Title: Local Anti-Crime Campaigns in Southeast Asia
Overview: Why did states conduct anti-crime campaigns in Southeast Asia? I study the national and local actors that carried out the violence; similarities in their conduct of these campaigns; and, public response. Anti-crime campaigns produce high levels of violence, with thousands of extrajudicial killings over a short span of time. There were thousands killed in anti-crime campaigns in Indonesia (1983 to 1985), Thailand (2003), and the Philippines (2016 to 2019). Routine police brutality only partly explains why state security forces have entrenched values and practices that facilitate extralegal violence. Crucially, however, this does not explain sharp escalations through focused campaigns. What is puzzling is that such illiberal practices occur in democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. Using archival news and other sources, this study seeks to launch a novel inquiry into these Southeast Asian cases of routine state violence that can escalate into popular, anti-crime campaigns of egregious state violence.
Bio: Sol Iglesias is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines and visiting research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. She is a co-convener of the Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences, an Editorial Advisory Board member of New Mandala of the Australian National University, and is on the Steering Committee of the Southeast Asian Coalition for Academic Freedom. She was a Mellon/Scholars-at-Risk Academic Freedom Fellow (2023–2024). She was the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence of the Justice in Southeast Asia Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023. She was selected as a Southeast Asia Research Group Fellow in 2017. The American Political Science Association selected her for its Asia Program fellowship (2021) and as an emerging democracy and autocracy scholar (2020). She has a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies, M.A. in Political Science (National University of Singapore), M.A. in International Affairs (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University) and a B.A. in Public Administration (University of the Philippines).
