, despite its initial resistance to the existing counterterror agenda, found...
The goal of this chapter is to present an analytic overview of what the potential of American decline means for rising powers on a global scale. The chapter argues that while indicators suggest American power has been declining, the shape this takes and the extent to which it falters will depend upon the contingency of global politics related to ov...
Since the start of the 21st century, humanity has faced at least three global crises. The first crisis pertains to the 9/11 terror attacks in the US that facilitated the US-led war on terror, which in turn, facilitated the expansion of state surveillance systems, widespread extrajudicial killings, and the prevalent use of torture and other abusive...
Peace is one of the most widely used yet highly contested concepts in contemporary politics. What constitutes peace? That broad analytic inquiry motivates this article, which focuses on the contentious discourses of peace within a society besieged by widespread trafficking and use of illegal drugs. Focusing on the illegal drug problem in Colombia a...
Book review essay of Constitutional democracy in crisis?
Global shift refers to the transformative, transitionary, aggregate, and multidimensional processes whereby a state, or a group of states, actively and strategically challenges the dominant power position of a status quo global hegemon or a leading group of states.
This is the preprint version (before peer-review). Updated version: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_326-1
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far-right policies and discourses have introduced policies that are seen as detrimental to the welfare of many vulnerable groups including indigenous populations. In the Asia-Pacific, two of the most vibrant electoral democracies in the region-Thailand and the Philippines-have recently backtracked from its democratic commitments and have violently...
What is the relationship between constitutional order and the emergence of oligarchic politics in contemporary democratic societies? How and to what extent does constitutional design contribute to oligarchic politics in contemporary liberal democratic states? Focusing on constitutional discourses, rather than the legal positivist interpretation of...
Why did claimant states in the South China Sea (SCS) dispute, especially China, recently increase its militarization activities, in ways that were relatively absent in the previous decades? Why is Beijing, under the Xi Jinping-led government, building artificial islands in a highly disputed maritime area that several Asian states have contentiously...
Why did claimant states in the South China Sea (SCS) dispute, especially China, recently increase its militarization activities, in unprecedented ways that were relatively absent in the previous decades? Espousing an analytically eclectic explanation rather than using one single International Relations (IR) paradigm, this essay demonstrates three k...
This review essay highlights the limitations and possibilities of a global human rights order based on analysis of five recently published books about human rights. The main argument states that reform of the global human rights order requires not only a shift to a more emancipatory notion of human dignity but also an emphasis on global justice and...
What is the relationship between Thailand’s human rights crisis during Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s leadership (2001–2006) and the USA-led post-9/11 war on terror? Why did the human rights situation dramatically deteriorate after the Thaksin regime publicly supported the Bush administration’s war on terror and consequently received US counte...
What is the relationship between Thailand’s human rights crisis during Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s leadership (2001–2006) and the USA-led post-9/11 war on terror? Why did the human rights situation dramatically deteriorate after the Thaksin regime publicly supported the Bush administration’s war on terror and consequently received US counte...
Over the last decade, the United States' position as the world's most powerful state has appeared increasingly unstable. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, non-traditional security threats, global economic instability, the apparent spread of authoritarianism and illiberal politics, together with the rise of emerging powers from the Global So...
Every year, millions of people move over very extensive
geographical distances, with the aim of temporarily or
permanently residing in their new destinations. At the
transnational level, this migration phenomenon can be seen
in various instances: Mexicans who are crossing the border
to the United States; the global Filipino diaspora who are
constan...
Despite having the earliest exposure to electoral democratic practices in the Asia-Pacific region, the Philippines remains to be one of the least stable democracies in the Global South. Notwithstanding the return of electoral democracy in 1986 after two decades of authoritarian rule, the Philippine state has yet to consolidate its democratic regime...
In today's age of increasing globalization and the emergence of global public policy issues, the concepts of civil society, public sphere, and the legitimacy of the legal system require further analytical scrutiny and philosophical reflection. As such, this article reflects on how the renowned German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas,...
What are the causes of state-initiated human rights violations? Are intra-national factors alone causally responsible for the emergence of human rights crises in the developing world? This essay critically examines contemporary social science literature on the causes of human rights compliance and violations, more particularly in the fields of inte...
Drawing primarily from social constructivist perspectives, this essay traces the contemporary interregional relations of East Asia and the European Union (EU). Considering the constructivist themes of shared identity and interests, I argue that there are fundamental difficulties found in these interregional relations, which must be urgently address...
Historically, narratives about the grandiosity of absolute monarchy and social discipline dominated the research agenda on European absolutism, as in the case of the renowned works of Norbert Elias. Yet, less emphasis was made about the various levels of powers existing outside the central monarchy and the importance of other institutions in laying...
