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This article critically reflects on the use of action‐oriented participatory research to rethink violence and security in Latin America. The authors draw on 12 years of such research (2008‒20) in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica and Mexico, working with communities living in the midst of chronic violence and criminality. Despite innovative experiments, security policies and practices in the region continue to be dominated by counterproductive militarized responses that have failed to address violence and crime. This article argues that in order to challenge politically potent punitive approaches to security and to highlight the interconnected social and economic drivers of insecurity, communities living these realities need to develop their own understanding of ‘security’. This can be used to inform sustainable solutions that address people's complex experiences of insecurity on the ground. The article brings the agency of those living amidst chronic violence into the security debate through participatory action research. It demonstrates that people living amidst such violence can contribute to making public security equitable, accessible and capable of protecting them while addressing the conditions that reproduce violence and crime without reproducing further violence. This is what is meant by ‘humanizing security’.

At the same time that the field of security moves away from traditional state‐centred perspectives towards a human‐centred understanding of security, contemporary states seem to be incapable of protecting people from increasingly complex forms of insecurity. Inadequate and inefficient public responses have contributed to the erosion of the idea of security as a public good, especially in contexts of chronic violence. In this article, we suggest that in these contexts 'security from below’could help analytically and in practice to humanise security provision by focusing attention on the lived experiences of insecurity, by encouraging participation in debates about the local and universal values that should inform state responses and by enabling people to demand a people‐centred but publicly delivered form of security. Rethinking security from below is not a suggestion for replacing the state; it is instead an attempt to increase the capacity of communities and local level actors to articulate their demands for better security provision based on agreed norms and under democratic principles in which security must be at the heart of all struggles for equitable development and social justice.

the Bolivarian Revolution. Yet, because of time constraints during Martínez's visit in 2008, her insights in this regard are limited to noting a novel official position associating public health with social justice, alongside obdurate medical attitudes linking illness and behaviour. Cancer care as part of the signature Misión Barrio Adentro programme for impoverished urban areas, and its fate amidst the worsening crisis of the Maduro regime, fall outside the scope of this interesting study, hopefully not for long.

In the context of growing concern with violence in Latin American and Caribbean cities this paper offers an analytical synthesis of urban securitisation which involves the construction of issues, spaces and populations as security threats. The synthesis contributes to debates on urban studies and critical security studies, which focus on neoliberalism as the driver of urban securitisation and militarisation as its main expression, by highlighting the embedded, contextualised and historically situated nature of securitisation and its multiple manifestations. The paper proposes a framework for the socio-spatial analysis of securitisation processes focusing on their causes, manifestations and consequences, while capturing their dialectic relation with cities’ spatial characteristics. Bringing together Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the social production of space with Wacquant’s analysis of the penal-assistential state, and using secondary sources complemented by primary data from our research, the paper shows that urban securitisation in this region is contingent to four socio-spatial dimensions common to Latin American and Caribbean cities – segregation, territorial stigmatisation, overlapping insecurities and territorial struggles. Using a multidimensional framework, the paper illustrates how unaddressed legacies of colonialism and notions of state power in the context of struggles with criminal actors have driven urban securitisation and diversified its targets and techniques beyond militarisation. Under a securitising logic, programmes which often appear progressive are also shown to prejudice marginalised groups and undermine democratic values. The paper concludes with a call for further multidisciplinary analyses that account for the socio-spatial and historical particularities of contemporary forms of urban securitisation in this and other regions.