Accessing Justice Amidst Inequality: Citizens, Claims-Making and Institutional Reform

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In most of Latin America, justice systems are seen as deeply flawed. Citizens perceive widespread corruption; differential treatment for the rich and poor; and most have low expectations that the state will protect their most basic rights. Since the 1990s, institutional reforms have left the region with gleaming constitutions guaranteeing stronger protections for people’s fundamental rights; legal systems based in oral argumentation; and more explicit connections with and honoring of international human rights treaties. Access to effective justice, however, remains uneven in Latin America, and entrenched inequalities and patterns of exclusion are often replicated within the state’s judicial institutions.
 
This panel draws on comparative evidence from Latin America to ask when, despite these perceived flaws and the region’s high levels of inequality, citizens take on the arduous task of navigating and reforming the state’s legal institutions – from the police, to the courts, to other sites of grievance redressal – and to analyze the material and political consequences of those efforts. When, why and how do citizens look to the state for redress? How do their perceptions of the justice system influence their claims-making behavior? How does inequality impact citizens’ perceptions of and engagement with the justice system? When do people mobilize to demand justice, especially those that have been victims of crime, and how does this mobilization and engagement change depending on whether the perpetrator is the state or criminal networks? Finally, how and why does the state use the language of human rights to legitimize action against these criminal networks?

Sub Track

• Law, Rights, and Citizenship

Session Organizer

• Janice K Gallagher, Rutgers University-Newark

Individual Presentations

• Class, Gender & Race: The Role of Inequality in Citizen Perceptions of and Engagement with Judicial Systems in Latin America - Janice K Gallagher, Rutgers University-Newark; Juliana Restrepo Sanin

• Popular Mistrust of the Justice System and Legal Mobilization in Latin America - Lisa Hilbink, University of Minnesota; Valentina Salas, University of Minnesota

• From Victims to Resilient Citizens: the Policy Feedback Effects of State Violence  - Yanilda M González, University of Chicago

• Resisting Protection: The Politics of Criminal Victimization - Eduardo Moncada, Barnard College, Columbia University

• Urban Securitization in the Name of Human Rights - Lindsay R Mayka, Colby College