Citizen security: Silencing women and migrants

This special issue of Latin American Policy explores the silences that surround citizen security, particularly how it marginalizes women and excludes migrants as subjects deserving of “security.” It does so by bringing together eight articles that attend to how these silences are compounded in both the analytical lenses and policy applications of citizen security. Focused principally on Mexico, each article offers insight into the exclusionary effects of citizen security. It contrasts with what the literature on the foundations of citizen security purports—its inclusionary and even democratic nature. Made manifest is not just how migrants and female or feminized subjects experience security differently, but also how these differences are often ignored or minimized. Before introducing each contribution, it is important to situate citizen security for readers less familiar with its history and present-day promises. This special issue comes at a moment of flux in security governance in Mexico. Citizen security does not operate in isolation but exists alongside a range of security approaches, old and new. The ongoing, ever-expanding War on Drugs is demonstrative of this complexity. Since 2006, successive administrations have come to rely on the armed forces when confronting organized crime. The result has been a greater presence of the military throughout the Republic, and an expansion in its role—from the protection of strategic infrastructure to its construction and management. The centrality of the military to security is, of course, nothing new. Doctrines of national security previously placed an emphasis on the military and intelligence services. Throughout the Cold War period, the military (alongside paramilitary forces) was directed against those it equated as enemies—primarily opposition groups, from students to workers—rather than organized crime. Although it was an era marked by “dirty wars,” many of the practices deployed and honed during the period remain relevant today (Delgado Barón, 2008, p. 115; Feierstein, 2010, p. 492). Then, as now, the armed forces have been converted into armies of occupation inside Mexican territory. The aim is not just to displace the criminal cartels but to establish areas of military rule. The result of these interventions has raised further questions—from the de facto application of a state of exception that has resulted in the death of civilians, to an inability to displace organized crime and thereby make manifest the weakness of the state as the sole guarantor of security (Estrada Rodríguez, 2017, p. 113). Citizen security operates amid this militarization. Rather than an approach opposed to the active presence of the military, citizen security in Mexico has taken on more ambiguous relations with the armed forces. It is apparent in both its implementation and application. First, a citizen-centered focus to security has come alongside support for more militarized approaches, as demonstrated in negotiations on Plan Merida. Part of a historic accord reached between the United States and Mexico in 2007, the Plan was evidence of growing concern in Washington over the increase in drug-related violence in Mexico. At the same time, negotiations also stipulated that US aid, including a substantial investment in intelligence hardware, was to be made contingent on social approaches to security. The militarized response to the War on Drugs by the Felipe Calderón administration (2006–2012) was not to be replaced. Rather, a citizen-orientated approach to combating violence and delinquency was to operate alongside militarization. Complementing the expanded role of the military were calls for citizens to become active partners in reducing violence. Second, and related, these partnerships reveal an overlap between citizen security and more traditional approaches. The application of citizen security initiatives in Mexico has oscillated from, at one end, genuine engagement with the citizenry to, at the other, repressive mano dura-like policies. For the latter, citizen security initiatives have been aggressively deployed to combat crime, from random delinquency to criminal organizations. Far from necessarily wresting control from a repressive state apparatus, mano dura policies have often extended such repression, albeit by expanding the role of police forces rather than the military. Most recently, this expansion is seen in the creation of a National Guard as a hybrid security force, which initially fell under civilian authority but was later moved to the Secretary of National Defense in 2023. An interest in citizen security accordingly operates alongside forms of governance already sedimented in the logics of national security, be it between militarization and citizen-centric approaches or between citizen security initiatives and an expanded police (cum-military) force. This complexity to citizen security is again apparent in its link with democracy. Already recognized by multiple state and municipal governments from the mid-1990s, citizen security came to national prominence in Mexico in the 2000s. Further consolidated with the transition to democracy, citizen security became an umbrella term adopted by national and international actors to reconcile security with democracy (Bonner, 2014, p. 261). Internationally, both government and nongovernmental organizations throughout Latin America used citizen security to describe concerns about improving social order amid rising crime. Various administrations throughout the region implemented citizen security to restructure the repressive state apparatus (Gasper & Gómez, 2015, p. 107; Neild, 1999, p. 1). In Mexico, the democratic promise of citizen security has been especially prominent in confronting legacies of distrust in the legal systems and in the multiple reforms directed at the police forces, but just how democratic is citizen security? Multiple authors note how citizen security reduces active citizen engagement (Muggah, 2017), how individuals are robbed of their democratic potential (Ungar, 2009), and how citizen security initiatives reproduce docile actors who are to accept their status as perpetually at risk (Schott, 2013). Often on display are forms of security that are defined by security officials and implemented at their discretion. Citizens are gradually brought into security governance, but in such a manner that reduces the ambit of possible political action. These citizen security initiatives might be less repressive than the practices associated with mano dura, but they remain violent. Contributing to this nascent literature, this special issue explores citizen security in relation to two historically excluded groups—women and migrants. If the former are implicitly excluded through their collapse into a universal understanding of the citizen, then the latter are explicitly excluded for not being “citizens.” The special issue operates within these exclusions. First, it explores how gender-based violence requires tailored solutions that must necessarily extend the remit of citizen security. Demonstrated is how citizen security's primary focus on public space not only universalizes how violence is lived but also marginalizes domestic violence as it occurs in the private sphere. Second, it examines how migrants’ recourse under citizen security is limited, despite migration being central to contemporary violence in Mexico, be it violence against (trans-)migrants or criminal networks of human trafficking. The special issue begins with an analysis of the social-historic context from which citizen security emerges. R. Guy Emerson situates citizen security initiatives in Mexico amid three principal themes—a political legacy of national security, an analytical legacy of human security, and an economic legacy of neoliberalism. Demonstrated are legal and institutional reforms with the implementation of citizen security that, in principle, move beyond doctrines of national security. In practice, however, these changes operate alongside forms of governance already sedimented in the militarized logics of national security. Marianne H. Marchand further explores this tendency and its intersection with the growing militarization of security in Mexico. Problematized is the idea that citizen security overcomes the militarized focus of national security, instead demonstrating a degree of continuity between the logics of security, both past and present. Anne Sisson Runyan then interrogates how security is defined, noting its implicit (and necessary) silences when it comes to questions of gender—silences that are only exacerbated when applied to policy positions in Mexico. Put forward is a feminist critique of the Mexican National Action Plan for Women, Peace, and Security as Janus-faced. The plan is Janus-faced insofar as it emphasizes a commitment to women's security elsewhere, while failing to address domestic insecurities as experienced by women, migrants, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and other marginalized groups within Mexico. Turning to questions of migration, Philippe Stoesslé asks, if security takes the citizen as its referent object, what does it mean for non-citizens? Through analysis of security initiatives in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Stoesslé reveals the everyday practices of exclusion that migrants face, exclusions exacerbated by citizen security initiatives. Jeaqueline Flores Álvarez continues with a situated application of security, by turning to questions of public safety amid an increase in alcohol consumption. Citizen security does not operate in a vacuum but is situated amid local practices and histories that potentially complicate any universal appreciation of security goals and citizen aspirations. Rebecca Bell-Martin and Alejandro Díaz Domínguez develop this socially situated approach further by revealing how social attitudes toward migrant communities perpetuate this already institutionalized discrimination. Through a detailed analysis of how Mexican society empathizes with migrants, the authors reveal an additional sociocultural undercurrent of discrimination. Laura Gómez-Mera locates her analysis amid broader transnational trends to explore questions of rights and responsibilities at the heart of citizen security. Written in a context in which the migrant experience is becoming increasingly precarious, Gómez-Mera interrogates the tension between the stated commitments of citizen security to protect the rights of migrants and other vulnerable groups and the evermore violent realities. Finally, in their contribution, Tony Payan and Karla Iroazem Delgado Hernández turn to the underlying question of how citizen security and migration play out in the context of Ciudad Juárez, previously the epicenter of citizen security initiatives at a municipal level. Payan and Delgado Hernández map the practices of social inclusion and exclusion for migrants by outlining the challenges of inclusion for both migrants and residents as each perceive their time in Ciudad Juárez as transitory. The special issue of Latin American Policy has been funded by the Puentes Consortium. We would like to thank the Puentes Consortium, as it has provided an invaluable forum through which to unite the abovementioned specialists in gender, migration, and security studies and to produce this special issue, “Citizen security: silencing women and migrants.” R. Guy Emerson is a professor in the Department of International Relaciones and Political Science at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. His work focuses on the intersection of life and security, both in Latin America and internationally. In the last two years, he has published in Theory & Event, Critical Studies on Security, International Political Sociology, and, Latin American Research Review. Marianne H. Marchand is a retired professor at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla and was a visiting professor at Carleton University (Canada). She is a member of the SNII (level 3) and is the academic editor of Third World Quarterly.

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