Special Issue: Securitisation and the Gendered Everyday: Global South Approaches

Guest Editors: Debanuj DasGupta, Sagnik Dutta, and Niharika Banerjea

I am very pleased to share that my article, “Playing the Good Samaritan”: Rethinking securitization and care work through a politics of conviviality in Santiago, Chile,“ has been published in Political Geography as part of the forthcoming special issue Securitization and the Gendered Everyday: Global South Approaches.

This special issue brings together scholarship that interrogates how security logics shape—and are shaped by—everyday life across the Global South. Moving beyond post-9/11 frameworks centered on the global North, the issue highlights how racialized, caste-classed, gendered, and sexualized communities have long navigated forms of mundane securitization.

Drawing on feminist and geopolitical perspectives, the collection examines the embodied, intimate, and infrastructural sites where securitization is produced, contested, and reimagined.

It has been a privilege to contribute to this project and to work with such thoughtful guest editors.

Article Abstract

This article examines how care work becomes politicized as a practice of resistance within Chile’s Estallido Social (2019–2020) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on ethnographic research in Santiago’s ollas comunes (community protest kitchens), it analyzes three cases from población Lo Hermida, where police dispersed ollas in public parks and infiltrated them under counter-insurgency operations.

Authorities framed these kitchens as unlawful protests and criminal activity masquerading as humanitarian aid, revealing how state actors recast care work as a security threat.

I argue that securitization in this context relied on a double dehumanization: it targeted communities as threatening “Others” while stripping security forces of their own social embeddedness. Yet this logic of separation—us/them, protector/subject, order/chaos—could not hold within the affective density of everyday life. Counterinsurgency sought to map relational ties through circuits of threat, but these persisted as affective attachments—the very texture of convivial life that securitization cannot contain or comprehend.

The ollas thus exemplified a politics of convivencia (conviviality): a mode of coexistence that neither dissolves inequality nor succumbs to enmity. By tracing how politicized care work unsettled securitization in practice, the article examines a pedagogical space in which participants reimagined the rights and responsibilities of democratic life.

(Featured image is an Arpillera depicting an olla común, Lo Hermida, Chile. Photograph by Nikola García Johnson.)