By giving up part of their individual freedom, citizens grant the State the necessary power to guarantee order, security and collective protection. It is this agreement that sustains state legitimacy and justifies its authority. But what happens when the institution created to protect starts to threaten those it should protect?
We can see this happening in two countries currently. Despite their evident differences in scale, history and institutionality, Sudan and the United States reveal a central similarity: in both cases, the State has increasingly resorted to the logic of security to deal with internal conflicts, treating certain social groups as threats. This securitization movement ends up resulting in the expansion of state coercive power and the compression of rights, although it manifests itself in different ways depending on the political and institutional context of each country.
The power of violence, when exercised by the State, is treated as legitimate. The police, the prison system, the judicial apparatus and control structures exist under the justification of maintaining social order. However, the legitimacy of this power is not automatic, it depends on clear limits, institutional responsibility and, above all, its commitment to protecting citizenship.
In Sudan, this logic is expressed in an extreme way through the direct use of armed violence against the civilian population. The fall of Omar al-Bashir’s regime in 2019 opened a transition process that proved unstable and unsuccessful, especially due to the persistence of armed actors competing for control of the State.
On the other hand, in the United States, marked by consolidated institutions, the logic of securitization is also present, especially in migration policy. The expanded role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reflects the transformation of migration (a social and humanitarian phenomenon) into a matter of national security. Mass detentions, accelerated deportations and increasingly normalized coercive practices indicate the use of the state apparatus against vulnerable populations, especially immigrants and refugees, who are now seen as risks to the internal order. Creating an evident paradox: an institution that was created to contain violence starts to reproduce it.
In both cases, although through different means, the same logic is observed: the State expands its instruments of control and repression in the name of security, producing insecurity for those it should protect.
In Sudan, this dynamic takes the form of overt military violence and institutional destruction; in the United States, it manifests itself through legal, police and administrative coercion, which dehumanizes specific groups and restricts fundamental rights.
It is possible to see that the State, by concentrating power, finds different ways to legitimize violence, and one of them is through the centrality of security, which, disconnected from the protection of rights, deepens inequalities and weakens the very notion of citizenship.
Manuela Torres is an International Relations student at the Federal University of São Paulo and is part of the Public Policy team at Livres.
