Rebuilding Citizenship after State Violence

• In Event: Security and Citizenship in Latin America

Abstract

This paper examines why and how individuals from disadvantaged sectors of society mobilize in response to these lethal human rights violations committed by state security forces in democracies, drawing on ethnographic evidence from Brazil. It develops the concept of state-induced trauma to characterize the ongoing nature of victimization at the hands of democratic states in particular. Building on a growing literature on victimization and political participation, I propose two mechanisms that elucidate the processes by which individuals who experience state-induced trauma come to engage in collective action against the state. First, I argue that refutation of stigma can serve as an important individual catalyst of mobilization among family members of victims of police violence. Second, I argue that two socialization processes within civil society organizations, namely the construction of shared identities and political learning, serve as collective catalysts of mobilization. I then demonstrate how these specific pathways to mobilization shape how victims’ families mobilize, leading to collective action frames that emphasize intersectional identities in making meaning of state violence and right-based claims-making strategies, which I call resilient citizenship. The concept of resilient citizenship argues that, under certain conditions, the marginalized citizens affected by these processes reclaim agency and reassert citizenship. It underscores the agency of marginalized citizens and existing power relations, shifting the object of study from policy interventions to change citizens to increase their resilience, to mobilization by affected citizens to change the state in order to reduce risk and adversity caused by the state itself.

Author

• Yanilda Maria Gonzalez, Harvard University