[Philippine corruption] Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines #9/204

While there have been incidents of overt resistance also in Bagong Silang (Palatino 2019), outright opposition has frequently been the domain of human rights organizations, the Catholic church, and some NGOs, along with parts of the media. However, support has always been ambivalent. For instance, the Social Weather Stations documented that widespread support of the war (up to 80 percent) was equaled by similar levels of fear that respondents or their families might become victims of the war (Social Weather Stations 2017). In this book, we also trace other forms of implicit or ambivalent engagement with the war on drugs in, for instance, echoes of revolutionary demands for equality, religious sentiments, and fear for the family and other kin.

While the war was clearly the result of Duterte’s policies, our data from Bagong Silang suggests that the police killed people in ways that resembled the killings before the war began (Jensen and Hapal 2015; Coronel 2017; McCoy 2009). In 2009, for instance, we documented and pursued the case of Aris’s killing (see the photo that follows). Aris was found dead in the neighboring province across the Marilao River. Shortly thereafter, stories began to circulate that a law enforcement unit had detained him immediately before his disappearance. In the months following the incident, banners showing Aris’s mutilated body and demanding justice were exhibited in a central part of Bagong Silang. A police officer we interviewed, who was unrelated to the murder of Aris, suggested that the law enforcement agency had picked up Aris so many times before but had had to release him again because he was under age. This time, he guessed, they wanted to teach him a lesson, which resulted in his death.

This raises questions about what kind of event the introduction of the war on drugs was. Was it indeed the doings of Duterte, maybe even reducible to him? While few would maintain such a simple view, there has been a strong emphasis on explaining the war by explaining Duterte. Rather than discussing this as a purely empirical question, it might be useful to distinguish conceptually between notions of radical transformation, critical events, and escalations. As should be evident from the previous discussion, we do not subscribe to the idea that the ascension of Duterte and the launch of his war on drugs were entirely a rupture from the past. Instead, we may think of the drug war as what Bruce Kapferer (2010) refers to as a “critical event …conceived as a particular plateau of intensity that has immanent within it a potential that effectively becomes knowable through the actualization or realization of the event itself” (15). The critical event is both transformational and a revelation of structures that became knowable through the drug war. While this is certainly true, there is also something quite dramatic about the drug war such that the notion of “critical events” does not suffice. Lars Højer and colleagues (2018) instead suggest the term “escalation” to capture how quantitative shifts in, for instance, killings may have lasting qualitative effects, what they call a “change of change,” at the same time as these shifts must be rendered legible by being “culturally measured” (52). Understanding the war on drugs as a critical event as well as an escalation allows us to explore how sudden change seldom happens out of nowhere and is made legible through the past and can have lasting effects.

It is also useful to widen the scope beyond the Philippines. The drug war is and has been analyzed primarily as a Philippine event—not least because of the focus on Duterte. However, the war actualizes the broader comparative perspectives on “wars on …,” that is, situations in which someone in power has been able, correctly or not, to frame a particular situation as an emergency that threatens the life of the polity. When framed as securitization (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998) or antipolitics (Walters 2008), a war on gangs, crime, drugs, terror, or even poverty gives those in control extraordinary powers to block a development, such as a putative drug crisis run amok.⁷To take but one example, in our own work in South Africa (Jensen 2010), we have explored how a war on gangs, carried out as counterinsurgency, reconfigured national and local politics. Counterinsurgency wars in Guatemala (Schirmer 1998) and the war on terror after 9/11 (Amoore and de Goede 2008) provide other examples where power protects a polity through dispensing life. In this way, understanding the Philippine war on drugs offers us new insights into a range of other potential murderous politics around the globe, and the global view allows us to understand the drug war as a patterned process beyond Duterte and even the Philippines.⁸

FIGURE 3.