#  Research in Progress 

 



   ![Colorful image depicting a mother holding her child](/sites/g/files/omnuum4221/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-09/Screenshot%202025-09-10%20at%2011.42.39%E2%80%AFAM.png?itok=tFgdtAgS) 

 

My second book manuscript, *Rebuilding Citizenship After State Violence,* examines the conditions under which marginalized individuals who have experienced violence at the hands of democratic state agents mobilize to reassert their citizenship rights. Focused on the mobilization of mothers of victims of police killings in three Latin American countries, the book examines the drivers of victims' mothers' distinctive mobilization strategies emphasizing victims’ identities – gender, race, and class – and leveraging formal democratic institutions.

Recent years have seen unprecedented mass mobilization against state violence, from historic Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd in the United States, to the months-long “national strike” protests in Colombia and Nigeria’s unprecedented #EndSARS protests. This global mobilization underscores that state violence can be highly consequential for politics, serving as a catalyst for robust citizen contestation. It also raises important questions about the effects of state violence on the citizens that must endure it and the extent to which democratic institutions can hold state agents accountable for rampant abuses. In Latin America, thousands of citizens are killed by the state’s coercive institutions each year, while countless others suffer modes of repression associated with authoritarian regimes (torture, enforced disappearance, and extrajudicial killings) long after transitions to democratic rule. These striking patterns of state violence are disproportionately borne by the most marginalized segments of the population – those who are poor, black, and from urban peripheries.

In response to this stratified state violence, family members of victims in countries such as Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil have mobilized socially and politically to hold state institutions accountable. Much political science scholarship finds that these marginalized citizens should be among the least likely to mobilize due to their socioeconomic characteristics, the policy feedback effects of carceral state policies, and the demobilizing effects of criminal violence in Latin America. Yet, family members of marginalized victims of state violence protest, advocate for legislative reforms, form organizations, and engage in other activist practices, antagonizing the very state institutions that killed their loved ones. What is the process by which victims of democratic state agents come to challenge the state socially and politically, making rights-based claims for justice, reparations, and reform?

*Rebuilding Citizenship After State Violence* examines the mode of contentious politics practiced by marginalized citizens of Latin American democracies in response to lethal human rights violations, investigating:

1. The **drivers** of mobilization: What are the conditions under which mothers and family members of victims of state violence mobilize after experiencing state violence?
2. The **repertoires** of mobilization: What strategies do these individuals employ to organize, raise public awareness, and exert pressure on state institutions?
3. The **impact** of mobilization: What effect do their actions have on state and social institutions?

In order to address these questions, *Rebuilding Citizenship After State Violence* draws on case studies of victims’ responses to police violence in Brazil, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. All three countries are young democracies where police violence has been a salient problem, but which exhibit considerable cross-case and temporal variation in the levels of mobilization by victims’ families. Brazil represents a case of fairly high mobilization by victims’ families, with the rise of many mothers’ collectives over the past two decades, as well as nationwide organizing and lobbying efforts. Colombia represents an intermediate case, with a more recent emergence of civil society organizations focused on police violence and mobilization by victims’ families. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic features low mobilization, with little civil society focus on police violence and sporadic individual-level mobilization by victims’ families.

Image credit: "Disobedient Mothers" by Anandana Kapur