Urban securitization and human rights in Colombia.
Lindsay Mayka
Assistant Professor, Colby College
October 26, 2018 12:00PM E53-482, Millikan Room
We'd like to invite you to the fourth Latin American Working Group session this semester. Lindsay Mayka from Colby College will be presenting her work on urban securitization and human rights in Colombia.
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP using the following link so we can get an adequate head count: https://goo.gl/forms/3xPNZO7ySyWXMbss1
WHO: Lindsay Mayka is an assistant professor of Government at Colby College. Previously, she was a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. Mayka’s areas of research include social citizenship rights for marginalized populations, urban governance, participatory policymaking, and the politics of institutional weakness, with a regional focus on Latin America. Her first book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America: Reform Coalitions and Institutional Change, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Mayka’s research has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Democracy, Comparative Politics, and Latin American Politics and Society. She received an M.P.P. and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley
WHAT: Urban Securitization in the Name of Human Rights
Why do states harness human rights frames to advance urban security projects? In May 2016, the government of Bogotá, Colombia led a large-scale security intervention of a zone called “The Bronx” in the city center, which had been the epicenter of criminal networks, homelessness, and illicit activity in the city. While designed by security forces, the intervention was framed by state actors as an effort to advance the human rights of vulnerable children and homeless citizens. I argue that a human rights frame was adopted because of policy legacies built up by the prior four mayors in Bogotá, which shifted public understandings of Bogotá’s city center as a place populated by citizens, rather than a site of battles between criminal organizations and the state. This talk advances the the importance of theories of ideas and discourse into our study of urban governance and security in developing countries.