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A Murderous Plague: State Hypermasculinity,
-19, and Atrocity Prevention in the
Philippines
Maria Tanyag | : ---
Senior Lecturer, Department of International Relations,
Coral Bell School of Asia Pacic Afairs, Australian National University,
Canberra, Australia
maria.tanyag@anu.edu.au
Abstract
When and why do state responses to crises such as the -19 pandemic embody
hypermasculinity? How does state hypermasculinity contribute to mortality during
a pandemic? This article examines state hypermasculinity as a main atrocity risk
factor and as a root cause of preventable deaths arising from failures in pandemic
response. It focuses on the case of the Philippines under the leadership of President
Rodrigo Duterte to build on feminist scholarship examining gender, crises, and the
rise of ‘strongman’ leaders globally. It argues that a state’s predisposition for violence
and atrocity crimes renders disease outbreaks more deadly. Signicant loss of life and
livelihoods during the pandemic are logical outcomes of state structures and responses
that combine militarised security, paternalism, and domination of feminised ‘others’.
Crucially, the implications of state hypermasculinity extend beyond pandemics as it is
clearly emerging as a vector for compounded human insecurities at a time of multiple
and overlapping crises.
Keywords
gender – hypermasculinity – Philippines – drug war – -19 – global health
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the 4.0 license.
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But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war,
one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead
man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred
million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puf of
smoke in the imagination … what man knows ten thousand faces?
1 Introduction
On 20 January 2020, the rst case of -19 was conrmed in the
Philippines. By March 2021, there were an estimated 800,000 conrmed cases,
14,000 deaths and a surge of approximately 10,000 new cases in one day.
During this period, there were approximately 122 million conrmed -19
cases and 2.6 million deaths worldwide. Two years into this pandemic, there
are now approximately 6 million lives lost. These gures are being driven by
‘worst-case scenario’ countries such as the Philippines where there have been
neither signicant decline in cases nor improvements in crisis management
and strategy. Albert Camus in The Plague wrote about the profound mental
and emotional challenges of comprehending and responding to mass loss of
life. If as the above epigraph points out, deaths by the millions render them
incrementally abstract, how then do we hold into account those who have
the responsibility to protect lives and prevent these deaths? This task is even
more onerous because when -19 became a global pandemic in 2020, the
1 Albert Camus, The Plague (London: Penguin, 1947), Part 1, Chapter 5.
2 This research received support from the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect,
University of Queensland. I thank Noel Morada and Mely Caballero-Anthony for feedback
on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive
engagement with the article. Writing during the pandemic and specifically on painful
realities happening ‘back home’ was difficult and yet made possible through the friendship
of Ruji Auethavornpipat and Earvin Cabalquinto.
3 World Health Organization (), ‘Coronavirus Disease (-19) Situation Report 1,
Philippines’, 9 March 2020, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/wpro---documents/
countries/philippines/emergencies/covid-19/who-phl-sitrep-1-covid-19-9mar2020
.pdf?sfvrsn=2553985a_2, 19 March 2022.
4 , ‘ Coronavirus (-19) Dashboard: Philippines’, https://covid19.who.int/
region/wpro/country/ph, accessed 16 February 2022.
5 , ‘ Coronavirus (-19) Dashboard: Overview’, https://covid19.who.int/,
accessed 28 April 2021.
6 ibid., accessed 19 March 2022.
7 Out of 53 countries, the Philippines was ranked ‘the worst place to be’ in during the -
19 pandemic by Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking. Scores are based on vaccination
rate, lockdown severity, and degree of safe reopening to international travel. For further
details, see https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-resilience-ranking/, accessed 19
March 2022.
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world was already in turmoil. Prior to the outbreak, there were 82.4 million
people forcibly displaced as a result of ‘persecution, conict, violence, human
rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order’. This period
corresponded with major political upheavals and transitions as the Black
Lives Matter protests erupted in the United States and pro-Trump supporters
stormed Capitol Hill contesting the outcome of the US presidential election.
In Thailand and Myanmar, pro-democracy and youth-led protests challenged
outdated styles and systems of militarised authority. Their peaceful resistance
characterised by three-nger salutes were met by arrests and, in some cases,
deaths. Existing international human rights and protection mechanisms are
being tested at a time when multiple insecurities are converging so clearly for
the most marginalised.
Questions of global accountability and responsibility for the outcomes
of pandemic responses are set against representations of -19 as an
‘unprecedented’ global crisis. The level of state emergency measures deployed
in response to the pandemic – from travel bans to lockdowns – overwhelm-
ingly substantiate how -19 presented unique and complex challenges
to global and national governance. Indeed, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
Director-General for the World Health Organization (), in his speech o-
cially declaring -19 a pandemic alluded to this uniqueness: ‘We have
never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus’. He added that, ‘to
do the right things with calm and protect the citizens of the world. It’s doa-
ble’. However, within months of the pandemic there were concerning devel-
opments reported all over the world on possible excesses of state power and
human rights violations especially by military and police in the context of
the pandemic response. In many parts of the world, representations of the
-19 pandemic as ‘exceptional’ or ‘extraordinary’ licensed state repres-
sion and aforded a narrative to absolve state responsibility to prevent loss
of life. Various human rights groups, experts, and the UN Oce of the High
8 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (), ‘Figures at a Glance’, https://
www.unhcr.org/en-au/figures-at-a-glance.html, accessed 19 March 2022.
9 , ‘ Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on -19
– 11 March 2020’ (emphasis added), https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/
detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-
march-2020, accessed 19 March 2022.
10 See Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2020/21: The State of the World’s
Human Rights, 6 April 2021, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/
POL1032022021ENGLISH.PDF, accessed 19 March 2022; and Human Rights Watch, ‘-
19 Triggers Wave of Free Speech Abuse’, https://features.hrw.org/features/features/covid/
index.html, accessed 19 March 2022.
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Commissioner on Human Rights () issued a call that state emergency
powers to curb the virus must remain guided by human rights principles and
must not be used to stie dissent.
This article seeks to provide an alternative feminist analysis that makes
clear how death and sufering do not constitute ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ collat-
eral damage to the global crisis posed by -19. Rather, it underscores that
violence arising out of any crisis reects the gendered ways in which power
and resources are (re)distributed in a given society, and globally. It asks, when
and why do state responses to crises such as the -19 pandemic embody
hypermasculinity? How does state hypermasculinity contribute to mortality
during a pandemic? Building on feminist perspectives, I examine the inter-
sections of pandemic response and mass atrocity prevention through the
logics of state hypermasculinity. Feminist scholars have been at the forefront
of critically interrogating the gendered dynamics to the pandemic, and what
these dynamics mean for mitigating various immediate and long-term harms.
Gendered diferences in pandemic leadership and crisis response were stark.
Since 2016 when President Rodrigo Duterte rose to power, he joined ranks of
other ‘strongman’ rulers in Southeast Asia such as Hun Sen, Prayut Chan-o-
cha, and the eventual return to politics of Mahathir Mohamad. Globally, he
was part of a long list of men dened by a shared anti-feminist and anti-dem-
ocratic ideology: Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Xi Jinping, Narendra
Modi, Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. These leaders, even
prior to the pandemic, displayed what Cohn has cautioned us of the ‘perils’
of masculinity. She points out how the practice of national security is perva-
sively shaped by ideas associating toughness and risk-taking with masculinity,
and femininity with fear, caution, and vulnerability. Consequently, the need
of male leaders like Trump to convince the world of how manly they are can
imperil us all, especially when the stakes are very high such as with the -
19 global crisis.
Studies have examined how populist and Far Right leaders employ gen-
dered discourses in their crisis management and response to the -19
11 , ‘Emergency Measures and -19: Guidance’, https://www.ohchr.org/
Documents/Events/EmergencyMeasures_Covid19.pdf, accessed 19 March 2022; ,
‘-19: States Should Not Abuse Emergency Measures to Suppress Human Rights –
UN Experts’, 16 March 2020, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews
.aspx?NewsID=25722, accessed 19 March 2022.
12 Carol Cohn, ‘The Perils of Mixing Masculinity and Missiles’, The New York Times, 5 January
2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/security-masculinity-nuclear-
weapons.html, accessed 19 March 2022. See also Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the
Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs, 12(4) 687–718 (1987).
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pandemic. This rapidly growing research area is demonstrating how ‘hyper-
masculine’ political leadership styles expected in times of crises were typically
projected by contemporary male world leaders. Hypermasculine leadership
by the likes of Trump, Putin, and Johnson is linked with failure to take the pan-
demic seriously which, in turn, contributed to the lack of timely and decisive
responses that could have helped save lives. Here hypermasculinity is dened
as the exaggerated embodiment of traits or qualities symbolising masculine
aggression, control, and dominance which may be context specic. It consti-
tutes a ‘“scenario of power” – evidenced in symbolism, rituals, texts, and doc-
trines – on the implementation and efectiveness of new and existing rules to
combat -19’. By paying attention to gender in state responses to -
19, feminist scholarship is demonstrating how contextualised discourses and
symbols of masculinities are pivotal in shaping national and global security
because they translate to policy choices and outcomes. However, what has
been relatively unexamined in these discussions, and what the case of the
Philippine state under Duterte clearly shows, is that these discourses and sym-
bolic representations of power are also connected with the structure or mate-
riality of hypermasculinity.
Direct and indirect impacts of -19 were far deadlier in an environ-
ment where there were pre-existing atrocity risk factors. This is exemplied
by the administration of Duterte whereby the self-ascribed ‘strongman’ leader
of the Philippines authored a national pandemic response that has resulted
in one of the most lethal and long-sufering of -19 responses within the
Asia-Pacic region, and globally. A murderous plague ensued such that -
19 related deaths and sufering were exacerbated by an ill-prepared govern-
ment on the one hand and, on the other, by ongoing heinous killings arising
from Duterte’s relentless ‘war on drugs’ which predated the pandemic. The
case of the Philippines illustrates how -19 deaths are intersecting with
state-sanctioned violence against the most vulnerable populations, notably
13 Anna Kuteleva and Sarah J. Clifford, ‘Gendered Securitisation: Trump’s and Putin’s
Discursive Politics of the -19 Pandemic’, European Journal of International Security
(online), (2021), doi:10.1017/eis.2021.5; Christine Agius, Annika Bergman Rosamond,
and Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Gendered Nationalism:
Masculinity, Climate Denial and Covid-19’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 21(4) 432–450
(2020).
14 Carol Johnson and Blair Williams, ‘Gender and Political Leadership in a Time of ’,
Politics & Gender 16, 943–950 (2020); Georgina Waylen, ‘Gendering Political Leadership:
Hypermasculine Leadership and Covid-19’, Journal of European Public Policy, 28(8) 1153–
1173 (2021).
15 Waylen, ‘Gendering Political Leadership’, p. 1161.
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the urban poor, human rights defenders, and indigenous peoples. It shows how
the pandemic, as a form of crisis, served as an opportunity to intensify state
repression.
In theorising hypermasculinity as logic, I seek to bridge feminist analysis of
individual leadership styles with structural and symbolic risk factors that con-
tribute to a state’s predisposition for violence and atrocity crimes. Signicant
loss of life and livelihoods during the pandemic are logical outcomes of state
hypermasculinity which combines militarised security, paternalist authority,
and the domination of feminised ‘others’. My analysis therefore emphasises
how state hypermasculinity is neither embodied simply by the gendered pro-
jections of power by state leaders, nor is it reducible to a leader’s speeches,
however violent and misogynistic they are. What makes hypermasculinity
particularly lethal is how all these combine with the unchecked mobilisation
of state institutions for coercion and violence. Crucially, we must increasingly
pay equal attention to how hypermasculinity results not only in gender-difer-
entiated pandemic outcomes but also in totality, for the role it plays in deter-
mining the terms of life and death globally. There is a structural pattern to
hypermasculinity which afects the distribution of state protection and pun-
ishment before, during, and after crises.
I develop my argument in three main parts. First, I provide a brief concep-
tual overview on state hypermasculinity as an organising logic to atrocity risk
factors by synthesising diferent critical feminist perspectives on peace and
security. I situate state hypermasculinity in the Philippines within the broader
political crisis posed by the resurgence of authoritarianism and rise of the
Global Right. Second, I then examine state hypermasculinity in the Philippines
as embodied by President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs to demonstrate how
a society was gradually but systematically primed for violence and its people
rendered immune to mass loss of life. Third, I show how compounded deaths
and violence in the ongoing health crisis in the Philippines are structurally
and symbolically connected to the failures of a hypermasculinised pandemic
response. The warning signs for which had already been in plain sight prior to
the pandemic.
2 State Hypermasculinity as a Core Atrocity Risk Factor
Central to feminist international relations theorising is that all states are gen-
dered – from the ideologies they harness and reproduce, to the material realities
16 Agius et al., ‘Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Gendered Nationalism’.
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they enable. States are gendered in that they sustain, and are sustained by,
discursive and structural processes. As Kantola argues, understanding the
state as a discursive and structural efect underscores how power operates and
not just who has power. Hypermasculinity epitomises why gender is funda-
mental to how crises are constructed materially and ideologically by the state.
As a ‘reactionary stance’, it ‘arises when agents of hegemonic masculinity feel
threatened or undermined, thereby needing to inate, exaggerate, or other-
wise distort their traditional masculinity’. Hypermasculinity is distinct from
hegemonic masculinity in terms of the exaggerated performance or excesses
in asserting male identity or masculine attributes. Connell denes hegemonic
masculinity as ‘a dominant form of masculinity that embodies, organizes,
and legitimates men’s domination in the world gender order as a whole’.
Hegemonic masculinity therefore constitutes endemic relations of domination
and subordination that operate between and among men and women. While
masculinities and femininities are uid, constructed, and contested, specic
variants gain purchase at particular contexts and historical junctures. For
instance, feminist scholars have examined hyper- and hegemonic masculinity
in relation to wars and militarised security, and in the context of economic
transformations. It is argued that hypermasculinity functions to consolidate
17 See for example, Swati Parashar, J. Ann Tickner, and Jacqui True (eds.), Revisiting Gendered
States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jane L. Parpart and Marysia Zalewski (eds.),
Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations (London;
New York: Zed Books, 2008); Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International
Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); V. Spike
Peterson, Gendered States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992).
18 Johanna Kantola, ‘The Gendered Reproduction of the State in International Relations’,
British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9, 270–283 (2007).
19 ibid.
20 Anna Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, ‘Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of
Violence and Desire from September 11’, International Studies Quarterly, 48(3) 517–538
(2004), p. 519.
21 Raewyn W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 46; Juanita
Elias and Christine Beasley, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity and Globalization: “Transnational
Business Masculinities” and Beyond’, Globalizations, 6(2) 281–296 (2009).
22 Shweta Singh and Élise Féron, ‘Towards an Intersectional Approach to Populism:
Comparative Perspectives from Finland and India’, Contemporary Politics (online), (2021),
p. 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2021.1917164.
23 Agathangelou and Ling, ‘Power, Borders, Security, Wealth’; Jennifer Heeg Maruska, ‘When
Are States Hypermasculine?’ in Laura Sjoberg (ed.), Gender and International Security:
Feminist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 235–255; Parpart and Zalewski,
Rethinking the Man Question.
24 Jongwoo Han and L. H. M. Ling, ‘Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State:
Hybridity, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Korea’, International Studies Quarterly, 42(1) 53–78
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political authority, especially in strengthening state control in the face of cri-
sis. As a reactionary stance, this is embodied by the state and its key agents in
order to ensure the adaptability and durability of patriarchal structures amid
internal or external threats.
With the growing interest to understand the role hypermasculinity plays in
the context of the -19 pandemic response and crisis management more
broadly, it is vital that we do not miss out the material or structural conditions
through which the state and its gendered construction of crises are made real
in peoples’ everyday lives. Here I dene state hypermasculinity as an organis-
ing logic to sets of gendered symbols, narratives, and assumptions that under-
pin or legitimate particular material relations of power. State hypermasculinity
encompasses not just leadership styles but also structural and symbolic func-
tions of the state. In the words of Agathangelou and Ling, ‘[w]e must scru-
tinize structures of privilege that protect certain denitions of “leadership,”
“patriotism,” and “devotion” … “Who benets from, and who pays for, the sac-
rices required by all this militarizing and globalizing?”’ The concept of state
hypermasculinity I employ builds on this expansive denition to reveal the
interlinked ways through which global politics is ‘overwhelming populated by
men and dominated by masculine aspirations’. Moreover, that the state is
not simply a unied entity but rather a ‘diferentiated set of institutions, agen-
cies and discourses’ operating through particular gendered logics of power.
Hypermasculinity includes how the state allocates resources and responsibili-
ties in society during ‘peace time’, how ‘crises’ are interpreted and framed, and
consequently, the range of expertise and courses of action deemed relevant.
There are three main indicators of state hypermasculinity.
a. Hypermasculinity as militarised security: This constitutes a rhetorical
and material posturing towards violence, retribution and aggression
against the enemy or ‘other’. This type of aggression is militarised
or with recourse to harnessing the excessive use of force through
state armed forces including the police. We see this for example in
(1998); Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender
Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Elias and Beasley, ‘Hegemonic
Masculinity and Globalization’.
25 See also Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997); Cynthia Enloe,
Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2013).
26 Agathangelou and Ling, ‘Power, Borders, Security, Wealth’, p. 134.
27 Parpart and Zalewski, Rethinking the Man Question.
28 Kantola, ‘The Gendered Reproduction of the State in International Relations’, p. 278.
29 Agathangelou and Ling, ‘Power, Borders, Security, Wealth’; Maruska, ‘When Are States
Hypermasculine?’.
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the legitimation of the excessive use of military and security forces
or the allocating of resources thereat in response to crisis. In crisis
settings, hypermasculinity as the hyper-focus on militarising crisis
response precludes human-centric and holistic approaches to secu-
rity. Consequently, such leadership actions are coded as the template
for ‘good’ or ‘strong’ crisis leadership.
b. Hypermasculinity as paternalism: The projection of benevolent pater-
nalism is evident particularly when male political leaders regard their
authority as the ‘father of the nation’ who knows and pursues what is
best for the country. This is also reected by narratives and imageries
of the paternal protector in justifying humanitarian interventions.
Emboldened by pre-existing gendered cultural norms around lial
piety, paternalism equates to an authoritarian form of governance
whereby institutional spaces for deliberation around public interests
and goals are constrained. The state as father can legitimately punish
those who disobey him and enforce discipline to maintain order. In
turn, society is expected to embody the maternal attributes of ‘dili-
gence, discipline and deference’. This means to efectively bear the
burden of development or crisis recovery without participating in
decision-making.
c. Hypermasculinity and the domination of feminised others: Projecting
a macho image is integral for legitimating domestic political author-
ity, especially in the face of external security threats. The state is
the embodiment of male aggression, invincibility, and sexual viril-
ity writ large such that prowess in the private sphere of intimate
relations is interpreted to extend to the public sphere of the state.
Hypermasculinity occurs in tandem with the denigration of women,
sexual minorities, and all those perceived to threaten or oppose the
state. It therefore naturalises sexual and gender-based violence and
demonstrates ways of weaponising cultures of sexism and misog-
yny. In state hypermasculinity, gendered violence and harms are
30 Fiona Robinson, ‘Humanitarian Intervention and Global Security Governance’ in The
Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2011), pp. 85–102; Anne Orford, ‘Muscular Humanitarianism: Reading the Narratives
of the New Interventionism’, European Journal of International Law, 10(4) 679–711 (1999).
31 Han and Ling, ‘Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State’.
32 Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation; Karen Kampwirth, Gender and Populism in Latin
America: Passionate Politics (Pennsylvania: Penn StateUniversity Press, 2010); Cas Mudde
and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, ‘Vox Populi or Vox Masculini? Populism and Gender in
Northern Europe and South America’, Patterns of Prejudice, 49(1–2) 16–36 (2015).
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not ‘unintended consequences’ but rather logical outcomes of crisis
response.
These indicators interrelate and provide starting points for examining the
gendered linkages between atrocity risk factors, state identity and institutions,
and leadership in crisis responses.
In this article, I situate the signicance of theorising state hypermasculin-
ity for its contribution to broadening our existing knowledge on atrocity pre-
vention and why gender matters to global security agendas such as the global
responsibility to protect (R2P). For example, feminist perspectives have iden-
tied the importance of taking seriously widespread sexual and gender-based
violence as early warning signs for other forms of atrocities; as well as the
gendered nature of atrocity risk factors more broadly. Thus far, the specic
import of state hypermasculinity to the study of crises and mass atrocities
remains underexamined. Yet through it, as feminist research suggests, we are
able to interpret how atrocities emerge or intensify based on the gendered log-
ics of state responses to crises. Framing state hypermasculinity as an atrocity
risk factor helps disrupt the notion that hypermasculinity as a phenomenon
is exclusive or limited to crisis settings to show that it increasingly extends to
the ‘everyday’ and can therefore be prevented. This is more relevant given
the context of increasingly routine and multiple crises at national and global
levels.
Scholarship on contemporary populism, the Far Right, and authoritarianism
suggest that their resurgence is not coincidental. Causal explanations situate
their shared origins in systemic political crises resulting from uneven devel-
opment, the sharpening of inequalities, and wider societal contradictions as
peoples are displaced and depleted by neo-liberal global economic policies.
33 Sara Davies, Zim Nwokora, Eli Stamnes, and Sara Teitt (eds.), Responsibility to Protect and
Women, Peace and Security: Aligning the Protection Agendas (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers, 2013); Sara E. Davies and Eli Stamnes, ‘GR2P Special Issue: The Responsibility
to Protect and Sexual and Gender Based Violence ()’, Global Responsibility to
Protect, 4(2) 127–132 (2012); Robinson, ‘Humanitarian Intervention and Global Security
Governance’.
34 On the point of how hypermasculinity was ‘unremarkable’ in the case of Vladimir
Putin see for example, Elizabeth A. Wood, ‘Hypermasculinity as a Scenario of Power’,
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18(3) 329–350 (2016); and Maruska’s analysis of
US foreign policy and popular culture in ‘When Are States Hypermasculine?’.
35 Vedi Hadiz and Angelos Chryssogelos, ‘Populism in World Politics: A Comparative Cross-
regional Perspective’, International Political Science Review, 38(4) 399–411 (2017); Priya
Chacko and Kanishka Jayasuriya, ‘Asia’s Conservative Moment: Understanding the Rise
of the Right’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 48(4) 529–540 (2018); Mereoni Chung, ‘Panel
Discussion: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy and Implications for Social Mobilization’,
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Hadiz and Chryssogelos argue that contemporary populism is ‘a distinctive
reaction to the social dislocations of globalisation, which can be expressed
in a dizzying variety of ways depending on the local, regional and historical
context’ and that ‘we see commonalities between populist reactions that have
emerged in the more advanced as well as less economically developed parts of
the world’. Drawing on feminist perspectives, what brings together variants
of strongman leaders across diferent political regimes in the major regions of
the world is that they all embody how the state and the authority that derives
from it are shaped by gender relations. Hypermasculine backlash is a global
phenomenon precisely because varied crises are threatening not only elite or
dominant men but also the international order and its role in organising and
reproducing life. We are actually experiencing an intensication of the conse-
quences of pre-existing patriarchal structures and violent masculinities.
Projections of ‘hard’ or ‘strong’ rule as well as intolerance of dissent and
opposition are intensifying and increasingly de rigueur at a time when global
processes are shaped by ever deepening insecurities posed by the rise of violent
extremism and religious fundamentalism, climate change, economic reces-
sion, protracted conicts, and now the pandemic. That is, in times of crises,
‘[ma]sculinised imageries allow national leaders to present security as a result
of their rule, making that rule legitimate’. Hypermasculinity, however, invari-
ably leads to perpetual cycles of competition and conict. Hypermasculinity
by one state triggers similar reactionary responses from other states and from
within societies. The structural efects of which include the resourcing of war
eforts and militaries at the expense of sustainable development and long-
term peace. In crisis settings, state hypermasculinity can be more intensely
fraught with contradiction and contestations because it is inevitably impotent
to address complex and multiple dimensions of insecurities. For instance,
security viewed through the lens of militarism produces particular beliefs and
, 14 March 2017, https://dawnnet.org/publication/panel-discussion-the-rise-of-
illiberal-democracy-and-implications-for-social-mobilization/, accessed 19 March 2022.
36 Hadiz and Chryssogelos, ‘Populism in World Politics’, p. 400.
37 Agnieszka Graff, Ratna Kapur, and Suzanna Danuta Walters, ‘Introduction: Gender and the
Rise of the Global Right’, Signs, 44(3) 541–560 (2019); Caroline Sweetman, ‘Introduction:
Gender, Development and Fundamentalisms’, Gender and Development, 25(1) 1–14 (2017);
Katrine Fangen and Inger Skjelsbæk, ‘Editorial: Special Issue on Gender and the Far Right’,
Politics, Religion & Ideology, 21(4) 411–415 (2020).
38 Kuteleva and Clifford, ‘Gendered Securitisation’, p. 3.
39 L. H. M. Ling, ‘Borderlands: A Postcolonial-Feminist Alternative to Neoliberal Self/Other
Relations’, Graduate Program in International Affairs Working Paper No. 2008–03, 2008,
https://css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/publications/publication.html/55107,
accessed 19 March 2022.
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institutions that attribute ‘expertise’ with the military. What are considered
inferior or secondary are civic spaces and the international community where
alternative crisis solutions may emerge from and are validated. Paradoxically,
failures in crisis management are being harnessed by populist and Far Right
leaders as justication for doubling down on militarisation and limiting dis-
sent. According to Chacko and Jayasuriya,
It is the tendency towards the sharpening of crisis and the inability to
manage these crises – the crisis of crisis management – that exemplify
the failure of neo-liberal political projects. These failures have led to au-
thoritarian tendencies in governance that are often legitimised through
appeals to populism and nationalism.
Duterte represents a particularly deadly variant of hypermasculinity compared
to other leaders like Trump who are situated in contexts where democratic
institutions and particularly civil society can prevent or to some degree lessen
abuses of state power. State hypermasculinity in the Philippines emerges out
of the relationship between individual ‘strongman’ leadership styles and the
‘normalised’ repertoires of state violence and repression at their disposal. For
example, McCoy’s analysis of Duterte situates him as a member of a ‘contem-
porary generation of global populists’ with the likes of Trump and Putin, and
as part of a ‘long lineage of “strongmen”’ within the Philippines. For a coun-
try long besieged by protracted conicts, severe disasters, poverty, and chronic
corruption, ‘strongman’ leaders appeal to a popular and historical desire for
order. According to McCoy, ‘successful Filipino strongmen … ofered a promise
of order, projecting an aura of personal power that appealed to their country’s
impoverished masses’. Importantly, the dening feature of Filipino popu-
list or strongmen leaders is the combining of the ‘high politics of great-power
diplomacy and the low politics of performative violence, with corpses writ-
ten upon and read as texts’. Duterte, like his predecessors, has been able to
monopolise, wield, and sanction the use of political violence especially at local
and provincial levels. Like his Asian counterparts, Duterte distinctly resorts
40 Chacko and Jayasuriya, ‘Asia’s Conservative Moment’.
41 ibid.
42 Alfred McCoy, ‘Global Populism: A Lineage of Filipino Strongmen from Quezon to Marcos
and Duterte’, Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, 32(1–2) 7–54 (2017).
43 ibid., p. 12.
44 ibid., p. 11.
45 ibid.; Weena Gera and Paul Hutchcroft, ‘Duterte’s Tight Grip over Local Politicians: Can
It Endure?’ New Mandala, 19 February 2021, https://www.newmandala.org/dutertes-tight-
grip-over-local-politicians-can-it-endure/, accessed 19 March 2022.
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to ‘culture’, particularly expressed in masculinised national values and iden-
tity to legitimise authoritarian modes of governance internationally. Yet this is
done while preserving global political and economic hierarchies. For instance,
as I will discuss further below, Duterte has employed rhetoric on national sov-
ereignty in resisting international human rights scrutiny over his ‘war on drugs’
yet, at the same time, expressing powerlessness over China on security issues
such as the ongoing South China Sea disputes and on imposing travel bans at
the start of the pandemic for fear of upsetting economic relations.
Much has been written examining Duterte as a populist leader and the
violent implications of his rule for human rights and well-being in the coun-
try. Systematic feminist analysis of Duterte’s presidency, however, remains
limited. Where his hypermasculinity has been examined, this is primarily in
terms of discursive performance and projection of power and separate from
the material basis of his power. Using the pandemic response in the Philippines
under Duterte, I underscore the urgent need to understand hypermasculinity
in an integrated manner – in ways that draw out the connections between the
gendered reproduction of the state, and the structural and symbolic risk fac-
tors for mass atrocities. In doing so, I advance a feminist approach to ongoing
discussions at the cross-roads of atrocity prevention and meaningful inclusion
of gender in pandemic response.
46 See for example, Mark Thompson, ‘Duterte’s Violent Populism: Mass Murder, Political
Legitimacy and the “Death of Development” in the Philippines’, Journal of Contemporary
Asia (online), (2021) https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2021.1910859; Paul D. Kenny and
Ronald Holmes, ‘A New Penal Populism? Rodrigo Duterte, Public Opinion, and the War
on Drugs in the Philippines’, Journal of East Asian Studies, 20(2) 187–205 (2020); Nicole
Curato (ed.), A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).
47 Typically, feminist analysis of Duterte has been included or folded within broad or survey
review of gender and populist leaders globally. Some exceptions are McCoy, ‘Global
Populism’, and Cleve V. Arguelles and Veronica L. Gregorio (eds.), ‘Special Issue on Gender
and Populism in the Philippines’, Review of Women’s Studies, (2), (2020), published by
the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.
48 Arguelles and Gregorio, ‘Special Issue on Gender and Populism in the Philippines’,
Review of Women’s Studies; Filomin Gutierrez, ‘Focus: Duterte and Penal Populism – The
Hypermasculinity of Crime Control in the Philippines’, Discover Society, 2 August 2017,
https://archive.discoversociety.org/2017/08/02/focus-duterte-and-penal-populism-the-
hypermasculinity-of-crime-control-in-the-philippines/, accessed 19 March 2022; J. De
Chavez and V. Pacheco, ‘Masculinity in the Age of (Philippine) Populism: Violence and
Vulgarity in Duterte’s Hypermasculine Discourse’, Masculinities and Social Change, 6(3)
261–283 (2020).
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3 Pre-pandemic Atrocity Crimes and Risk Factors in the Philippines
Prior to the -19 pandemic, several risk factors for mass atrocities were
reported in the Philippines. Based on an Asia-Pacic regional assessment for
atrocity crimes against civilians, the Philippines was deemed to be at ‘very
high risk’ (together with Myanmar and the Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea). First, several protracted conicts are afecting rural or remote areas of
the Philippines, but particularly in Mindanao. Mindanao has been transition-
ing to peace after the signing of the peace agreement between the Philippine
government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front () in 2014. The enact-
ment of the 2018 Bangsamoro Basic Law, which broadly formalised the terms
of the peace agreement, further armed this commitment to peace. However,
violence and instability have renewed with the emergence of extremist groups
threatening to undermine the peace gains. These Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria ()-aliated groups were able to put one locality, Marawi, under a
ve-month siege in 2017. Their presence in Mindanao is justifying ongoing mil-
itary-led counter-terrorism operations. Consequently, Mindanao was under
martial law until January 2020 (around the time that -19 was about to
become a global disease outbreak) and at the time of writing remains in a
state of emergency. On another conict front, the communist insurgency in
the Philippines, which is among the longest running insurgencies in the Asia-
Pacic region, continues to result in sporadic violence and localised internal
displacement. The government peace process on this front has stalled despite
initial optimism in 2016 when Duterte declared a unilateral ceasere, resumed
formal talks, and temporarily released detained representatives for negoti-
ations. By 2017, Duterte reversed these decisions and issued a proclamation
reinstating the status of the Communist Party and all aliated members as
terrorists.
Second, pre-existing weak state structures have perpetuated a deeply rooted
culture of impunity and have long enabled routine crime and human rights
violations to go unreported in the country. If violent crimes do get reported,
49 Asia Pacific Centre for Responsibility to Protect, Asia Pacific Regional Outlook No. 13,
2019, https://r2pasiapacific.org/files/4152/APRO%20October%202019%20%20FINAL.pdf,
accessed 19 March 2022.
50 Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (), Philippines, ‘Peace
Process with the Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army/National
Democratic Front (//)’, https://peace.gov.ph/timeline/peace-process-cpp-
npa-ndf/, accessed 19 March 2022; see also Jose Reganit, ‘Duterte Orders “Mass Arrest” of
Consultants Out on Bail’, Philippine News Agency, 6 December 2017, https://www
.pna.gov.ph/articles/1018188, accessed 19 March 2022.
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victims face multiple barriers – from lack of legal and nancial resources to
dealing with further threats of death or retaliation from the perpetrators. Prior
to serving as President, Duterte was a mayor in Mindanao where atrocities
committed by his ‘death squad’, once described as a ‘murderous plague’, were
heavily documented. Yet, to date, no one from the squad has been prosecuted
and made accountable for their crimes. Duterte himself has been rewarded
with political oce based on his legacy of violence. The problem of impu-
nity is reportedly most acute when violence is one-sided and perpetrated by
state armed groups such as the military or police. Extrajudicial killings and
related crimes such as sexual and gender-based violence have been found to
distinctly impact marginalised populations, particularly women, girls, and
sexual minorities belonging to poor, ethnic or indigenous communities.
Similarly, in cases of gender-based violence, victims already face barriers at the
barangay or community-level response. While under the law, all barangays
must be equipped to assist and refer services, there are cases where barangay
ocials themselves do not know how to issue domestic violence protection
orders. Rape victims in remote locations are also faced with lack of access
to health services that are vital to treat the often brutal consequences of such
violence. These examples reect the long history of lack of access to justice
and the compounding impacts of weak local or community-level public social
welfare especially in geographically remote areas.
Third, the Philippines is at high risk for climate vulnerability. According to
the Global Climate Risk Index report, the Philippines is in the top ve countries
in the world in terms of populations most afected by extreme weather events
from 2000 to 2019. It also had the highest prevalence of extreme events at 317
in a span of 19 years, or roughly 17 mega-disasters per year. Extreme disasters
51 Kenneth Roth, Philippine Death Squads: A Murderous Plague (New York: Human Rights
Watch, 2009); Human Rights Watch, ‘“You Can Die Any Time”: Death Squad Killings in
Mindanao’, 2009, https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/04/06/you-can-die-any-time/death-
squad-killings-mindanao, accessed 19 March 2022.
52 Ronli Sifris and Maria Tanyag, ‘Intersectionality, Transitional Justice and the Case of
Internally Displaced Moro Women in the Philippines’, Human Rights Quarterly, 41(2) 399–
420 (2019); Sara Davies, Jacqui True, and Maria Tanyag, ‘How Women’s Silence Secures the
Peace: Analysing Sexual and Gender-based Violence in a Low-Intensity Conflict’, Gender
and Development, 24(3) 459–473 (2016).
53 Barangay (village or community) refers to the basic unit of public administration in the
Philippines.
54 Davies et al., ‘How Women’s Silence Secures the Peace’.
55 German Watch, ‘Global Climate Risk Index: Table: The 10 Countries Most Affected from
2000 to 2019’, https://germanwatch.org/sites/germanwatch.org/files/2021-01/cri-2021_
table_10_countries_most_affected_from_2000_to_2019.jpg, accessed 19 March 2022.
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can trigger or exacerbate atrocity risks in pre-existing conict and disaster-in-
duced displacements. In March 2020, as -19 started to spread nation-
wide, there were reportedly 359,941 internally displaced persons in Mindanao
due to protracted conicts and disaster. Approximately 127,865 of those had
been displaced by the 2017 siege of Marawi. Climate vulnerability is further
compounded by atrocity risk factors in relation to forced evictions and aggres-
sion on issues of ancestral lands and environmental protection, with killings
of indigenous peoples, peasants, and activists who resist businesses and local
elites in order to protect the environment, traditional lands, and livelihood.
The country therefore is also one of the deadliest places to be an environmen-
tal defender. These forms of violence implicate the Philippine state and its
role in enabling human rights violations by extractive industries such as min-
ing and logging companies and large-scale agribusiness.
While it is clear that atrocity risk factors have been in place prior to the
Duterte presidency, there is also mounting and compelling evidence that these
have all intensied since he took oce in June 2016. Embodying the logic of
state hypermasculinity, Duterte has intensied the militarisation of security;
paternalism, along with a concomitant restriction of public deliberation and
dissent; and the repression of feminised others. First, militarism has been the
default security approach under Duterte’s rule and his pronouncements form
part of, and feed, societal violence. He rose to power by promising to restore
order and discipline in the country by violent means. Duterte postured that
he was responding to a crisis driven by criminality and corruption afecting
the country. Consequently through his own admission, he made ‘uniformed
personnel of government’ as the ‘backbone of [his] administration’. This
includes fullling a campaign promise of improving the salary and benets
56 UN Human Rights Council, Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines: Report of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, //44/22, 29 June 2020
[henceforth , Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines].
57 Global Witness, Defenders of the Earth: Global Killings of Land and Environmental
Defenders in 2016 (London: Global Witness, 2017).
58 , Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines.
59 See Nicole Curato, ‘Politics of Anxiety, Politics of Hope: Penal Populism and Duterte’s Rise
to Power’, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 35(3) 91–109 (2016); McCoy, ‘Global
Populism’; Salvador S. F. Regilme Jr., ‘Visions of Peace amidst a Human Rights Crisis: War
on Drugs in Colombia and the Philippines’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 6(2) (2021),
doi:10.1093/jogss/ogaa022.
60 See Nikko Dizon, ‘Duterte and His Generals: A Shock and Awe Response to the Pandemic’,
Rappler, 31 July 2020, https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/duterte-shock-and-
awe-coronavirus-pandemic-response-generals, accessed 19 March 2022.
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received by the military and police. As soon as he was elected, the drug war
deployed death squads writ large. Demonstrating the profound extent of state
punishment, the death toll from Duterte’s drug war since July 2016 ranges
from a conservative estimate of 8,663 people according to the UN Human
Rights Council, to possibly three times as high based on statements from the
Philippine Commission on Human Rights and information collected by the
International Criminal Court. The ocial record from the Philippine Drug
Enforcement Agency, the agency implementing Duterte’s drug war, is 6,011
deaths from July 2016 to December 2020. Duterte’s war on drugs has been rea-
sonably believed to account for crimes of murder, torture, and the iniction of
serious physical injury and mental harm perpetrated throughout the country
based on ndings from the International Criminal Court. It has also been
argued that those crimes satisfy the stages of genocide.
Second, Duterte, referred to by his followers as Tatay Digong (father), bene-
ted from and actively reproduced representations of himself as father of the
nation. Consequently, underpinning his paternalistic exercise of power is the
expectation that society will full feminine attributes of duty and obedience.
Protection is extended to society so long as they do not challenge his authority.
Core to state hypermasculinity under Duterte is the drive to actively dismantle
61 In 2016, increase in combat and incentive pay for the military and police was authorised
under Executive Order 3, among the first orders Duterte issued at the start of his
presidency. In 2018, Duterte signed Joint Resolution no. 1 passed by Congress which sought
to increase the base salary of all military and police personnel. See Cynthia Balana and
Gil Cabacungan, ‘Duterte Gives Soldiers, Cops Huge Pay Hike’, Philippine Daily Inquirer,
4 October 2016, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/821504/duterte-gives-soldiers-cops-huge-
pay-hike, accessed 19 March 2022; Pia Ranada, ‘Duterte Signs Resolution on Pay Hike for
Soldiers, Cops’, Rappler, 9 January 2018, https://www.rappler.com/nation/193248-duterte-
signs-joint-resolution-pay-hike-soldiers-cops/, accessed 19 March 2022.
62 , Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines.
63 ibid.; Human Rights Watch, ‘“Our Happy Family Is Gone”: Impact of the “War on Drugs”
on Children in the Philippines’, 27 May 2020, https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/05/27/
our-happy-family-gone/impact-war-drugs-children-philippines#_ftn3, accessed 19 March
2022.
64 International Criminal Court, ‘Pre-trial Chamber 1 (Situation in the Republic of the
Philippines)’, 15 September 2021, https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/CourtRecords/
CR2021_08044.PDF, accessed 19 March 2022.
65 Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, ‘Home: #RealnumbersPH’, https://pdea.gov.ph/2-
uncategorised/279-realnumbersph, accessed 19 March 2022.
66 International Criminal Court, ‘Report on Preliminary Examination of Activities 2020’,
2020, https://www.icc-cpi.int/itemsDocuments/2020-PE/2020-pe-report-eng.pdf,
accessed 19 March 2022.
67 Dahlia Simangan, ‘Is the Philippine “War on Drugs” an Act of Genocide?’, Journal of
Genocide Research, 20(1) 68–89 (2018).
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media presence. Doing so functions to prevent sources validating the (in)accu-
racy of state information, to stie dissenting views, and to help obscure the sys-
tematic and widespread nature of the violence perpetrated by state agents. A
notable example is the rejection of the franchise renewal and therefore efec-
tive closure of a major media and broadcasting company, -, known to
air criticisms of Duterte’s governance. Moreover, Philippine democracy has
been constantly threatened and undermined with the rapid and increased
production and dissemination of misinformation and disinformation on social
media. Researchers have shown how politically motivated falsely curated con-
tents are circulated by so-called ‘architects of networked disinformation’.
These disinformation networks have weaponised the internet to bolster pop-
ular support for Duterte’s administration. Meanwhile, social media platforms
are turned into toxic environments for any individual or institution express-
ing criticism or grievances against him and his administration because of the
harassment and vitriolic campaign they face from paid trolls, ‘bot armies’, and
through a range of fake news websites run by Duterte supporters.
Third and relatedly, in enforcing his paternalist rule, state hypermasculinity
under Duterte is evidenced by the violent repression and domination of femi-
nised ‘others’. While ostensibly targeted at eliminating illicit drugs in the coun-
try, the drug war is shown to have been used as a pretext to eliminate political
opposition and create a general climate of fear and reprisal. Back when he was
still a mayor, Duterte’s drug war was already known to extend to his political
rivals. This tactic is observed to be part of his presidency too, with local may-
ors and political rivals facing intimidation, threats to life, or eventually getting
killed. Anyone in political oce or aspiring to be elected are feminised (that
is, rendered weak or forced into submission) vis-à-vis Duterte’s rule, for they
‘confront fearsome examples of what happens to those who fall out of favour
with the presidential palace’. Most visibly, Duterte has focused on wielding
his authority to subjugate women in political oce who have criticised his rule
68 Jonathan Ong, ‘Chief Disinformation Architects in the : Not Exactly Who You
Think’, Rappler, 11 February 2018, https://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/
disinformation-architects-philippines, accessed 19 March 2022; Jonathan Ong and Jason
V. A. Cabañes, ‘Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll
Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines’, Communication Department
Faculty Publication Series No. 74, 2018, https://doi.org/10.7275/2cq4-5396; Jonathan Ong,
Ross Tapsell, and Nicole Curato, ‘Tracking Digital Disinformation in the 2019 Philippine
Midterm Election’, August 2019, www.newmandala.org/disinformation, accessed 19 March
2022.
69 McCoy, ‘Global Populism’, p. 38.
70 Gera and Hutchcroft, ‘Duterte’s Tight Grip over Local Politicians’, p. 13.
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and who he perceives as threats. These prominent women include former Chief
Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno (who was impeached from oce), Senators Leila
de Lima and Risa Hontiveros and Vice President Leni Robredo. Clearly with
a gendered pattern of intimidation and repression, Duterte has also targeted
women in the media, notably Maria Ressa, a journalist and Chief Executive
Ocer of a news website – Rappler. Ressa has faced arrests and multiple crim-
inal charges. She, along with other critics, was the focus of state-sponsored
online ‘patriotic trolling’, misogynistic comments, and hate speech. The rise
and resilience of Duterte’s strongman rule is connected with his leveraging of
underlying sexism and misogyny in Philippine society. While addressing state
forces, Duterte gave an order against female communist rebels: ‘We won’t kill
you. We will just shoot your vagina’. In the past, Duterte has also publicly
promoted impunity for sexual violence under martial law. He has said every
soldier can rape at most three women and still be protected from prosecution
under his administration.
Lastly, Duterte’s eforts to dominate those who oppose him is evident in
his clear disregard for international and national human rights institutions
and civil society. Juxtaposed against his hypermasculine rule, these forces
represent an important mitigating factor for atrocity crimes. Duterte, how-
ever, has consistently expressed anti-United Nations statements, including
openly threatening to inict physical violence against a female UN Special
Rapporteur. Under his leadership, the State has resisted cooperating on any
external inquiry into his drug war and related extrajudicial killings, claiming
national sovereignty. Notably, the International Criminal Court launched a
probe into possible crimes against humanity in February 2018. The Philippines
consequently gave notication of its withdrawal from the Rome Statute on
17 March 2018, which became efective the following year. Nationally, he has
criticised and sought to undermine the work of the national Commission on
Human Rights. He has threatened to abolish the Commission and accused civil
71 See , Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines.
72 Earvin Charles Cabalquinto and Maria Tanyag, ‘A Murderous Plague in the Philippines’,
New Mandala, 24 March 2021, https://www.newmandala.org/a-murderous-plague-in-the-
philippines/, accessed 19 March 2022.
73 Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Philippines: Rodrigo Duterte Orders Soldiers to Shoot Female
Rebels “in the Vagina”’, The Guardian, 13 February 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2018/feb/13/philippines-rodrigo-duterte-orders-soldiers-to-shoot-female-rebels-in-
the-vagina, accessed 19 March 2022.
74 Jodesz Gavilan, ‘Duterte’s Tirades, Threats vs United Nations: “Useless” to “Sunugin Ko
Pa Iyan”’, 22 September 2020, https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/rodrigo-duterte-
tirades-threats-statements-against-united-nations, accessed 19 March 2022.
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society groups of ‘weaponising human rights’ to merely discredit his author-
ity. Human rights activists and lawyers have been included in the long list
of groups that are the targets of extrajudicial killings. Data being collected by
independent groups show that there have been ‘at least 61 lawyers killed under
the 5 years of Duterte. In contrast, only 49 lawyers were killed in a span of 44
years from Marcos to former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, Duterte’s
predecessor’. Many lawyers face or have been threatened by criminal charges
themselves as reprisal for pursuing human rights cases. From January 2015
to December 2019, the Oce of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
veried cases relating to the death of 208 human rights defenders, journalists,
and trade unionists – 30 of whom were women.
Prior to the pandemic, checks and balances against atrocity crimes were
severely curtailed. State hypermasculinity, particularly the range of violent
discursive and structural mechanisms at Duterte’s disposal since 2016, should
have served as a clear and early warning signal for the murderous plague that
would ensue beginning in 2020 when -19 reached the Philippines. I
now turn to examining the specic intersections of pandemic harms with pre-
existing atrocity risk factors.
4 Intersecting Atrocities: The Nexus between the -19 Pandemic
and State Hypermasculinity
Sudden changes as a result of disasters or epidemics are among the recognised
‘triggering factors’ for atrocity crimes under the UN Framework of Analysis for
Atrocity Crimes. Crises can aggravate existing risk factors or may be used as
an ‘opportunity’ to perpetuate atrocity crimes with impunity. This is indeed
75 UN News, ‘At UN General Assembly, Philippines’ Duterte Denounces Groups “Weaponizing”
Human Rights’, 22 September 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1073072,
accessed 19 March 2022.
76 Lian Buan, ‘Lawyers Killed: 61 under Duterte, 49 from Marcos to Aquino’, Rappler, 15
March 2021, https://www.rappler.com/nation/lawyers-killed-duterte-marcos-aquino-
administrations-data-studies’, accessed 19 March 2022; see also Carlos Conde, ‘Record
High Killing of Philippine Lawyers’, Human Rights Watch, 15 March 2021, https://www
.hrw.org/news/2021/03/15/record-high-killing-philippine-lawyers, accessed 19 March 2022;
similar examples of databases on the drug war are Dahas (https://dahas.upd.edu.ph/) and
Investigate (https://www.investigate.ph/).
77 , Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines.
78 ibid.
79 United Nations, Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes: A Tool for Prevention (New York:
UN, 2014).
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the case in the Philippines where, alarmingly, the national pandemic response
is even being harnessed in the service of the drug war and state repression.
Intersecting with deaths due to -19, extrajudicial killings registered a 50
per cent increase between April and July 2020. According to International
’s Global Monitor of -19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights
which surveys 162 countries, the Philippines is among several countries where
concerning developments are occurring. International has signalled
the alarm on countries such as the Philippines for ‘-19 related measures
or developments that violate human rights or democratic benchmarks’ and
‘because [these are] considered either disproportionate, unnecessary, illegal
or indenite’. Under the leadership of Duterte, the Philippine pandemic
response has been marked by multiple violations especially in terms of per-
sonal integrity and security. It is also classied as ‘high risk’ for pandemic-
induced democratic backsliding notably due to restrictions on civil liberties,
media integrity, and freedom of expression.
4.1 Militarised Pandemic Response
The Philippine -19 response, circumscribed by state hypermascu-
line logic, has been punitive, criminalised, and deadly. It strongly illustrates
violence and sufering were logical outcomes of discursive and structural
processes reproduced by the State; and not simply ‘natural’ and therefore inev-
itable consequences of an unprecedented global health crisis. As pointed out
by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:
The response to -19 has seen the same heavy-handed security ap-
proach that appears to have been mainstreamed through the ramped-up
campaign against illegal drugs and by counter-insurgency imperatives.
While important measures were taken to mitigate the economic impact
of the pandemic on vulnerable communities, threats of martial law, the
use of force by security forces in enforcing quarantines and the use of
laws to stie criticism have also marked the Government’s response.
80 Carlos H. Conde, ‘Killings in Philippines Up 50 Percent during Pandemic’, Human Rights
Watch, 8 September 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/08/killings-philippines-
50-percent-during-pandemic, accessed 19 March 2022.
81 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International ),
‘The Global State of Democracy Indices: Philippines’, https://www.idea.int/gsod-indices/
countries-regions-profile?rsc=%5B840%5D&covid19=1, accessed 19 March 2022.
82 ibid.
83 International , ‘The Global State of Democracy Indices: Philippines (-19)’,
https://www.idea.int/gsod-indices/profile/covid19/philippines, accessed 19 March 2022.
84 , Situation of Human Rights in the Philippines, p. 16.
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Duterte has authorised the locking up of quarantine ofenders and has told law
enforcers to ‘shoot troublemakers dead’. There were also reports that curfew
violators were being abused, and in one province, detained in dog cages. In
the context of vaccine roll-out, Duterte similarly ordered people who refuse
vaccination to be arrested.
Since assuming oce, Duterte has made every national decision-making
process military and police-driven and therefore exclusionary. Duterte has
viewed governance through the truncated lens of war and wields the mili-
tary and police at every crisis. To lead the country’s pandemic response, his
administration created the Inter-Agency Task Force on -19, comprised
predominantly of retired generals and ex-military personnel, including a man
dubbed as the ‘vaccine czar’. He has maintained that the military is best
placed to lead the pandemic response because they excel in logistics. The
dominance of the defence and security sectors within Duterte’s cabinet leaves
little room for the technical health expertise needed to respond to a pandemic.
Moreover, the long legacy of militarism in the country is a contributing fac-
tor to why, structurally, preparedness for a pandemic was low in the country.
For example, research by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative suggests that
there are limited connections and collaboration among actors with expertise
on pandemics in the country. Human development and life expectancies
among Filipinos are uneven such that ‘[F]aced with catastrophic events, the
85 SunStar Philippines, ‘Duterte Orders: Shoot Troublemakers Dead’, 1 April 2020, https://
www.sunstar.com.ph/article/1850972/Manila/Local-News/Duterte-orders-Shoot-
troublemakers-dead, accessed 19 March 2022.
86 Maria Ela L. Atienza, Aries A. Arugay, Jean Encinas-Franco, Jan Robert R. Go, and Rogelio
Alicor L. Panao, ‘Constitutional Performance Assessment in the Time of a Pandemic: The
1987 Constitution and the Philippines’ -19 Response’, International Discussion
Paper 3/2020, 2020, p. 17; see also Margaret Wurth and Carlos H. Conde, ‘Philippine
Children Face Abuse for Violating -19 Curfew’, Human Rights Watch, 3 April 2020,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/philippine-children-face-abuse-violating-covid-
19-curfew#, accessed 19 March 2022.
87 Karen Lema, ‘Philippines’ Duterte Threatens Unvaccinated People with Arrest’, Reuters, 7
January 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-duterte-threatens-
unvaccinated-people-with-arrest-2022-01-06/, accessed 19 March 2022.
88 Among key figures are Retired Generals Roy Cimatu, Carlito Galvez Jr., and Delfin
Lorenzana. See Dizon, ‘Duterte and His Generals’.
89 Azer Parrocha, ‘Ex-Generals Best People to Lead Covid Response, Palace Insists’, Philippine
News Agency, 23 March 2021, https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1134594, accessed 19 March
2022.
90 See Phuong Pham, Vincenzo Bollettino, Patrick Vinck, Ariana Marnicio, Lea Ivy
Manzanero, Mark Toldo, Rachel Dickinson, Alexis Smart, and Evan Bloom, ‘Network
Analysis of Actors Working to Support Disaster Preparedness and Resilience in the
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rich draw down their wealth; the poor draw down their health’. That is, prior
to the pandemic, poorer households already had less resources to spend on
health because these were redirected to everyday or ‘survival’ expenses such as
food. With the pandemic, health gaps intensied as punitive measures further
victimised the poor. It was commonly reported that the reason why people
broke -19 restrictions was out of desperation. Strict lockdowns meant
income loss and hunger. Approximately 41 per cent of the total number of
conrmed cases and 39 per cent of deaths in the country are from the National
Capital Region, where the urban poor of Manila are located.
The initial phase of the -19 health crisis was marked by clear short-
ages in equipment and facilities thereby endangering the safety of health work-
ers. There were nationwide problems in the availability of personal protective
equipment (), ventilators, beds, and diagnostic equipment and supplies.
These health shortages are structurally linked to militarism and to the mas-
sive redirection of resources towards Duterte’s war on drugs. The already weak
health systems in the country were further eroded by the lack of resourcing for
health workers during the pandemic. This is in contrast to the wealth directed
towards the police and military. Worse, in August 2021, a routine audit of
state expenditures revealed that billions worth of -19 funds have either
been unused or misused. The conditions have rapidly worsened for health
workers such that on multiple occasions, a coalition of medical and health
care groups have protested and threatened to resign from their posts due to
government ineciencies and corruption which have left them underpaid and
Philippines’, 2020, https://hhi.harvard.edu/publications/network-analysis-actors-working-
support-disaster-preparedness#, accessed 19 March 2022.
91 Human Development Network, Philippine Human Development Report 2020/21, p. 52,
https://www.hdn.org.ph/2020-2021-philippine-human-development-report/, accessed 19
March 2022.
92 Yoonyoung Cho, Jorge Eduardo Avalos, Yasuhiro Kawasoe, Douglas Johnson, and Ruth
Reyes Rodriguez, ‘Mitigating the Impact of -19 on the Welfare of Low Income
Households in the Philippines: The Role of Social Protection’, -19 Low Income
Survey Note No. 1, 2021, World Bank Group, https://documents.worldbank.org/
en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/698921611118950758/mitigating-the-
impact-of-covid-19-on-the-welfare-of-low-income-households-in-the-philippines-the-
role-of-social-protection, accessed 19 March 2022.
93 Philippines, ‘-19 in the Philippines Situation Report 71’, 27 February
2021, https://www.who.int/philippines/internal-publications-detail/covid-19-in-the-
philippines-situation-report-71, accessed 19 March 2022.
94 See also Gera and Hutchcroft, ‘Duterte’s Tight Grip’.
95 Rappler, ‘: ’s Low Utilisation of Crisis Funds Affected Health Services’, 19 August
2021, https://www.rappler.com/nation/doh-low-utilization-crisis-funds-affected-health-
services-coa-report-2020, accessed 19 March 2022.
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overworked, as well as on the ‘frontlines’ of the country’s ‘losing battle’ against
-19.
4.2 Virulent Paternalism
Because Duterte reproduces and invests in militarising crises, he cannot but
interpret difering views as an existential threat to his power. As part of the
logic of state hypermasculinity, institutional spaces for diverse voices and per-
spectives to pandemic response were limited, especially from health experts.
This is evident in that Duterte, like his strongman counterparts globally,
shunned advice from health experts in a bid to project masculine invincibility.
He initially implied that ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, could be used as
treatment for -19. He also advised people to clean their face masks
with petrol. The country’s own department of health had advised against
these measures. Duterte clearly beneted from, and therefore did nothing to
mitigate, the -19 ‘infodemic’ which readily emerged and ourished in
the country. As was seen in the context of the war on drugs, disinformation
functions to detach and desensitise people from the systematic killings occur-
ring in the country. It serves as a convenient tool for perpetuating Duterte’s
virulent paternalism because, in a digital environment muddled by falsehoods
and inaccuracies, people are aforded narratives that only validate their own
pre-existing beliefs and arm experiences that reect their immediate or
narrow environment. His authority cannot be easily refuted or challenged
because, in part, people’s access to reliable information has been fragmented.
The implementation of -19 regulations was similarly mediated by
a pervasive climate of disinformation and mistrust. Widespread and coordi-
nated disinformation provided a fertile ground for framing health experts and
professionals as blameworthy despite their being on the front lines of the crisis.
96 See Adrian Portugal, ‘Philippines Health Workers Protest Neglect as -19 Strains
Hospitals’, 1 September 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-
health-workers-protest-neglect-covid-19-strains-hospitals-2021-09-01/, accessed 19 March
2022; and Neil Jerome Morales, ‘“Losing Battle”: Philippine Doctors, Nurses Urge New
-19 Lockdowns as Infections Surge’, Reuters, 1 August 2020, https://www.reuters
.com/article/us-health-coronarvirus-philippines-idUSKCN24X3IA, accessed 19 March
2022.
97 Xave Gregorio, ‘Duterte Refuses to Discourage Ivermectin to Treat -19’, Philippine
Star, 11 September 2021, https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2021/09/11/2126454/duterte-
refuses-discourage-ivermectin-treat-covid-19, accessed 19 March 2022.
98 , ‘Rodrigo Duterte: “I’m Not Joking” – Clean Masks with Petrol’, 31 July 2020, https://
www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53605108, accessed 19 March 2022.
99 Ong et al., ‘Tracking Digital Disinformation’; Cabalquinto and Tanyag, ‘A Murderous
Plague in the Philippines’.
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Based on existing data, almost 20 per cent of those infected in the country are
health workers. Networks of Filipino health workers and professionals have
voiced their discontent over the national response and protested against pan-
demic militarism because these have led to solutions that are not informed
by human rights and security. Duterte and his spokespersons responded by
framing Filipinos, especially front-line health workers who express their dis-
content, as ‘enemies’ who do nothing but complain. Most notably, in one
of his nightly pandemic ‘talks’ via YouTube, aired on 2 August 2020, he stated
that these ‘complaints’ amount to a form of ‘demeaning the government’ and
as an incitement to ‘revolution’ – to which he dared them to ‘do it’. As in the
case of health workers in other parts of the world, Filipino health workers are
targeted and vilied by their own government.
Finally, for all his hypermasculine posturing against the UN and the inter-
national human rights community, Duterte was initially recalcitrant to impose
travel restrictions for China against health expert advice. He and his spokesper-
sons maintained that to do so would be ‘unfair’ to China, a move tantamount
to upsetting good economic relations. This stance is a continuation of his for-
eign policy approach on geopolitical security issues involving China such as
on the South China Sea territorial dispute. It demonstrates how hypermascu-
linity is relational and multifaceted. The contradiction in projecting himself
as a macho ruler domestically, while selectively subordinating his masculinity
globally, is reconciled through the discursive and structural efect of benevo-
lent paternalism. In his own words, ‘But who’s going to war?… ‘My troops? My
police ocers? They will all just die… Why will I go to war for a battle I cannot
win? That would make me look stupid.’
100 UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN ), ‘Philippines
-19 Humanitarian Response Plan (May 11, 2020 Revision)’, 11 May 2020, https://
reliefweb.int/report/philippines/philippines-covid-19-humanitarian-response-plan-
may-11-2020-revision, accessed 19 March 2022.
101 A prominent example was Harry Roque, Duterte’s spokesperson, who berated a doctor
representing the Philippine College of Physicians at an inter-agency meeting at a time
of resurging cases. See Philippine Star, ‘“Uncalled for”: Roque under Fire over
Outburst on Doctors in Meeting’, 10 September 2021, https://www.philstar.com/
headlines/2021/09/10/2126231/uncalled-for-roque-under-fire-over-outburst-doctors-iatf-
meeting, accessed 19 March 2022.
102 A full video recording was published in RTVMalacanang (official YouTube channel of
the Executive Office), https://youtu.be/G4GXAiEVkOo.
103 See broader study by Sangeeta Mehta, Flavia Machado, Arthur Kwizera, Laurent
Papazian, Marc Moss, Élie Azoulay, and Margaret Herridge, ‘-19: A Heavy Toll on
Health-care Workers’, The Lancet, 9(3) 226–228 (2021).
104 Nestor Corrales, ‘Duterte: Will Only Lose War with China, so Why Risk It?’, Inquirer.
Net, 16 May 2018, https://globalnation.inquirer.net/166996/duterte-ph-will-lose-war-
china-risk#ixzz7NZwCqeHe, accessed 19 March 2022.
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4.3 Feminising and Silencing Opposition
Despite the UN’s global call for a ceasere to end the -19 pandemic,
the Philippine state under Duterte intensied its counter-insurgency and
counter-terrorism operations. While lockdowns were in efect, the Philippine
government passed the Anti-Terrorism Act in June 2020. Red-tagging refers to
the labelling of or insinuation that individuals and groups who are left-lean-
ing are all communists and therefore terrorists. The targets of red-tagging, fol-
lowing the same trajectory of the drug war, has broadened beyond the usual
suspects of communists and members of the New People’s Army. They now
include individuals who hold critical views against the Duterte administration,
journalists, and universities, the last for allegedly indoctrinating students with
leftist ideology and communist recruitment. For example, only a few months
after the Anti-Terrorism Act was passed, the National Council of Churches
in the Philippines reported that as a result of being red-tagged or labelled
as a communist organisation in a presentation made by the Department of
National Defense to the Philippine Congress in 2019, they were harassed by the
military. The National Council provides emergency assistance to communi-
ties especially in rural and displacement settings. Consequently, incidences of
military harassment hindered timely humanitarian response.
The intensication of red-tagging while the -19 pandemic is ongo-
ing represents fundamental problems in the security approach embodied by
the Philippine state. Prior to the Anti-Terrorism Act, Executive Order 70 was
adopted to pursue a whole-of-nation approach via the National Task Force to
End Local Communist Armed Conict in 2018. Yet, overwhelmingly this has
resulted, like the drug war, in human rights violations and deaths at a time
when thousands of Filipino lives were being lost due to the pandemic. In
March 2021, the coordinated killings and arrests of human rights activists,
known as the ‘Bloody Sunday’ operation, occurred in several provinces south
of Manila. A local police chief conrmed that the operation was legitimate and
105 UN, ‘UN Secretary-General Calls for Global Ceasefire to Focus on Ending the -19
Pandemic’, https://www.un.org/en/academic-impact/un-secretary-general-calls-global-
ceasefire-focus-ending-covid-19-pandemic, accessed 19 March 2022.
106 Elmor Santosa, ‘Despite Abrogation of – Pact, This 1981 Agreement Still Bars
Police and Military from Campuses, Former Student Leaders Say’, Philippines, 19
January 2021, https://cnnphilippines.com/news/2021/1/19/UP-DND-pact-Soto-Enrile-
agreement-.html?fbclid=IwAR3DQKuwcZ79ug0G1LmKLUmr7YxAmpjrl5f9pgAMw7xq
Ol6hB QxR3OoWHZw, accessed 19 March 2022.
107 Alliance, ‘Critical Voices of Civil Society Organisations Suppressed in the
Philippines’, 10 December 2020, https://reliefweb.int/report/philippines/critical-voices-
civil-society-organisations-suppressed-philippines, accessed 19 March 2022.
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in line with Executive Order 70. Two days before the Bloody Sunday operation,
Duterte delivered a public statement where he openly ‘ordered the police and
military “to shoot and kill right away” if they see communists holding a gun
and “ignore human rights”’. There are reports that the new anti-terrorism
law has been weaponised to silence discontent from the public regarding the
shortcomings and violent approach to the pandemic.
A material cost of silencing opposition is in limiting access to humanitar-
ian assistance and movement of aid workers. In particular, it has undermined
the work of churches, service-oriented groups, and humanitarian organisa-
tions serving communities most at risk such as those in internal displacement
facilities. The negative consequences are gendered too. Women’s civil soci-
ety groups have been crucial in mitigating pandemic response gaps. Within
months of the -19 lockdowns being enforced in the country, women’s
groups sounded the alarm on the highly likely pandemic ‘baby boom’ esti-
mated at 1.8 million unplanned pregnancies and 751,000 unintended pregnan-
cies. For a country with already high maternal mortality rates, the baby boom
will also likely be tied to maternal deaths and health complications emanating
from pandemic-clogged health systems and fractured social welfare mecha-
nisms. Indeed, according to the United Nations Population Fund ()
Philippines,
[w]hen health service providers are overburdened and preoccupied
with handling -19 cases, however, lifesaving care and support to
[gender-based violence] survivors (i.e. clinical management of rape,
mental health and psycho-social support, etc) may be cut of. Other vul-
nerabilities that women are facing connected to the lockdown have also
been reported.
108 Jacqueline de Guia, ‘Statement of Spokesperson, Atty. Jacqueline de Guia, on the
Reported Deaths and Arrests in Southern Tagalog’, Commission of Human Rights, 8
March 2021, http://chr.gov.ph/statement-of-chr-spokesperson-atty-jacqueline-de-guia-
on-the-reported-deaths-and-arrests-in-southern-tagalog/, accessed 19 March 2022.
109 Alliance, ‘Critical Voices of Civil Society Organisations Suppressed’.
110 See for example Nicola Nixon, ‘Civil Society in Southeast Asia during -19:
Responding and Evolving under Pressure’, GovAsia No. 1, September 2020, https://
asiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GovAsia-1.1-Civil-society-in-
Southeast-Asia-during-the-COVID-19-pandemic.pdf, accessed 19 March 2022.
111 United Nations Population Fund () Philippines, ‘Policy Brief: Bayanihan to Heal
as One Act (-19 Response)’, 17 April 2020, https://philippines.unfpa.org/en/
publications/unfpa-policy-brief-bayanihan-heal-one-act-covid-19-response, accessed 19
March 2022.
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Consequently, women’s groups have had to improvise ways of continuing the
gender-specic services they provide at great personal risk due to -19
exposure and red-tagging from the military and police. Local government lead-
ers, especially mayors, are also leading innovative and responsive solutions to
care for their constituents in spite of Duterte’s rebuke that they are ‘upstaging’
national government eforts. Public calls for accountability have not been
fully stied despite growing cases of pandemic-induced human rights viola-
tions and threats of atrocity crimes.
5 Conclusion: Resisting State Hypermasculinity as Atrocity
Prevention
State hypermasculinity in response to the -19 health crisis is potentially
accelerating reversals in atrocity prevention, human rights, and peacebuild-
ing. In this article, I have examined the case of the Philippines under Duterte
wherein the current state response to the pandemic embodies a continuation
of hypermasculinity via militarised security, paternalism, and the subjugation
of feminised ‘others’ as ‘enemies’ of the state. The ongoing -19 situation
underscores the importance of not situating the scale of death and disease
outbreak in the country in terms of governance failures that occurred because
of an ‘unprecedented’ crisis. Rather, it must be viewed against the range of
heightened risk factors and mass atrocities perpetrated under Duterte’s hyper-
masculine rule. The warning signs were already present: the war on drugs;
systematic targeting of the opposition and ramping up a military-driven rule
that excludes the importance of other expertise; the proliferation of misin-
formation and disinformation; red-tagging; and the harnessing of misogyny
and normalisation of sexual and gender-based violence. Paying attention to
the logic of state hypermasculinity is crucial for atrocity prevention. Resisting
state hypermasculinity is necessary to avoid preventable deaths and human
rights violations before, during, and after any crisis. Rendering governance t
for purpose in the context of multiple crises requires understanding how vari-
ous atrocity crimes follow crisis-specic or ‘crisis-induced’ logics. This includes
examining the implications of state hypermasculinity for impeding regional
112 Athena Charanne R. Presto, ‘Mayors Are Keeping the Philippines Afloat as Duterte’s
-19 Response Flails’, New Mandala, 8 July 2020, https://www.newmandala
.org/mayors-are-keeping-the-phillippines-afloat-as-dutertes-covid-19-response-flails/,
accessed 19 March 2022.
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and global cooperation on health governance founded on holistic and human
security approaches.
While crises can provide windows of opportunity to strengthen and link up
existing atrocity protection and prevention measures, viewing -19 pan-
demic responses in relation to the structural and symbolic risk factors of state
hypermasculinity reveals that atrocity prevention can no longer be intelligible
in relation to ‘states of exception’. It must be increasingly reoriented as a perma-
nent part of global long-term structural reforms, sustainable development, and
just post-pandemic recovery. As this article has shown, the global pandemic is
highlighting the need to take seriously how strengthening health systems and
local responses are vital for atrocity prevention and yet are depleted by con-
tests of masculinity among world leaders. While we are yet to see it happening
on a global scale, crisis-prone countries such as the Philippines are illustrative
of the urgent need to ensure global security agendas such as the Responsibility
to Protect, incorporate a more expansive denition of gendered risk factors
and early warning signs, and how atrocities occur in the context of intersecting
hazards from conicts, disasters, climate change vulnerability, and pandemics.
Ensuring gender-responsive atrocity prevention is at the heart of pandemic
response must involve tackling how state hypermasculinity is clearly emerging
as a vector for pathological crises that result in preventable deaths.
The problem, however, is that while -19 is enabling an important shift
to understanding gender in the context of disease outbreaks, it remains siloed
under ‘solutions’ rather than for constituting a global threat to health more
generally. As Harman argues, ‘[w]hen gender is recognised at all, it is as a
solution to health outbreaks, where gender norms and expectations as to who
does care (women), who leads (men) and who counts (men and women, but
not non-binary people) are maintained’. That is, gender is seen as relevant
in so far as it reproduces the gendered division of labour, the feminisation of
responsibility for crisis response, and a blindness to how gender is causal to
the systemic crises we are experiencing today. There is yet to be a systematic
engagement on how gender through hypermasculinity serves as a risk factor
for atrocity crimes and thus constitutes a threat to global security.
113 Mely Caballero-Anthony, ‘Health and human security challenges in Asia: new agendas
for strengthening regional health governance’, Australian Journal of International Affairs,
72(6) 602–616 (2018).
114 Sophie Harman, ‘Threat Not Solution: Gender, Global Health Security and -19’,
International Affairs, 97(3) 601–623 (2021).
115 ibid., p. 623.
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In examining the case of the Philippines under Duterte, I aim to facilitate
new lines of inquiry to scrutinise how crises and insecurities – whether real
or constructed – enable leaders who have pre-existing ‘strongman’ or hyper-
masculine attributes to rise to power. How and to what extent is hypermas-
culinity deliberately being performed or embodied in order to consolidate
political authority and legitimise the excessive use of state power in response
to -19? Further research can examine how crises such as the global
pandemic enable existing leaders to more intensely revert to or rely upon
hypermasculine rhetoric and response and at what costs. Indeed, prior to the
pandemic, the resurgence of state hypermasculinity was already constitut-
ing a signicant global threat to the well-being of many people. It should not
be a surprise therefore that countries that are failing to manage -19 or
are contributing to pandemic inequalities globally are also those where state
hypermasculinity is evident. Crucially, Duterte is illustrative of the extreme
and deadly variant under which state hypermasculinity can operate if given
the political-economic structures for ‘strongmen’ to brazenly wield political
violence. The challenge ahead in the Philippines and more globally is for aca-
demics, policymakers and practitioners alike to proactively begin to address
the challenges and barriers posed by recognising state hypermasculinity as an
early warning sign for atrocity crimes. As this global crisis further unfolds, it
is important to monitor how the target of state hypermasculinity is broaden-
ing to include not only pre-existing vulnerable groups but also increasingly an
ever-growing category of individuals, and all of us collectively.
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