Cultivating Credible Partnerships with Civil Society

This chapter turns to two local protective mechanisms that primarily protect communities through civil society partnerships: threatening accountability and reintegrating victims. Churches brought needed local credibility to civil society partnerships, while civil society organizations contributed expertise and implementation experience. Threatening accountability encompasses activities that raise the likelihood that state agents will be held accountable for human rights abuses, such as training local church networks in human rights documentation. Efforts at reintegrating victims involve initiatives to socially, financially, and psychologically assist the families of those left behind by Drug War violence, who remained at great risk of subsequent violence. After using the parish-based survey to get an overall sense of the distribution of these activities, the authors empirically substantiate their operation through qualitative and quantitative evidence, including parish interviews, experimental evidence from a sample of plausible Philippine police personnel, and survey evidence of ordinary Filipinos.