Spotlight: Wilfredo Magno Torres III, S-CAR PhD Student

On Friday March 14, 2014, The Asia Foundation, with support from the Southeast Asia Studies Program and Johns Hopkins University, held a book launch for Rido: Clan Feuding and Conflict Management in Mindanao. As Wilfredo Torres, one of the editors of the book and a PhD student at S-CAR explained to me, “Rido is a type of conflict characterized by sporadic outburst of retaliatory violence among kinship groups and communities.  It can occur in areas where government or central authority is weak and in areas where there is a perceived lack of justice and security. Many armed confrontations in the past involving insurgent groups and the military were triggered by a local rido.”

Wilfredo is an anthropologist with over a dozen years of experience in peace development initiatives. Before coming to S-CAR, he managed The Asia Foundation’s conflict management program in the Phillipines. In this capacity, he designed, supported, and coordinated conflict management projects in close collaboration with partners of the Foundation that wanted to help improve relations between communities and security forces. Wilfredo’s decision to pursue his PhD in conflict analysis and resolution was borne out of three questions: “How do we know if our peacebuilding projects are making any difference?  How do we measure our impact?  How do we come up with more institutionalized responses to rido (clan conflicts) and other localized community level conflict?” To Wilfredo, despite a commitment and passion for project implementation, he noted that measuring their effectiveness and attributing community peace outcomes to projects had been a constant challenge for the program he managed. "I have gained a lot of experience from my conflict management work and I am sitting on a wealth of information which I want to make sense of" he said.  He believes that studying at S-CAR is an excellent opportunity for him to reflect and think more about his work experience, and to become exposed to new ideas to further enrich his chosen vocation.  
"I was not disappointed after taking CONF 801, our introductory course to the field of conflict analysis and resolution.  It made me realize my place and role in the conflict analysis and resolution field, and this has inspired a new outlook for me, especially in the way I can now look back at my previous work and how it relates to the greater scheme of things."