The objective of our working group is to contribute to the construction of a knowledge and research system in Latin America and the Caribbean that comprehensively studies the dimensions linking the mechanisms of different forms of government and the plurality of violence that decisively influence and affect the reconfiguration of the democratic landscape in the region. The sophistication of governance technologies is particularly compelling for our studies; we consider it vital to focus on them through analysis that allows us to reconstruct a possible map—not unique or unequivocal—of combinations and interconnectedness of the matrix of the neoliberal art of governing from the Latin American experience (Murillo, 2013, 2018).

In the early decades of the 21st century, center-left Latin American governments implemented inclusive social policies and multilateral-oriented international policy strategies. However, at the same time, in the field—and culture—of social control, these same governments saw an intensification of various actions that strengthened—and reconfigured—repressive policies, such as a greater police presence in cities and the expansion of the criminal justice system. This led to harsher punishments and a systematic increase in the prison population without a reduction in levels of social violence and crime.

The enormous heterogeneity of linked and regionally distributed forms of violence irreversibly harms the most vulnerable (Misse, 2014; Auyero/Berti, 2013; Tenenbaum/Viscardi, 2018; Otamendi, 2015). The problem ranges from the assassination of journalists, community leaders, and human rights defenders through organized violence; the lethality of militarized police forces; to the incarceration of poor youth whose dilemma is migration, confinement, imprisonment, or violent death. The lives of the victims and their communities are violently reproduced without the established government systems for victim assistance managing to positively impact their social trajectories (Ginga, 2019).

This diversity of violence takes contingent but structurally simultaneous forms; it is episodic, yet 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, governing territories and partially erasing the boundaries between violence in the family, on the street, in the neighborhood, and in public spaces (Auyero/Berti, 2013). Likewise, the difference between processes of violence in central and peripheral cities (Briceño León, 2018) of the region compels us to create a diversified map of regions that specifies the types of rural, urban, and cross-border dynamics in which violence unfolds.

The widespread reproduction of violence through illegal networks has been the mechanism by which various territories, and in some cases various institutional networks of our national or subnational states, have been controlled; for example, the recruitment of young people by illegal networks and enforced disappearances (Chinas Salazar, 2019). Therefore, it is crucial to establish the impact of organized crime on democracy in its different dimensions, such as electoral processes, local governance, human rights violations, and the effects on communities and society in general. Likewise, it is essential to examine the relationship between organized crime and political power, and its influence on democracy.

In turn, the increased cruelty inflicted on the bodies of murdered people has become increasingly noticeable in recent years. The spectacle of violence is on display in cities in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, where, according to Reguillo Cruz (2021), dying no longer seems to be enough. This reveals not only a profound crisis of modernity but also violates all limits imposed by the emotional and sensory structures formed within it, limits of what is civilly tolerable (Elias, 2009). The suffering caused by these situations requires a thorough investigation of the conditions that give rise to these instances of suffering perpetrated by the State; but also, and fundamentally, it requires highlighting the conditions that will allow this problem to gain relevance on public agendas and become an urgent priority for democratic governments (Tavares Dos Santos et al., 2022) worldwide.

It is worth noting the globalization of social conflicts, which alters norms and values ​​and generates transnational social movements, such as feminism, environmentalism, and mobilizations or migrations to large cities. Similarly, this unleashes a process of social exclusion: computerized and digital exclusion, resulting in a vast number of people without homes, food, land, or work; and a crisis of future prospects for young people. Furthermore, a generation marked by discouragement is emerging. Many social forces of resistance have arisen in this 21st century, from protests to movements across diverse social sectors seeking alternatives within the context of global development.

Therefore, understanding the historical context of state-society relations and the role that violence has played in the region is fundamental to comprehending the types of control, prevention, mediation, or democratic pacification in those regions whose rural communities and cities experience varying degrees of conflict or violence (Rodríguez Cuadros, 2015). Focusing on the contexts of our countries to prevent all forms of violence—including femicides, institutional, diffuse, structural, ethnic/racial violence, and violence generated by a geopolitics of drugs rooted in micro-trafficking, subsistence crime (Duque, 2015), and the struggle for illegal markets—becomes essential for detecting authoritarian and fascist forms of political violence that threaten democracies.

As we have mentioned, in recent decades crime has increased in the region, as have violent dynamics, the mechanisms for controlling organized crime at different territorial scales and the State administration where the relationship between organized crime and political power (Duncan, 2014) is increasingly visible or legitimized, which challenges us to continue expanding the discussion on forms of government from the criminal issue and its impacts on the functioning of democratic regimes, in aspects such as electoral processes, local governance, violations of human rights, and the effects on community and societal organizations.

However, policy initiatives based on alternative, grassroots conceptions of human security or citizen security have borne fruit. Now, the key question, when we refer to public policy, is to analyze how the articulation between different levels of social control—bureaucracy, police, public administration, politics, and non-governmental organizations—is processed, and what the specific weight of various actors—legal and illegal, individual and collective—is in the production of an alternative security framework for all citizens. In short, our project continues its contribution to the understanding of violence by reconstructing a map that reveals the facets of how governments shape criminality and the fissures that delegitimize governments and weaken democracy. A sharp examination of these issues will allow us to effectively influence power dynamics that favor resistance.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, in the latter years of the 21st century, we have witnessed the renewal of the neoliberal governmental matrix, which finds ways to impose itself in various countries through elections, coups d'état, or the social, economic, and media destabilization of governments. Some of the clearest expressions of these processes have been the exponential increase in organized economic crime (Pegoraro, 2015; Bergman, 2018), the plundering of human and social rights, the precarization of workers, the repression of social protest, and the increase in violence perpetrated by state security forces—in many cases allied with non-state sectors—as the sole response to mitigate social conflict. This is not merely an update of the economic program, but rather a quest to naturalize and create the conditions for establishing ways of life that align with the core values ​​of the neoliberal art of governing (Murillo, 2013).

Over the years, the Working Group has made significant contributions to understanding violence, crime, and how governments address them. Group members Tavares dos Santos and Barreira (2016) point out a paradox in recent years in Latin America: inclusive social policies, which in some countries have led to a significant increase in the purchasing power of social classes at the beginning of the 21st century, are accompanied by an intensification of repressive security policies. Therefore, it is essential to consider that we are facing a penal social control state that, while exhibiting nuances in certain countries, shares several common characteristics. This state operates through repressive police forces, a punitive judiciary resistant to democratization, and the growth of private security services, police forces, and prisons, which in turn strengthen the "police-industrial complex" and the concept of public security. This type of security is equivalent to the security of the State and the dominant classes and is synonymous with a "Reason of State": elements that have been and are key in the construction of the modern State (Tavares Dos Santos and Barreira, 2016: 31).

When we turn our attention to the workings of the justice system, we realize that the notion of paradoxes also applies. While efforts are made to expand the rights of minorities and vulnerable groups through the justice system, the limits and challenges of a punitive justice system become apparent, as it ends up reproducing various forms of institutional violence and intensifying social inequalities, as in cases of gender-based violence and conflict. The issue of gender-based violence is central to this debate and continues to be considered within the sphere of state control bodies (police, judiciary, prison system) with little attention paid to other dimensions: community relations, the socialization process of new generations, which are also fundamental for deconstructing these forms of violence (Fachinetto, 2016:434).

In this context, it is important to highlight the thousands of victims of the war on drugs; the reports of torture suffered by people deprived of their liberty in prisons; police violence against young men, especially those from poor backgrounds (Guemureman, 2015), and against Black and Indigenous populations (Calazans et al., 2019); the increase in cases of gender-based violence and femicide (Segato, 2013); violence against children and young people (Gayol and Kessler, 2018; Tenenbaum et al., 2021); the phenomenon of hundreds of thousands of enforced disappearances (Maldonado Aranda, 2022; Delacroix, 2020); political violence; and the punitive culture that permeates the social fabric and legitimizes authoritarian state practices. These are major challenges facing both academia and public policy in Latin America. An academy in action, not only in the sense of seeking an analytical understanding of these phenomena, but also of mapping and systematizing social struggles and resistance against violence as horizons from which democratic societies, respectful of human rights, can be built.

This working group proposal aims to continue building and democratizing knowledge based on the accumulated knowledge produced in previous groups, giving continuity to critical and original problematizations in the face of a challenging scenario that threatens democracy. It draws on previous research experiences from other CLACSO working groups, in which we have participated for over a decade (Security in Democracy, Security, Violence and Obstacles to Citizenship; Violated, Stigmatized and Imprisoned; Violence, Security Policies and Resistance) and the articulation of the academic, political, and social activism trajectories of the participants, who have accumulated regional knowledge and experiences in shared lines of research (Zavaleta, 2015; Angarita, 2015; Tavares et al., 2019).

In short, the members of this group, as expert or trainee researchers, of multiple genders, from different ethnic backgrounds, distributed in various countries where the social sciences have unequal developments, but in a network, will work on the lines of research.

General objectives:

To contribute to the construction of a knowledge system on violence, governments and democracy based on a dialogue of knowledge between academia, institutions and social groups that influence the multisectoral design of policies and interventions in the field of citizen security that contribute to the real strengthening of democratic regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Develop a research-action program on the modes of governance - state and non-state - of the criminal issue, its consequences in the social and political life of citizens, the violation of the rights of the most disadvantaged groups, and how they weaken the democratic regimes of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Lines of work:

State and non-state modes of governance, whether legal or illegal, institutional or ad hoc. This includes research on security policies from a governance perspective, and the prevention of crime and violence from a governmentality perspective. It also encompasses analyses of the governance of criminal and paramilitary organizations as regulatory mechanisms in the territories of political power, illegal markets, criminal diversification, and violence.

The use of violence as a mechanism for resolving different social, political, cultural, and digital conflicts, as well as for the adoption of different forms of government.

Political violence and extreme ideological stances, hate speech and narratives, and the use of digital space and mass media to create the conditions for the establishment of fascism in Latin America. The risk this poses to democracies. Power dynamics, not necessarily found within state institutions, are undermining the consensus achieved after the end of dictatorial regimes and the restoration of democracy in several countries of our continent.

Peaceful or violent resistances according to repertoires of protest in defense of life in cases of extractivism 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) and the reproduction of inequalities in vulnerability (confinement of young people and ethnic minorities).