Legitimizing Coercion: The moral politics of emergency rule in Peru

• In Event: Democratic Institutions and the Law (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Law Section)

Abstract

Across contemporary democracies, emergency measures such as expanded police powers, military deployments, and the suspension of civil liberties are increasingly normalized responses to insecurity. Scholars influenced by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben interpret such measures as sovereign assertions that erode democratic order. Research on democratic backsliding similarly treats emergency powers as instruments of executive overreach. Yet these approaches struggle to explain why citizens often support coercive emergency rule. This paper addresses that puzzle through an ethnographic study of repeated States of Emergency (SoEs) in Callao, Peru, a port city widely associated with organized crime and extortion. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024, including interviews with police officers, prosecutors, policymakers, and residents, as well as extended participant observation, the study examines how emergency rule is made legitimate in everyday life. Rather than viewing SoEs solely as legal instruments, I conceptualize their legitimacy as a moral and practical accomplishment co-produced by state actors and citizens. I argue that emergency governance in Callao becomes legitimate through three intertwined processes. First, coercion is framed as morally necessary to compensate for institutional weakness and bureaucratic inefficiency. Second, visible force is experienced as protection, producing affective reassurance even when it entails expanded police powers. Third, emergency rule is collectively authorized through shared diagnoses of crisis that render extraordinary measures reasonable and even desirable. These findings complicate dominant accounts of democratic erosion by showing that emergency rule is not simply imposed from above. Instead, it is sustained through shared moral reasoning about responsibility, safety, and state obligation. The paper highlights how, under conditions of chronic insecurity, the suspension of rights can be interpreted not as democracy’s failure but as its possible defense.

Author

• Andrea Roman Alfaro, University of New Mexico