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Crime and insecurity are top public policy concerns in Latin America. Political leaders offer tough-on-crime solutions that include increased policing and punishments, and decreased civilian oversight. These solutions, while apparently supported by public opinion, sit in opposition to both criminological research on crime control and human rights commitments. Moreover, many political and civil society actors disagree with such rhetoric and policies. In Tough on Crime, Bonner explores why some voices and some constructions of public opinion come to dominate public debate. Drawing on a comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile, based on over 190 in-depth interviews, and engaging the Euro-American literature on punitive populism, this book argues that a neoliberal media system and the resulting everyday practices used by journalists, state, and civil actors are central to explaining the dominance of tough-on-crime discourse.
The &“disappearance&” and torture of many people during the worst days of the authoritarian regimes that ruled many Latin American countries in the 1970s have been well documented and widely condemned as abuses of human rights. Less well known is what has become of the movements for human rights once democratic governments were restored in these countries. In this book, Michelle Bonner reveals how the defense of human rights continues today, taking Argentina as her primary example (with comparison to Chile in the final chapter). Bonner shows that the role of women&—viewed as protectors of the family&—is key to understanding how human rights movements have evolved. Moreover, the conti...
This volume offers a much-needed analysis of police abuse and its implications for our understanding of democracy. Sometimes referred to as police violence or police repression, police abuse occurs in all democracies. It is not an exception or a stage of democratization. It is, this volume argues, a structural and conceptual dimension of extant democracies. The book draws our attention to how including the study of policing into our analyses strengthens our understanding of democracy, including the persistence of hybrid democracy and the decline of democracy. To this end, the book examines three key dimensions of democracy: citizenship, accountability, and socioeconomic (in)equality. Drawing from political theory, comparative politics, and political economy, the book explores cases from France, the US, India, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Brazil, and Canada, and reveals how integrating police abuse can contribute to a more robust study of democracy and government in general.
Neoliberal policy approaches have swept over the American political economy in recent decades. In Framing Inequality, Matt Guardino focuses on the power of corporate news media in shaping how the public understands the pivotal policy debates of this period. Drawing on a wide range of empirical evidence from the dawn of the Reagan era into the Trump administration, he explains how profit pressures and commercial imperatives in the media have narrowed and trivialized news coverage and influenced public attitudes in the process. Guardino highlights how the political-economic structure of mainstream media operates to magnify some political messages and to mute or shut out others. He contends that news framing of policies that contribute to economic inequality has been unequal, and that this has undermined Americans' opportunities to express their views on an equal basis. Framing Inequality is a unique study that offers critical understanding of not only how neoliberalism succeeded as a political project, but also how Americans might begin to build a more democratic and egalitarian media system.
Despite the pervasiveness of electoral democracy in Latin America, the police continue to repress political protests. Why? Does the majority of the public support the repression of protests? If not, whom do they hold accountable, and how? Michelle Bonner offers a new perspective on police reform and democratic accountability by analyzing how people talk about the policing of protests in Argentina and Chile. Tracing the history of policing protests in the two countries and exploring current discourses, practices, and media coverage, she finds that talk most definitely does matter.
An in-depth comparative analysis of the interplay of police, democracy, state, and civil society in Argentina and Brazil, with disturbing implications for the consolidation of democracy in Latin America as a whole.
Rather than reducing criminality, prisons in Latin America drive crime by creating the conditions for its growth.
Explains the persistence of violent, unaccountable policing in democratic contexts.
Social Movements cleverly translates the art of collective action and mobilization by excluded groups to facilitate understanding social change from below. Students learn the core components of social movements, the theory and methods used to study them, and the conditions under which they can lead to political and social transformation. This fully class-tested book is the first to be organized along the lines of the major subfields of social movement scholarship—framing, movement emergence, recruitment, and outcomes—to provide comprehensive coverage in a single core text. Features include: use of real data collected in the U.S. and around the world the emphasis on student learning outco...
Police Visibility presents empirically grounded research into how police officers experience and manage the information politics of surveillance and visibility generated by the introduction of body cameras into their daily routines and the increasingly common experience of being recorded by civilian bystanders. Newell elucidates how these activities intersect with privacy, free speech, and access to information law and argues that rather than being emancipatory systems of police oversight, body-worn cameras are an evolution in police image work and state surveillance expansion. Throughout the book, he catalogs how surveillance generates information, the control of which creates and facilitates power and potentially fuels state domination. The antidote, he argues, is robust information law and policy that puts the power to monitor and regulate the police squarely in the hands of citizens.