1 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 2 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. 3 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. 4 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). 5 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/. 6 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/. 7 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. 8 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. 9 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. 10 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. 11 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. 12 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. 13 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. 14 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. 15 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 Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Amnesty International. Philippines: “If you are poor, you are killed”: Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines’ “War on Drugs.” Amnesty International. Last modified January 31, 2017, amnesty.org/en/documents/asa35/ 5517/2017/en/. Balibar, Etienne. “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty.” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001):.25. Accessed January 5, 2017, doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.00213. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Essence of Neoliberalism.” Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Le Monde diplomatique. Accessed January 5, 2017, http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu. Bourgois, Philippe. “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. Butler, Judith. Foreword. State of Insecurity, by Isabell Lorey, London: Verso, 2015. vii-xi. Duterte, Rodrigo. “Meeting with the Filipino Community in Singapore (Speech) 12/16/2016.” YouTube video, 1:02:01. Posted by “RTVMalacanang,” December 18, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKTwyYV1UAI. Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167191. Accessed January 5, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/422690. Gavilan, Jodesz 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. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 17 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/licensekill/philippine-police-killings-dutertes-war-drugs. Kleinman, Arthur. “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. Lorey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Translated by Aileen Derieg. London: Verso, 2015. 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-theperformance-and-trust-ratings-of-the-top-five-philippine-government-officials/ ---. “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-onthe-performance-and-trust-ratings-of-the-top-national-government-officials-and-keygovernment-institutions. Republic of the Philippines Presidential Communications Operations Office, “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-rodrigo-duterte-during-the-meetingwith-the-filipino-community-in-singapore-the-max-pavilion-and-hall-9. 18 ---. “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-duterteafter-the-groundbreaking-ceremony-in-cordova-cebu/. ---. “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-ofpresident-rodrigo-roa-duterte/. ---. “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-presidentrodrigo-roa-duterte-during-his-talk-to-the-men-of-the-central-command-centcom-of-thearmed-forces-of-the-philippines-afp/. ---. “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-duterteduring-the-10th-anniversary-of-the-eastern-mindanao-command-eastmincom/. Sørensen, Mathias Klitgård. “Foucault and Galtung on structural violence.” Irenees. Last modified October 2014, http://www.irenees.net/bdf_fiche-analyse-1032_en.html#iref:3. 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=265 366. 19 Van Leeuwen, Theo. “The Discursive Construction of Legitimation.” Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2009.