R G Emerson
Biographic Data
| ID | 42172 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R G Emerson |
| GIVEN NAMES | R G |
| FAMILY NAME | Emerson |
| SIGNATURE | EMERSON R G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universidad de las Américas Puebla |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3863-0513 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Mapping protests: Geophilosophy and gender-based violence in Puebla, Mexico
México feminicida , Mexico feminicide, was scrawled across the route of the march. Written during protests on International Women's Day in Puebla, Mexico, the paper maps graffiti against gender-based violence: from handprints and symbols of Venus to demands for justice. Mapped is less the location of each piece than how graffiti forges its own coordinates: if longitude reveals a violent organization of bodies and spaces, then latitude forwards or…
Citizen security: Silencing women and migrants
This special issue of Latin American Policy explores the silences that surround citizen security, particularly how it marginalizes women and excludes migrants as subjects deserving of “security.” It does so by bringing together eight articles that attend to how these silences are compounded in both the analytical lenses and policy applications of citizen security. Focused principally on Mexico, each article offers insight into the exclusionary ef…
Citizen security in Mexico: Legacies of distrust
The article provides a backdrop to citizen security in Mexico, presenting a critique that challenges the democratic bases of citizen security and offering an alternate genealogy of its analytical and practical implementations. On the one hand, citizen security emerges not only from a violent legacy of national security but also amid larger international and domestic trends. Internationally, citizen security is consistent with shifts toward human …
Longitudes and latitudes of gender-based violence in Tlaxcala, Mexico
A gendered security dispositif: Mobilizing gender in Mexico City
This article concerns the security governance of gender in Mexico City. It begins by juxtaposing the alleged rape of a 17-year-old female by security officials against the policy responses that ensued: policies designed to make it safer for women to navigate dangerous streets. The article explores this radical turnaround: how an episode in violent opposition to security governance would ultimately sustain its implementation. It does so through wh…
Biopower: Forum on the Actuality of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' at Its Centenary, Part IV
Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In their separate contributions, sasha skaidra and R. Guy …
Counter-maps of body-territory: Gender-based violence in Mexico
Vigilant Subjects, Risky Objects: If You See Something, Say Something
If You See Something, Say Something": individuals detect the warning signs of an attack and notify authorities before it is too late. Yet, rather than a permanent state of alert, these vigilant subjects are only ever provisionally activated upon discovering risky objects: seeing something is to draw risky objects from a dangerous indeterminacy, while saying something is to affirm vigilant subjecthood. Offered is a processual account of these emer…
The Monument to Independence as an event: No nos cuidan, nos violan, they do not protect us, they rape us
On August 16, 2019, protesters arrived at the Monument to Independence in Mexico City. In response to three separate allegations of rape by police in less than a month, demonstrators scrawled 565 pieces of graffiti to transform a historical site of national commemoration into a symbol of state violence against women. México feminicida (Mexico is femicide) covered the central plaque that previously read: ‘[from] the Nation to the Heroes of Indepen…
Critique of biopolitical violence
Written 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of violence’ offers an escape from the biopolitical spiral into death. It confronts the violent underside to a politics of life by refusing to justify force on set political-legal grounds, and, by offering readings that continually undermine any official position. First, critique is mindful of the spurious ends and means of biopower: the violence deployed to protect life that requires evermore fo…
Who Is the Citizen in Citizen Security
This article explores the governing logics and political implications of citizen security in Puebla, Mexico, specifically, the Programa Nacional de Prevención del Delito (National Program for the Prevention of Crime, PRONAPRED). Taking a biopolitical perspective, the article centers on how citizens are produced through the application of citizen security initiatives. This production operates at two levels: the regulation of populations and the mo…
Decentering Responsibilization: Towards a Nomos of Governmentality in Mexico
This paper charts the mechanics of civic responsibility in preventing violence. Attention centers on divergent practices of responsibilization in Puebla, Mexico, which emanate from both state rationales associated with citizen security initiatives and from community-based measures that confound such official logics. Situated in the workings of governmentality beyond advanced liberalism, the paper proposes a decentering of responsibilization. This…
Necropolitics: Living Death in Mexico
Towards a process-orientated account of the securitisation trinity: The speech act, the securitiser and the audience
Por qué no les callan: Hugo Chávez’s Reelection and the Decline of Western Hegemony in the Americas
On October 7, 2012, Hugo Chávez was comfortably reelected president of Venezuela. Just days before the vote, the impression given by major international print media was that it would be close, an assessment that proved to be at best optimistic. Western media coverage of the election in Venezuela was designed to skew the result toward the opposition, and this effort singularly failed. The "propaganda model" advanced by Herman and Chomsky is now fa…
Limits to a cyber-threat
This paper reveals the limits to representing cyberspace as a threat. In contrast to more conventional threats, the suggestion is that the not-immediately-apparent consequences of a cyber-attack make it largely reliant on official practices of representation. Exploring the implications of this reliance, the paper outlines how attributing meaning and culpability – always contested practices – are amplified in the potential absence of a readily app…
(Re)Conceptualising the third face of power: Insights from Bourdieu and Foucault
The strength of Lukes’ third face of power is the recognition that agents can be influenced by structures and ideas in ways of which they are unaware. The weakness of Lukes’ position is that his consideration of the third face is under-developed. In this article, we argue that Bourdieu and Foucault’s work offer fruitful ways of exploring this ‘pre-conscious’ dimension. Using Bourdieu’s work, the core of any understanding of the third face is root…
The Periphery Strikes Back? The Subtlety of L atin A merican Power in the U nited S tates
In this article, we propose the concepts of “generalized” and “specialized” soft power through an analysis of the effects of L atino power in the U nited S tates. By focusing on demographic features, mass media, education, science and technology, and business, we attempt to provide a snapshot of the subtlety of L atino power in terms of flows and degrees of penetration within the U . S . landscape. We conclude by pointing out the main differences…
Strong Presidentialism and the Limits of Foreign Policy Success: Explaining Cooperation between Brazil and Venezuela
This paper concerns the growing importance of the executive to the foreign policies of Brazil and Venezuela. Exploring the implications of this trend, it examines the extent to which the concentration of power in the presidency—rather than its diffusion in institutions—facilitates the steering tasks of government in an interstate setting. It focuses on the issue of energy security—a theme integral to both states—so as to tell a larger story about…
An Art of the Region: Towards a Politics of Regionness
Recent analysis on New Regionalism has, for Björn Hettne, raised important ontological questions over ‘what we study when we study regionalism’. The paper contributes to this debate by focusing on the shared beliefs, norms and rituals that hold a region together. Working between the New Regionalism literature and thinking on international regimes, this paper – to paraphrase Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie – outlines the ‘inescapable inter-su…
Institutionalising a Radical Region? The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
This paper explores the diplomatic potential of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People's Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP). It does so by refusing to take the region as a fixed, given actor and, instead, suggests that regional organisation is better understood as a process of construction that involves diverse actors and a plurality of interests. Rather than assuming commonality – be it a shared series of beliefs, or, in a more pra…
Post-hegemony and Gramsci: A Bridge Too Far
This article expands upon the theory of post-hegemony so as to maintain the multitude as an operative political category alongside the State. Ironically, it does so by returning to Antonio Gramsci. It argues that the multitude - or, for Gramsci 'civil soc
Promoting 'American' democracy
Dating from the Reagan presidency's ‘crusade for freedom’, democracy promotion has been a central pillar of US foreign policy. Whether claims by George H.W. Bush that ‘beyond containment lies democracy’, or by George W. Bush that intervention into the Middle East promoted a ‘march to freedom in the Muslim world’, the importance of democracy to US foreign policy should not be underestimated. Far from promoting democracy, however, critics suggest t…
A Bolivarian People: Identity politics in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela
The 1998 electoral success of Hugo Chvez brought about a dramatic shift in Venezuelan identity. While rhetorically inclusive at first glance, references to the 'Venezuelan people' would not speak to all Venezuelans. Rather, the 'people' would come to denote a previously marginalised segment of society now at the centre of Venezuelan political life. More than a simple reorientation in political focus, this shift in the politics of Venezuelan ident…
Embracing Strangeness: The Politics of Solidarity
Be it the ideal of liberal democracy, the opening of local markets to the fluctuations of international capital, or the elusive quest for development, the discursive strategies of the North and the policy orientations that they enable toward the South are well explored. Less explored, however, is the way in which the South interacts with this received wisdom. This article explicitly focuses on how Venezuela, as one of the more outspoken southern …
Radical Neglect? The "War on Terror" and Latin America
The rise of leftist governments in the Americas and the adoption of policy initiatives contrary to U.S. interests highlight a disconnect in interamerican relations, which cannot be understood simply as U.S. "neglect" of Latin America. In contrast to arguments that attribute the deteriorating relations to U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East, the article examines whether the "War on Terror" acted as a guiding paradigm for the George W. Bush adm…
Post-hegemony and Gramsci: A Bridge Too Far
This article expands upon the theory of post-hegemony so as to maintain the multitude as an operative political category alongside the State. Ironically, it does so by returning to Antonio Gramsci. It argues that the multitude - or, for Gramsci 'civil soc
Counter-maps of body-territory: Gender-based violence in Mexico
Decentering Responsibilization: Towards a Nomos of Governmentality in Mexico
This paper charts the mechanics of civic responsibility in preventing violence. Attention centers on divergent practices of responsibilization in Puebla, Mexico, which emanate from both state rationales associated with citizen security initiatives and from community-based measures that confound such official logics. Situated in the workings of governmentality beyond advanced liberalism, the paper proposes a decentering of responsibilization. This…
Strong Presidentialism and the Limits of Foreign Policy Success: Explaining Cooperation between Brazil and Venezuela
This paper concerns the growing importance of the executive to the foreign policies of Brazil and Venezuela. Exploring the implications of this trend, it examines the extent to which the concentration of power in the presidency—rather than its diffusion in institutions—facilitates the steering tasks of government in an interstate setting. It focuses on the issue of energy security—a theme integral to both states—so as to tell a larger story about…
An Art of the Region: Towards a Politics of Regionness
Recent analysis on New Regionalism has, for Björn Hettne, raised important ontological questions over ‘what we study when we study regionalism’. The paper contributes to this debate by focusing on the shared beliefs, norms and rituals that hold a region together. Working between the New Regionalism literature and thinking on international regimes, this paper – to paraphrase Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie – outlines the ‘inescapable inter-su…
The Monument to Independence as an event: No nos cuidan, nos violan, they do not protect us, they rape us
On August 16, 2019, protesters arrived at the Monument to Independence in Mexico City. In response to three separate allegations of rape by police in less than a month, demonstrators scrawled 565 pieces of graffiti to transform a historical site of national commemoration into a symbol of state violence against women. México feminicida (Mexico is femicide) covered the central plaque that previously read: ‘[from] the Nation to the Heroes of Indepen…
Towards a process-orientated account of the securitisation trinity: The speech act, the securitiser and the audience
(Re)Conceptualising the third face of power: Insights from Bourdieu and Foucault
The strength of Lukes’ third face of power is the recognition that agents can be influenced by structures and ideas in ways of which they are unaware. The weakness of Lukes’ position is that his consideration of the third face is under-developed. In this article, we argue that Bourdieu and Foucault’s work offer fruitful ways of exploring this ‘pre-conscious’ dimension. Using Bourdieu’s work, the core of any understanding of the third face is root…
Longitudes and latitudes of gender-based violence in Tlaxcala, Mexico
Limits to a cyber-threat
This paper reveals the limits to representing cyberspace as a threat. In contrast to more conventional threats, the suggestion is that the not-immediately-apparent consequences of a cyber-attack make it largely reliant on official practices of representation. Exploring the implications of this reliance, the paper outlines how attributing meaning and culpability – always contested practices – are amplified in the potential absence of a readily app…
Promoting 'American' democracy
Dating from the Reagan presidency's ‘crusade for freedom’, democracy promotion has been a central pillar of US foreign policy. Whether claims by George H.W. Bush that ‘beyond containment lies democracy’, or by George W. Bush that intervention into the Middle East promoted a ‘march to freedom in the Muslim world’, the importance of democracy to US foreign policy should not be underestimated. Far from promoting democracy, however, critics suggest t…
Radical Neglect? The "War on Terror" and Latin America
The rise of leftist governments in the Americas and the adoption of policy initiatives contrary to U.S. interests highlight a disconnect in interamerican relations, which cannot be understood simply as U.S. "neglect" of Latin America. In contrast to arguments that attribute the deteriorating relations to U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East, the article examines whether the "War on Terror" acted as a guiding paradigm for the George W. Bush adm…
A Bolivarian People: Identity politics in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela
The 1998 electoral success of Hugo Chvez brought about a dramatic shift in Venezuelan identity. While rhetorically inclusive at first glance, references to the 'Venezuelan people' would not speak to all Venezuelans. Rather, the 'people' would come to denote a previously marginalised segment of society now at the centre of Venezuelan political life. More than a simple reorientation in political focus, this shift in the politics of Venezuelan ident…
Embracing Strangeness: The Politics of Solidarity
Be it the ideal of liberal democracy, the opening of local markets to the fluctuations of international capital, or the elusive quest for development, the discursive strategies of the North and the policy orientations that they enable toward the South are well explored. Less explored, however, is the way in which the South interacts with this received wisdom. This article explicitly focuses on how Venezuela, as one of the more outspoken southern …
Independence and Revolution in The Americas
Promoting 'American' democracy
Dating from the Reagan presidency's ‘crusade for freedom’, democracy promotion has been a central pillar of US foreign policy. Whether claims by George H.W. Bush that ‘beyond containment lies democracy’, or by George W. Bush that intervention into the Middle East promoted a ‘march to freedom in the Muslim world’, the importance of democracy to US foreign policy should not be underestimated. Far from promoting democracy, however, critics suggest t…
An Art of the Region: Towards a Politics of Regionness
Recent analysis on New Regionalism has, for Björn Hettne, raised important ontological questions over ‘what we study when we study regionalism’. The paper contributes to this debate by focusing on the shared beliefs, norms and rituals that hold a region together. Working between the New Regionalism literature and thinking on international regimes, this paper – to paraphrase Friedrich Kratochwil and John Ruggie – outlines the ‘inescapable inter-su…
Institutionalising a Radical Region? The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
This paper explores the diplomatic potential of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People's Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP). It does so by refusing to take the region as a fixed, given actor and, instead, suggests that regional organisation is better understood as a process of construction that involves diverse actors and a plurality of interests. Rather than assuming commonality – be it a shared series of beliefs, or, in a more pra…
Post-hegemony and Gramsci: A Bridge Too Far
This article expands upon the theory of post-hegemony so as to maintain the multitude as an operative political category alongside the State. Ironically, it does so by returning to Antonio Gramsci. It argues that the multitude - or, for Gramsci 'civil soc
Strong Presidentialism and the Limits of Foreign Policy Success: Explaining Cooperation between Brazil and Venezuela
This paper concerns the growing importance of the executive to the foreign policies of Brazil and Venezuela. Exploring the implications of this trend, it examines the extent to which the concentration of power in the presidency—rather than its diffusion in institutions—facilitates the steering tasks of government in an interstate setting. It focuses on the issue of energy security—a theme integral to both states—so as to tell a larger story about…
(Re)Conceptualising the third face of power: Insights from Bourdieu and Foucault
The strength of Lukes’ third face of power is the recognition that agents can be influenced by structures and ideas in ways of which they are unaware. The weakness of Lukes’ position is that his consideration of the third face is under-developed. In this article, we argue that Bourdieu and Foucault’s work offer fruitful ways of exploring this ‘pre-conscious’ dimension. Using Bourdieu’s work, the core of any understanding of the third face is root…
The Periphery Strikes Back? The Subtlety of L atin A merican Power in the U nited S tates
In this article, we propose the concepts of “generalized” and “specialized” soft power through an analysis of the effects of L atino power in the U nited S tates. By focusing on demographic features, mass media, education, science and technology, and business, we attempt to provide a snapshot of the subtlety of L atino power in terms of flows and degrees of penetration within the U . S . landscape. We conclude by pointing out the main differences…
Limits to a cyber-threat
This paper reveals the limits to representing cyberspace as a threat. In contrast to more conventional threats, the suggestion is that the not-immediately-apparent consequences of a cyber-attack make it largely reliant on official practices of representation. Exploring the implications of this reliance, the paper outlines how attributing meaning and culpability – always contested practices – are amplified in the potential absence of a readily app…
Towards a process-orientated account of the securitisation trinity: The speech act, the securitiser and the audience
Por qué no les callan: Hugo Chávez’s Reelection and the Decline of Western Hegemony in the Americas
On October 7, 2012, Hugo Chávez was comfortably reelected president of Venezuela. Just days before the vote, the impression given by major international print media was that it would be close, an assessment that proved to be at best optimistic. Western media coverage of the election in Venezuela was designed to skew the result toward the opposition, and this effort singularly failed. The "propaganda model" advanced by Herman and Chomsky is now fa…
Necropolitics: Living Death in Mexico
Who Is the Citizen in Citizen Security
This article explores the governing logics and political implications of citizen security in Puebla, Mexico, specifically, the Programa Nacional de Prevención del Delito (National Program for the Prevention of Crime, PRONAPRED). Taking a biopolitical perspective, the article centers on how citizens are produced through the application of citizen security initiatives. This production operates at two levels: the regulation of populations and the mo…
Decentering Responsibilization: Towards a Nomos of Governmentality in Mexico
This paper charts the mechanics of civic responsibility in preventing violence. Attention centers on divergent practices of responsibilization in Puebla, Mexico, which emanate from both state rationales associated with citizen security initiatives and from community-based measures that confound such official logics. Situated in the workings of governmentality beyond advanced liberalism, the paper proposes a decentering of responsibilization. This…
Vigilant Subjects, Risky Objects: If You See Something, Say Something
If You See Something, Say Something": individuals detect the warning signs of an attack and notify authorities before it is too late. Yet, rather than a permanent state of alert, these vigilant subjects are only ever provisionally activated upon discovering risky objects: seeing something is to draw risky objects from a dangerous indeterminacy, while saying something is to affirm vigilant subjecthood. Offered is a processual account of these emer…
The Monument to Independence as an event: No nos cuidan, nos violan, they do not protect us, they rape us
On August 16, 2019, protesters arrived at the Monument to Independence in Mexico City. In response to three separate allegations of rape by police in less than a month, demonstrators scrawled 565 pieces of graffiti to transform a historical site of national commemoration into a symbol of state violence against women. México feminicida (Mexico is femicide) covered the central plaque that previously read: ‘[from] the Nation to the Heroes of Indepen…
Critique of biopolitical violence
Written 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of violence’ offers an escape from the biopolitical spiral into death. It confronts the violent underside to a politics of life by refusing to justify force on set political-legal grounds, and, by offering readings that continually undermine any official position. First, critique is mindful of the spurious ends and means of biopower: the violence deployed to protect life that requires evermore fo…
Biopower: Forum on the Actuality of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' at Its Centenary, Part IV
Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In their separate contributions, sasha skaidra and R. Guy …
Counter-maps of body-territory: Gender-based violence in Mexico
Citizen security: Silencing women and migrants
This special issue of Latin American Policy explores the silences that surround citizen security, particularly how it marginalizes women and excludes migrants as subjects deserving of “security.” It does so by bringing together eight articles that attend to how these silences are compounded in both the analytical lenses and policy applications of citizen security. Focused principally on Mexico, each article offers insight into the exclusionary ef…
Citizen security in Mexico: Legacies of distrust
The article provides a backdrop to citizen security in Mexico, presenting a critique that challenges the democratic bases of citizen security and offering an alternate genealogy of its analytical and practical implementations. On the one hand, citizen security emerges not only from a violent legacy of national security but also amid larger international and domestic trends. Internationally, citizen security is consistent with shifts toward human …
Longitudes and latitudes of gender-based violence in Tlaxcala, Mexico
Political science (23 works) · Law (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (8 works) · Global Security and Public Health (7 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)