The article sets lynching of presumed criminals in the city of El Alto, Bolivia, in relation to both everyday experiences of insecurity about crime and violence and the enactment of neighborliness as a grounded notion of citizenship. Focusing on the experience and management of insecurity and its paradoxical entanglement with the enactments of citizenship and state-citizen relations, the article argues that people's attempts to remain safe constitute a permanent process of making visible and defacing (following Michael Taussig's notion of defacement) dangerousness and criminal subjects vis-à-vis the construction of community and local expressions of citizenship.

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Based on two cases from Santiago, the article develops a theory of ‘civil victimhood’ to explore how civil conduct is paired with notions of victimhood in performances of citizenship in situations such as post-dictatorship Chile. In this context, victimhood is informed by two discourses, namely human rights and securitization. While the human rights discourse works to situate evil in the dictatorial past and victims as forgiving and deserving citizens, securitization practices operate within a temporality of the potential and generate new forms of othering and exclusion. This understanding of the civil citizen as (potential) victim delineates the forms of social and political action that are seen to have a legitimate place in public life. It is argued that the combination of civil victimhood and securitization is emerging as a form of governance that serves to exclude many of the poor from the full benefits of citizenship.

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