Genesis of Duterteland: Central-Local Dynamics of State Repressiveness in the Philippines

• In Event: 128. Agents of Innovation or Clientelism? Understanding Local-Level Governance in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Why does repressiveness occur in democracies with prior experience of authoritarian rule? In the Philippines, why was there a period of intense state repression around 2005 and 2006? This occurred well after democracy could have consolidated, and certainly past an appreciable interval since the Marcos dictatorship was overthrown in 1986.

While it may have seemed that the Philippines was lurching back towards authoritarianism, violent state repression fell off sharply under domestic and international pressure. Moreover, a finer-grained analysis of individual cases of political violence reveals a pattern of locally motivated disputes contributing to repressiveness during this period. Tellingly, scholarship on local politics in the Philippines is concerned with violence as some sort of preferred mode of electoral politics.

This “Wild, Wild East” is dominated by caciques, local bosses, strongmen, and feuding warlords. These studies tend to focus too much on electoral politics however, and not enough on quotidian forms of violence. In contrast to over-emphasis on either the central state or sub-national fragmentation, this study argues that well-aligned central and local factors amplify state repression. A comparison is made among regions such as Davao, Central Luzon and Eastern Visayas where state violence has been high, as well as neighboring regions exhibiting low levels of violence.

Data is drawn from richly detailed casefiles of the country’s Commission on Human Rights, human rights NGOs’ reports and newspaper archives. This study furthermore contextualizes the alarming spate of extrajudicial “anti-crime” killings that have occurred in the wake of the 2016 national and local elections.

Author

• Sol Iglesias, National University of Singapore