“…Penal populism is characteristic of corrupt governance that rejects liberal democracy (Iglesias, 2020;Pernia, 2019;Thompson, 2016;Untalan, 2016) in favour of brute force (M. Thompson, 2022a) and efficient justice (Gaspar, 2016). The securitization of drugs (Aculana et al, 2019;Apriellio, 2021;Utama, 2021) and the performance of crises (Lasco, 2020) through the manipulation of the media (Parmanand, 2023), coupled with attacks on institutions and mechanisms of accountability (Brooke et al, 2023), allow proponents of the WOD to justify punitive though ineffective policies and isolate critical voices (Iglesias, 2022;Johnson & Fernquest, 2018). 3 LAMCHEK and JOPSON By identifying the WOD with penal populism, scholarship suggests that the Philippines' WOD is part of a more global phenomenon eroding democracy, that is, the rise of populism, characterised by the appeal of 'anti-elite' demagogic leaders, an evocation of a crisis, and a coarsening political discourse (Moffitt, 2015;Moffitt & Tormey, 2014).…”