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

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.

From Presence to Influence: Gender, Nationality and Network Centrality of Corporate Directors

The enduring lack of diversity in the corporate elite continues to attract attention from scholars and practitioners. However, the issue of representation or ‘body count’ – in particular for women – tends to dominate the discussion and overshadows social-relational dimensions. Adopting a network perspective, this article investigates how gender and nationality interact with human and social capital (i.e. director capital), explaining why particular directors hold more influential positions in the corporate elite. Findings from Swiss data show that some specific aspects of human and social capital matter more than others for being an influential director and that, ceteris paribus, Swiss citizens benefit most from both sources of capital. The discussion engages with the implications of our findings on current approaches intended to increase the numbers of appointments of ‘diverse’ directors, and how these are expected to change the corporate elite and the related job market in the longer term.

Horribly hilarious: An interpretation of Esther

Finding humor in the book of Esther is not terribly unusual among those who read, study, and commentate on the book. Sustaining that outlook as the body count grows, however, proves more of an interpretive challenge. This interpretation of Esther, one that both adheres to the biblical narrative and follows a thread of the comic through it, undertakes that challenge. Comedy’s aspects of being revelatory and boundary-drawing enable a reading of Esther as farce that reckons with the troubling violence of Esther, without endorsing its replication beyond the story-world it inhabits.

Epilogue: Iraq and Its Casualties Today

The book covers the 2003-2017 period, but what has happened in Iraq since 2017? After nearly two decades of war, Iraq has experienced its least violent year; seventeen years after the invasion, during 2019 2,392 civilian deaths were recorded by Iraq Body Count. In its worst year, 2006, Iraq had witnessed the violent deaths of more than 29,500 civilians. The monthly and yearly totals, assembled after the painstaking daily task of extracting the data from hundreds of reports, betray the true magnitude and impact of the war on Iraqi civilians. The controversy surrounding the precise figures, the counts, or the estimates ultimately leads to the realisation that we do not need for millions to have been killed for the world to be outraged by the catastrophic impact of the War on Terror on the Iraqis. The number of certain civilian deaths that has been documented to a basic standard of corroboration by passive surveillance methods, in an ongoing war and through ongoing casualty recording, provides enough evidence to deem this invasion and occupation a security failure.

Iraq 2014–2017: Obama and the Banality of Killing

The 2014-2017 period is explored through discussions on the nature and role of the Islamic State, notions of war and peace, tyranny and democracy, captivity and liberation, in the context of political and security developments. The chapter raises questions regarding the impact of the Islamic State, as well as the impact of the way the coalition has countered the terror. Precision bombing, the Arab Spring, the Islamic State and the rise in civilian deaths are presented as factors contributing to the state of human security in Iraq. As a generation of Iraqis had, by 2017, grown up in occupation, terrorism, insurgency and western support, as the body count rose and national, regional and global security in this War on Terror once again took top position on our security agenda, how was the human security of Iraqis assured by this support?

Body Count

Lily Hamourtziadou's important analysis of the scale and causes of civilian deaths in Iraq since the US-led coalition's 2003 invasion sheds new light on the War on Terror. From early fighting to the departure and return of troops and the rise of ISIS, she tracks the cost of conflict and constructs an insightful human security approach to war.

Introduction: Human Security and the Emergence of Body Counts

How do we understand human security and casualty recording in the 21-century, our fundamental human rights and the importance of recording their violation? Human security and human rights are mutually reinforcing, as they identify the rights that need to be protected and recognise the ethical and political importance of securing the holders of those rights. Protecting human rights and upholding humanitarian law are essential to human security, which makes imperative the need to highlight the insecurity caused by armed conflict through assessing the impact on civilian life. Casualty recording bodies like Iraq Body Count have emerged, in order to record the toll the War on Terror took on those the Geneva Conventions called protected persons. The recognition of the importance of the right to life, security and liberty has placed great demands on governments and organisations to closely monitor and record human deaths from armed violence, and, by documenting those deaths in as much detail as possible, to give a human face to victims of war.

The Long Journey to the War on Terror

The devastating loss of life in a war still fought and grown in size requires an answer to the question: what is this War on Terror? Other than to find, stop and defeat terrorist groups, why are men, women and children killed daily, or live in poverty and fear, without home or country? How can we come to understand this human insecurity, its context and its consequences? The chapter explores the journey to the War on Terror and four narratives around it: clashing civilisations, the battle between good and evil, the politics of a hegemon and a hegemonic shift. The securitisation of Iraq is traced back to the Gulf War and links are made between the two wars, in terms of how issues around Iraq became part of the West’s security agenda and in terms of how ‘speaking security’ resulted in the deaths of thousands. The chapter concludes by introducing the first publication of Iraq Body Count, the Dossier on Civilian Casualties, compiled by IBC in the 2003-2005 period. The Dossier provided an initial assessment of the War on Terror, by revealing the recorded impact of the invasion and of the violence it triggered on civilians.

Body Count

The need to secure civilians and their fundamental rights has led to the moral imperative to track, record and memorialise the killing and the suffering of those who find themselves in the midst of violent conflict. Body Count tracks and explores civilian deaths in Iraq following the 2003 invasion by the US-led coalition. It is a recounting of the conflict through the counting of its victims. The book provides a narrative of the War on Terror by charting its course and its impact, through ‘live’ reports and through reflective analysis by the principal researcher of the NGO Iraq Body Count. It highlights the importance and the challenges of casualty recording, it maps the insurgency in Iraq and the ensuing civilian deaths, the struggle between military power and ideology, the increasing radicalisation, the seeking of security through hegemony, and the cycle of violence. The book narrates state collapse through discussions on the neoliberal system’s effect on Iraq’s security, on military interventions and the Western control paradigm, on individual and community trauma. It raises questions on leadership and hegemony, the vulnerability of weak states, winning and losing, regime and energy security. It tells the daily story of Iraq: a story of fear, of executions and mass graves, of airstrikes and car bombs, of heroism and sacrifice, and of life carrying on.