Newton RCUK-CONACYT - Mobile Solutions to the Mexican Kidnapping Epidemic: Beyond Elite Counter-Measures Towards Citizen-Led Innovation

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Kidnapping has emerged as a major source of societal insecurity in Mexico, with public authorities recording 1,698 kidnappings in 2013. However, despite this being the highest number on record, official statistics reflect only a small fraction of incidents and the majority of kidnappings go unreported. Police complicity; high levels of impunity; failure to uphold the rule of law: all have eroded public confidence in state capacity to combat this illicit practice. In this context, the insecurity born of kidnapping pervades Mexican society and the so-called 'democratization' of this threat ensures that it is no longer just the rich who are exposed. This criminal phenomenon also manifests extra-territorial reach as its ramifications seep across the US-Mexico border.Our project will chart the shifting topography of the Mexican kidnapping epidemic and examine various 'mobile solutions' that have emerged to counter it. These include strategies such as: internal/external migration; cross-border security services; escort security; and, personal locator-chips. However, our ambitions extend beyond these multiple mobilities and the protection of wealthy elites, to engage with innovative 'citizen-led' responses. Working with activist-citizens, NGOs and human rights defenders, our transnational academic collaboration will build capacity within Mexico by developing a portfolio of counter-kidnapping resources. Together we will work to provide answers to the key question: how do you counter kidnapping when you cannot access private solutions or rely on the state?Through Participatory Action Research (PAR) with activists and victims' groups, we will explore the potential of the following resources: a counter-kidnapping handbook; a support-network for the families of kidnap victims; and, a mobile-phone 'app' developed as both a secret alerting system and a secure reporting mechanism. Harnessing the potential of new technological resources -most notably Amnesty International's 'Panic Button' app- we will explore new means to foster strategies of peer-to-peer security planning, to strengthen victims' independence and to improve their capacities to assist others. Integrating new technology into citizen-led counter-kidnapping we will work to bring forth much needed social change. We will also encourage project participants to contribute to a database of 'kidnapping diaries' by recording their narratives of this illicit phenomenon using new technology.Whilst the connection between security and technology is often framed in terms of social or mobility control in academic debates, our research takes an alternate approach. We examine how technology can facilitate, rather than restrict, mobility, as well as how it can both protect human rights and those who defend them. By making smartphone technology available to participants and training them in Amnesty International's recently developed 'PanicButton' app, we will initiate a feedback process to calibrate this app towards the specific challenges of kidnapping in Mexico. Through collaboration with those experts who developed the app, our project is uniquely placed to harness both their expertise and the transformative potential of PAR to innovate technology for social impact; in this case citizen-led counter-kidnapping.Our project is ambitious in seeking not only to track this illicit phenomenon across Mexico's social classes and territorial boundaries, but also to harness deeper understanding of kidnapping to both inform and innovate citizen responses. By extending counter-measures against kidnapping beyond entrepreneurial private security solutions for elites towards wider societal benefit through citizen-led action, we pioneer new thinking on how to guarantee security when states fail to uphold the rule of law. Furthermore, as kidnapping is a regional problem across Latin America, our research builds Mexican capacity but also provides a template that can be adapted for other contexts.