Democracy beyond Legitimate Coercion: Deadly Use of Force by the Police in the Philippines and Brazil

This project investi­gates state coercion in the form of deadly police violence in times of domestic peace in two demo­cracies of the Global South. With Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolso­naro, populists came to power in both coun­tries, giving the police a free hand in com­bating drug-related crime. But even before that, both countries stood out within their regions due to high levels of police vio­lence.

The project exa­mines the relation­ship between deadly police violence on the one hand and the violent attitudes of poli­ticians and the general popu­lation on the other. Most of the research on exces­sive police violence is attributed either to charac­teristics of the environ­ment in which police­men serve or to deficits of the police as an organi­zation, to deficits of the organi­zational culture or to specific strategies for preventing or combating crime. Instead, this project focuses on the role of public opinion and a corres­ponding populism of political elites who may expect a tough stance to be advan­tageous in elections as factors for explaining the use of deadly police violence with varying degrees of fre­quency – both between and within states.

The aim of the project, for which third-party funding is provided by the DFG since February 2021, is to collect accurate data on the extent of lethal police violence in Brazil and the Philip­pines for at least a decade. This frame­work will not only provide accurate infor­mation on differen­ces between states and provinces, but also reveal changes over time at the national and sub-national levels. Through intensive field research in several sub­national units, differences in the local perception of crime by the popu­lation and the local elites as well as the attitudes of the local police leader­ship and their de jure and de facto depen­dence on the local political leader­ship are worked out. On that basis, the logics under­lying police use of lethal force are recon­structed – in phases of “normality” without a centrally orches­trated campaign against crime and in phases of central political excess.

Photo: JIATF West via flickr. CC BY-ND 2.0