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.

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 The Failed Rhetoric: Presupposition Analysis on Duterte’s 5th State of the Nation Address

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Murillo ◽  
Aiden Yeh
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Lexical Item ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Political Speeches ◽  
Presupposition Triggers

Presupposition triggers play a vital role in verbal communication. It is a linguistic element that can be employed in utterances. Language has a significant role too in the communication and interpretation of intentions by analyzing presupposition in political speeches. One example of these is the speech articulated by politicians which often serve as vehicles toward achieving their ultimate goals. This study analyzed the presupposition triggers found in the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte’s 5th State of the Nation Address (SONA). Data was analyzed using critical discourse analysis (CDA), an approach to cognitively analyze how Duterte communicated his political intentions through the use of presupposition triggers. The results show that his SONA was filled with propositions that were erroneous and ambiguous. One example of his propositions was the frequently used lexical item “rest assured”, i.e., “Rest assured that we will not dodge our obligation to fight for human rights.” This highly contentious statement pertains to the killings and his war on drugs, and other human rights violations that his government is being accused of; a recrimination which alludes to the fact that the human rights crisis in the Philippines has heightened, if not worsened ever since he took office.  This study concludes that the study of presupposition enhances the comprehension of what is being communicated, particularly in political speeches where failed rhetorics could also reflect a failed state.  

The Philippines in 2016

Asian Survey ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina G. Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Small Country ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time

This article explains why the Philippines, a small country and a long-time US ally, shook the world in 2016 by democratically electing a president who has defied conventional expectations, touched the lives of ordinary Filipinos, been accused of human rights violations in his war on drugs, and could affect the geostrategic rivalry between the US and China.

Courting Migrants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Burgess
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Qualitative Comparison ◽  
Integrative Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration

This book examines state–migrant relations in four countries with a long history of migration, regime change, and democratic fragility: Turkey, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the Philippines. It uses these cases to develop an integrative theory of the interaction between “diaspora-making” by states and “state-making” by diasporas. Specifically, it tackles three questions: (1) Under what conditions and in what ways do states alter the boundaries of political membership to reach out to migrants and thereby “make” diasporas? (2) How do these migrants respond? (3) To what extent does their response, in turn, transform the state? Through historical case narratives and qualitative comparison, the book traces the feedback loops among migrant profiles, state strategies of diaspora-making, party transnationalization, and channels of migrant engagement in politics back home. The analysis reveals that most migrants follow the pathways established by the state and thereby act as “loyal” diasporas but with important deviations that push states to alter rules and institutions.

Reading Statelessness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.

Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1405-1423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Slaughter
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Nation State ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
Full Development ◽  
International Human ◽  
Administrative Structures

With adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the United Nations conscripted, almost by default, the historically Euronationalist forms of the Bildungsroman and natural law to legitimate its vision of a new international order. This essay elaborates the conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vision that normative human rights law and the idealist Bildungsroman share in their cooperative efforts to articulate, normalize, and realize a world founded on the fundamental dignity and equality of what both the UDHR and early theorists of the novel term “the free and full development of the human personality.” Historically, formally, and ideologically, they are mutually enabling and complicit fictions: each projects, in advance of administrative structures comparable to those of the nation-state, an image of human personality and sociality that ratifies (and makes legible) the other's idealistic vision of the proper relations between individual and society. (JRS)

scholarly journals Towards Global Governance: The Inadequacies of the UN Drug Control Regime

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 291-295
Author(s):  
Antonia Eliason ◽  
Robert Howse
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
Drug Control ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Psychotropic Substances ◽  
United Nations Convention ◽  
Global War ◽  
Control Regime ◽  
Illicit Traffic

Human rights and the UN drug control regime have long had an uneasy relationship, which is evident today in the tensions that exist between criminal justice reform advocates, the institutions of the UN drug control regime, and economic interests that stand to benefit from decriminalization and legalization efforts. The UN drug control regime's relationship with human rights cannot be properly discussed without acknowledging its colonial and racist roots. From the earliest agreement on drug control in 1909, born out of the crisis of opium dependency caused by the forced opening of China to trade in opium by the British, to the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which was a product of America's war on drugs, international efforts to regulate drugs have never been for the benefit of those who have suffered the most from both the supply of drugs and its criminalization. The war on drugs has been a global war from the beginning, arising out of colonial structures that centered white/European racial dominance. The inadequacies of the international drug regime and current efforts to reform it are rooted in this historical legacy. In light of this, we argue that efforts by international bodies to center human rights in the discussion on reforming the UN drug control regime are, so far, insufficient. Only through recognizing the power imbalances at play can we advance the possibility of a system that values individuals and responds to a changing landscape where corporate interests are coming to the table in the context of decriminalization and legalization.

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.

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