The ability of a state to protect its own citizens' lives is a key part of democratic legitimacy. While the right to physical integrity is nearly universal, holding those who violate this right legally accountable has proved difficult. I argue that the dynamics between civil society groups and government officials can activate investigatory processes plagued by bureaucratic inertia. I develop two analytical categories of civil society actors: Activists impose a political cost to impunity and challenge victim-blaming narratives, whereas advocates facilitate the flow of investigative information between state officials and family members of victims. Drawing from original statistical, ethnographic, and interview evidence, I find that a synergistic political dynamic between activists and advocates can emerge in which political pressure is mounted by activists and channeled into investigatory advances by advocates. While local groups usually anchor these activist-advocate dynamics, international actors may play definitive roles in disrupting tenacious patterns of impunity.

Does political mistrust lead to institutional disengagement? Much work in political science holds that trust matters for political participation, including recourse to the justice system. Scholars of judicial institutions, relying largely on survey research, argue that low trust decreases legal compliance and cooperation, threatening the rule of law. Legal consciousness and mobilization scholars, meanwhile, suggest that trust does not drive justice system engagement. However, their single-case study approach makes assessing the wider implications of their findings difficult. Based on an innovative comparative focus-group study in two uneven democratic states, Chile and Colombia, we show that trust is not the primary factor driving justice system engagement. Rather, people’s engagement decisions are shaped by their expectations and aspirations for their political system and by their politically constructed capacities for legal agency. Our study offers insights of relevance for analysts of various forms of political participation in uneven democratic states across the globe.

How do people living in settings marked by normalized rights violations, transform into rights-claiming and, ultimately, rights-bearing citizens? Bootstrap Justice centers the voices and perspectives of people whose lives have been upended by the disappearance of their loved ones in Mexico. The book argues that as people participate in ongoing mobilization and claim-making over time (1) their legal consciousness— their understandings of the state and of themselves as citizens and political actors—shifts, and that with these shifts, (2) their ability to challenge impunity is likewise transformed. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic work, Bootstrap Justice offers unique insight into the critical but often overlooked role of informal relationships and dynamics in shaping substantive legal and human rights outcomes. The book presents in-depth analyses of the individuals involved in the daily struggle to find their loved ones, the organizations they form, the social movements they join, and the state- and national-level legal and political contexts that condition what is possible for them to achieve. This multi-level, temporally situated perspective provides unique insight into what has been achieved in the past decade, and draws lessons relevant beyond Mexico about what can be achieved in the struggle against impunity.

No abstract

No abstract