Pierre Gaussens
Research Interests: Violence, Conflict and Peace, Social Movements, Local Governments, Human Rights, Gender, Critical Theory, Latin American Sociology
Challenging the State: Community defense groups in Mexico
In a context including new forms of warfare, insecurity, and the erosion of the legitimate monopoly of violence in various parts of the world, a diversity of non-state armed actors has emerged. Among these groups, one particular structure is community defense, created primarily to fight conditions of insecurity for collectives and communities in order to regulate security in their territories.
The emergence of this type of armed actors represents a societal challenge that has fueled scientific discussions. The innovative character of this research project lies in the construction of an analytical proposal from a Latin American perspective, that challenges not only academic debates, but also the global public agenda in this field. The main scientific goal of the research seeks to identify and explain the different patterns with which community defense groups relate to the Mexican state, from cooperation to conflict.
It is at this level that lies the main contribution of Latin American research on this phenomenon, which is not necessarily conceived as an antithesis of the state or a symptom of its weakness, from functionalist premises, but is analyzed as a new form of power in relation to the state. In this sense, community defense is a conceptual arena for observing contemporary dynamics that subvert our traditional conceptualizations of the state and resistance to domination.
Pierre Gaussens is a sociologist and researcher at the College of Mexico. He has been a professor at several universities in Ecuador and Mexico. His main line of research focuses on the sociology of violence and peace. He is particularly interested in studying the social responses that violence produces as peacebuilding processes. In this sense, his postdoctoral research project analyzed the armed self-defense groups that emerged in southern Mexico to defend their communities from criminal violence. Now, he is starting a new research project in this same line but applied to other areas of knowledge, between medical sociology and gender studies, on the non-violent forms of childbirth care that doulas practice to address the problem of obstetric violence.