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Paper short abstract

This paper is based on ethnographic research in Chile and examines how stray-bullet deaths in marginalized neighborhoods produce brief and selective state responses that are shaped by moral economies of grievability.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, Chilean media outlets have frequently reported on deaths caused by stray bullets, portraying them as symbols of public insecurity. These events occur in marginalized municipalities plagued by territorial stigma, where firearms are commonplace and state protection is unevenly distributed due to suspicion and neglect. Public narratives often link these shootings to drug trafficking, using them to promote increasingly punitive security agendas and harsher penalties. In these neighborhoods, lethal violence is structurally patterned, revealing internal boundaries within democratic rule that differentiate between lives that are actively protected and lives that are habitually exposed (Stoler, 2022).

Based on long-term ethnographic research with a family following the death of their infant child in 2019, this paper analyzes how highly publicized deaths result in a temporary and exceptional state presence. Through promises of justice and discretionary ex gratia pensions, state intervention eventually dissipates. These transfers reflect a neoliberal state that relates to the poor through conditional assistance. In this model, recognition depends on implicit criteria of deservingness and conditioned citizenship (Rojas, 2020).

I argue that this uneven landscape of state recognition is sustained by moral economies of grievability (Butler, 2004). This hierarchy ensures that only those who conform to the "ideal victim" (Christie, 1986) trigger exceptional responses, while other deaths—contaminated by territorial stigma—remain morally ambiguous and are quietly displaced (Han, 2015, 2017). This research exposes how necropolitical regimes distribute the right to be recognized as a victim and how families contest these regimes through their everyday experiences of grief.