Citizen security in Mexico: Legacies of distrust

Abstract

The article provides a backdrop to citizen security in Mexico, presenting a critique that challenges the democratic bases of citizen security and offering an alternate genealogy of its analytical and practical implementations. On the one hand, citizen security emerges not only from a violent legacy of national security but also amid larger international and domestic trends. Internationally, citizen security is consistent with shifts toward human security that prioritize individual existence over territorial integrity. Locating the citizen as its referent object, citizen security forwards a universal citizen situated against an ever‐expanding list of threats. Domestically, citizen security coincides with wider neoliberal reforms premised on public–private partnerships and a reliance on individual responsibility. On the other hand, a separate genealogy of citizen security in present‐day Mexico is offered, wherein its application is drawn from three interconnected themes—how citizen security emerges amid a political legacy of national security, how it develops from analytical limitations in human security, and how it operates in a context of neoliberal governance.