Violence, Policing, and Citizen (In)Security

The authoritarian regimes that governed Latin America from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s were often violent, and governments justified their violence through the National Security Doctrine.¹ Postauthoritarian Latin America remains violent but in a different way. Insecurity is now one of the most pressing issues on the public agenda. In most countries, levels of crime are worrisome. For example, the crime rate in Honduras—including homicide, assault, kidnapping, rape, theft, attempted robbery and theft, and drug offenses—was the highest in the world in 2009 (Ungar, 50, 106). In most countries, police remain violent, corrupt, and ineffective. Police reform is elusive or temporary. Nonstate actors such as paramilitaries, vigilantes, and private security have stepped in to provide “security” and in the process contribute to greater insecurity. In response, many national and international actors have adopted the term “citizen security” as a way of reconciling the idea of security with democracy and distancing it from the authoritarian past.

The relationship between security and democracy is an uneasy one that begs for conceptual clarity and a better understanding of the conflicting demands from citizens for both greater rights and iron-fist policing. Over the last decade a new and growing area of scholarship on policing, violence, and security has taken on this challenge. Given the magnitude of the problem, it is not surprising that scholars have come at the issue in multiple ways. Some have chosen to focus on a particular issue, such as violence, crime, or policing, and aim to define it and understand its forms, causes, and possible solutions. Other scholars have taken a more institutional approach, assessing the structure of the police or criminal justice institutions, analyzing attempts at reform, and proposing better methods for reform. Both approaches (institutional and noninstitutional) and all four areas of study (violence, crime, policing, and criminal justice institutions) are interconnected and necessary if we are to achieve a better understanding of the current form of democracy that has emerged in the region and find the best path forward.

The five books under review here make important contributions to this literature. While only one of the reviewed books takes an institutional perspective, they all force us to ask similar key questions: What do we mean by security? What is the relationship between rights and security? What role do the police play in security? And, most provocatively, what is the relationship between security, neoliberalism, and democracy? These questions are threads that join the volumes together, yet each book also tackles its own question and provides a unique contribution to the field of inquiry.

Violence and Democracy

Like most of the books reviewed here, in Violent Democracies in Latin America, editors Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein argue that if we are to understand violence in the region and its relationship to democracy, we cannot limit our analyses to state institutions. They argue that such analyses point to either the failings of democracy in Latin America, exemplified by modifying the term with adjectives (e.g., illiberal, disjunctive, or delegative democracy), or to the false assumption that the region is on a natural evolutionary path in which institutions will lead the way to less violence and greater democracy. Instead, Arias...