Abstract
Steffen Bo Jensen's and Karl Hapal's “Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics” is an excellent in-depth study on the impact of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs on a local community living in barangay Bagong Silang at the northernmost edge of the National Capital Region of the Philippines.
The authors focus on three interrelated questions (2): How did the violent campaign become so omnipresent, how will it end and with what consequences, and why did the urban poor areas bore the brunt of the killings?
They do this in five empirical chapters for this Barangay that is not only a former resettlement site populated since the late 1970s by urban poor from Manila City, but also the most populous barangay of the Philippines with approximately 260,000 inhabitants. Conscious about this, the authors explicitly “refuse to explore the war or Duterte outside the context of Bagong Silang” (23).
Jensen and Hapal argue that understanding how the campaign took hold and was implemented on the local level necessitates an exploration of “how violence and conflict animated communal life before the war, how local politics was carried out, and how the state, notably the police, conducted themselves” (4) in the years before Duterte. They are able to make good on this promise as their first stint of field research dates back to 2009. This allows them to link the pre-Duterte past with the Duterte-present of Bagong Silang.
In the empirical chapters they analyse in detail, which aspects of the past became formative for the way the campaign was implemented and how practices of the past were transformed by the way the campaign unfolded in Bagong Silang.
In the first chapter Jensen and Hapal unfold their central descriptive and analytical concept: communal intimacy. This is, first, an unavoidable condition of living together in a densely populated area. It also means having extensive knowledge of each other (11) and a specific “style of coping and morality” (18), that enables people to navigate their everyday life under such circumstances. It also forms the backbone of local politics and social control.
While communal intimacy was a shared resource for individual survival and social order in pre-Duterte times, the intimate knowledge about all members of the purok and barangay later formed the “backbone of the drug war. […] Hence, the intimate affectionate relationality that keeps people alive is also what puts them at risk” (18). During the war on drugs, “communal intimacy has been radically reconfigured” (p. 14), becoming a mortal threat to all those who were put on the local watch lists compiled by purok and barangay authorities.
In chapter two the empirical analysis of Bagong Silang sets out with a focus on the Barangay Justice System and the wider politics of policing before Duterte. Formal and informal practices make sure that most “minor” cases do not get to the attention of the police but are resolved within the barangay, mostly in informal ways and by individuals who owe their positions at the purok- or barangay level to their political loyalty to local power-holders. Despite its injustices and the prominent role of violence as an integral part of barangay social control, this system was relatively predictable (42). In chapter 3, Jensen and Hapal show that the local police stance on law enforcement before Duterte was heavily tainted by equally predictable monetary considerations. For both, the barangay and purok authorities as well as the local police, the question whether, when and how to enforce laws was to be constantly negotiated. The divide between legality and illegality was “constantly blurred in complex ways through processes that relate to family, community and law enforcement” (36).
Duterte's war on drugs left the basic principle of this negotiated order intact even though core dimensions were severely damaged, most importantly predictability. The barangay and purok-level authorities were transformed into de-facto subordinate auxiliaries of the PNP, as they were forced to compile the watch-lists that became the basis of Tokhang-operations as well as real and fake buy-bust operations and the extrajudicial killings. At the same time “the price of survival” (70) to be paid to the police went up significantly (70) for persons involved in illegal drugs. That is, the relational economy continued to work, albeit with a much-strengthened bargaining position for the police.
Surprisingly it is only in chapter four, that the concrete practices of social control depicted in the preceding chapters are embedded into the history barangay Bagong Silang. Chapters five and six provide interesting analyses of topics that, however, have little to do with the empirical argument as advanced in chapters two and three. Core information, as the support for the Duterte campaign voiced by community activists might fruitfully have been included in the earlier analysis, as it emphasises the uncomfortable social fact that the vast majority of local residents felt, “that is was morally legitimate to get rid of the bad elements of society” (118).
In the final chapter seven, the authors first sum up their argument about the relationship between communal intimacy and violence, before broadening their analytical perspective to “wars on…” as a global phenomenon, of which Duterte's war on drugs was only one peculiar instance.
Here the authors turn away from their own dictum to stick exclusively to Bagong Silang. They view Bagong Silang and the Duterte campaign through the frames of securitisation and counterinsurgency, an attempt that remains unsatisfactory in many respects.
One aspect is the popular claim that the war on drugs is a war on the poor and serves to secure the privileges of the elite, leaving “the poor with the blame for their own suppression” (154). This would require at least some explanation in light of the broad support for the campaign among the local (poor) residents.
The argument of the drug-war as a war serving to uphold elite privilege also ignores the government's lists of “narco-politicians” and other narco-personalities who were declared fair game for targeted killings. Not only vigilantes, but also the PNP actively targeted politicians in their operations, killing at least 50 incumbents from July 2016 to December 2022. Thus, incumbent politicians died at a higher rate in police operations during the Duterte-years than members of the population of Caloocan or the Philippines. Given that also a number of police officers with alleged links to organised crime were killed, the general framework of a “war against the poor” and a focus on the frame of preserving elite privilege seems at least to be undercomplex.
Also problematic is the straightforward link of policing during the war on drugs to counterinsurgency and Mindanao as the epicentre of a counterinsurgency approach (154ff). While “many people in Manila” might perceive of Mindanao “as incarnating danger and violence” (156) this is more an unfounded generalisation and prejudice than a legitimate assessment. Equalling Mindanao as such with violent counterinsurgency and linking this to the war on drugs also completely ignores that overall, Mindanao saw low death rates in the war against drugs. Further, even the “Davao boys,” that is, police-officers hailing from Davao and supposedly representative of the violent strain of policing in other areas, are a more diverse group of people, as exceptional cases as the one of Quezon City's Batasan police district suggest, where some of them authored extremely violent operations. In Bulacan and Manila, equal in police-violence-levels to Quezon City, Davao boys played no role.
The tendency to link outwardly similar patterns or activities in a causal manner is also prominent in the argument that “motorcycle-riding assassinations” that “have become the hallmark of the drug-related killings in Bagong Silang” were modelled on drive by shootings in state authored killings of insurgents and social and political activists (158). This ignores completely that motorcycles have been prominent as getaway-vehicles in the targeted killing of politicians and state officials as well as in targeted killings in general.
Despite these caveats, Jensen's and Hapal's study is an eminently readable and highly informative analysis of the local dynamics of a highly urbanised, densely populated, poor and unequal local setting that made possible an extremely violent war on drugs and, at the same time, gave it its specific localised form.