Status : Verified
| Personal Name | Hapal, Karl Arvin F. |
|---|---|
| Resource Title | MAKING SENSE OF THE WAR ON DRUGS: A critical analysis of Rodrigo Duterte’s discourse on drugs and the legitimation of violence, 2016-2022 |
| Date Issued | May 2026 |
| Abstract | In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte launched his war on drugs immediately after assuming the presidency. By the time he was done, about 30,000 individuals had been killed according to independent documentation efforts done by various human rights organizations in the Philippines. Apart from the killings, what made the war on drugs remarkable was the amount of support it received from the public. What just happened? How did mass killing become morally acceptable— even virtuous — in a democratic society? Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and examining 1,155 presidential speeches, the study unpacks how Duterte justified the campaign and normalized state violence at a devastating scale. The study shows that Duterte's discursive strategies — nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, and intensification and mitigation — cohered into a durable ideology organized around a Manichean world of virtuous victims and condemned enemies. Illegal drugs were framed as an existential national threat; Duterte, as the indispensable sovereign capable of resolving it. This ideology, the study argues, is not Duterte's invention. It is rooted in coloniality — specifically, the ontological division between the "salvaged" and the "condemned" inherited from colonial governance and reactivated through his rhetoric. Within this colonial ontology, the drug user was produced as the modern homo sacer: a figure stripped of juridical protection and rendered killable without legal consequence. The elimination of the homo sacer, however, required a sovereign of extraordinary configuration. This study proposes the concept of homo superanus to describe Duterte's unique exercise of power: a figure who does not merely decide the exception but becomes the living embodiment of sovereignty itself — moving fluidly between legal authority, charismatic mandate, traditional paternal power, and divine purpose as circumstances demand. |
| Degree Course | Doctor of Social Development |
| Language | English |
| Keyword | Necropolitics; war on drugs |
| Material Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
Preliminary Pages
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Category : F - Regular work, i.e., it has no patentable invention or creation, the author does not wish for personal publication, there is no confidential information.
Access Permission : Open Access