Paper short abstract:

The increasing practices of private security, criminalisation, and support for punitivism by middle class citizens must be understood in the context of economic insecurity and neoliberalisation, as well as the historical displacement of a politicised notion of class during the Uruguayan dictatorship

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, heated debates have erupted in Uruguay over the issue of (in-)security. The state's response to rising crime and the perceived sense of insecurity has been punitive: increased penalties and the introduction of criminal offenses have led to a steady rise in incarceration. Support for these measures has been particularly strong among the middle class, which has faced increasing precarity and economic insecurity. In the country that has long prided itself on its broad middle class, more and more people are experiencing the effects of neoliberalisation and are living with the constant fear of slipping into what has become known as new poverty. Today, middle class has become a fragile, and insecure category, often based on debt and an identity that can easily be lost when one is associated with marginality. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork my paper argues that the increasing practices of private security, discursive criminalisation along lines of race, class, and territory, and support for and demand of state punitivism by people describing themselves as middle class must be understood in this context of economic insecurity.

My paper further argues that by highlighting the historical roots of middle class as a depoliticised category and its ideological function, we can better understand how crime became a signifier of growing social and economic fractures since the displacement of a political notion of class by middle class as a contested and exclusive category must be seen as a result of the brutal dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s.