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The Politics of Disposable Life in Duterte’s Drug War
Kristine Marie Reynaldo
University of the Philippines Diliman
ktreynaldo@up.edu.ph
Disclaimer: This draft is a work-in-progress that is part of a broader research project on the
discursive construction of inhumanity and the legitimation of killing in Duterte’s Drug War. Pending
further study of textual and other evidence, the conceptual analysis presented in this paper should
not be taken as sufficient to support the conclusions reached. In its current form, this paper was
presented at the "Thinking Humanity at Its End" conference organized by the Center for
Intercultural Philosophy, held on May 27, 2017 in Quezon City. Some parts of this paper were also
presented at the 2017 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Global Network Winter Camp on "Conflict and
Justice: Precarious Bodies in Inter-Asia Societies" held in Hsinchu, Taiwan on January 16-20 with
the support of the Taiwan Experience Education Program-University System of Taiwan (TEEPUST) and the International Institute for Cultural Studies of National Chiao Tung University,
Taiwan.
Abstract: The supposed inalienability and universality of human rights notwithstanding, it is clear
that, where Duterte’s War on Drugs is concerned, the category of humanity is selectively applied;
one source of legitimation for what has been called “the democide of the poor,” for instance, is the
notion that those who commit crimes are less than human, that their lives are worth only the prize
for their elimination. But how is the worth of a life determined, and what could account for why
certain populations are allowed to remain in conditions of suffering, to die or to be killed? How is
public consent produced and maintained for what seems to be morally, legally, and rationally
untenable? My research inquires into popular narratives that have legitimized and normalized the
culture of killing suspected criminals without due process, and locates these narratives within critical
discourses on normalized violence and the neoliberal state. I aim to understand, at a theoreticalsystematic level, the war on drugs and the responses it has elicited from publics within the interface
of structural, symbolic, and everyday violence that conditions precarious subjects under neoliberal
governmentality. Using conceptual taxonomies of violence by Galtung (1969), Bourgois (2001), and
Žižek (2009), my paper seeks to surface the role of invisible modalities of indirect violence in
constituting and normalizing conditions in which inflicting direct, spectacular violence upon certain
categories of people becomes socially acceptable. Connecting this to Lorey’s (2015) exposition of
the three dimensions of the precarious under the neoliberal state, I also argue that the extraordinary
violence of the drug war is enacted as an illusion of state power to allay the anxieties that arise from
generalized insecurity amid the harms visited by unregulated market forces and the state’s inability to
deliver political goods to its citizens, which produce a crisis of legitimacy.
Keywords: War on Drugs, Duterte, violence, insecurity, neoliberal state
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I. The democide of the poor
Within six months after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took office on June 30, 2016,
riding to electoral victory on a platform that emphasized the eradication of crime, more than six
thousand people, most of them from poor urban areas, were killed in connection to the statesponsored War on Drugs. About one-third of the casualties were suspected drug pushers and users
shot in police operations, allegedly for resisting arrest, while the majority were victims of vigilantestyle executions by unknown armed persons.1 By the end of 2016, despite myriad issues concerning
presidential policies and public conduct, headline inflation, human rights violations, the burial of the
dictator and plunderer Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, and condemnations from
international organizations, human rights advocates, leftist and other activist groups, the Catholic
Church, and other members of civil society, President Duterte’s public approval rating remained
high at 83%, according to Pulse Asia.2 That figure dipped only slightly to 77% by March 2017,3
despite extensive investigative reports by Amnesty International,4 Human Rights Watch,5 and the US
Department of State,6 among numerous others published by local and international news media,
1. Jodesz Gavilan et al, “Duterte’s War on Drugs: The First Six Months,” Rappler, accessed January 5, 2017,
http://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/rich-media/rodrigo-duterte-war-on-drugs-2016.
2. Pulse Asia Research, Inc., “December 2016 Nationwide Survey on the Performance and Trust ratings of the
Top National Government Officials and Key Government Institutions,” Pulse Asia Research, Inc. Philippines, accessed
January 5, 2017, http://www.pulseasia.ph/december-2016-nationwide-survey-on-the-performance-and-trust-ratings-ofthe-top-national-government-officials-and-key-government-institutions.
3. Pulse Asia Research, Inc., “March 2017 Nationwide Survey on the Performance and Trust Ratings of the
Top Five Philippine Government Officials,” Pulse Asia Research, Inc. Philippines, accessed May 25, 2017,
http://www.pulseasia.ph/march-2017-nationwide-survey-on-the-performance-and-trust-ratings-of-the-top-fivephilippine-government-officials/.
4. Amnesty International, Philippines: “If you are poor, you are killed”: Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines’ “War on
Drugs,” Amnesty International, January 31, 2017, amnesty.org/en/documents/asa35/ 5517/2017/en.
5. Human Rights Watch (HRW), “License to Kill”: Philippine Police Killings in Duterte’s “War on Drugs,” HRW,
March 1, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/03/01/license-kill/philippine-police-killings-dutertes-war-drugs.
6. U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, “Philippines,” Country Reports on
Human Rights Practices for 2016, accessed May 25, 2017,
https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport/index.htm?year=2016&dlid=265366.
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holding the police and the chief executive criminally liable for extrajudicial killings7 and the culture
of impunity brazenly abetted by the current administration. In a speech made to Filipino migrant
workers in Singapore in December 2016, when his campaign promise to rid the country of illegal
drugs should have been fulfilled, Duterte instead declared that his War on Drugs would not abate
until the end of his term in 2022, until the last drug pusher was killed, for, he said, it was not a crime
to destroy those who would destroy the country. In response, the audience breaks out in applause
and chants his name while making his trademark gesture, a raised fist.8
I include the above vignette to illustrate the impetus of my current research: to inquire into
the narratives that have legitimized and normalized the culture of killing suspected criminals without
due process, and to locate these narratives within critical discourses on normalized violence and the
neoliberal state. I aim to: (1) describe the dominant representations of the War on Drugs, the range
of affects they evoke, and their place in the narratives of corruption, nationalism, human rights, and
Philippine underdevelopment in the popular imagination; (2) identify key social actors in the
discursive legitimation of the War on Drugs, and map and classify the justifications given for it, and;
(3) understand, at a theoretical-systematic level, the War on Drugs and the responses it has elicited
from publics within the interface of structural, symbolic, and everyday violence that conditions
7. “There is no explicit definition of extrajudicial executions under international law. Amnesty International
defines extrajudicial executions as unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by order of a government or with its
complicity or acquiescence, which is along the lines of descriptions provided by international experts. Extrajudicial
executions would under this understanding include unlawful killings both by state forces and by non-state groups and
individuals that state authorities fail to properly investigate and prosecute” (Amnesty International, Philippines: “If you are
poor, you are killed,”14).
8. Republic of the Philippines Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO), “Dec. 16, 2016 –
Speech of President Rodrigo Duterte during the Meeting with the Filipino Community in Singapore, The Max Pavilion
and Hall 9,” PCOO.gov.ph, accessed January 5, 2017, http://pcoo.gov.ph/dec-16-2016-speech-of-president-rodrigoduterte-during-the-meeting-with-the-filipino-community-in-singapore-the-max-pavilion-and-hall-9. See also the online
video recording of the speech: Rodrigo Duterte, “Meeting with the Filipino Community in Singapore (Speech)
12/16/2016,” YouTube video, posted by “RTVMalacanang,” 1:02:01, December 18, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKTwyYV1UAI.
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precarious subjects under neoliberal governmentality. To answer the first two problematics, I plan to
analyze a corpus of texts published in the first six months of Duterte’s presidency to gain insight
into how the War on Drugs has been represented by those who defend its legitimacy. These texts
include: (1) the speeches given by Duterte; (2) the publications of the Presidential Communications
Operations Office (PCOO), including statements to the press by PCOO Secretary Martin Andanar
and Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella, and; (3) the blogs of the two most prominent
supporters of Duterte—Mocha Uson and Sass Rogando Sasot—who purport to speak for and to
the masses and provide political information, analysis, and guidance, reaching millions of people
through their online platforms. Reading these texts, I will categorize the range of responses to the
war on drugs according to van Leeuwen’s typology of the discursive construction of legitimation:
authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis,9 and identify the dominant
sources of justification for the war on drugs and the death toll it has given rise to. The third
question—how may the War on Drugs and the responses it has elicited from publics be understood,
at a theoretical-systematic level, within the interface of structural, symbolic, and everyday violence
that conditions precarious subjects under neoliberal governmentality?—is what I will focus on in
this paper. In doing so, I hope to provide one way of understanding why, notwithstanding legal and
moral norms and the lack of empirical support to justify a punitive approach, the War on Drugs
appears to be sanctioned by the approval of the majority in government and public spheres, and
why, despite the dire statistics on what some have called the “democide of the poor,” it has been
difficult to consolidate dissent and channel diffuse expressions of outrage into social movements
against killings that have become a feature of everyday life for marginalized communities in urban
centers like Metro Manila, Davao, Cebu, and elsewhere.
9. Theo Van Leeuwen, “The Discursive Construction of Legitimation,” Discourse and Practice: New Tools for
Critical Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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II. “Criminals have no humanity”
“Are there human lives that have so lost the quality of legal good that their very existence no
longer has any value, either for the person leading such a life or for society?”
– Karl Binding, Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived (Leipzig, 1920)10
“Sabi ko nga [Like I said], crime against humanity? In the first place, I’d like to be frank with
you. Are they humans? What is your definition of a human being? Tell me. Human rights.
Use it properly in the right context, if you have the brains.”
– Rodrigo Duterte, “Speech … during the 10th Anniversary of the Eastern Mindanao
Command (EastMinCom), Davao City, 26 August 2016”11
The supposed inalienability and universality of human rights notwithstanding, it is clear that,
where Duterte’s War on Drugs is concerned, the category of humanity is selectively applied; one
justification for the campaign is the notion that those who commit crimes are less than human, that
their lives are worth only the prize for—and the money saved in the process of—their elimination.
In a media interview with Duterte in Cebu in March 2017, concerning his alleged culpability for
crimes against humanity, he avows, “If you kill criminals, it is not a crime against humanity. The
criminals have no humanity. God damn it.”12 Such sentiments echo his earlier statements excusing
his promotion of violations against the rights of suspected drug personalities: “[Ang may] takot sa law
at takot sa Diyos, yan ang may human rights. … Pero kung itong mga criminal … wala yan.”13 [Those who
10. Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998), 81.
11. Republic of the Philippines PCOO, “Speech of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte during the 10th Anniversary
of the Eastern Mindanao Command (EastMinCom), Davao City, 26 August 2016,” PCOO.gov.ph, accessed May 25, 2017,
http://pcoo.gov.ph/aug-26-2016-speech-of-president-rodrigo-roa-duterte-during-the-10th-anniversary-of-the-easternmindanao-command-eastmincom/.
12. Republic of the Philippines PCOO, “Media Interview with President Rodrigo Roa Duterte after the
Groundbreaking Ceremony in Cordova Cebu Virlo Public Market, 02 March 2017,” PCOO.gov.ph, accessed May 25,
2017, http://pcoo.gov.ph/march-02-2017-media-interview-with-president-rodrigo-roa-duterte-after-thegroundbreaking-ceremony-in-cordova-cebu/.
13. Republic of the Philippines PCOO, “Speech of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte during his talk to the men
of the Central Command (CentCom) of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), Cebu City, 5 August 2016,”
PCOO.gov.ph, accessed May 25, 2017, http://pcoo.gov.ph/aug-05-2016-speech-of-president-rodrigo-roa-duterte-duringhis-talk-to-the-men-of-the-central-command-centcom-of-the-armed-forces-of-the-philippines-afp/.
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have fear of the law and fear of God, they have human rights. … But these criminals … have none.]
“You must remember that those who are already in[to] shabu for almost one year, they are dead.
They are the living walking dead. They are of no use to society anymore. And yet we have to
sequester [funds] for them. We have to feed them because they are human being[s]. And we need
money [for that] and where do we get the money [for that]?”14 What is interesting to me in these
statements is their decoupling of the human being as a biological category and this being’s
entitlement to rights, which is socially constructed, morally evaluated, predicated on the being’s
perceived humanity. Hence, even though these rights are assured by the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, made legally binding under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(ICCPR) as well as domestic laws, these legal instruments and obligations are swept aside because of
material considerations, such as the lack of resources for proper law enforcement, not to mention
for addressing the roots of criminality, which include poverty, unemployment, inaccessibility of
public services, and so on. But Duterte’s pronouncements do not acknowledge these root causes of
crime; instead he attributes crime to moral and psychological degradation resulting from
involvement in drugs. In this way, the human being loses personhood or the property of humanity,
and thereby also his entitlement to rights. Thus we see how the value of human life, rather than
being an ontological given, is socially determined.
Given the evidently widespread assumption that the life of a human being has no inherent,
inalienable, and sacrosanct value, what could be the basis of its worth? How do people like Duterte
draw the line between lives worth protecting, and lives not worthy of being lived? What could
14. Republic of the Philippines PCOO, “Press Conference of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, Davao City, 21
August 2016,” PCOO.gov.ph, accessed May 25, 2017, http://pcoo.gov.ph/aug-21-2016-press-conference-of-presidentrodrigo-roa-duterte/.
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account for why certain populations are allowed to remain in conditions of suffering, to die or to be
killed?
The targets of Oplan Tokhang and the places often visited by vigilante killings are telling:
[I]n all but one of the cases investigated by Human Rights Watch, the victims of
drug-related killings by the police or unidentified gunmen were poor … and many
were suspected drug users, not dealers at all. Almost all of the victims were either
unemployed or worked menial jobs, including as rickshaw drivers or porters, and
lived in slum neighborhoods or informal settlements.15
Etienne Balibar uses the phrase “the ‘death zones’ of humanity” to refer to those places that
contain “what some Latin American sociologists provocatively call población chatarra, ‘garbage
humans,’ to be ‘thrown’ away, out of the global city.” These “garbage humans” include “populations
which are not likely to be productively used or exploited but are always already superfluous, and
therefore can be only eliminated either through ‘political’ or through ‘natural’ means.”16 Whence
come these garbage humans? Postwar reconstruction, rapid industrialization in the 1950s,
population growth, and uneven regional development spurred migration from the countryside to the
city. The ballooning of the population in urban centers meant increased demand and competition
for scarce employment, space, and other means of subsistence. Zygmunt Bauman asserts that “an
inevitable outcome of modernization, and an inseparable accompaniment of modernity,” with its
mechanisms of “economic progress,” “globalization,” and “order-building,” 17 is the generation not
only of industrial waste, but also of “human waste”—that is, “surplus populations” comprising
15. HRW, “License to Kill,” 17.
16. Etienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001): 25, accessed January
5, 2017, doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.00213.
17. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 5-6.
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redundant laborers and flawed consumers who lack the means to actively participate in the processes
of production and consumption in a market society.18 Though the problem of superfluous and
undesirable populations, “weigh ever more heavily on the … consumerist culture of
individualization,”19 to these “wasted lives,” Bauman relegates a number of social functions: one,
they constitute an expedient “object of … resentment,” “the target on which the anger” and
anxieties of the relatively secure yet threatened citizens in the social order may be unloaded20; two,
their confinement and segregation from the “useful” members of the population lends the policing
state an appearance of legitimacy amidst its helplessness in the face of unregulated market forces,
and; three, they are the rubbish collectors of a consumerist society obsessed with the gratification of
insatiable desires for commodities, but reluctant to deal with the refuse of material accumulation.21
In this ruthless logic, it makes sense that unwanted people take care of unwanted things. Ghettoed
and hidden from view, these “garbage humans” are, at best, objects of charity and pity, often
ignored, usually targets of criminality, criminalization, and scorn. In the case of the War on Drugs,
these surplus populations, too disempowered to cause a fuss in the face of abuse, serve as easy
scapegoats and targets of state violence.
III. The continuums of violence and insecurity
18. Ibid., 39.
19. Ibid., 7.
20. Ibid., 58.
21. Ibid., 59.
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But what does violence consist in? To illuminate this question, I wish to turn to conceptual
taxonomies of violence, developed by Galtung (1969),22 Bourgois (2001),23 and Žižek (2009)24 that
distinguish between direct/subjective violence, that is, violence that is inflicted by a subject on
another, and indirect violence, including structural, symbolic, and everyday violence, which,
operating through political, economic, and cultural structures, are not usually seen or labelled
violence. My research seeks to uncover the role of these invisible modalities of indirect violence in
constituting and normalizing conditions in which killing members of an underclass of surplus
populations becomes not only socially acceptable, but even qualified as a political “good.”
Connecting these classifications of violence to Isabell Lorey’s exposition of the three dimensions of
the precarious under the neoliberal state in her book, State of Insecurity (2015),25 I argue that the
extraordinary violence of the Drug War is enacted as an illusion of state power to allay the anxieties
that arise from generalized insecurity amid the harms visited by unregulated market forces and the
inability of the state to deliver political goods to its citizens.
Duterte’s War on Drugs has given rise to widespread accounts of extraordinary forms of
direct violence, in which an agent inflicts harm on another’s person.26 When the police bang on
doors and force their way into the houses of private citizens whose names are included in the drug
watch list, shoot suspected users and dealers in their beds while the latter are sleeping or begging for
22. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167-191.
Accessed January 5, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/422690.
23. Philippe Bourgois, “The power of violence in war and peace: Post-Cold War lessons from El Salvador,”
Ethnography 2 no. 1 (2001): 5-34, accessed January 5, 2017,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14661380122230803.
24. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2009).
25. Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, translated by Aileen Derieg (London: Verso,
2015).
26. Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 170.
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their lives, plant evidence in crime scenes, steal the victims’ valuables, and drag the slain body on the
floor, out the door,27 or when unknown armed assailants gun down suspected street pushers,
wrapping their heads and bodies in masking tape or plastic,28 they are inflicting direct or subjective
violence. However, the persistence of the Drug War, which victimizes the poor almost exclusively,
also belies indirect or objective violence. Instead of operating through an easily identifiable
perpetrator of physical or psychological harm, indirect violence, in the form of inequality, is built
into oppressive economic, political, and cultural structures that organize social relations and
determine the distribution of power and vulnerability, opportunities and risk.29
Philippe Bourgois forwards a conceptual understanding of indirect violence as a continuum
of structural, symbolic, and everyday harms experienced from the macro- to the micro-level.30
Structural violence refers to “the systematic constraint on human potential due to economic and
political structures”31 that deprive large sectors of the population of life chances enjoyed by
members of more dominant social groups.32 In other words, structural violence consists in social
injustice; Galtung, who introduced the concept into academic debates in the 1960’s, uses the two
terms interchangeably. Meanwhile, the naturalization of social hierarchies and the legitimation of
structural violence are functions of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence,” by which the
dominated are conditioned to become complicit in their own domination through the internalization
of oppressive ideologies as they are interpellated through social institutions that reproduce these
27. Amnesty International, Philippines: “If you are poor, you are killed,” 20-26.
28. HRW, “License to Kill,” 8.
29. Galtung, “Violence, Peace,” 171.
30. Bourgois, “The power of violence,” 8.
31. Mathias Klitgård Sørensen, “Foucault and Galtung on structural violence,” Irenees, last modified October
2014, http://www.irenees.net/bdf_fiche-analyse-1032_en.html#iref:3.
32. Galtung, “Violence, Peace,” 171.
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worldviews.33 Lastly, everyday violence refers to “routine practices and expressions of interpersonal
aggression that serve to normalize violence at the micro-level.”34 Focusing on the subjective
experience of risks and harms that are considered ordinary in the context of particular communities,
such violence is rendered invisible and less likely to be labeled violence.35 For example, women’s
unpaid “second shift,” the gender wage gap, and the devaluation of feminized care work in the labor
market are manifestations of structural violence that are legitimized by the symbolic violence of sexism,
which likewise normalizes acts of everyday violence, such as street harassment or domestic abuse.
The concepts of everyday, symbolic, and structural violence are central to contemporary
discourses on the “state of insecurity” under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a nuanced term, which
David Harvey defines thus:
Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that
proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized
by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is
to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. …
But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. ... In so far as neoliberalism
values market exchange as “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all
human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs”, it emphasizes
the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social
good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market
33. Bourgois, “The power of violence,” 8.
34. Ibid., 8-9.
35. Arthur Kleinman, “The Violences of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social
Violence,” Violence and Subjectivity, ed. Veena Das et al (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 228.
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transactions, and it seems to bring all human action into the domain of the market. ...
The cultural consequences of the dominance of such a market ethic are legion.36
Neoliberalism, then, understood as a set of economic and political policies governing globalized
capitalism, “a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives,”37 and an ethos of
individualization, works through the interface of forms of indirect violence to constitute precarious
subjects whose central preoccupation is insecurity.
Isabell Lorey, writing on how neoliberalism normalizes insecurity, identifies three
dimensions of the precarious38: 1. Social-ontological “precariousness,” which is the common
experience of vulnerability that is inherent in being human — that is, being mortal and relational,
and therefore subject to the vagaries of existence and affected by the will and actions of others; 2.
“Precarity,” the differential experience of vulnerability contingent on identitarian positioning within
intersecting political and economic hierarchies that unevenly distribute power and privilege, as well
as vulnerability to such risks as death, disease, environmental hazards, crime and violence, and; 3.
“Governmental precarization,” which denotes modes of subjectivation and governing, such as legal
and cultural norms and institutions, that produce self-regulating subjects who have internalized
relations of inequality, capitalist exploitation, and precarity as natural conditions of existence, and
competitiveness as the basis of relative security. The driving concerns of the precarious subject are
thus self-care, self-development, self-advertisement, and ownership as ways of guarding against the
constant threat of insecurity. Such relentless self-regulation is the function of neoliberal subjugation,
36. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 2-4.
37. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Le Monde diplomatique, accessed
January 5, 2017, http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu.
38. Lorey, State of Insecurity, 11-14.
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for the “dismantling and remodelling of collective safeguarding systems”39 and the “privatization of
risk”40 means that the ever-performing, ever-productive, self-securing subject is left little time, space,
energy, and other resources to organize and mobilize with others who are similarly overburdened to
develop networks and practices of assistance and resistance. “The more the subject regulates him or
herself, the more effectively does the broader form of regulation work.”41 If the self-regulating
subject is both the product and instrument of neoliberal governmentality, then those who fail in the
projects of self-making and self-management—the poor, the criminal, the drug addict, the insane or
disabled, and others who are similarly morally excluded by civil society—constitute a social liability
and a threat. From one perspective, the extermination of these “undesirables,” usually through the
slow death of deprivation, constitutes a social good.
The normalization of forms of indirect violence that reproduce precarity and precarious
subjects is concretely realized in the phenomenon of the War on Drugs and its continuance. On the
one hand, the sense of powerlessness, distrust of social institutions, fear of reprisal, and resignation
felt by the families of those who were killed, which prevent them from pursuing justice, bespeaks
the extent to which the experience of violence has become normal for all those who toil at the
margins of society and suffer most grindingly the brutalities of poverty and social injustice. On the
other hand, those privileged enough to live untouched by the threat of murder at the hands of the
state and who either abet or tolerate the War on Drugs often do so out of their desire to feel a sense
of security as they navigate a mode of existence that demands the constant performance of
aspiration, self-regulation, perseverance, and resilience, despite regular conditions of distress and
existential threats, as part of the demonstration of productivity, and thus, of worth, competitiveness,
39. Ibid., 89.
40. Ibid., 63.
41. Judith Butler, Foreword to Lorey, State of Insecurity, x.
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and governability. The neoliberal subject’s failure to demonstrate capacity for self-making, self-care
and self-management exposes him or her as a liability or threat to others.
For Lorey, what distinguishes the neoliberal “state of insecurity” from other states since the
dawn of modernity and the rise of individualism is the reason for self-regulation and compliance
with modes of governing: in the sovereign state of feudal monarchy, subjects obey to be under the
protection of absolute government that exercises a monopoly on violence; in the welfare state of
embedded liberalism, subjects obey to be under the protection of social security systems through
which the administrative state redistributes resources.42 In the neoliberal state, subjects no longer
assume protection by the state, and rather conform to the demands of productivity, virtuosity, and
competition by capitalizing on their “flexible, mobile, performative-cognitive, affective,” and “free”
labor, 43 that is, their economically valorized selves, out of fear of being rendered disposable and
relegated to the death zones of penury and moral exclusion.
While neoliberalism normalizes violence, it balances or makes tolerable constant insecurity
with the promise that relative security can be had on the basis of individual “merit”—a notion that,
while masking unequal advantage, creates an illusion of superiority over less meritocratic others
who thus deserve their destitution. The focus on securing the self and one’s immediate society (e.g.
family and close friends) reproduces the system of differential precarity, in which everyone is at risk
of redundancy and disposability, and being less at risk means accepting that certain populations must
be perpetually relegated to zones of insecurity, suffering, and death — that is to say, “Better them
than me.” The illusion of security thus begins with the process of othering.44 Meanwhile, the
government, to forestall a crisis of legitimacy resulting from its inability or reluctance to institute the
42. Ibid., 47-48.
43. Ibid., 103.
44 Ibid., 43.
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kind of systemic, structural changes needed to effect substantial and progressive change to the
longstanding problems of poverty and social injustice, resorts to staging the continuous performance
of spectacles of crisis, which justify the need for a strongman wielding increasingly autocratic rule to
save the people from urgent, impending dangers in an unstable world.
What maintains the workings of neoliberal society is the acclimatization of its subjects to a
state of insecurity and everyday violence, so that they come to take precarity and the structural and
symbolic forms of violence that reproduce it as something not to be questioned or rebelled against,
but simply endured. Internalizing neoliberal mantra, one seeks power in individual action, in
developing biographical solutions to structural problems. One turns the focus on the self, enhancing
personal value, sometimes at the expense of the collective good, to buffer against the anxieties of
possible redundancy. However, this continual turning into and around and around the self may only
reinforce “fantasies of invulnerability”45 causing harm to others while leaving the systems of social
injustice intact. Perhaps the path to empathy and resistance to neoliberal governmentality consists in
embracing precariousness as a condition of shared humanity, recognizing differential, systemically
structured privileges that determine one’s experience of security against the violation of one’s rights,
and constituting networks of solidarity and cooperation, a society not of competition, but of care.
45. Ibid., 111.
16
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