PAST PROJECT

Non-state security provision and rural policing in southern Mexico

Checkpoint of the Ronda Comunitaria at the entrance of Cherán. Checkpoint of the Ronda Comunitaria at the entrance of Cherán. Image © Kristóf Gosztonyi

This project explores alternative forms of security provision in rural areas of southern Mexico that emerged as responses to criminal violence and the failure of the state to defend its citizens.

Timeframe: 2019 - 2020


This qualitative study contributes to a mixed-method research project on “Rural Policing in Southern Mexico” at the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PovGov, at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Stanford University). Beatriz Magaloni (Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Professor of Political Science) directs the PovGov Lab and the overall Rural Policing research project.

The Rural Policing Project aims to understand alternative forms of security provision in rural areas of southern Mexico that emerged in recent years as responses to criminal violence and the failure of the state to defend its citizens. These alternative forms of security provision include communal police forces in indigenous areas or different autodefensa groups in non-indigenous areas. Some have been temporarily or permanently formalised and operate with a basis in law while others remain informal. The study seeks to understand how these non-standard police forces (in the following non-government police, NGP) operate, relate to other police forces and to their communities and how they are perceived by the populations of these communities. Within the conflict transformation research tradition at Berghof, the project picks up on investigations of non-state armed groups and their perceived legitimacy in a variety of conflict settings, most recently in Afghanistan.

The qualitative research component carried out by the Berghof Foundation is funded by Stanford University and should contribute to the overall research by describing the social and ethnographic context in which non-standard police forces operate. The qualitative data help in the design of the quantitative survey, by proposing possible causal mechanisms for the emergence of trust in local NGP forces and by generating hypotheses for statistical testing. Geographically, the study focuses on two southern Mexican states, Michoacán and Oaxaca.

Background

Partners and funding

 

 

 


Media contact

You can reach the press team at:
+49 (0) 177 7052758
press@berghof-foundation.org