Contesting the semantics of security

Original drawing for Ojalá by @PazConNadie.

Books • Susana Draper • March 26, 2024 • Leer en castellano

This is the first excerpt from the introduction to Libres y sin miedo: Feminist horizons and alternative justice by Susana Draper, which was published by Tinta Limón in February of this year. Click here to read the second excerpt.

Neoliberal economic policies have prompted the intensification of structural violence and the rise of new security paradigms that encourage a reliance on policing and the criminalization of poverty and social struggle.

Loïc Wacquant argues neoliberal policies create the sensation that "crime" has increased when what has actually increased is selective criminalization, which these policies depend upon.

For her part, Maristella Svampa uses the term "security state" in her analysis of state restructuring under neoliberalism. She describes a political-legal geography marked by an increase in the number of police and their powers as a means to deal with conflict through the criminalization of different groups (poor youth, migrants, political and social organizations).

The proposals to lower the age of criminal responsibility in different Latin American countries over the last decade, which often surface in the context of political campaigns, are a point on this map. In the context of increasingly criminalized lives and communities, seeking to control crime from above reinforces systemic violence.

Our ability to understand struggles to end violence must go hand in hand with transforming the world in which such violence exists—and mutates—over time.

Being able to imagine alternative horizons of accountability and justice is key. The usual official response to gender-based violence is to reinforce the security mechanisms of the patriarchal and neoliberal state. But these measures are put in place as part of the same process of securitization that has generated a historic increase in the imprisonment of women.

Struggling against violence in a historical moment—in which criminalization and imprisonment are the state's main tools—requires that we sharpen our analysis and expand our understanding of justice. This is something we have learned through collective processes of politicization regarding the experiences of imprisoned women, in which the denunciation of gender violence sets off a multiplicity of state and capitalist dispossessions.

This is why we must consider the question of justice within a broader horizon of social and ethical justice and dignified life.  

Punitive power and neoliberal violence

Tensions and debates around justice and feminism are not new, but they have intensified in the heat of unfolding of sexual abuse allegations stemming from #MeToo and struggles against femicide.

The issue of feminism and justice is often approached from a legal or juridical perspective, especially when sexual violence or femicide are at issue. This can lead to separating these events from the broader map of violence within which they occur. This has consequences at different levels.

On the one hand, it leaves out how violence increases as the material conditions for sustaining life become more precarious. The more violence increases, the more it reinforces a system of criminalization that selectively punishes those who have been made most precarious.

This generates a cycle of violence that feeds on itself and which it is difficult to break.

On the other hand, by placing trust in the existing judicial system, solutions are proposed that present the state as a neutral, impartial figure.

When we look at this issue from a perspective that takes into account the complexity of interpersonal, state and capitalist violence, the question of punitivism ceases to be a moral issue, and we can understand it within the framework of neoliberalism.

In other words, when we stop framing punitivism or anti-punitivism as an issue of the correct moral position regarding punishment, we can understand how it functions within the economic system of neoliberalism, characterized as it is by the criminalization of the violence generated by the precariousness of life that it produces.

Cuts to the basic necessities of life (housing, health, education), which are called social "spending" in the neoliberal era, have generated a profound crisis in the material conditions required for the social reproduction of life. This is accentuated by a frontal attack on the kinds of labor historically carried out by women and feminized bodies.

Through "structural adjustments" in the 1980s and cuts to social spending in the 1990s, a "security" policy was installed at the hemispheric level that equates "more security" with more police, more militarization and more criminalization.

Today's debates urge us to search for and unearth a longer and more fragmentary history of feminist abolitionism (in the North) or anti-punitivism (in the South). The poetics of these movements illuminate an extensive history of analysis toward liberation and social dis/incarceration.

Toward a horizon of justice and freedom

It is important to create meanings that do not fall into semantic equivalence between "security" and surveillance systems, police and military apparatus, so that our struggles are not caught up in producing more repression and militarization of everyday life, which, as we know, generates more violence.

In official discourse, "security" is separated from the material conditions of life and is reduced to police and military management. Feminists have insisted on a vision of security tied to the possibility of territorial defense, housing, food, education and the desire to live with dignity.

In contesting the meaning of security, we must forge an analysis beyond the ways in which we are told to think and feel. That is how we can begin to articulate our vision of the worlds we want to inhabit.

What can we do to feel secure and be part of communities in which all people live in dignity? Why are the media and the police so keen to make us feel fearful and unsafe, leading those most protected by the system to feel victimized and justifying ever expanding systems of control?

In the spirit of Claudia Cesaroni's astute and complex mapping, we can move toward deploying meanings to think through "security" beyond the limitations and negations expressed by many "nos" (i.e., don't get mugged, don't get robbed, don't get raped). Fear mongering in the mainstream media rests on these "nos," while ignoring the fear of eviction, of going hungry, of not having an income, of price hikes, of being fired, or of going deep into debt in order to survive.

Within the neoliberal framework, discourses of "security" have been limited to crime and delinquency, gangs and drugs. These discourses reduce our capacity to imagine living in a way in which security does not come from security guards, from putting up bars, from surveillance cameras and police, but rather from communities capable of sustaining dignified social relations.

It is crucial to understand how these problems are interconnected so as to broaden the dimensions of struggles to give the word "security" different meanings that are tied to the possibility of living with dignity.