Well-known political scientist, educator, writer, advocate, and nationalist Temario C. Rivera, PhD passed away on Sept. 18.

Rivera was a faculty member of the UP Diliman Department of Political Science from 1986 to 2019, serving as a professorial lecturer from his mandatory retirement in 2012. He was the department chair from 1993 to 1997.

The Public Management Development Program (PMDP) of the Development Academy of the Philippines acknowledged Rivera as one of its faculty in a 2018 post in its website. In its Facebook post, the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) said Rivera was “a tenured professor of international relations at the International Christian University of Tokyo.”

As an author, one of his major books is the award-winning Landlords and Capitalists: Class, Family and State in Philippine Manufacturing (UP Press, 1994), which received the Outstanding Social Science Book Award by the National Academy of Science and Technology in 1996, the National Book Award (social sciences) by the Manila Critics Circle, and the UP Chancellor’s Book Award.

He was also author of Philippines: State of the Nation (1996); Probing Duterte’s Foreign Policy in the New Regional Order: ASEAN, China, and the US (2018; co-author), and co-editor of Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy (2011 and 2016 editions) and The Marcos Restoration: The CenPEG Papers on Election 2022.

Rivera was editor-in-chief of the internationally peer-reviewed Scopus journal Philippine Political Science Journal of the Philippine Political Science Association (PPSA) for 20 years (1993 to 2013), and editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian in 1967 and the Philippinensian (1966 edition).

At the time of his demise, Rivera was the chairperson of CenPEG, “a public policy center founded shortly before the May 2004 election,” it said in its website. The center’s advocacy is to promote “a governance that is pro-people and democratic, where the poor are empowered and are the real source of sovereign authority; are active leaders and actors in society and government.”

According to a Facebook post by his sister Alma Rivera Sarmiento, Rivera was “detained for five years in 1974 as a political prisoner because of his strong opposition to [the] Marcos dictatorship… He was passionate and suffered among thousands of youth during that time, and continued to pursue social justice and government reforms till the end of his life.”

His achievements and contributions in the field of political science earned him several awards. In 2019, he was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award in Democratization and Governance by the UP Alumni Association. In 2017, Rivera was conferred the PPSA Distinguished Leadership Award.

According to the PMDP website, Rivera “received his Bachelor and Master of Arts in Political Science at UP [1966 and 1982 respectively] and his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Fulbright scholar and a Rockefeller Foundation graduate scholar.”