ABSTRACT
Since the election of President Duterte in 2016, the Philippines has experienced a violent war on drugs, wherein it has been estimated up to 36,000 people have been extrajudicially killed by the Philippine National Police, in encounter killings, or by unknown killers, usually assassins riding in tandem on motorcycles. Many of these victims have had their bodies found in public, covered in packing tape, with cardboard signs on them declaring them to have been involved in drugs and warning of a similar fate befalling any others who become involved in drugs. I conducted fieldwork on the war on drugs in the Philippines in 2019, and this chapter discusses the ethics of this research. How were the ethics requirements of my academic institution complied with, how did the ethics requirements imposed by my academic institution shape the fieldwork, and how has compliance with the ethics requirements of my academic institution impacted attempts to publish the results of my research. In this chapter, I also discuss the practicalities of conducting research in a country where the government has no compunction about killing its own citizens and where interview participants are in danger of being killed extrajudicially.
