Walden Bello’s Global Battlefields: An Activist’s Self-interview as Memoir

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Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love, Walden Bello, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2025

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Depending on who you ask, Walden Flores Bello is an activist-intellectual who’s different things to different people. He’s multifaceted for sure, but all of his sides evoke a strong opinion.

To his fellow Filipino activists, Bello is either a major guiding light of the guerrilla movement whose writings have imbued the struggle with philosophical star dust (if Slavoj Žižek became an actual guerilla), or a pompous, snobbish smarty-pants with fancy letters after his name who wrote books rather than getting his hands dirty in the movement’s trenches while simultaneously being lucky enough to be rendered stateless abroad while real fighters did the hard work opposing the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose reign of terror lasted from the early seventies to the mid-eighties. At the height of his failed run for senator and vice-president of the country, detractors labelled him an embodiment of the Red Menace and a recruiter for the Communist Party, always striving to overthrow any gains of good governance as long as it pleased his hammer and sickle-wielding masters. And to his fans or avid readers, Bello is a towering figure who’s authored (or co-authored) 25 books in the fight against the myriad forms of imperialism. Bello’s “deglobalization” theory is now one of the major intellectual resources for such struggles.

“Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love (2025)” is his first memoir. The author, now entering his 80s, delves mostly into how his life has become a symbol of lived activism as “romance.”

Like any romance, the comedown is the tragedy waiting in the wings. Breakup as failure. The other shoe dropping. Bello is nothing if not candid about how he viewed his defining identity as a failure in the memoir. “We failed, so I failed, and it is a failure I live with every day as traditional elite politics reigns supreme and unchallenged in our country…” he wrote in a letter to his friend in Kyoto, Japan on why he might be viewed as a success in professional academic circles but also as an activist who’s flunked his mission.

I went into this book expecting more of the personal rather than the political. But as Bello himself states repeatedly through the chapters, these areas are to him one and the same.

I was about halfway through the 300-plus pages when I realized that this memoir won’t help you to know Bello on a deeper, more personal level beyond his work. You won’t get a feel for what it was like for such a dedicated intellectual to see his marriages and close relationships fray and eventually break under the strain of ideological and professional zeal.

We do get some personal details where they’re unavoidable, such as in Bello’s childhood where he touched on his upbringing in a middle-class, artistically inclined and privileged family; his mother was a singer while his father worked in the entertainment business.

There are also limited anecdotes about his relationships. One of the best was about eloping to marry his first wife in 1969, sneaking her out from Jolo in the southern Philippines to Manila, the capital city. And in Chapter 19 we do get a break from all the work of fighting against oppressive capitalist forces to get as close as we can to an intimate impression of his family life. Bello’s had three marriages, two which ended in divorce, the third cut short by cancer. As he mused about his relationships with women—most significant in the story of how he focused on taking care of his third, Thai-born wife until she passed away—I finally felt that I got a sense of the man. This seemed like a self-interview that Bello needed as much as I, the reader, did. It’s affective, candid writing on marriage and grief.

I would have appreciated more of these chapters of inward scrutiny, but as this episode ended on a cliffhanger—where, as Bello tried to balance himself getting off a boat, a hand attached to a “freckled face, with mischief in her eyes” reached out to his rescue—perhaps another memoir (this time more introspective and literary) is forthcoming? I would love to read that one.

The rest of the memoir is enough of an adventure into those same titular battlefields, text that reads like a laundry list for a future Netflix docu-drama.

Bello’s participation in the street battles of Seattle, Prague, Cancun, and Genoa are story highlights, as well as his participation in a team that sneakily infiltrated the World Bank’s Washington DC offices and, over a period of three years, copied secret documents to prove how the Bank was complicit in the Marcos regime. That ninja kind of activism was eventually compiled into the 1982 book Development Debacle. This was a tale Bello could only tell 10 years later, after the statute of limitations had lapsed.

Surprising good humour served with intent adds flavour to the tales, whether it’s hurling a pie at the outgoing managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or dressing up as Kermit the Frog at a skit during a protest.

Filipino readers will be interested in Bello’s term as an elected Congress official, his fights within the legislative system advocating for women’s reproductive rights and overseas Filipino workers rights, up to his resignation in March 2015 when his party, Akbayan, continued to support then-President Benigno Aquino III over irreconcilable issues. Similarly, he takes us behind the scenes in his failed bids for senator and vice-president. All of these are revelatory and entertaining for those familiar with and who have lived through the events. His efforts to present “an alternative to elite politics” while not necessarily winning power are quite illuminating and very much in keeping with his tried and tested disruption tactics.

Personally, I found the episodes on what led to his eventual resignation from the Communist Party of the Philippines after his “ethical crisis” the most moving. Bello was unable to countenance the wholesale murder of the party’s own cadres on the operations collectively dubbed Kampanyang Ahos. Also known as “the Purge” (historically referred to as the Second Great Rectification Movement), Ahos was a series of actions designed to ferret out “people suspected as ‘deep penetration’ military agents.’”

Bello confessed, racked with anxiety and anticipated guilt: “I had the sense of fortunately having escaped being in the position of being an executioner, sitting in judgement of his peers on those blood-soaked fields. Even more damning, I knew I would have acted the same way.”

Ahos eventually resulted in the grisly torture and execution of several thousand party cadres, many whose guilt was questionable. It was something that I had also lived through and was familiar with. Critics and victims dubbed it an organizational paranoia that ran amok, a case of a revolutionary movement eating its own children.

While holding up a lived case study of how he confronted real life armed with an ideology that, he discovered, must also be constantly in flux, reforming itself to keep up with the world as it changes, Bello is at his best when he self-interrogates. He is at his most interesting when he is radically, unflinchingly honest with himself.

It’s quite a hefty and heady book, both on physical paper and figuratively. You may be surprised what you find between the covers and the kind of trouble Bello got into with his decades of activism. Strap in for this read.