The UP Asian Center, in partnership with the Focus on the Global South, will hold the book launch and public discussion of Walden Bello's "Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire and Love" on 26 April 2025, 2:00 PM, PHT (GMT+8), at the GT-Toyota Asian Center Auditorium, UP Asian Center. The event is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE LAUNCH AND DISCUSSION
Global Battlefields is a powerful memoir that traces Walden Bello’s lifelong fight for justice, spanning his involvement in the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship, the anti-globalization movement, and his work as a legislator and scholar. Through firsthand accounts of historic moments – from the resistance in Chile to the protests in Seattle – Bello reflects on the victories, setbacks, and lessons learned in confronting power. By hosting this event, we hope to bring together the UP community and our friends to celebrate our shared commitment to democracy and the struggles we have endured to protect it. The event would also serve as a platform to foster dialogue and reflection on the themes explored in the book.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In this riveting, often funny, sometimes risqué narrative, a legendary public intellectual from the global south takes us through the moments of a life of engagement: childhood with artist parents, education under the Jesuits, antiwar activism at Princeton, underground work as a communist cadre against dictatorship, radical professor and prolific writer, globe-trotting crusader against empire and globalization, and parliamentarian who makes history with the only resignation on principle in the annals of Congress. But this is more than a political diary. It is a search for the meaning of what the author calls the “lost generation”—his cohort of revolutionary youth that reached for the stars, fell short, but still made a difference. Read more and buy now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WALDEN BELLO
Adjunct Professor at SUNY, independent scholar, and global activist
Walden Bello is concurrently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009), and Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013).
Bello got his BA from the Ateneo de Manila University in 1966 and his PhD in sociology from Princeton University in 1975. He received the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in Stockholm in 2003 for his work showing the negative impact of corporate-driven globalization. He was also named Outstanding Public Scholar by the International Studies Association in San Francisco in 2008. He has honorary doctorates from Panteion University in Athens (2006) and Murdoch University in Perth (2012).
A human rights activist since the Marcos era, he is currently active in opposing the anti-human rights policies of the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte. As a human rights and peace campaigner, academic, environmentalist and journalist, and through a combination of courage as a dissident, with an extraordinary breadth of published output and personal charisma, he has made a major contribution to the international case against corporate-driven globalization. Read more.
References:
Photo grabbed from: Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South – The Havens Wright Center for Social Justice – UW–Madison
Profile taken from: About Walden | Walden Bello
Description of book taken from: Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love | Ateneo de Manila University Press
