Police as state: Governing citizenship through violence

Abstract

In this chapter, Guillermina Seri and Jinee Lokaneeta argue that police abuse reproduces “violent exclusions” from citizenship in democracies. In particular, it makes visible a biopolitical mechanism generating categories of individuals allowed access to different levels of citizenship, or none, in ways that echo dominant class, racial, caste, religious, or gender hierarchies in a society. Rooted in political theory, the chapter draws on a most different comparison of the illustrative cases of Argentina and India. Despite their contrasting historical and institutional trajectories, India and Argentina converge on their uneven conditions in guaranteeing citizenship rights. Their findings highlight parallel mechanisms of informal, legal or extralegal state violence, institutional practices, and public discourse through which states regulate access to rights and citizenship that tend to remain concealed and tolerated.