Exploring the Punitive Turn, Carceral State, and Sovereignty from Below (1 of 2)

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Over the past two decades, prison populations across Latin America have exploded. Tough-on-crime policies and discourses surrounding ‘citizen security’ (seguridad ciudadana) have soared, often being deployed in political campaigns waged against ‘drug trafficking’ or ‘organized crime’. Yet those imprisoned tend to disproportionately come from historically impoverished sectors of society and marginalized areas. Effectively, this has meant that concerns for citizen security have served to mask (or enhance) practices of criminalization, containment, confinement, and social relegation rather than inclusion and community-building. What they have also intended to delegitimize are particular forms of resistance, practices of ‘sovereignty from below’ (including criminal enterprise) and enactments of ‘extralegal agency’ or insurgent citizenship.
This panel is concerned not only, or not as much, with how the ‘criminal’ Other is constructed in such policy contexts, but especially with how 1) these ‘Others’ experience and deal with the varying forms of confinement and exclusion imposed on them, and 2) with how state agents enact punitive, carceral, and/or what might be seen as ‘new’ authoritarian agendas. Regarding the latter, the intention is to scrutinize the localities and temporalities of the ‘carceral state’ and ‘authority’. In order to do this, we bring together close ethnographic explorations of different confining/sovereign practices and the ways these are enacted and/or experienced. Specifically, we are interested in interrogating how differing techniques and practices of confinement and sovereignty (both from above and from below), shape and are shaped by novel (and not so novel) a search or denial of justice and inclusion.

Sub Track

• Violence and Insecurities

Session Organizers

• Julienne Weegels, Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation CEDLA

• Evi Kostner, Utrecht University

Chair

• Wil G Pansters, Utrecht University

Discussant

• Andrés Antillano, Universidad Central de Venezuela

Individual Presentations

• The Co-creation of Venezuela's Carceral state: Inmate Self-Rule, Punitive Populism and the “Penitentiary Revolution” - Cory Fischer-Hoffman, Lafayette College

• Conflicting Sovereignties: Confinement, Revolt and Repression in Nicaragua - Julienne Weegels, Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation CEDLA

• ICE in the Atmosphere: How Central American Migrants Navigate Immigration Enforcement in the Age of Trump - Anthony W Fontes, American University

• Autonomía, capacidad, estabilidad y formalidad. Una mirada comparativa sobre la participación de los presos en las relaciones gubernamentales en las prisiones en América Latina - Sozzo Maximo