Second, conceptually, we aim to contribute to the understanding of local politics, especially in relation to violence in the Philippines, within Southeast Asian studies. Our approach draws on feminist and anthropological studies of politics and violence, a literature to which the discussion of the war situated in Manila can also respond. However, the main aim is to contribute to Philippine and Southeast Asian studies of violence and intimate politics. To a significant extent, Philippine historiography and studies have been preoccupied with understanding politics and violence from the top down. The top-down approach has produced substantial and important insights that have animated our analysis.3However, to echo, for instance, Wataru Kusaka (2017b) as well as earlier critics, we stress the need to take seriously what we could call politics from below, or subaltern approaches.4We home in on communal forms of affective relationality as they are informed and animated—but not determined—by structural forms of oppression and violence. Our data provides important insights into how people deal with police violence through a combination of both vertical and horizontal social relations, money, and what is referred to as diskarte, that is, the ability to deal with and survive ongoing crisis-like situations (Jensen and Hapal 2018, 45). Our data illustrates how policing regimes are maintained, justified, or regulated based on the interactions among and between various communal actors. While forms of dealing with violence have been reconfigured as a result of the drug war, our analysis shows that they continue to affect how people respond, serving as models for action that are slightly out of sync. We suggest that we should understand local politics as more than functions of or reactions to elite political culture or a bifurcated space pitting the poor against the elite. Instead, we propose to focus as well on the intricate horizontal and vertical relations and how they are entangled with relations to and exchanges with authority—state or nonstate—locally. As we show, there is a perpetual conflict, which is often violent, between aspirations of equality and social hierarchies, which is folded into intimate relations at the local level. It is this configuration that we attempt to capture through the concepts of communal intimacy and the violence of politics.
Based on these remarks, the remainder of this introduction is intended to accomplish four things. In the first two sections, we address and elaborate on the empirical and conceptual contributions of the book. First, we briefly introduce the war on drugs, asking what kind of event it was. In the second section, we unpack the conceptual lens suggested earlier by situating it within politics in Bagong Silang as well as thematic, and especially anthropological, studies on intimacy, violence, and conflict in the Philippines. In the third section, we situate our research methodologically in Bagong Silang as a social space in the broader national and metropolitan economy and in its history of violence, dispossession, and displacement. In the final section, we introduce the different chapters that make up this book and explain how each contributes to the overall narrative of the book.
The War on Drugs
Much has already been written about the war on drugs and it makes little sense to rehearse all these discussions.5However, in order to explain our arguments, a few remarks are necessary. The war on drugs began quite literally in late June 2016, when President Duterte took over the reins of government. Duterte’s war on drugs was based on his conviction that illegal drugs were destroying the Philippines. In his election campaign, he managed to convince the public of a drug crisis in the Philippines and called for immediate action. Calling the Philippines a “narco-state,” in which drugs had become a threat to national security and the integrity of the nation, Duterte claimed that the number of drug users had reached a high of four million.