The Performance of Sovereignty

The Performance of Sovereignty: Psychological Life Inside the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines examines the psychological and political realities of the Japanese occupation during World War II and the creation of the Japanese-sponsored Second Philippine Republic.

Rather than focusing primarily on military campaigns, this book explores a deeper question: what happens when a society must publicly perform sovereignty while privately recognizing its limits?

In 1943, amid war, censorship, scarcity, and occupation, Filipino officials drafted a constitution, inaugurated a president, and declared a republic. Courts functioned, ministries operated, and public ceremonies invoked independence and national unity. Yet Japanese military authority remained behind these institutions. The appearance of statehood existed alongside the reality of external control.

Through this contradiction, the book explores the psychological life of occupation: the divide between public obedience and private belief, between political ritual and lived experience. Citizens navigated fear, accommodation, survival, guarded speech, and moral uncertainty while trying to endure daily life under constrained power.

At the center of the narrative stands Jose P. Laurel, president of the Second Philippine Republic. Was he a collaborator, a pragmatist, or a leader attempting to preserve fragments of Filipino agency under impossible conditions? Rather than offering simple moral judgments, the book examines the burden of leadership inside compromised systems.

Drawing from wartime records, political theory, and historical scholarship, The Performance of Sovereignty explores symbolic sovereignty, political ritual, constitutional legitimacy, collaboration and resistance, food shortages, inflation, and the psychological strain of living within contradictory structures of power.

Written in an accessible yet reflective style, this work presents the occupation not only as a wartime episode, but as a broader meditation on sovereignty, legitimacy, institutional survival, and the human capacity to endure political contradiction.