This article explores policing and urban ordering in the Philippine war on drugs. With an empirical point of departure in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Metro Manila, the article highlights the perspective of the state police in an area that has been heavily exposed to the drug war and can be considered as one of its hot spots. It is examined how inspirations from counter-insurgency strategies are implemented in policing the war on drugs and discussed how this form of policing is negotiated and what implications it produces on the ground. In doing so, the article asks, ‘how have counter-insurgency policing strategies transformed urban space and the possibility of life in the poorer sections of Manila’? Drawing on a conceptual framework on borders, policing and the production of fear, the article argues that there exists an intimate connection between the employed policing strategies and the transformation of urban space with the potential of fundamentally reconfiguring urban sociality in areas such as Bagong Silang.

This article explores the social and moral implications of Duterte's war on drugs in a poor, urban neighbourhood in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, surveys, and human rights interventions, the article sheds light on policing practices, social relations, and moral discourses by examining central perspectives of the state police implementing the drug war, of local policing actors engaging with informal policing structures, and of residents dealing with everyday insecurities. It argues that the drug war has produced a climate of ambiguous fear on the ground, which has reconfigured and destabilised social relations between residents and the state as well as among residents. Furthermore, this has led to a number of subordinate moral discourses — centred on social justice, family, and religion — with divergent perceptions on the drug war and the extent to which violence is deemed legitimate.