A discussion with Naomi Roht-Arriaza
October 8, 2025
In the second session of our Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control series, we’ll look at how authoritarian states use borders—physical and societal—to define in-groups and out-groups. Policing agencies in authoritarian states are then able to expand and contract who is deserving of protection and to define social conceptions of safety and belonging in reference to so-called enemies within. Our speakers will showcase their expertise on Latin America to help us explore the role of police in perpetrating state violence, in concentrating state power, and in constructing marginality and structures of domination. We will explore how authoritarian states use the labels of criminalization and “enemies” to engage in their own criminal acts as state crime, borrowing from foreign comparative examples outside the U.S. and learning from frameworks in the international human rights regime. We will also learn how scholars are centering marginalized and colonized perspectives in telling these histories to uproot these structures of power.
Speakers
Naomi Roht-Arriaza is Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at The University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She grew up in New York and Latin America, including stints in Chile, Guatemala and Costa Rica. She earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley, a M.A. from the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy (formerly the Graduate School of Public Policy), and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Professor Roht-Arriaza has worked as an immigration paralegal, an organizer, and a teacher for a nonprofit focused on corporate accountability. After graduating from law school, she clerked for Judge James Browning of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. During 1991 to 1992, Professor Roht-Arriaza was the first Riesenfeld Fellow in International Law and Organizations at UC Berkeley School of Law.
Professor Roht-Arriaza is the author of The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (2005) and Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (1995), and coeditor of Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice. She is a coauthor on The International Legal System: Cases and Materials (6th Ed.) with Mary Ellen O’Connell and Dick Scott (Foundation Press 2010). She continues to write on accountability, both state and corporate, for human rights violations as well as on other human rights, international criminal law and global environmental issues. In 2011 she was a Democracy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and in 2012 she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Botswana.
Links to resources shared during the event
- Outlawing Police Quotas
- El Salvador’s Authoritarian Slide Should Hold Lessons – Not Examples – for the U.S.
- The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (The Nelson Mandela Rules)
- Has the United States declared war on itself? (¿Ha declarado Estados Unidos la guerra contra sí mismo?)
- International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance
- The State Department is lying about El Salvador
- Setting the Stage: International and Transnational Law and Policies
- Hidden in Plain Sight: The In/Visibility of Human Rights in El Salvador’s Prisons Under the State of Exception
- Safety For Whom? The Cost of El Salvador’s Latest Quest for Peace
The Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice (HKS); Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Professor of Sociology (FAS).