Epidemiology of Extrajudicial Killings: Examining Violence During Duterte’s War on Drugs

• In Event: Crime, Violence, and Totalitarian Regimes in Asia

Abstract

This research focuses on documenting extrajudicial killings that have taken place within Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent War on Drugs. The research project uses GIS to map and analyze drug-related extra-judicial killings in the Philippines from May 2016 to the present. The mapping of extra-judicial killings, which locates them at the specific places and times that they occurred, facilitates use of an epidemiological framework to raise questions about the nature of this form of state violence and about the nature of violence in general. The research result suggests that there are many factors that may aid or inhibit the spread of violence.
The research collected a five year (2016-2021) of reported and published data of extrajudicial killings from 60 news websites, and a number of focus group discussion among family members of survivors and individual interview of church and community leaders. Incidence of extrajudicial killings significantly spread throughout Luzon and Visayas regions in the first year (2016) of Duterte’s war on drugs and significantly declined in its 2nd (2017), 3rd (2018) and 4th (2019) year. Despite the decline, the type of victims spread from drug related killings to political killings.

Author

• Chris Magno, Gannon University