For the right to live in peace: The political agency of popular neighborhoods confronting insecurity and criminal violence

How does insecurity shape political agency in communities exposed to criminal violence? Research has often emphasized fear, withdrawal, and declining political participation, while paying less attention to how residents transform insecurity into collective claims on the state. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2022 in a low-income neighborhood on the urban periphery of Santiago, Chile, this article examines the emergence of the “right to live in peace” as a political claim. We show how experiences of criminal violence, unequal access to state protection, and institutional ineffectiveness are recast as collective grievances and mobilized through neighborhood organizations, protests, and demands for justice. These practices reveal insecurity as a terrain of popular politicity through which residents challenge inequalities in protection and recognition and assert claims to substantive citizenship. The article contributes to debates on urban violence and political participation by showing how insecurity can become a basis for political agency, generating collective claims that reconfigure relations among territory, citizenship, and the state.