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

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

The Philippines' COVID-19 Response

The Philippine response to COVID-19 has been described as being one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world. Why has the Philippine government relied heavily on draconian measures in its "war" against COVID-19? And what discourse informed the framing of its response as a war against the virus? This article argues that the government’s reliance on draconian measures was a consequence of securitising COVID-19, appreciating the virus as an "existential threat". The securitisation of COVID-19 was reinforced with a narrative characterising the situation of the country as being at war against an "unseen enemy". This war-like narrative, however, invariably produced a subject, the pasaway. As the perpetual enemy of health and order, the pasaway became the target of disciplining and policing. The targeting of the pasaway was informed by deep-seated class prejudices and Duterte's authoritarian tendencies

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

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