Policing Borders and the Designation of Enemies Within

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

Daniel Gascón is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology and a Faculty Leadership Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Dr. Gascón is the lead author of the 2019 book, The Limits of Community Policing: Civilian Power and Police Accountability in Black and Brown Los Angeles, and the lead author of the 2024 book, Policing and State Crime in the Americas: Southern and Postcolonial Perspectives. He has published in academic journals such as Critical Sociology, Social Justice, Social Problems and Race & Justice. Dr. Gascón’s ongoing research examines historical cases of police civil rights violations against Black and Latino Bostonians. Currently, he teaches introductory criminology, criminal justice, and ethnographic methods courses. 

Naomi Roht-Arriaza is Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at The University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. 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.

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).