Citizen security and human security in Latin America

Abstract

As the chapters of this Handbook make abundantly clear, security in all its forms is now, and has long been, a central preoccupation of states, citizens, and other actors in Latin America. In this chapter, I focus on citizen security and human security as two frameworks within which security in Latin America is conceptualized; I call attention to the idea of security as both a lived experience – that is, as a routine part of daily life – for Latin American people, and as an everyday program of state formation. Citizen security and human security are understood in this analysis as two powerful discourses, sets of policies, and regimes of governance around which much political contestation in Latin America is centered, as people, states, and nonstate actors (which might include private corporations, criminal gangs, paramilitaries, and local community organizations, among many others) negotiate the meaning of security and the appropriate means of attaining it in their societies. The chapter is thus anthropologically oriented: It explores the conceptual bases of citizen security and human security, but grounds this exploration in the empirical reality of daily life in Latin American societies, where people struggle every day to enhance their own security, nonstate actors take on new and variable roles in security provision, and states work to position themselves as the best and only providers of security for their citizens. 1There are two reasons for discussing citizen security and human security in the same analytical framework. For one, as political discourses and policy frameworks, both citizen security and human security aim to broaden the public understanding of what security is thought to entail. As security studies scholars have shown us, the academic and policy approach to security was long governed by those whom Buzan, Waever, and Wilde (1998) call the “traditionalists,” for whom security pertains strictly to questions of military affairs and defense of the state against internal and external threats (e.g., Chipman 1992). Opposing the traditionalists, from this perspective, are the so-called wideners, those with a much broader view of security. These scholars reject the traditionalists’ insistence on a military or interstate dimension, including security dilemmas and the prospect of an international nuclear war, as the sole criteria for identifying security threats (Waever et al. 1993). This broader perspective understands that security is a response to anything that can be persuasively identified as threatening to the state or society, and that this identification is a cultural and political process that varies across contexts. In keeping with this rough division of perspectives, citizen security and human security can be seen as efforts to widen public understanding of security. Both of these discourses representways of thinking and talking about security that locate the beneficiaries of security outside the state (i.e., as citizens or human beings), and identify a broadly inclusive range of possible threats to that security. Both of these discourses thus represent important departures from more traditional understandings of security in the Americas, which served to bolster the so-called national security state during the long years of authoritarianism and the Cold War. However, despite this broadening effect, in practice citizen security focuses almost exclusively on threats posed by criminality; it demonizes criminals, authorizes state and popular violence, and undermines citizens’ basic rights in exchange for a promised security. Citizen security, then, like national security before it, narrows security to a focus on a particular perceived threat to public order and safety, while continuing to privilege the state as the only actor capable of producing and providing security. Therefore, this chapter contends that citizen security represents a new iteration of longstanding approaches to security: old wine in new bottles, if you will.