Book Review: Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics: Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang

Abstract

Steffen Bo Jensen’s and Karl Hapal’s “Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics” is an excellent in-depth study on the impact of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs on a local community living in barangay Bagong Silang at the northernmost edge of the National Capital Region of the Philippines. The authors focus on three interrelated questions (2): How did the violent campaign become so omnipresent, how will it end and with what consequences, and why did the urban poor areas bore the brunt of the killings? They do this in five empirical chapters for this Barangay that is not only a former resettlement site populated since the late 1970s by urban poor from Manila City, but also the most populous barangay of the Philippines with approximately 260,000 inhabitants. Conscious about this, the authors explicitly “refuse to explore the war or Duterte outside the context of Bagong Silang” (23). Jensen and Hapal argue that understanding how the campaign took hold and was implemented on the local level necessitates an exploration of “how violence and conflict animated communal life before the war, how local politics was carried out, and how the state, notably the police, conducted themselves” (4) in the years before Duterte. They are able to make good on this promise as their first stint of field research dates back to 2009. This allows them to link the pre-Duterte past with the Duterte-present of Bagong Silang. In the empirical chapters they analyse in detail, which aspects of the past became formative for the way the campaign was implemented and how practices of the past were transformed by the way the campaign unfolded in Bagong Silang. In the first chapter Jensen and Hapal unfold their central descriptive and analytical concept: communal intimacy. This is, first, an unavoidable condition of living together in a densely populated area. It also means having extensive knowledge of each other (11) and a specific “style of coping and morality” (18), that enables people to navigate their everyday life under such circumstances. It also forms the backbone of local politics and social control.