Police Power in the Philippines in the Time of the Pandemic

Abstract

In the essay “Police Power: The Biopolitical State Apparatus and Differential Interpellations,” Banu Bargu developed the notion of the Biopolitical State Apparatus (BSA). This essay deploys Bargu’s notion of the BSA within what it claims is a militarized police power in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Illustrating how the functioning of militarized police power underpins the implementation of public-health policy and the enforcement of laws that complement such power, the essay will further demonstrate through the BSA concept what police power says about the state under the Duterte regime, how this regime relates to the state of exception and posttruth politics, and how its policing operates in contrast to other states.

Key Words:

• Biopolitical State Apparatus (BSA)
• Rodrigo Duterte
• Police
• Pandemic
• State

Notes

1 See “Speeches,” Presidential Communications Operations Office, Republic of the Philippines website, accessed 12 May 2020, https://pcoo.gov.ph/presidential-speech.

2 I decided to expand the word list to twenty as the corpora analyzed is relatively large, with 312,401 total word tokens. The first twenty words are significant in at least giving a coherent and satisfying image of the corpora in question.

3 Here and following, the portions of Duterte’s speeches in brackets have been translated from Filipino.

4 The communist-led rebel group Bagong Hukbong Bayan, or New People’s Army.

5 Merkel’s one publicly available speech contains only 1,782 word tokens, hence the low frequency of mentions. Lee’s one publicly available speech contains only 1,342 word tokens, hence the low frequency of mentions.

6 “Presidential Speeches,” Korea.net, accessed 8 May 2020, http://www.korea.net/Government/Briefing-Room/Presidential-Speeches. For purposes of this research, I have included as COVID-related speeches those whose titles explicitly mentioned as much. There may be speeches I have not included in which Moon mentioned the pandemic, but these were speeches intended for rather different purposes. I was able to digitally analyze twelve of Moon’s speeches with a total of 8,812 word tokens.

7 See the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act, Republic Act No. 11469, sec. 1418, h. 6616 (2020). https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/downloads/2020/03mar/20200324-RA-11469-RRD.pdf.

8 The relationship between order and structure is elaborated in Badiou’s (2006, 25) ontology. He explains that “structure is both what obliges us to consider, via retroaction, that presentation is a multiple (inconsistent) and what authorizes us, via anticipation, to compose the terms of the presentation as units of a multiple (consistent).” Badiou continues that “this distribution of obligation and authorization makes the one … into a law.” The one as a structure or as an ordered existence is ontologically tied with the law so that, whenever the former is presupposed, the other is also. A structured existence that presupposes order likewise presupposes a law that counts as one inconsistent element.

9 The term “martial law” appeared twenty-four times in Duterte’s speeches.