Introduction
People living on the margins of cities in Jamaica, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, El Salvador, among others, are central to discourses and practices of security, violence and citizenship (Arias and Goldstein 2010; Caldeira 2000; Gray 2004; Hilgers and McDonald 2017; Holston 2008). The impact of national security policies and practices on the quality of citizenshipāunderstood broadly as political, social and civil rights (Marshall 1950) and a practice whereby people constitute themselves as political subjects in order to claim these rights (Insin and Neilson 2008)āis, in fact, a controversial and widely debated topic in Latin America and the Caribbean. The security practices of the state, and its structuring power, reinforce and produce notions of who is a citizen and who is not and are critical to the ways in which citizenship is framed and enacted in marginalized spaces. Citizenship on the Margins argues that attention must be paid to the intersection of these issues because of the way in which insecurity, violence and the invocation of national security are transforming state power and raising new concerns over citizenship rights .
This question of the connection between security and citizenship is particularly pertinent in the current period where neoliberal globalization and an increasing emphasis on the security of the state, coupled with its inability to address violence and insecurity, have made citizenship more precarious for those living on the margins of society. While the constitutions in the region provide for citizenship in the juridical sense, class discrimination, produced by structural inequalities and the stratification of society, through production or consumption processes and racial hierarchies, has created differentiated and unequal citizenship (Campbell and Clarke 2017; Holston 2009; Thomas 2011). Those targeted by legal and extralegal security practices of the state are normally seen as ānon-citizens ā who pose a threat to the security and well-being of the state and the āgood citizenā.
Further interrogation of the relationship between citizenship and security provides a means of considering new complications and consequences. Citizenship on the Margins examines these issues and the conditions under which local actors have emerged to challenge state legitimacy while providing their own version of citizenship. Criminal actors, āviolent non-state actorsā, ādonsā and ādrug lordsā who control local spaces, by providing security and their own form of de facto citizenship, have arguably destabilized and redefined notions of citizenship. This form of citizenship, which takes up the challenge of state neglect, is problematic not only because of the pernicious way in which the threat of violence is used but because it is intrinsically detrimental to those who would (re)claim the freedom to challenge it.
Increased militarization of public safety (Zaverucha 2000), transnational policing (Bowling 2010), securitization (Buzan and Waever 1998), extrajudicial killings, mass surveillance and the use of emergency powers all testify to a deepening of state power and a repositioning of citizenship rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. As violence intensifies and as states in Latin America find new, or rely on old, techniques to deepen state power, citizenship rights are being treated as secondary to safeguarding the security of the state. Security practices and laws which purport to address threats such as transnational organized crime and gang violence have raised questions about rights and the extent to which countries in the region are willing to make decisions that compromise citizenship rights but also the quality of citizenship, in the substantive sense.
Higher incidences of violence, gangs , guns and involvement in organized crime give states in Latin America and the Caribbean an increased ability to violate rights, victimize their citizens, criminalize urban poverty and marginality and to argue that the state must act with urgency to safeguard the security of the state and the security of its ālaw-abiding citizensā. The region is not exceptional in this sense. To invoke Agamben, the state of exception has become the ādominant paradigm of governmentā in contemporary politics. As long as āthe global civil warā remains āunstoppableā, the state of exception can be justified as a technique of government (Agamben 2005: 2). On this account, the book is a useful point of comparison not just for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean or the global South but for countries outside the region that have prioritized national security over almost all functions of government since the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York.
Whose rights are affected when national security laws and policies are enacted? How do states in Latin America and the Caribbean justify curtailing rights to satisfy the goals of national security? How do policy elites and people occupying different positions of power construct the amorphous relationship between rights and security? How and with whom do citizens negotiate their rights? How do everyday citizens resist or cope with problematic forms of state authority? Why do countries in Latin America and the Caribbean deploy security policies and techniques which have negative effects on the quality of both citizenship and democracy? In order to answer these questions, it is, of course, important to understand how power works and circulates in different spaces where the state seeks to exercise control. If power works through and combines āthe deployment of force and the establishment of truthā, as asserted by Foucault (1977: 184), then it is important to examine this process as well as the social and political order that undergirds it.
Citizenship on the Margins critically explores the impact of national security and state power on citizenship rights and experiences. Using cross-country data and examples from Latin America and the Caribbean and drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jamaicaāwhere high levels of violence, in(security) and transnational organized crime are transforming state powerāthe book argues that higher levels of security threats, as constructed by the state, pose challenges for the successful enjoyment of citizenship rights . This construction and the responses often result in increased violation of, or lack of respect for, the rights of the urban poor . āNon-citizensā who are constituted as threats to the security and well-being of the state, and who often lack access to basic public services and the privileges enjoyed by the middle and upper classes, must negotiate their rights. They must navigate the vicissitudes of formal and informal authority and the power of security actors who act as arbiters of rights. The book challenges the view that measures taken by the state to address national security are always responses to objective threats and argues that threats are also constructed by different actors in society. While there is a dominant security discourse ...