• Title: ‘Domestic threats to state sovereignty in the ‘frontier zone’. Federal State policing performance and population disputes on the margins
• Speaker: Sabina Frederic (Visiting Professor, IAS, School of Law, University of Warwick; National University of Quilmes-National Council of Scientific Research)
• Chair: Prof Jackie Hodgson, co-director COPR
• When: 15 May 2025, 1-2pm, Room s2.12 (Lunch from 12.30 in s2.09; Seminar 1-2pm in s2.12) & Online (this is a hybrid event - please contact Sandra.Phillips@warwick.ac.uk if you wish to join online).

Official narratives and state performances have marked certain populations in certain territories of the so-called “border zone” of Argentina, 100 km inland from the national border, as a threat. They have also assimilated certain populations to this state concept, as in part occurred in the conflictive neighborhoods of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. The federal forces (Gendarmerie, Naval Prefecture and Federal Police) have been an instrument
of control, repression and protagonists in the execution of several homicides, by action or omission, in out-of-protocol procedures over the last two decades. Their most emblematic victims have been members of native communities, settlers engaged in the 'illegalized' trafficking of goods, and young people from segregated neighborhoods. I am interested in comparatively analyzing the scenarios in which the genealogy of the procedures that ended in murders is inscribed, focusing, on the one hand, on the struggle between federal and local state actors (executive and judicial), the web of private actors intertwined with the State and the apathy and impotence of police personnel; on the other hand, on the ways in which the populations acted before and after, highlighting strategies of dispute, resistance or - at least - redefinition of their place in those margins and consequently of those margins themselves.

In this way, I try to answer the question of how this anxiety to consolidate sovereignty through the harassment of Argentine citizens turned into threats or enemies, challenges the State's own capacity to control those margins. Thus, governance in times of pulverization of the welfare state -which in Argentina has resulted in the growth of labor informality (currently half of the employed population), deregulation, the contestation of laws that guarantee rights, among others- finds segregated populations expanding those margins, while discovering the ambiguous and limited control of the State. To what extent, then, is this a criminal or 'criminalizing' governance, and how is it related to neoliberal rationality?
The cases analyzed are the result of fieldwork from an ethnographic perspective
with people from the federal forces and members of the populations of three sites: Oran, Province of Salta,border with Bolivia; Bariloche, Province of Rio Negro, border with Chile;
and the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires.