2024/03/20 by David Lozada, Andrew Rosser · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Philippine History and Culture #Asian Studies and History #Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/14672715.2024.2329070
openalex publication_date 2024/03/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/17
The Duterte administration in the Philippines displayed broad hostility towards civil rights.Yet its approach to specific civil rights issues varied significantly.This paper analyses this variation by focusing on two cases: the lowering of the minimum age of criminal responsibility and extra-judicial killings in the war on drugs.In both cases, Duterte and his allies sought to enact and implement policies that infringed civil rights, yet they only succeeded in the latter.The nature and role of mediating coalitionsconfigurations of actors that opposed, supported, or disengaged from efforts by Duterte and his allies to undermine civil rightswere the key determinants of this variation.The government backed down on lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility because unified rights groups were supported by sections of the oligarchic elite.But it conducted, incited, and persisted with extra-judicial killings in the war on drugs due to fragmentation among rights groups and an absence of significant support for these groups from oligarchic elites.This variation has significant implications for how scholars understand the politics of civil rights in the Philippines, particularly during the Duterte presidency, as well as strategies to better protect civil rights in the country.