Daniel M. Goldstein

This project explores the intersection of ideas about and discourses of “security” and “human rights” as they encounter one another in the context of an urban, indigenous neighborhood of a Bolivian city. In response to the absence of state law in their communities, many local people have turned to violence, including the vigilante lynching of criminal suspects, in an effort to create “security” for their families, insisting on their own “right to security” against the rights of the criminally accused. This project explores the conjuncture of two powerful transnational discourses—security and human rights—to reveal the ways in which “security” ultimately can work to defeat “rights,” as violent local actors operate within and against national and global formations of politics and law.