Guest Speaker Gabriela Seghezzo: Security Against Democracy in the Neoliberal Return in Argentina

Event Date: 

Thursday, May 16, 2019 - 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Event Location: 

  • Lane Room Ellison Hall 3824

Gabriela Seghezzo, PhD.
Director of Program of Foucaultian Studies (PEF-IIGG-UBA)
Director of Program of Studies on Social Control (PECOS-IIGG-UBA)
Researcher of CONICET
Professor at UBA and UNAJ  

Security Against Democracy in the Neoliberal Return in Argentina

Parallel to the evidence of the first social effects of the violent economic downturn, the security ghost gets strengthened. Is it sheer coincidence that we witness the increase of the security issue at the heat of the collective experimentation of the consequences of the economic recession and dismissals? The insecurity fear becomes a political operator as it reinforces and rearticulates a constellation of neoliberal discourses. While the economic policies, such as the hike on utilities rates, produce exclusion effects and whatever is popular vanishes into thin air, the security reason reappears. But under what disguise does it now come? That is the new element we should pay attention to now.

This security wise issue has come to stay and this is so because it is one of the modalities assumed by the neoliberal government of populations. It changes, it incorporates elements, but it is regular in its effects. The security wise issue as it is structured today cannot be solved. Because, rather than a problem to be figured out, it is the support base on which power relationships and intervention mechanisms are deployed. And now It is the scenario of an empowered police State and, on the extreme, the possibility of the construction of a macrofascist epic, a popular movement born from statehood itself which, through fear and the promise to invoke fear, legitimizes harassment, violent intervention and exclusion of that amorphous, diffuse and always open mass which is constructed as a threat to order and security. Dangerous merger between the State and security wise issue: in no case does the neoliberal return suppose a “withdrawal” of the State, rather it involves a transformation of its intervention modalities on behalf of modernization, rationalization and security. A low intensity and high social legitimacy rule of law for interventions which violate the guarantees of full citizenship.

The proposal of the presentation is actually to outline the status of the security issue since the restoration of neoliberalism in Argentina, in which the security discourse energizes the exclusion of large social sectors while joining the revitalized array of neoliberal types of discourses which had been blocked during the post neoliberal momentum.