Papers

• Communal intimacy and the war on drugs in the Bagong Silang Steffen Jensen Aalborg University

  This presentation explores the role of communal intimacy in the war on drugs in the Philippines. It argues that while the war on drugs was orchestrated from the outside by Duterte and his police force, it was fought locally in ways that were embedded in the gendered and general fabric of intimate, communal relations. While most focus has been on the police, we focus here on the Barangay Justice System that was made complicit – with or against their will – in the day to day actions of the war. Through four case studies of local members of the justice system as well as quantitative survey, the presentation ask how and to what extent did gendered and general structures become central in the war on drugs in Bagong Silang? The presentation draws on work carried out with Karl Hapal.

• Everyday forms of exclusion: hidden and open violence in natural resources control and extraction in Southern Negros Occidental Angela Asuncion University of Guelph Dominique Caouette Universite de Montreal John Edison Ubaldo University of the Philippines Diliman

  Land is a significant area of contention in the Philippines. Richly endowed in mineral resources and fertile arable lands, tensions have developed between the pressures of extractive accumulation and land dispossession. These dynamics are pronounced in remote frontier lands. In peripheral regions, national and provincial political institutions are diffused and meditated by local power dynamics. We analyse this phenomenon by examining the history of Sipalay and Hinobaan, two municipalities located in the southern region of the Western Visayan province of Negros Occidental, which host varying extractive industries. We aim to deconstruct the underlying mechanisms of violence and resistance throughout political history between these two adjacent municipalities. We argue that despite Sipalay and Hinobaan sharing a similar geographical location and context, the forms of resistance in each locality vary due to differences in community agency. To reveal the level of re-possession occurring across decades, publicly accessible land titles of redistributed land covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program were cross-referenced with the Tax Map Control Roll of the respective municipalities. Archival research on the municipalities’ history and interviews conducted during field visits from 2017 to 2019 will focus on transformations in state and non-state violence, including during the Rodrigo Duterte administration (2016-2022).

• From the war on drugs to COVID-19: situating Duterte’s violent politics its implications beyond 2022 Karl Arvin Hapal University of the Philippines

  Rodrigo Duterte governed the Philippines thru fear, intimidation, and violence. This is illustrated in his war on drugs which has, thus far, claimed the lives of around 6,000 people and the arrest of about 300,000 based on official government figures. Despite the condemnation of various domestic and international actors, Duterte remains undeterred in his bloody campaign. The war on drugs continued as the COVID-19 gripped the Philippines. As with the war on drugs, Duterte responded to the pandemic with an iron fist – relying on militaristic approaches and the threat or actual use of violence to achieve compliance. This presentation aims to situate the violent and militaristic approach of Duterte’s war on drugs and pandemic response through the lens of securitization. The presentation makes the case that Duterte depicted both the illegal drugs and the pandemic as an existential threat which, in turn, required extraordinary, and if necessary, violent responses to save the nation from peril. The presentation also makes the case that the securitization of the war on drugs and the pandemic has relied on pre-existing class prejudices that the Philippine state used in the past to render its violent practices justifiable. The presentation ends by providing initial reflections on the impact of Duterte’s securitizing act on democratic institutions, as well as on the broad political landscape in the Philippines after the 2022 elections.

• The Paradox of Service Delivery: Engaging with State Violence in Sitio San Roque Ervin Grana University of the Philippines Diliman

  Pierre Bourdieu defines symbolic violence as the sine qua non of force and coercion. But how might the context of a slum community filling gaps in the Philippine government’s COVID-19 response complicate our understanding of state violence? I advance two insights through the case of two grassroots initiatives supported by a political intermediary – a term I leverage to describe a middle-class challenger organization situated in a Strategic Action Field (SAF). First, I argue that Bourdieu’s concept of social capital permits an account of the differing effects of physical and symbolic violence. On the one hand, states enact physical violence to regulate intra-community engagement in grassroots initiatives; on the other hand, states enact symbolic violence by defining and delimiting the institutional context from where an inter-community tie derives its value. Finally, although I argue that physical and symbolic violence operate in a dialectic, the effects of the former are dispersed within a SAF. The effects of the latter, in contrast, are pronounced within an organization, whereby a political intermediary makes use of its organizational identity as a schema through which it organizes around (hybrid) institutional logics constructed by the state.

Abstract

Keywords

• Authoritarianism
• Democratic Backsliding
• Philippines
• Social Movements
• Violence