The Philippines
Maritime coercion, alliance consolidation and economic leverage across the West Philippine Sea, Second Thomas and Scarborough Shoals, the Luzon Strait and the EDCA site network. Published monthly from the IPSC signal corpus across eight domains — grey-zone and Coast Guard operations, South China Sea contestations, the US alliance and EDCA, forward access and basing, trilateral alignment, defence modernisation, domestic politics and foreign policy, and Chinese influence and economy — with the classification protocol open to inspection.
Dr Hugh S. Tuckfield
Founder and Executive Director, IPSC. PhD Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. Former senior policy adviser to Australian state and federal governments; fellowships at Oxford and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
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A Baton at Second Thomas Shoal: China crosses the physical-contact threshold
July 2026 was defined by the convergence of kinetic grey-zone escalation and an unprecedented alignment surge — the highest-intensity signal environment recorded in this centre. Two pressure tracks ran simultaneously: China executing coordinated physical coercion at both Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal during the week of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting, while Manila hosted the most densely layered set of alliance-consolidating instruments the Philippines has received in a single calendar month.