Negotiated Citizenship: Managed Relationships with a Violent State

What happens in a democracy when the state deploys violence against its own citizens? Or when it denies certain citizens access to safety and protection from violence? How does this violence impact how people think about their own citizenship, and how they relate to the state? This project seeks to answer these questions by investigating the relationship between living in neighborhoods with high police and interpersonal violence and the subjective citizenship of neighborhood residents, through a comparison of two neighborhoods in Chicago, USA and Seine Saint Denis, France. This project engages in particular with the important and contemporary debate within American political science, that seeks to establish the relationship between carceral contact (including police violence) and civic participation. During the past year that I have been engaged in field work in Chicago and Saint Denis, it has become clear that my work will make a unique and fruitful intervention in this literature. I argue that our current understanding of police violence and the resulting engagement or withdrawal from the state is overly simplistic, and that residents instead perform different forms of negotiated engagement with the state, influenced by the broader perception of state responsiveness or negligence as informed by their experiences with the police.