“What citizens can see of the state”: Police and the construction of democratic citizenship in Latin America

Abstract

Police exercise the state's monopoly of legitimate use of force, a fundamental state function that shapes the construction of citizenship. What are the implications for citizenship when that monopoly is profoundly contested and unevenly distributed? This article explores this question in Latin America, where police confront historically high rates of crime and violence in the context of uneven state capacity and pervasive social inequality. Throughout Latin America, citizens lack the security necessary to engage in everyday political, economic, and social activities that are constitutive of citizenship, resulting in constrained citizenship. At the same time, citizens' everyday interactions and relationships to police reproduce existing social inequalities along lines of race, class, and geography, resulting in stratified citizenship. These policing practices and the concomitant constraints on and stratification of citizenship are mutually reinforcing, with troubling implications for state formation and democracy in the world's most violent and most unequal region.

The Politics of Criminal Victimization: Pursuing and Resisting Power

“…66 Such puzzling cross-regional and subnational variation offers fertile terrain to study why victims select distinct responses when confronted with similar forms of criminal victimization. The resulting insights could help policymakers build constructive forms of public-private collaboration to stem crime and advance the rule of law (Arias and Ungar 2009; González 2017; Moncada 2009).…”

Ausencia y presencia estatal como forma de reproducción de la violencia urbana en el distrito de Aguablanca (Cali, Colombia)

“…Esta problemática se extiende a lo largo de otras ciudades latinoamericanas como São Paulo (Brasil), donde la intervención policial y estatal es violenta cuando actúa sobre las comunidades negras de zonas marginadas y empobrecidas (Alves, 2014;González, 2017). Esto exige que, para mostrar los diferentes lugares que en esta problemática ocupan los cuerpos racializados que viven en Aguablanca, cuando se nombre la violencia a nivel social y en investigaciones sea de una manera no reduccionista, responsabilizando de los índices de violencia solo a pandillas, fronteras invisibles y microtráfico, o donde ser negro o negra sea solo una referencia descriptiva y de acercamiento etnográfico (Lasso, 2013;Ordoñez, 2016;Quintín;Urrea, 2001), pues urge poner especial atención a la forma como los funcionarios del Estado, especialmente la policía, enfocan sus acciones violentas en grupos racializados, por 7.…”

Neoliberal politics and state modernization in Chilean penal evolution

“…Differences between the public or subsidized goods and basic services used by most of the population and private (paid) alternatives grew in terms of access and quality. Institutions reflected the already highly stratified country, giving rise to a very pronounced experience of stratified citizenship (González, 2017).…”

“…But recent reforms changed the state infrastructure of control, causing a shift in its output. Prior to that reform and given the limited capacity of the state, social control took the complementary form of informal control practices and brute force by the police or military (Arias, 2006; Cao and Zhao, 2005; González, 2017). In many cases, state incapacity to deal with crime spurred the citizenry to resort to lynching and vigilantism (Godoy, 2004; Nivette, 2016).…”