“Local Anti-Crime Campaigns and the Emergence of
Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ in the Philippines”
Sol Iglesias
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines
The national anti-crime campaign under former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte killed an estimated 6,200 people, based on official estimates, to as many as 30,000 people, according to human rights groups and the International Criminal Court prosecutor. This level of mass violence was unprecedented in the country’s postwar independence, yet its origins need to be better understood. Why did it emerge as a dominant form of political violence? I trace the emergence of anti-crime violence in former President Duterte’s bailiwick of Davao City, as well as in nearby Tagum City in Southern Mindanao and in urban areas of Central Luzon, prior to the national “war on drugs.” I argue that the weak Philippine state, unable to monopolize the use of force and constrained by particularistic interests, regulates violence using tactics that include accommodation with local political bosses. The violence thus scaled up with the endorsement and collusion of national elites, in Davao City. In the absence of such accommodation, the state was able to crack down on local armed groups, eliminating the Tagum City Death Squad (similarly linked to the local mayor) and the Red Vigilante Group operating in the cities of Gapan and Bulacan. I account for relative shifts in the use of violence, illuminating the central-local dynamics of anti-crime campaigns—a new, pernicious form of state terror. This presentation is part of a larger book project that uses new and unused source material in a novel dataset of violence in six regions throughout the country, from 2001 to 2016.
Coffee, tea & donuts will be served!
This event is free and open to the public. A recording will be available on the CSEAS YouTube channel following the event.
Sol Iglesias is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines, teaching subjects such as Political Analysis, Comparative Politics and Human Rights & International Relations. She has a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies and a M.A. in Political Science from the National University of Singapore as well as a M.A. in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a B.A. in Public Administration from the University of the Philippines. She was selected as a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Fellow in 2017. In 2021, she was a co-recipient of a Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WISEASS) grant and a selected participant of the Beyond Essentialism Project of Essex University and the University of the Philippines. The American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Democracy and Autocracy Committee selected her as an Emerging Scholar in 2020 and she won an APSA Asia Program fellowship and research grant in 2021. She was the first female, first Asian, and first Filipino director of Political and Economic affairs at the Asia-Europe Foundation in Singapore. She also worked as a consultant to the World Bank and the Local Government Academy of the Philippines. She has published extensively on political violence in the Philippines, on Philippine politics and current affairs, on political conditionality in the European Union’s relations with Southeast Asia, as well as on regionalism in Asia and Europe. She is currently writing a book, How a Weak State Governs: The Dynamics of Violence in Philippine Politics, on the central-local interactions that produced violence in the democratic, post-dictatorship period.