Populism and the war on drugs in Southeast Asia

Rodrigo Duterte promised in his campaign for the Philippine presidency that he would dump the corpses of the country's drug dealers and addicts into Manilla Bay and fatten all the fish there. Duterte's anti-drug war may be the most notorious in Southeast Asia, but it is not the only one in recent memory. In the early 2000s, Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister of Thailand, launched a bloody campaign of his own, which claimed just under 3,000 victims in the operation's first three months. Just prior to Duterte's election victory, across the Sulawesi Sea, Indonesian President Joko Widodo began a tactically similar, albeit less intense, anti-drug campaign that has produced over a hundred fatalities so far with many more convicts still on death row. Liberals in Southeast Asia therefore face a challenging paradox. To combat the appeal of populism, they must establish order; in doing so, however, they may undermine the same liberal principles which they argue distinguish them from their populist antagonists.