Public Lecture: Authoritarianism, Militarisation and Policing: A “Police Palimpsest”?

This public lecture is jointly hosted by the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Leeds and the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre.

Please join the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies and ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre for a public lecture given by Máximo Sozzo. 

Abstract

A widespread way in Latin American social sciences of reading police practices that are at odds with the principles of the rule of law in various contexts in the region – such as the high doses and varied forms of the use of violence against socially disadvantaged groups – has been as legacies of authoritarianism, especially identified with the existence of dictatorial regimes. In turn, these dictatorial regimes – generated from coups d'état by the armed forces – took to extreme degrees the levels of militarisation of police institutions, which had already emerged during their naissance in the broader framework of the processes of nation-state building during the 19th century (Sozzo, 2005; 2008; 2016). This lecture aims to rescue this reading, but at the same time to problematise the idea of ‘legacy’ as discursive and practical components that remain identical to themselves over time. The talk is intended to emphasise the need to pay attention to innovations in the present that take up, but at the same time redeploy, those discursive and practical components of the past in a partially different way, generating a ‘metamorphosis’ (Castel, 1980; 1994; 1997) in which authoritarianism, militarisation and policing are reconnected in a way that presents a ‘dialectic of the same and the different’, giving rise to a kind of ‘police palimpsest’ (Goodman and Quinn, 2023). In order to illustrate this discussion, this lecture addresses two contemporary developments in Argentina, which emerged in the context of the rise of ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall, 1988; see Hall et al, 1978): a) the revival with new force of the proposal for legal reform by various national and provincial governmental actors to enable the armed forces to intervene in matters of ‘internal security’, breaking the consensus around the prohibition of their doing so that emerged during the transition to democracy (Miranda, 2023); b) the extreme expansion of the use of the old police power of ‘detention for identity checks’ by ‘street police officer’, exploring the case of the Police of the Province of Santa Fe (Sozzo, 2000; 2002; 2008). 

About the Speaker

Máximo Sozzo is Professor of Sociology of Law and Criminology at the National University of Litoral (Argentina). He is also Leverhume Visiting Professor at the Law School of the University of Edinburgh (2023/2025).  His latest books in English are Punishment in Latin America. Explorations from the Margins (Edited with L. dal Santo. Emerald, 2024), Decolonising the Criminal Question (edited with A. Aliverti, A. Chamberlen & H. Carvalho. Oxford University Press, 2023) and Prisions, Inmates and Governance in Latin America (Palgrave, 2022). He is currently Editor in Chief of Punishment and Society – The International Journal of Penology.

How to Register

Please register in advance via Tickettailor.