Starting originally as policy-oriented research on policing and violence in 2009, the authors’ case study of Bagong Silang in Caloocan City has transitioned into a book on communal violence within the emerging subfield in the study of politics: Interpretive Political Ethnography. Although the authors insist that their book is not about the ‘war on drugs’, the pages clearly reveal the heavy influence of the drive against the drug menace on their thinking and work. As Chapters One, Two, Four, and Seven show, the discussions revolve around the impact of former president Rodrigo Duterte's ‘war on drugs’ in 2016.
Chapter One lays out the authors’ theoretical argument on intimacy, which means ‘intimate knowledge of each other’ (p. 11) of residents in the community in which they lived, as central to its explanation in the book. In the view of the authors, the risk of being dragged into violence, one's ability to avoid or to overcome it should one become embroiled, can be understood in terms of how one navigates the intricate webs of communal relations for survival. Chapter Two frames intimacy in the context of communal, urban and village policing, and illustrates how intimate knowledge shapes violence and also communal relationships, for example by naming residents who are involved in drugs, persons who can be added to the drug watch list, and so on. Knowing who does what, and how it might impact one's status in the community, does have an effect on relations among state officials and village officials, and among residents. Residents with familial links or are known to the village leaders are either less suspected or spared, while those without such links are mostly the ones at risk.
In Chapter Three, the authors’ claim that the drug war resembles the continuing violence of the past, since the Philippine State is ‘no stranger to killing its own people’ (p. 55). While this may be valid, without a comparator to Bagong Silang as a case study, which they have categorically ‘refused to explore’ (p. 23), such a claim has no empirical basis. Their argument that corruption animates the drug war, citing cases of ‘tokhang for ransom’, is unwieldy if not an overstatement. Tokhang for ransom only shows Duterte's lack of control of how policemen use their authority in the drug war. While Filipinos are no strangers to violent killings, framing the drug war simply as a ‘continuity’ or nothing new ignores the fact that there is indeed a distinct type of violence in Duterte's ‘war on drugs’. It differs from other forms of state-sanctioned violence because, apart from violence targeting armed communist rebels and anyone who is sympathetic to the communist cause, no other sitting president actively targets criminals and drug users but Duterte.
In Chapter Four, the authors explore violence in the context of Bagong Silang residents’ experience of years of neglect and as settlers who had been displaced from other places. The years of neglect, displacement and deprivation have rather led them into being framed as easily disposable. Indeed, in the eyes of the State, they are easily disposable, that is, from displacement to exclusion from the State's protection. This vulnerability became more glaring with the onset of the ‘war on drugs’. Once again, police violence has preyed on residents of Bagong Silang, where people lived and thrived despite years of government neglect, depravity and constant resettlement. Communal violence, the authors allude, appears to be pre-determined in urban places akin to Bagong Silang. These are the types of places where state officials, who worked with village leaders on community policing, rely heavily on the latter in deciding who can be targeted and who spared of violence.
Chapters Five and Six, however, do not seem to fit the book's overall theme. Chapter Five's illustrations of the work of former anti-Marcos activists as ‘revolutionary politics’ (p. 101) is doubtful. There is nothing ‘revolutionary’ in transactional politics where former anti-Marcos activists now operate as political brokers between the residents and the politicians, in exchange for status and financial reward. While Chapter Six does talk about subaltern politics, which means the recruitment of ordinary people in the community, the performance of initiation rites, and the politics of community-based fraternity, there was no discussion on communal violence apart from some fraternity members having been killed in the drug war. The chapter's content also contradicts the author's claim early in the book that their case studies are ‘not focused on electoral politics’ (p. 30). Clearly, the recruitment of members to establish a community-based fraternity, where politicians can extract votes, is to build an electoral base to win elections.
Lastly, a number of concepts that are not clearly defined are used. For example, ‘activist politics’ (p. 27), ‘patriarchy on the street’ (p. 30), ‘local state’ (p. 44), and ‘state violence’ (pp. 12, 29, 61, 76), appear but no context is provided as to what these terms mean so that readers could understand why they were used. It may be self-evident to the authors, but this may not be the case for most readers. By not clearly defining terms, for instance ‘state violence’, the authors run the risk of alluding to the various forms of violence arising from the war on drugs as ‘state violence’, which is not the case. The book's theoretical and empirical analysis is remarkable, as is the inclusion of the vast literature on the subject. But it could be hard to read and may not be reader-friendly to those unfamiliar with the authors’ continental European tradition of scholarship, in which the writing tends to be theoretically dense.
