James Warren’s The Sulu Zone did something that still impacts the way we read this region. He took the categories outsiders had carried into the Sulu and Celebes Seas — piracy, slavery, ethnicity, the state — and showed that each of them misdescribed what was actually there. What Spanish and British officials filed as piracy was organised raiding, sanctioned by a sultanate and driven by the China trade. What they filed as slavery was a fluid absorption of captives into Tausug society, which is not what that slavery means in the Atlantic. The observations were not wrong. The filing system was. How we file things matters, as we shall see.
Warren bounded that world by its trade: China, Palawan and Mindanao to the north, Borneo to the southwest, the Celebes and Moluccas to the southeast, with Jolo sitting astride these trading routes at its centre. Southern Palawan also stretched significantly into this zone. Warren has the Tausug fighting Brunei for control of “the trade and resources of southern Palawan, Balabac, and the north end of Borneo.” Sherif Usman ran the coastal trade along the coasts of Balabac and southern Palawan in the 1830s. Usman put down Balabac’s refusal of tribute so thoroughly that he halved the island’s population. The Spanish planted a garrison on Balabac in 1858 to choke off the Sulu seafaring traffic to Labuan, an island off the northwest coast of Borneo. When the raiding sea vessels (prahus) ran north toward the Visayas, they navigated by sighting Balabac.
That is the world the Molbog have lived in since before the Spaniards came.
They are the only indigenous people of Palawan whose majority is Muslim, and there are not many of them. James Eder, who worked in Palawan for forty years, counted several thousand in the Balabac islands. Most of Palawan’s Muslims are not Molbog at all. They are Tausug and Jama Mapun and Maranao, some settled for generations under the sultanate, others off the boats that left Mindanao in the 1970s. These Moro tribes outnumber the indigenous population considerably. But the Molbog were here first, and they took Islam not by conquest but by contact. The Tausug traders put in at Balabac on the run between Brunei, Palawan and Sulu. There was enough intermarriage that the children of those unions have their own name, kolibugan. The Islam of the Molbog is real and it is layered. They keep the Five Pillars and they also keep the crocodile, which they call opo, the word they use for a grandparent, and which they will not kill.
For fifty years there has been argument about whether these people are Moro. I want to suggest we have been arguing about the wrong thing.
Two answers, both wrong in the same way
The first says Palawan is Moro land, invoking the Sulu sultanate’s old claims. It adds to this the “Minsupala” idea from the Tripoli talks. The Minsupala idea (also written MinSuPala) from the 1976 Tripoli talks is the proposal to create one single autonomous region covering all of Mindanao, the Sulu Archipelago, and Palawan. Finally there is the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro of 2012, which named the Bangsamoro as the natives of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago “and its adjacent islands including Palawan.”
The second answer says Palawan is not Moro at all, and it has the legal receipts: three plebiscites since 1977, three refusals, and a provincial board that passed a resolution this January objecting to Palawan’s appearance on a Mindanao-independence map submitted to the United Nations. Each side has evidence. Each side is answering a question about belonging with an argument about maps.
But read the enacted law, and the ground shifts under both of them. Warren’s point about filing systems is the useful one here, because a statute is nothing but a filing system with force behind it. It knows provinces, municipalities and boundaries; it has no filing category at all for a shoreline held by use. Republic Act No. 11054, the Bangsamoro Organic Law of 2018, defines the Bangsamoro people in Article II, section 1, as the natives of “Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago and its adjacent islands.” The words including Palawan are gone. They were in the peace agreement and they did not survive the legislature.
Nor is that the only excision. The Framework Agreement had promised that contiguous areas with substantial Bangsamoro populations “may opt anytime” to join by petition and plebiscite. But the statute confines such petitions to the two months before ratification, a window that closed in 2019. These two deletions changed the story and the filing.
What Congress did, quietly and effectively, was to separate Bangsamoro identity from Bangsamoro jurisdiction and then remove the bridge.
Bugsuk
The Molbog now live on the far side of that separation, and Bugsuk is where the cost comes due.
In 2005 a Molbog and Palaw’an community at Sitio Mariahangin, on Bugsuk island off Balabac, filed for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title. Twenty-one years on it has not been granted, and the record of those years is a study in which papers move and which do not. The Department of Agrarian Reform placed 10,821 hectares under coverage in 2014 and lifted that coverage in 2023. A 5,500-hectare eco-tourism resort, developed by Bricktree Properties, advanced on schedule. In April 2025 roughly a hundred armed security personnel arrived to begin demolitions; ten community leaders were arrested in May; by December, 282 residents were holding summonses from nine private titleholders. Ninety-seven families remain where there were once a hundred and fifty. The same community was cleared off the same ground once before, in 1974, to make room for a politically connected coconut plantation.
In February the Senate’s Committee on Cultural Communities and Muslim Affairs took the case up. Counsel for the community told the committee that while the islanders’ claim had sat for two decades, a second application over the same ground had moved: the titleholders and the developer had sought a certificate of non-overlap, the document that declares no ancestral domain is present and so dispenses with the need to ask anyone’s consent. Counsel further questioned whether the required field-based investigation had been carried out.
Read those two files side by side, because together they say something neither says alone. One asks the state to recognise that a people are there. The other asks it to certify that they are not. The first has waited twenty-one years. The second did not wait.
And here Warren stops being background and becomes the whole difficulty. The Molbog hold their place as the people of that shore have always held it, by residence and use and the crossing itself; every instrument arrayed against them at Bugsuk is a land instrument. A title records a boundary. A coverage order records a parcel. Neither has a file field for a channel that has been worked for three hundred years, which means the paperwork cannot record the thing it is being asked to decide. Warren watched colonial officials make exactly this mistake and call the result piracy. Is the mistake being made again today, and is the result being called a vacant lot?
Named in one place, governed from another
Set the heritage registry beside the eviction notice and the arrangement comes into focus. The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region’s own Commission for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage lists the Molbog among the Bangsamoro peoples. Cotabato names them and cannot reach them; Manila administers Palawan and does not see them; and in the space between, a corporation and nine titleholders see them with perfect clarity.
It is a settled arrangement with a predictable result, and the result is that a people can be honoured in a registry in Cotabato while being carried off the land the registry says is theirs.
One caution against reading too much into that. It does not follow that BARMM membership would have saved Bugsuk. Sulu, removed from the region by the Supreme Court in 2024, is not short of jurisdiction, only of Bangsamoro jurisdiction. The Teduray and Lambangian inside BARMM hold both recognition and jurisdiction, and are dispossessed anyway. These indigenous people already have both official recognition and jurisdictional mechanisms inside BARMM, yet they remain effectively dispossessed of secure control over much of their ancestral land. Formal status alone has not prevented displacement, violence, or loss of territory.
The split between the body that names a people and the body that governs them describes the Molbog position accurately. There land problem remains unresolved.
The absence in the sources
There is a further absence, and it indicts the scholarship, mine included. In assembling this piece I read government pages, advocacy statements, a Senate hearing record, foreign ethnographers and an Indonesian journal article. Not one Molbog author.
The wider literature is barely thicker. Eder observed in 2010 that ethnographic research on Palawan’s Muslims was “conspicuously lacking,” and that they were “scarcely mentioned in any of the principal works on Islam in the Philippines.” Fifteen years on, that is still close to true. The Molbog have essentially one dedicated study to their name, Lanfranco Blanchetti’s 1996 chapter on ecology, rice and debt among them, published in an Ateneo volume on Palawan’s frontier development. It is a good chapter. It is also, for a people of several thousand with a live claim on 56,000 hectares, the whole shelf. We have a literature about them and no literature by them, and a people without jurisdiction turns out to be a people without an archive; the two deprivations are the same deprivation wearing different clothes.
The February hearing made the point better than any argument could. Lawyers appeared, and the agencies, and the developer. The islanders did not; Bataraza is five hours overland from Puerto Princesa and the notice was short. At the close the chairman suspended the hearing, said he wanted the thing put right, and asked that next time the katutubo (the indigenous people) themselves be in the room. It was a decent instinct, and it is worth pausing on what it concedes. A committee of the Republic convened to consider whether a people may keep their island, and got through the morning without hearing from them.
Why this matters beyond Balabac
For those of us who study the region, southern Palawan is not a curiosity at the edge of the Bangsamoro file. The Molbog are the one Moro people whose entire modern history has run outside every autonomy arrangement the Philippines has attempted, which makes them the natural experiment for the question the BARMM literature actually cares about: does autonomy protect Moro land and identity, or does it mostly redistribute who fails to?
That question is about to get louder. The Bangsamoro votes on 14 September 2026 in its first regular parliamentary election, and the argument over what the region is for will run through the campaign. It is worth carrying southern Palawan into that argument, because the places a settlement excludes tell you as much about it as the places it includes.
Warren changed how we read this region by refusing to accept the categories the filing officers had used. Southern Palawan asks the same of us, and it asks it about people who are still there and whose file is still open. Whether the Molbog are Bangsamoro is a question for lawyers and historians. Whether anyone is listening to them is a different question, and the answer to that one is presently no.
Bibliography
Blanchetti, Lanfranco. “Ecology, Rice, and Debt among the Molbog.” In Palawan at the Crossroads: Development and the Environment on a Philippine Frontier, edited by James F. Eder and Janet O. Fernandez, 111–26. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996.
Eder, James F. “Muslim Palawan: Diversity and Difference on the Periphery of Philippine Islam.” Philippine Studies 58, no. 3 (2010): 407–20.
Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro. Government of the Philippines and Moro Islamic Liberation Front. 15 October 2012.
Mufahamah, Raisatul, Sujadi, and Edegar da Conceição Savio. “Migration, Balik-Islam, and Identity Formation of Muslims in Palawan of the Philippines.” Al Albab 14, no. 1 (2025): 3–21.
Philippine Statistics Authority. Religious Affiliation in the Philippines (2020 Census of Population and Housing). Quezon City: Philippine Statistics Authority, 2023.
Province of Sulu v. Medialdea, G.R. No. 242255. Supreme Court of the Philippines, En Banc, 9 September 2024.
Republic Act No. 11054, An Act Providing for the Organic Law for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. 27 July 2018.
Saleeby, Najeeb M. The History of Sulu. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1908.
Warren, James Francis. The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981. 40th anniversary ed., Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2021.
Notes on Southeast Asia 
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