In recent decades, Latin America has witnessed a transformation in the modes, actors, and intensities of violence. Following the wave of bloody military dictatorships that crushed the vast majority of armed struggles in the region, the development of constitutional regimes consolidated processes of democratization (at least in a formal and procedural sense) that led to a decline in political violence and a unanimous condemnation of state-sponsored repression and extermination (despite the fact that human rights violations continue in numerous countries across the continent). However, parallel spaces of violence (in the plural) have emerged, linked to various forms of illegality, the expansion of informal and illegal economies (primarily the trade in drugs, weapons, and people), and the perceived weakness or complicity of state institutions in addressing these problems, resulting in a consequent distrust of these institutions by citizens (Alba Vega and Kruijt, 2007). In Latin America, violence has multiplied and become heterogeneous and complex: the subcontinent is one of the regions with the highest homicide rates on the planet despite not having wars between countries. In this sense, the region today reveals violence with other faces, other agents, other aims: a violent pluralism (Desmond and Goldstein, 2010), which includes active segments of civil society in its manifestations, making them its protagonists.

In this context, vigilantism emerges as one of the most relevant and socially impactful dimensions of this violence. In recent decades, strategic responses to risk containment have appeared among segments of rural and urban communities, both marginalized and from middle and upper-middle-class sectors. These responses involve vigilant actions against collective violence, including lynchings, self-defense groups, militias, neighborhood organizations, paramilitaries, and even parallel security and justice institutions within their communities.

The events mentioned here are not exclusive to Latin America. The appropriation of security by communities or collectives to which vigilantism appeals has become visible since the 1990s and 2000s worldwide, in documented experiences in African countries such as Nigeria, Mozambique, and South Africa (Saunders, 2011; Pratten, 2006), European countries such as Russia and Northern Ireland (Frank, 2017; Monaghan, 2011), and Asian countries such as Thailand and Chechnya (Schuberth, 2013). In fact, the contemporary notion of vigilantism appears associated with the characterization of a series of actions in the southern United States towards the second half of the 19th century, linked to criminal, political and social control (Thurston, 2011; Phillips, 1987) and the marking of racial distances (Favarel-Garrigues & Gayer, 2016; Buur & Jensen, 2004; Buur, 2010, Brown, 1975).

Studies on vigilantism in Latin America, which emerged primarily in the late 1980s, have followed two main lines of inquiry: on the one hand, those that view it as a product of the macrostructural social and economic transformations resulting from the implementation of the neoliberal shift in the late 1970s. This has led to more unequal, heterogeneous, and fragmented societies characterized by segregation and social polarization, a proliferation of violence, and the circulation of stigmatizing hate speech directed at a perceived "dangerous other" (Ariza, 2018), generally comprised of various subaltern groups that bear the brunt of vigilante violence (migrants, youth, marginalized communities, among others). On the other hand, another set of studies has addressed the issue from the perspective of institutional dynamics, local political cultures, and the collective organizational capacities and resources in the communities where vigilantism has emerged. Thus, these approaches have considered that the emergence of these actions is linked to the existence of spaces where the relationship between the State and society is tenuous, with a clear difficulty for the State to monopolize the use of violence (Huggins, 1991; Martins, 1995; Benevides, 1984; Guerrero, 2000; Castillo, 2000), and under a coexistence of other legal orders, such as the community-traditional one, which confront and compete with positive legality (Vilas, 2006). This latter line of interpretation—strongly debated in recent years—has positioned collective violence as a practice permitted by the customs and traditions of indigenous or traditional communities.

The comparative study of vigilantism in various Latin American countries, conducted by this Working Group over the past three years and involving researchers from 13 countries in the region, has generated new lines of research, understanding, and analysis of contemporary vigilantism in relation to Anglo-Saxon literature. This includes considering its contextual modifications, its variability over time, and its increasing incorporation as a legitimate action within different repertoires of conflict. In short, we can point to at least three conceptual advances compared to previous lines of research, based on our empirical investigations. The first is that the State is not necessarily absent from vigilant actions, nor can it be characterized as inherently weak. Rather, it becomes relevant intermittently and gradually in the coordination or permissiveness of these actions, in what could be considered a type of extended security governance. The second advance posits that not all vigilantism disrupts state institutions. Conversely, some vigilant actions foster citizen participation in strengthening the rule of law in crime prevention (Fuentes, Gamallo, Quiroz, in press). The third argument maintains that the powers permitted by the customs and traditions of indigenous or traditional communities are not causally linked to collective vigilant violence. It has been shown (Gamallo, 2014; Fuentes Díaz & Binford, 2001), in the Guatemalan and Mexican cases, that the increasing frequency of lynchings in districts with a greater indigenous presence is not due to the appeal to customs and traditions, but rather to a community response to a situation of structural insecurity. Through the dialogues held in the Working Group, we have identified that these events express a need to restore a threatened order and an articulation of legitimacy that does not rest entirely on state institutions, but is instead dispersed across multiple areas. In this sense, vigilantism expresses a relocation of the authority that guarantees order, a process in which other entities hold it to a greater extent than the State, reformulating claims about justice and alternative ways of obtaining it.

We believe that vigilantism redefines the public and private security agenda in Latin America and expands the notion of security governance through the incorporation of non-state actors, making it relevant to understanding diverse forms of intersectional violence. The results of our research reveal that vigilantism and collective violence are not only current issues in most countries but also phenomena connected to historical processes of state formation and political subjectivities, as well as to the structural transformations resulting from recent neoliberal reforms. The Working Group thus contributes to the consolidation of a field of research, teaching, dissemination, and outreach within the social sciences, employing specific theoretical and methodological strategies within the field of violence studies.

This Working Group aims to characterize, analyze, and compare the diverse forms of collective punitive violence (González et al., 2011; Gamallo, 2020) that have emerged vigorously in Latin America and have been grouped for conceptual understanding under the term vigilantism. We propose to deepen the study of these actions in their connection with other practices and scenarios in the region, such as the emergence of multiple forms of violence and the context of insecurity, the generation of social control practices in response to crime, specific forms of community regulation of security, their use as a repertoire in political contestation, their use as political intermediation with the State, in the micropolitics of managing illegal activities, as well as in the hybrid governance of insecurity, among other processes included in what can be considered security governance.

The proposal offers three contributions to the understanding of vigilantism in Latin America. First, by adding perspectives to the emerging academic literature on the concept of vigilantism. Second, by contributing to the collective understanding of the methodologies that can be used to analyze a phenomenon that is difficult to study empirically in a systematic way. And third, by contributing to theories of the conditions under which civil society and state actors mobilize to generate regulatory vigilantist practices.

In all interpretations of this phenomenon and in all the forms that these social appropriations of security take in Latin America, justice emerges as a substantial component (Candotti et al., 2019). Testimonies gathered from witnesses to these events confirm that their recurrence is directly linked to the social perception of widespread impunity. This impunity is sustained by legal justice systems, both by the lack of judicial agents in local communities and by the low ratio of judges per capita in the countries of the region, which is below the world average (Le Clercq, 2016). From this perspective, one of the lines of research developed in the region has vigorously focused on the issue of state formation, exploring how the institutions of different Latin American countries have allowed for levels of structural impunity, as well as ethnic and class bias in access to justice. In this line of thought, a recent investigation on Chile and Argentina (Quiroz, 2022), regarding the reaction of the justice administration system to lynchings, observes that even lynching violence often goes unpunished.

Another dimension, situated within the characterization and effects of neoliberalism, has been its relationship with public security policies. This has been addressed in two parallel but interconnected areas. On the one hand, there is the “punitive turn,” consisting of the application of repressive security policies, the hardening of penalties, and an increase in police violence marked by an authoritarian and violent discourse that emerges against the backdrop of new social consensuses on contemporary forms of punishment (Rodríguez, 2020). In this sense, various studies have critically demonstrated how hegemonic media legitimize collective violence against subjects constructed as dangerous, such as young men and those from marginalized communities (Baquero, 2015; Focás, 2016). On the other hand, some appropriations of security are fostered by the State through citizen participation policies that accompanied this shift, involving collectives and communities that, on occasion, evolve into various forms of vigilantism (González, 2021; Dikenstein, 2019; Caravaca, 2014). In some cases, the involvement of private companies in security governance strategies is even promoted, including the participation of the ICT market in hybrid security regimes (human-non-human / public-private), which are intertwined with the phenomenon of collective violence.

Regarding the punitive shift in the region, in recent years the implementation of security policies such as the War on Drugs in Mexico (2006) and Democratic Security in Colombia (2002) have incorporated new variables into the understanding of vigilantism, such as violence perpetrated by non-state armed actors, the militarization of internal security, and the autonomy of entire regions in relation to national or local states. Thus, we observe that the recourse to vigilantism and collective violence reshapes local political environments through conflict with armed actors—state or otherwise—redefining the public-private relationship and thereby producing new forms of statehood and citizenship.

Finally, it can be said that vigilantist actions unfold as forms of collective action available to certain actors in specific circumstances, forming repertoires of action (Tilly, 2007). Some research has emphasized the subjective nature of punitive collective actions, suggesting that their incorporation as a repertoire of action reveals cultures not shaped by the grammars of official statehood (Fuentes, 2017). Along these lines, some authors have focused on the capacity of certain communities to activate collective actions and the relationship of these episodes to the culture of struggle and social movements in each particular territory (Gamallo, 2020). Empirical studies have shown that vigilantist collective actions occur more frequently in territories with stronger organizational traditions that typically rely on collective problem-solving (Gamallo, 2014; Mendoza, 2004).

The studies developed by this Working Group lead us to understand that the expressiveness of violence, its ritualization, and its recurrence only make sense when we consider how societies and state frameworks have been formed and the conflictive relationships that have mediated long historical cycles, as well as their degree of efficiency in social regulation. In this sense, the intensity of violence and the incorporation of different patterns of confrontation as collective actions are related to governmental capacities, institutional strengths, and their subjective inscriptions in the social fabric over time. From this perspective, we can understand the variability of these actions in the region, which could be considered hard and soft forms of vigilantism—this characterization being one of the group's specific findings.

This proposal for the continuation of our Working Group seeks to account for the destructive dynamics produced by these actions, as well as to envision, with the information gathered, alternatives that can be translated into public policies to mitigate the effects of various violent social conflicts. We hope that this framework for interpreting the phenomenon and the plurality of perspectives from which it is approached will contribute to identifying tensions and points of convergence and divergence among the different approaches, thus outlining a regional field of study that allows us to identify similarities and nuances at different scales: sub-state, state, regional, and global.

Finally, a key factor for our Working Group is human resource development. We will integrate undergraduate and graduate students into research on this topic. Furthermore, we have established links with actors from organized civil society and government sectors focused on security and peace processes, with whom we will deepen this relationship and continue to collaborate on public policy development.