scholarly journals Forensic sciences and the Philippines’ war on drugs

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 288-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Go ◽  
Maria Corazon A. De Ungria
Keyword(s):  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Forensic Sciences

scholarly journals Visions of Peace Amidst a Human Rights Crisis: War on Drugs in Colombia and the Philippines

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Santino F Regilme
Keyword(s):  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Illegal Drug ◽  
Public Health Approach ◽  
Illegal Drugs ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
State Repression ◽  
The Core ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Local Discourses

Abstract Peace is one of most widely used yet highly contested concepts in contemporary politics. What constitutes peace? That broad analytic inquiry motivates this article, which focuses on the contentious discourses of peace within a society besieged by widespread trafficking and use of illegal drugs. Focusing on the illegal drug problem in Colombia and the Philippines, the central puzzle of this paper constitutes two fundamental questions: How do state leaders justify their respective “war on drugs”? How do they construct and discursively articulate ideals of peace in the context of the illegal drug problem? This paper compares the post-9/11 Colombian war on drugs (2002–2010) vis-à-vis the Philippine war on drugs under the Duterte administration (2016–2019), particularly in terms of how their presidential administrations articulate “peace” in the context of resolving the drug problem. The paper examines the varying discourses of peace, investigates how those local discourses relate to global discourses on peace and illegal drugs, and underscores how and under which conditions those peace discourses portray the material distributive conflicts in those societies. The core argument states that the Uribe and Duterte administrations primarily deployed the notion of peace as a justificatory discourse for increased state repression, intensified criminalization of the drug problem, and the reluctance of the state in embracing a public health approach to the proliferation of illegal drugs.

Overcoming and Penalizing Precarity: Narratives of Drug Personalities Arrested in the Philippine War on Drugs

2022 ◽  
pp. 089692052110702
Author(s):  
Filomin C. Gutierrez
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Trade Liberalization ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Productive Work ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Metro Manila

The article problematizes state penality as a mechanism of repression of precarious workers through a war on drugs in the Philippines. The narratives of 27 arrested ‘drug personalities’ in Metro Manila tell of how methamphetamine energizes bodies and motivates minds for productive work. Bidding to be classified as willing and able workers and family men, the study’s participants orient to a moral stratification that pits the ‘moral versus immoral’ and the ‘hardworking versus lazy’. Qualifying their drug use as strategic and calculated, they uphold the neoliberal values of individual choice and accountability. Their support for the anti-drug campaign stems from their recognition of a drug problem and the socioemotional toll of the dysfunctions of living in the slums. While trade liberalization facilitates methamphetamine inflow, a war on drugs fuels an authoritarian populism. As the state reaffirms symbolic mission to protect its citizens, it blames precarity to a problem population.

scholarly journals “. . .delivered from the lie of being truth”: The Affective Force of Disinformation, Stickiness and Dissensus in Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing

Text Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 84-96
Author(s):  
Vincent Pacheco ◽  
Jeremy De Chavez
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Filipino American ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
Affective Feedback ◽  
Patron Saints ◽  
Body Count

Waged in 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has claimed over 20,000 lives according to human rights groups. The Duterte administration’s own count is significantly lower: around 6,000. The huge discrepancy between the government’s official count and that of arguably more impartial organizations about something as concretely material as body count is symptomatic of how disinformation is central to the Duterte administration and how it can sustain the approval of the majority of the Philippine electorate. We suggest that Duterte’s populist politics generates what Boler and Davis (2018) call “affective feedback loops,” which create emotional and informational ecosystems that facilitate smooth algorithmic governance. We turn to Patron Saints of Nothing, a recently published novel by Randy Ribay about a Filipino-American who goes back to the Philippines to uncover the truth behind the death of his cousin. Jay’s journey into the “heart of darkness” as a “hyphenated” individual (Filipino-American) allows him access to locally networked subjectivities but not its affective entanglements. Throughout the novel, he encounters numerous versions of the circumstances of Jun’s demise and the truth remains elusive at the end of the novel. We argue that despite the constant distortion of fact and fiction in the novel, what remains relatively stable or “sticky” throughout the novel are the letters from Jun Reguero that Jay carries with him back to the Philippines. We suggest that these letters can potentially serve as a form of “dissensus” that challenges the constant redistribution of the sensible in the novel.

Here-There: Enduring an Unwatchable Philippines in San Francisco

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-261
Author(s):  
Kathleen DeGuzman
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Transnational Media ◽  
Media Events ◽  
Extrajudicial Killings

This article studies diasporic spectatorship of transnational media of the Philippines and proposes that the unwatchable is not simply that which cannot stand to be seen. Rather, within the context of two Filipino-centric visual media events organized in San Francisco, the article frames as unwatchable difficult viewing experiences that produce unexpected strategies for beholding. By examining Brillante Mendoza’s film Ma’Rosa (2016) and Raffy Lerma’s photojournalistic coverage of extrajudicial killings linked to President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines, the article positions laughter, silence, and turning away as diasporic viewing strategies that charge seemingly unengaged emotional responses with a politics for enduring traumatic visual media.

scholarly journals Governing through Killing: The War on Drugs in the Philippines

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T. JOHNSON ◽  
Jon FERNQUEST
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
First Year ◽  
Harsh Punishment ◽  
The World

AbstractThis article focuses on the war on drugs in the Philippines in order to explore issues related to extra-judicial killing, which remains common in many countries that have abolished the death penalty and in many more that retain it but seldom carry out judicial executions. In the first year of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency (2016–17), thousands of people were killed by police or by vigilantes who were encouraged to prosecute his war on drugs. At a time when democracy is in retreat in many parts of the world, this case illustrates how popular harsh punishment can be in states that have failed to meet their citizens’ hopes for freedom, economic growth, and security.

scholarly journals Police Violence and Corruption in the Philippines: Violent Exchange and the War on Drugs

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Jensen ◽  
Karl Hapal
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The Relationship

In this article we explore the relationship between money and violence in the Philippine war on drugs. Building on long-term ethnographic and political engagement with a poor urban neighbourhood in Manila, we suggest that while the war on drugs has taken state killings to a new level, the Philippine state was no stranger to killing its own citizens before its onset. Furthermore, we argue that we cannot dissociate the killings from the rampant corruption in the Philippine police. By invoking the concept of violent exchange, the article shows that both corruption and death enter into particular understandings of state–citizen relationships. Because the war has reconfigured how death and corruption work, people in urban Manila are attempting desperately – as the stakes are high – to figure out how to engage with the police under these transforming conditions.

What next for the Philippines’ war on drugs?

The Lancet ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 398 (10317) ◽  
pp. 2139-2140
Author(s):  
Talha Burki
Keyword(s):  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines

Ambiguous fear in the war on drugs: A reconfiguration of social and moral orders in the Philippines

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Anna Bræmer Warburg ◽  
Steffen Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Discourses

This article explores the social and moral implications of Duterte's war on drugs in a poor, urban neighbourhood in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, surveys, and human rights interventions, the article sheds light on policing practices, social relations, and moral discourses by examining central perspectives of the state police implementing the drug war, of local policing actors engaging with informal policing structures, and of residents dealing with everyday insecurities. It argues that the drug war has produced a climate of ambiguous fear on the ground, which has reconfigured and destabilised social relations between residents and the state as well as among residents. Furthermore, this has led to a number of subordinate moral discourses — centred on social justice, family, and religion — with divergent perceptions on the drug war and the extent to which violence is deemed legitimate.

scholarly journals Rafael Lerma’s Photojournalistic Take on the Duterte Administration’s Drug War: A Counter-Barthesian Semiological Study

Plaridel ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-110
Author(s):  
Feorillo A. Demeterio III,
Keyword(s):  
Early Phase ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
National Police

Rafael Lerma is an award-winning and outspoken Filipino photojournalist who works for the broadsheet The Philippine Daily Inquirer. When President Rodrigo Duterte took office on 01 July 2016 and started to implement his campaign promise to mount a thorough war on drugs, Lerma became one of the photojournalists who consistently documented the grisly track of the said war. His most iconic image—that of a dead pedicab driver being cradled by his grief-stricken widow—did not escape the rambling speech of the President himself during the latter’s first State of the Nation Address. This paper culls 25 of Lerma’s most famous images related to the Duterte administration’s drug war. From these 25 images, six recurrent sociocultural icons have been identified: 1) poverty; 2) the dehumanization/demonization of the casualties; 3) religion; 4) the weakness of governance in the Philippines; 5) Operation Plan Tokhang conducted by the Philippine National Police; and 6) the state and the nation. By subjecting these visual sociocultural icons to an inverted version of the semiology of the early phase of the French philosopher and cultural critic Roland Barthes, the researcher textually explores Lerma’s take on the said war. Furthermore, this paper theoretically tests the capacity of Barthes’ semiology to tackle not only ideological discourses that are tucked beneath some sociocultural icons but more so counter-ideological discourses that are launched by the less privileged sectors of society.

Christianity and Duterte’s War on Drugs in the Philippines

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayeel Cornelio ◽  
Erron Medina
Keyword(s):  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines
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