Ithaca and London: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2022. xviii, 191 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper; US$17.00, ebook. ISBN 9781501762772.
When Rodrigo Duterte rose to power in the Philippine presidential election of 2016, he rose using the brazen spectre of violence. Duterte unashamedly adopted a campaign, which would later become national policy, centred around what he labelled the “drug menace” and his record on the provincial level as mayor of Davao City to combat the menace with violence—unapologetic, righteous, brazen violence that would reach far beyond Davao and the presidential palace and consume a nation for his tenure as president. Furthermore, the genie will not go back in the bottle now, even if his successor President Marcos Jr. would wish for that. President Marcos Jr. is beholden to the Duterte clan with Sara Duterte, Rodrigo’s daughter, elected as his vice president. Duterte’s war on drugs will not go away even if its iconic mouthpiece has, and the new president would rather ignore it. The victims, estimated at beyond 20,000, and their families, continue to suffer the indignity of no prospects for accountability or justice. The reflections of this violence across the Philippines reach deep into its institutions and psyche. It is hard to talk about the “impact” and “legacy” of this time when the killing and suffering continue.
And so, it’s of great importance to the contemporary study of the Philippines that Steffen Bo Jensen and Karl Hapal’s book engages with these issues, and it does so admirably. This is a complex topic that touches on many facets of the Philippine social, political, economic, and cultural body. The clever approach adopted here is to examine the violence in microcosm, through a lens that tries not to flounder in any vain attempt to examine a complex nation divided geographically (politically and physically), ethnically, religiously, and politically. These divisions were only deepened by Duterte’s violence. Communal Intimacy instead examines the barangay of Bagong Silang, a dense maze of narrow concrete alleys home to 260,000 people at the northern outer edges of a sprawling metropolitan Manila. It is a useful community to examine, embroiled in the urban sprawl on the edges of the nation’s aspirations. The book uses the community of Bagong Silang to ask three questions: How did the violent campaign become so omnipresent? How will the drug war end and with what consequences? And why exactly was it that poor, urban areas in Manila like Bagong Silang included so many of the numbers of dead?
The book then attempts to engage more deeply with the issues of violence in the community, beyond Duterte’s branded drug war. After all, the extrajudicial violence that became the hallmark of the drug wars existed long before Duterte began his presidential campaign, and continues today. Instead, the authors ask: “What happens to a place and its people during extraordinary times?” (2). To do this, they attempt “a serious examination of the intricate webs of relationships, forms of violence, and exchange relations both animated by and animating the war on drugs” (3). By partnering with the Balay Rehabilitation Center, a community-led project in Bagong Silang, Jensen and Hapal have achieved a remarkable ethnography. By “refusing to explore the war [on drugs] or Duterte outside the context of Bagong Silang” (23) the book focuses the reader to wrestle with the true intimacies of violent power exchanges in locale, without abstraction and narrative.
Chapters 2 and 3 rightly call attention to the police and their complex and troubling role for many in the community. I could certainly read more on this area. Having a close empirical account of this is rare and the book proves that such research is possible to serve this fundamental area of domestic political violence in the Philippines. The sociology of the police in the community presented here proves the inherent corrupting nature of local politics in the Philippines and their role within the security state. We need more accounts like this, especially in relation to election politics and the resulting election violence. The two pages dedicated to this (39–41) felt like a prelude to much more.
Instead the book moves on to morality, which may be of interest to scholars and researchers of the morality of violence. Chapter 5 focuses on the role of community activists and their struggles are well detailed. Sections on the language of the drug war and the “entanglements” of the politicians, activists and police across the community stand out. In chapter 6 the authors use the student fraternity group Tau Gamma Phi as a means of exploring the layers and overlaps of the various activist groups and their history with the rebel movements of the Philippines.
Although a brief account of a complex community over a long period, the book is an excellent marker for those looking both to complete community-based research into political violence at the street level in the Philippines. The story told is painfully vivid and while the authors hope that the book contributes to global discussions, and I am sure it will, it deserves to become a fixture of Philippine studies.
Tom Smith
University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth
Royal Air Force College Cranwell, Cranwell Village