When I began my dissertation on political violence in the Philippines, the worst violence in the post-dictatorship period had occurred in from 2005 to 2006, with hundreds of extrajudicial killings aimed mainly (but certainly not exclusively) at leftwing activists. Then in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte was elected president when I was a couple of years into my research and suddenly, my work took on a new significance. His “war on drugs” killed thousands.

My formative years began with the people-powered ouster of the Marcos dictatorship. I remember whispers about family friends who were arrested and tortured. Those hushed fears gave way to jubilant yellow ribbons and laban (fight) signs after Marcos fled in 1986. Democracy was restored but it was even weaker than before. Over the years, I have studied different forms of political killings—during elections, counter-insurgency, and anti-crime campaigns—in the Philippines. I have also written about the effects of Duterte’s drug war violence, particularly how it has caused democratic backsliding (a decline in the quality of democracy without its full collapse) in the Philippines.

Here at CSEAS in Kyoto, I begin a new project that compares anti-crime campaigns in the Philippines with the drug war under former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand and the penembakan misterius (mysterious shootings) in 1980s Indonesia when Suharto was president.

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When the drug war violence in the Philippines started to ramp up, it reminded me of traveling in Bangkok in 2003. Without any prompting, a few people told me what a scourge drug crime was for society and what a great job Thaksin was doing in his fight against the drug yaba. They spoke approvingly of the police killings in Thaksin’s drug war.

Reading Joshua Barker’s earlier work (now part of a book) on Indonesia’s Petrus killings and Seno’s Mysterious Shooter trilogy were also influential.  More recently, after combing through several weeks’ worth of Indonesian dailies, I first encountered the term “petrus” in a report on May 21, 1983. I literally gasped when I saw it. It was very exciting to visually trace how things developed over the months until that point. First, there were disparate stories of very general anti-crime activities of the government. Then, stories began to enter the daily news of campaigns against gali (gangs). Then the metro news began mentioning dead bodies that were bertato, or tattooed. Without living through that time in Indonesia, one would have to have read Barker’s work or have some other means to understand the significance of this. Otherwise, it would be mystifying why authorities finding a corpse with tattoos would merit a news article at all. Here I was struck by the importance of archival research.

Comparing the Thai and Indonesian cases with Duterte’s national “war on drugs” and other anti-crime operations in the Philippines are not at all straightforward. But I have an intuition that making these comparisons, despite the huge differences in the contexts surrounding each case, will improve our understanding of why states sometimes conduct these supposedly valiant crusades.

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I was lucky to have participated in programs for early career researchers shortly after I obtained my doctorate. I think it is crucial for early career researchers to gain professional development training that they may not receive even during their graduate studies. This includes, for example, skills necessary for writing for journal articles, such as how to respond to reviewer feedback and how to conduct a peer review.

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I always recommend that students interested in working on the drug war in the Philippines read Jensen and Hapal’s Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics: Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines. It is an excellent ethnography of Caloocan City, a so-called hot spot in the drug war, by authors who carried out both ethnographic and human rights advocacy work there for more than a decade. Their book explains how people in the barangay were able to navigate state violence before the drug war and shows how their tactics of survival failed once the national campaign changed the rules of the game. This book—quite the opposite of my research on national patterns in the violence—uncovers so well what we often miss in violence studies. While we are well equipped to explain how, where, when, and why people are harmed, this book instead tells us how people can also escape violence and thwart the state. This perspective is critical for students who are often just about to start their fieldwork.

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Ideally, a researcher is free: able to pursue the questions they are interested in and, crucially, able to endure the writing process. Writing is hard for many of us, sometimes gut-wrenchingly so. The pleasure of writing comes with that “Eureka!” moment when you untangle a particularly gnarled knot in your mind. But the rest is pain. What makes a writer write—what we live for—is the completion of our work. After the grueling long weeks, months—even years—the sudden lifting of the constant weight of an unfinished work is bliss.

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I would like to finish my first book (on political violence in the Philippines), so that I can shift my focus and work on my next book on anti-crime campaigns in Southeast Asia. I am in no rush for the second book and would like to savor the research process over many years to come, with fieldwork in Indonesia and Thailand. I would love to continue working as I have here in Kyoto, in between a few years of teaching in my home institution, to be somewhere else for a semester either for fieldwork or to write. But ultimately, what I love most about being a scholar is teaching. In the Philippines, I aim to make a difference in our nation’s life by making a difference in my students’ lives. Finally, I intend to continue my activism in defense of academic freedom and in support of the peace process.

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CSEAS is a premier institute for Southeast Asian studies in the world. I have worked closely with CSEAS colleagues, on the organizing committee of the Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies in Asia (SEASIA) conference and in organizing the 2023 online conference Martial Law and the Marcos Restoration. When I saw the call for applications for the fellowship, I jumped at the chance. I had already begun slowly working on my Anti-Crime Campaigns in Southeast Asia project; this fellowship gives me the time and space to make critical advances in theorization and organizing the materials I have so far. I am also using the time to conclude or at least advance a number of ongoing projects, including my first monograph How a Weak State Governs on political violence in the Philippines. Moreover, I greatly appreciate that CSEAS is a refuge for academics at risk in their own countries. As such, I hope to deepen ties between CSEAS and the Southeast Asia Coalition for Academic Freedom, of which I am a board member.

 (February 2025)