Review of Vicente L. Rafael’s The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte

The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte offers an investigation of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte's regime of fear which weaponizes death to control life and masks violence through his obscene and vulgar articulations. It is an interrogation of the machinations of the sovereign, a political strongman, in relation to the governed. The book also examines how Duterte's surge to power was contingent on the Philippines' history of electoral violence and its peoples neocolonial condition by using Michel Foucault's "biopolitics" and
Achille Membe's "necropolitics" as analytic lenses.