Law's End: Community Justice, Citizen Security, and Human Rights in Evo's Bolivia

FAIN: FT-57444-10

Daniel Marc Goldstein
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8559)

The objective of this project is to explore the conjuncture of two powerful transnational discourses -- security and human rights -- examining their deployments and transformations in daily social practice to reveal the ways in which "security" ultimately can work to defeat "rights," as violent local actors operate within and against national and transnational formations of politics and law. The project examines, historically and ethnographically, the circumstances facing the indigenous residents of a marginal urban neighborhood in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a community to which the official institutions of law do not extend, and where people are essentially abandoned to face crime and violence without the protection of the democratic state and its rule of law. The project asks: What is the nature of security in the modern world, and to what lengths are individuals, communities, and societies willing to go to attain it?

Associated Products

Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City (Book)
Title: Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City
Author: Daniel M. Goldstein
Editor: Gisela Fosado
Abstract: In Outlawed, Daniel M. Goldstein reveals how indigenous residents of marginal neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance security with rights. Feeling abandoned to the crime and violence that grip their communities, they sometimes turn to vigilante practices, including lynching, to apprehend and punish suspected criminals. Goldstein describes those in this precarious position as "outlawed": not protected from crime by the law but forced to comply with legal measures in other areas of their lives, their solutions to protection criminalized while their needs for security are ignored. He chronicles the complications of the government's attempts to provide greater rights to indigenous peoples, including a new constitution that recognizes "community justice." He also examines how state definitions of indigeneity ignore the existence of marginal neighborhoods, continuing long-standing exclusionary practices. The insecurity felt by the impoverished residents of Cochabamba—and, more broadly, by the urban poor throughout Bolivia and Latin America—remains. Outlawed illuminates the complex interconnections between differing definitions of security and human rights at the local, national, and global levels.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/outlawed
Primary URL Description: DUP website
Access Model: no
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8223-531
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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