The objective of our working group is to contribute, through the construction of cutting-edge knowledge and scientific innovation, open to the dialogue of knowledge, to the Latin American public debate (in a global perspective) for the evaluation of the implementation carried out so far of public security action courses for the multi-agency design of policies of a second generation of citizen security programs (Angarita, 2015).

For a quarter of a century, a structural relationship has been observed in the region between increasing inequality, high rates of social and political violence, and the reproduction of peripheral and semi-peripheral capitalisms with authoritarian electoral regimes (Kessler, 2009; Schedler, 2016). Thus, inequality and violence increase in an articulated manner with respect to exploitation and securitism, and various actors respond to this situation with the rhetoric and policies of penal populism, while various forms of popular resistance (some expressions of social fascism such as lynchings, others democratic such as community policing, self-defense groups, victims' collectives, observatories, or think tanks) multiply defensively, disjointedly, without a counter-hegemonic program, sometimes through minimal agendas, sometimes contradictory or impractical ones (Fuentes/Fini, 2018).

The enormous heterogeneity of accumulated, interconnected, and regionally distributed forms of regional violence irreversibly harms the most vulnerable (Misse, 2014; Auyero/Berti, 2013; Tenenbaum/Viscardi, 2018; Otamendi, 2015). The lives of victims and their communities are violently reproduced without the governmental victim support systems established to repair the damage being done to restore the opportunities closed off in their social trajectories.

The widespread reproduction of violence at the individual level through illegal networks has been the mechanism by which various territories in our countries, and in some cases institutions or various institutional networks of our national or subnational states, have been controlled. For example: the recruitment of young people by illegal networks; the forced disappearances and murders of journalists, community leaders, and human rights defenders through organized violence; the lethality of militarized police forces; the incarceration of poor youth whose dilemma is migration, incarceration, the barracks, or violent death; femicides; institutionalized racism; new forms of exploitation and precariousness; and the murder of community leaders, journalists, or human rights defenders. These factors predominate over the limited impact of the few and inadequate prevention policies, especially in the new right-wing cycle established in much of the region.

 This diversity of violence has contingent but structurally simultaneous forms; it is episodic, but it becomes routinized as a resource used by perpetrators against victims; it is reproduced as a mechanism for the ephemeral resolution of conflicts, the construction and strengthening of authority and reputation among and/or the extraction of rent and other material or symbolic resources, linking each other in the territories and partly erasing the limits between violence in the family, the street, the neighborhood and public spaces (Auyero/Berti, 2013).

According to González and González (2015), these processes can be best observed through the hypothesis of the differentiated or variable geographical presence of violence and state institutions. Likewise, we believe that, through regional analyses from a historical perspective, the use of quantitative and qualitative methodological resources can be applied to national, subnational, and local trends and dynamics and associated factors, or through methodological strategies such as ethnographies in neighborhoods or institutions, including biograms, biographies, or the biographical method, or other methods such as action research. These methods enable the observation of this social process at the individual, group, and community levels as an incorporated, learned, and socially constructed process, where the micro, meso, and macro dimensions of violent processes are articulated, processes that can be unlearned, mediated, or pacified (Feixa, 2018; Sautu, 2004; OSH, 2014).

            Indeed, the difference between processes of violence in central and peripheral cities of the region compels us to create differentiated maps of regions that specify the types of rural, urban, and cross-border dynamics in which violence unfolds. For us, internal conflict and civil war are not the same, nor is violence within civil war the same as civil war itself (Kalyvas, 2007; Briceño León et al., 2018). The historical context of state-society relations and the role that violence has played and continues to play in the region are fundamental to understanding the types of control, prevention, mediation, or democratic pacification needed in those regions whose rural communities and cities experience varying degrees of conflict or violence (Rodríguez Cuadros, 2015).

In this sense, the project aims to continue contributing to the understanding of violence in its various institutional, social, and private manifestations, in order to evaluate the security policies implemented to date and influence the formulation of coordinated strategies for citizen and human security. Given this complexity, securitism—the recourse to heavy-handed tactics, increased penalties, class, gender, and racial biases in the use of big data for prevention, and the incarceration of impoverished groups—is simplistic and dangerous. Security policies, whether from the right or the progressive left, that have had little experience (whether in the case of community policing or, in a different logic, neighborhood policing) with human or citizen security policies, enable the reproduction of inequalities generated by the cycles of neoliberal accumulation and hegemony in our societies and, worse, in most cases, exacerbate the problem.

            It is evident that the process of accumulation of plural violences is linked to inequality and the hegemony produced by neoliberal regimes in the region, practically the majority. Although some center-left governments, such as in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Chile, have implemented their own security policies with the old police and judicial apparatuses inherited from neoliberal states, paradoxically they have not managed to build citizen or human security policies, while these experiences are the demand of a plurality of social actors who monitor and intervene in these processes through suggestions and annual reports in the region.

            On the contrary, we conceive of the dialogue of knowledge as the opening of university knowledge to the knowledge of social actors in the field of violence. It is a strategy for articulating social experiences that places at the center of the regional debate the construction of knowledge and the impact of scientific research on the social integration of diverse subjects in contexts of inequality, exclusion, and violence (Saravi, 2018). This strategy guarantees a recovery of good regional practices for articulating demands under the principle of citizen and human security, the latter understood as comprehensive security, free from poverty and fear, with social development and access to justice, as well as through respect for human rights and political-democratic rights (Kloppe/Abello, 2018).

To this end, we propose action research on the plurality of violence articulated in vulnerable groups, from the perspective of intersectionality where the precarities of class, race and gender overlap; the undesirable effects of neoliberal securitism and the capacity for resistance and community resilience of social groups affected by these state violences or types of violence associated with neo-extractive megaprojects, understood as a form of defense and construction of post-neoliberal democratic regimes (Wacquant, 2010; Calvo, 2012).

It is true that in past decades, in the region, we have accumulated knowledge about the heterogeneity of violence and security policies through various case studies, regional analyses, and comparative studies, including the work of the aforementioned groups in which the members of this project have participated (Alvarado, 2013; Tavares/Barreira, 2016; Zavaleta, 2015; Barreira, 2008). However, we also observe the atomization or dispersion of analyses that, due to specialization or focus, separate the plurality of interconnected forms of violence from the reproduction of cycles of accumulation and state transformations.

Indeed, we have observed, from different disciplinary angles, the collusion between a neo-extractivist model of accumulation by dispossession, illegal networks and the penal system (Sobering and Auyero, 2019), the financing of the penal economy, human trafficking and anti-immigration policies; the shift from the militarization of the police to military policing in the region with financing and training from centers of power; the increase in the prison population, reproducing the selectivity of the penal system in terms of race and social class and the market of private prisons; the neoliberal policies of state disengagement in matters of the social state and at the same time a punitive shift in matters of security (Kessler, 2013, Otamendi, in press) to name a few, all of them with serious consequences for civil liberties and human rights, social cohesion, equality and democratic stability.

In these circumstances, we believe it is time to reposition our observations within broader structural or cultural processes that give meaning to the valuable case studies developed thus far (Wieviorka, 2004; Dubet, 2015). At the macrosocial level, a series of long-term transformations characterized as “decivilizing” have been identified. According to this author, late modernity saw an articulation with higher levels of exclusion and inequality, weakening social cohesion (Dubet, 2015), the resurgence of racism, and the persecution of minorities and otherness. Similarly, in this context, rigid identities have been replaced by contingent identities and weakened institutions (Dubet, 2002).

On the other hand, regarding the impact of the knowledge built up to now, despite our achievements in the field of security policies, the low influence of studies on insecurity, violence, and citizen security on the design of public policies for human security may be due to the closed self-reproduction of Latin American security, legality, and justice institutions. However, we also believe it is related to the low technical competence—a historical technical deficit in the democratic opposition—to influence, accompany, and systematically evaluate, in a multi-agency manner, processes at different levels of government, where right-wing governments tend toward penal populism based on the incarceration of the poor. It may also be related to the low exchange of experiences between university and community researchers.

In retrospect, a brief inventory of our work in the field of violence studies in the region reveals a number of valuable studies relevant to our objective. However, among them are some Anglo-Saxon texts that reproduce inequalities between nodes in central and peripheral city networks, or that tend to transfer successful global cases without a timely contextualization or detachment from the context in which they occurred. This situation can be characterized as security colonialism, exemplified by zero tolerance (Wacquant, 2010).

Reversing this neoliberal trend, by going against the grain, can be achieved by identifying opportunities in each locality or city (where we will work according to the institutional affiliations of our team members) through a multi-agency approach based on inverse logic. Qualitative or ethnographic observation of violence, comparisons between cases, trend analyses, and evaluations of neoliberal security policies and the resistance of social movements and activists will allow us to develop a complex, multidimensional, methodical, and contextualized agenda that multiplies and articulates resistance within public security policies from the ground up.

This public task, based on state reconstruction from below, demands the deconstruction of security rhetoric, demonstrating its fallacies through case studies and comparative analyses; effective influence on the nodes of progressive left-wing elites, now displaced by the right—except in some countries like Mexico, Bolivia, and Uruguay—through the development of public pronouncements, bulletins, media activism, and the integration of regional coalitions that reconsider government timelines and public agendas to address issues of shared concern, integrated with diverse social actors such as those involved in this proposal, on issues such as gun regulation, the promotion of disarmament, resistance to lowering the age of criminal responsibility, police demilitarization, drug decriminalization, reducing incarceration, and transitional justice for cases of internal conflict of varying intensity, among others.

This strategy involves thinking outside the box, conducting cutting-edge research and scientific innovation, as well as effectively influencing the functioning of security and justice institutions in authoritarian electoral states in the region. This public intervention also requires a shift in the balance of power within the scientific field, because in some of our Latin American societies, the social sciences are subjected to judicial scrutiny in the same way that in developed societies—for example, in France—they are wrongly accused, due to a confusion between scientific and legal judgment, of reproducing a culture of excuses for illegality by sociologically justifying illegal practices (Zavaleta/Alvarado, 2018; Lahire, 2016).

 In these circumstances, we believe that our group can contribute to the achievement of these goals through multi-agency knowledge dialogue with strategic alliances with the organizations that make up this project; the opening of university research programs to the complex observation of the field of violence and the legal field and security policies, including the penal system and the public defense of civil, political and human rights in a counter-hegemonic sense as a reconstruction of the public and democratic strengthening the protection of vulnerable minorities (Sousa Santos, 2014).

This proposal offers a synthesis of diverse experiences from previous research networks of other CLACSO working groups in which we have participated for a decade (Security in Democracy, Security, Violence and Obstacles to Citizenship; Violated, stigmatized and locked up) and the articulation of academic, political and social activism trajectories of the participants through research together with social activism groups that have accumulated regional knowledge and experiences about the shared lines of research (Vargas, 2012; Zavaleta, 2015; Angarita, 2015, Tavares and others, 2017).

The members of this group, whether as expert or emerging researchers, of diverse genders and ethnic backgrounds, and distributed across various countries where the social sciences have developed at different rates, but working in a network, will collaborate on projects based on the topics mentioned above as general lines of research. To this end, we propose following a systematic agenda to which we will all contribute from our respective regions. This agenda ensures that the group members are deeply committed to initiating a new cycle of studies, particularly regarding what we have shared as a Latin American sociology of violence, while remaining aware of the cycle of capital accumulation and the authoritarian electoral regimes that prevail in the region.

Under these circumstances we propose

General Purpose

-Develop a research program on the plurality of violence that intersectionally affects vulnerable groups and all societies in the region, particularly their democratic regimes; on the effects of neoliberal securitism; on the capacity for community resistance and its regressive versions, through the dialogue of knowledge between university researchers, community researchers and progressive political actors for the multisectoral design of policies for a second generation of citizen security programs for the defense and construction of post-neoliberal democratic regimes in Latin America.

The general outlines of our action research program

1. The use of violence as mechanisms for resolving gender, status, ethnic, social, economic, political, intersectional and rent extraction conflicts (arms trafficking, military prohibition of illicit substances, enforced disappearance, human trafficking, lethality of armed and security forces, organized violence, cybercrime, financial and environmental crimes).

2. Security colonialism as the asymmetric and unequal exchanges between central and peripheral elites of neoliberal or progressive security policies and their impacts on freedoms, human rights, human development and democracy, especially on the most vulnerable, stigmatized and invisible groups.

3. Peaceful or violent resistances according to repertoires of protest in defense of life in the face of extractivism (displacements, resistance movements to megaprojects) and different manifestations of violence (in their most negative forms such as lynchings, homicides, femicides, militias and armament; or in their progressive forms, such as care networks, protection of victims, grassroots organizations, regional networks), reproduction of inequalities in vulnerability (confinement of young people and ethnic minorities) and suppression of freedoms through censorship or repression.