The war on drugs in Southeast Asia as ‘state vigilantism’

Abstract

This paper makes the case that existing typologies of political violence and state killing do not capture the character of extra-judicial killings seen in the Philippines’ ongoing war on drugs, and its forerunner which took place in Thailand in 2003. It will argue that the thousands of murders witnessed in both campaigns represent a distinct form of targeted killing, which is state directed and biopolitical in form, in attempting to discipline vital aspects of human life. It is this disciplinary element which raises questions of vigilantism, which was historically an extra-legal form of social control. As a consequence, the paper responds to the lacuna in current targeted killing literature, which has neglected and as a consequence undertheorized how states utilise apparent vigilante violence for political ends in the context of the war on drugs. Comparing both Rodrigo Duterte and Thaksin Shinawatra's tactics in their respective wars on drugs, it will demonstrate that state vigilantism as a typological category refers to intense periods of extrajudicial killings, where the state seeks to dehumanise a target group while actively orchestrating vigilante style violence against it.