Security, Emancipation and Narcotics- State Vigilantism and the War on Drugs in Southeast Asia

Today, it is generally accepted in much of the world that, judged by its outcomes, the war on drugs represents a failure. However, despite policy trends in some regions and at the multilateral level reflecting the failure of ‘traditional’ security approaches, the war on drugs remains a powerful discursive force in Southeast Asia. Using the case studies of Thailand in 2003 and the Philippines from 2016 onwards, this thesis addresses the question of how elites have sustained the regimes of truth associated with the war on drugs to legitimise forms of extrajudicial killing. It is argued that the biopolitical logics of the discourses of the war on drugs were effective in constructing the threat to the extent that extrajudicial killings were deemed permissible. It is also suggested that the violence witnessed in both case studies cannot be explained by existing models of state killing, and as a result the concept of state vigilantism is developed here. The role that non-state actors have played in contesting traditional paradigms of security is also of some interest in this thesis. As a result, the Aberystwyth School’s understanding of emancipation is explicated through the consideration of how non-state drug policy actors contest dominant security paradigms within Southeast Asia.