The Philippine experience with transitional justice (TJ) has evolved through successive periods of political violence and human rights violations, from the Marcos dictatorship and internal armed conflicts involving communist insurgencies and Bangsamoro liberation groups to the more recent War on Drugs. Although the Philippines has established initiatives addressing accountability, truth, reparations, and memorialization, these have not developed within a unified and comprehensive TJ framework. Post-Marcos efforts initially focused heavily on recovering the Marcos family’s ill-gotten wealth, while addressing victims’ human rights violations remained a secondary mandate. The absence of sustained political commitment to standardized TJ mechanisms, combined with shifting political agendas across administrations, has produced a fragmented approach to accountability, truth-seeking, reparation, and collective memory. This has left unresolved aspects of the country’s authoritarian past, creating space for competing historical narratives and revisionism, alongside subsequent democratic and rule-of-law backsliding, including the return of the Marcos family to power and the rise of Rodrigo Duterte and his administration’s widespread human rights violations in the context of the War on Drugs.
The war on drugs represents a significant context in which these dynamics of TJ can be examined. Under Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, a militarized campaign targeting suspected drug users and traders was marked by thousands of alleged extrajudicial killings, unlawful arrests, arbitrary detention, torture and other forms of human rights abuses. Even after the administration of Duterte, efforts to pursue justice for the victims have consequently remained patchwork and contested, amid scepticism among grassroot actors about the integrity of government-led accountability measures under the Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration. Violations against human rights did not occur within a conventional transitional setting, such as the end of a dictatorship or armed conflict, nor were they followed by a clear political transition accompanied by standardized transitional justice mechanisms. Instead, the violence emerged within an existing democratic system and continued across a change in political leadership. The Philippines’ War on Drugs can therefore be understood as an aparadigmatic context for TJ, one that does not fit the typical model of a clear political transition followed by state-led TJ mechanisms.
This context makes the role of grassroots actors particularly important. Where formal TJ mechanisms are absent, limited, or unable to adequately respond to ongoing violations, grassroots actors including, victims’ families, human rights defenders, journalists, faith-based groups, and medical groups, instinctively undertook practices that resemble, intersect with, or support TJ interventions although not explicitly operating under TJ framework. Among these practices, documentation occupies a central position. Documentation is often treated primarily as a means of collecting and preserving evidence for future accountability or truth-seeking processes. Yet in contexts such as the Philippines’ War on Drugs, where formal TJ processes may be uncertain or unavailable, documentation can acquire a broader significance.
Against this backdrop, this research examines how grassroots documentation practices can contribute to rethinking of TJ in an aparadigmatic setting such as the Philippines’ War on Drugs. It focuses on how and why grassroots actors document violence, the purposes these practices serve, and how documentation shapes the emergence and development of broader responses to harm. By starting from these everyday practices rather than predetermined TJ pillars or institutional mechanisms, the research reconceptualizes TJ as an interconnected ecosystem in which documentation can connect and generate multiple forms of justice-seeking. Centering grassroots practices in this way contributes to a more grounded understanding of TJ, one that reflects how communities navigate violence and its aftermath, particularly where formal TJ pathways do not exist.
