Who Is the Citizen in Citizen Security? (original) (raw)

Citizen security in Mexico: Legacies of distrust

Latin American Policy, 2024

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.

New perspectives on citizen security in Latin America

2013

estud. socio-jurid., bogota (colombia), 15(1) The concept of ‘citizen security’ came to prominence across Latin America during the late 1990s, concurrent with a growing perception that the region was becoming increasingly beset by rising crime and insecurity, and that this new wave of violence differed from prior hegemonic forms in that it did not threaten states or governments, but principally affected the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. The approach “mark[ed] a sharp departure from traditional policies of state or national security” by focusing on quality of life and human dignity, and “the re-conceptualised social and political keyword of citizen security was encoded with other concepts of freedom and universal rights, and positioned to represent the concrete as well as intangible elements of the public good”, as Marquardt points out. In other words, the concept projected security as “a cultural construct involving an equalitarian form of sociability, an environment freely s...

Democracy and Multidimensional Security : The rising need for citizen security in Latin America

2005

  1. I would like to present a few ideas about the evolution of the concept of security in Latin America, because when we talk about security sometimes we are not using the same language. Security is an area of major concern for all of us, here in the United States, in Latin America and in the world. One problem for the analysis of the concept of security –as a matter of international and domestic policy—is the difficulty to reduce it to a precise meaning. (1)

[Call for papers] Among (in)security, “strong hand” policies, and communities of fear

2019

This special issue of Revista CS aims to identify and problematize diverse practices, behaviors, and experiences observed in the new punitive turn that strikes the Latin American region. It is interesting to understand and question from the social sciences the processes linked to the rise of policing, the loosening of legislation on the carrying of weapons, the debate over the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility, and the criminalization of immigration. Date of publication: CS 31 (May-August, 2020).

(In)Security and Self-Government: Lessons from the Mexican Experience

ICL Journal

Using the Mexican experience in the centralization of public security, this paper proposes federalism as a model of a vertical control of powers and, more importantly, a way of promoting self-governance, citizen participation and, through them, local security. We argue that while federalism as an organizational model of the State does not guarantee self-governance or citizen participation, it can help promote them and through their enhancement, improve security at the community level. Since 2006, the Mexican government has implemented a security strategy that has increasingly centralized public security decisions. The strategy relies on the deployment of federal security forces (Army, Navy and Federal Police) across the country, to replace or support state and local police. The results have been mostly negative. On one hand, there has been an exacerbation of violence in the country, including many incidents in which violence was used disproportionately or illegally by state official...