Mapping the Political Economy of Drugs and the Death Penalty in Southeast Asia

UN data shows soaring production and trafficking of drugs across Southeast Asia. States have responded with a 'war on drugs', committing to criminal justice solutions over health measures. While some have used 'extrajudicial executions' of drug traffickers, most have increased judicial death sentences. They assert their sovereign right to determine which offences cause most serious harms within their communities and the appropriate punishments, claiming that capital punishment for drug crimes does not breach international law. They claim that those sentenced to death committed heinous drug offences and the public demands capital punishment to deter drug offending, claims that are tenuous given the recent rise in drug trafficking occurred concurrently with increasingly harsh penal responses. Our research will test the veracity of these assumptions and make a major contribution to our ongoing programme of research in Southeast Asia, including recent studies on public and 'elite' opinions (Hoyle, 2021a,b). Our research will challenge the efficacy of the death penalty, and rationales for retention for drug crimes, while developing scholarship on capital punishment in the region.
To better understand states' responses to drug offences, and contribute to the wider theorization of penal power, the project aims to gather qualitative and quantitative data on how Southeast Asian jurisdictions' criminal justice responses to drug offending are shaped by historical and contemporary power relations, politics and culture. Collecting original data alongside information held by statutory and civil society bodies, it will map who is sentenced to death for drug offences - including their race, gender, socio-economic status and citizenship-and why.
Focusing on Indonesia as a case study for Southeast Asia, interviewing drug offenders in prison and those in the community who are part of a drug crime network, we will explore the motivations for drug-related crime, considering contextual, situational and interactional factors that led some to commit serious drug offences while others resisted. In so doing, we will assess the extent to which the death penalty can deter potential drug offenders. This innovative research on deterrence will shift the theoretical, methodological and geographical focus away from the US, and develop scholarship on penal power and punishment regimes in the global south.
Our research findings will be widely disseminated through a variety of media. We will continue to develop our productive relationships with professionals and users of our research across Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia. We will build a dissemination strategy attuned to these relationships, bringing relevant stakeholders into an ongoing dialogue, and building capacity among local academics. While some workshops and seminars throughout the project will be 'closed', to manage sensitivities, most dissemination will reach wide audiences, including scholars in the region, to achieve maximum awareness and to foster dialogue.
International human rights law has so far failed adequately to challenge the retention and administration of the death penalty in Southeast Asia. Robust theoretical and empirical research that identifies and confronts the boundaries of regional rationales and identifies means of shifting the discourse could change policy and practice. Where we have drawn on our empirical and theoretical work in the past, we have realised change, most recently in the PI and Co-I's written submissions to the government of Sierra Leone which resulted in abolition of the death penalty there, and we are currently using our research in a constitutional challenge to the death penalty in Guyana. These and other efforts in Asia demonstrate the potential for excellent academic research to inform policy and practice and to secure legal change when it is effectively harnessed for impact. Our work will assist local academics and partner NGOs in these efforts.