The Hague as Archive: Duterte’s War on Drugs, Instrumental Sovereignty, and the Architecture of Global Impunity

Abstract The March 2025 detention of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte under an ICC arrest warrant marks an unprecedented legal rupture, yet its significance extends far beyond individual prosecution. The Duterte case exposes how global security infrastructures, instrumental sovereignty, and oligarchic legality co-produce authoritarian impunity. Using Duterte’s drug war as a paradigmatic case, the article develops four key arguments. First, violent narcotic governance in the Philippines was sustained by transnational counterterrorism alliances, legal security frameworks, and strategic silence from key partners. Second, Duterte’s sovereignty rhetoric functioned as political stagecraft that concealed dependence while resisting external scrutiny, preserving U.S. military ties and courting Chinese finance. Third, the ICC should be read not only as a tribunal but as a moral archive : a site that names atrocity, preserves counter-memory, and affirms victims’ and survivors’ dignity when domestic institutions failed to do so. Fourth, the article advances “radical accountability,” a survivor-centered approach that links truth-telling and recognition to reparations, institutional redesign, and redistribution. Acknowledging the Court’s selectivity, including the importance of consistent treatment in the case of Palestine, the article shows how archival naming can still be mobilized to disrupt impunity and to strengthen local justice claims. Framed at the intersection of critical legal theory, international relations, and postcolonial studies, the article reconceives accountability as an ongoing, emancipatory struggle against the systemic and transnational architecture that makes mass disposability appear lawful.