Janice Gallagher’s Bootstrap Justice: The Search for Mexico’s Disappeared takes place in the context of a violent confrontation between organized crime groups and between these and the state. In Mexico, experts estimate that more than one hundred thousand individuals are disappeared—that is, missing or imprisoned against their will. Most are presumed to have fallen prey to organized crime. Some may be forcibly detained by state security forces. Others are victims of collusion between state and criminal elements. While some are found alive, most are not. Since 2006, more than five thousand bodies have been discovered in unmarked graves across Mexico (Al Jazeera, “Bodies of Young People Found in Mass Grave in Mexico’s Guanajuato,” 2020). Mexico’s minister for human rights recently called the country “one enormous clandestine grave” (Proceso, “México, ‘una gran fosa clandestina’: Encinas; presentan plan de búsqueda de desaparecidos,” 2019).
Bootstrap Justice calls our attention to the backdrop of pervasive impunity against which these disappearances take place, as well as citizens’ pursuit of justice within it. Perpetrators of disappearances are rarely tried and convicted in Mexico, with impunity rates “approaching 100 percent” (p. 3). The herculean challenge of pursuing justice in this setting motivates the book’s puzzle: where rights abuses are the norm, how do individuals become rights-claiming and rights-bearing citizens?
Gallagher’s central claim focuses on the transformative nature of political mobilization that disappearances inspire. Her argument proceeds in four parts. She posits that disappearances constitute a unique form of trauma because they leave surviving family members with unrelenting (and thus particularly cruel) uncertainty about their loved ones’ fate. This suffering motivates long-term participation in justice activism as family members repeatedly seek answers about their loved ones’ whereabouts. Mobilization, in turn, transforms individuals’ ideas about their relationship with, and agency before, the law, or their legal consciousness. In this sense, mobilization pushes individuals to view themselves as agent-laden actors who can compel the law to work in their favor. These transformations in legal consciousness at the individual level work in tandem with changes in the dynamics of state–criminal collusion, which generate new political opportunities for justice demands. As the political opportunity structure opens, victims’ families engage in a shared repertoire of contention to challenge impunity, thereby becoming rights-claiming and, in rare instances of success, rights-bearing citizens.
Gallagher relies on an astounding catalog of evidence. She brings over 10 years of experience working with the victims’ advocacy community in Mexico, including three years of ethnographic participant observation. She pairs these with 250 interviews, numerous government documents, an original dataset, and a survey. Her approach to this evidence is both unconventional and effective. She employs an interpretive lens to inform her theory of individual-level mobilization while leveraging these theoretical foundations to advance more positivist claims. The result is a sensitive, careful, victim-centered text that is as theoretically rich and compelling as it is self-effacing. Gallagher is a clear authority on this topic, yet she speaks softly so that her interlocutors’ voices come to the fore.
This rich evidence is presented across seven chapters that skillfully move between multiple levels of analysis to demonstrate interconnected processes of mobilization at individual, movement, and contextual levels. Chapters 2 and 4 systematically compare life-history narratives of three sets of victim-family members. These chapters establish the individual-level patterns of mobilization sparked by disappearances and the transformation in legal consciousness that sustains their ongoing mobilization. In chapters 3 and 5, Gallagher turns to the broader political and legal contexts in which mobilization takes place. Through subnational comparative analysis of state–criminal dynamics, chapter 5 demonstrates how fluctuations in state–criminal alliances generate shifts in legal and political opportunity structures. These, in turn, shape how victims advance justice claims. Gallagher underscores two conditions: the (in)stability of state–criminal alliances and the perceived motivations of state officials. Erosion of impunity is most likely when activists perceive state officials as working in solidarity with victims and where unstable state–criminal pacts create fissures in structures of impunity that victims can exploit. Chapter 6 brings these prior chapters to their logical conclusion by asking: what have victims’ movements achieved?
Linking processes of individual-level mobilization with movement-level processes and their outcomes is a major feat among several achieved in this book. Foremost among them, Bootstrap Justice demonstrates the theoretical and empirical value of centering victims. Through this approach, we learn how citizens act to close the breach between what states are supposed to do and their actual provision of rights. In this regard, Gallagher departs from much research on criminal governance focused on how states manage criminals and how criminals control communities. Gallagher flips this formula on its head, revealing instead how citizens compel the state to deliver justice, albeit incompletely.
Privileging victims’ voices also complicates our conceptions of justice. How do victims regard justice and what form does justice take when criminal convictions are unlikely? Gallagher challenges readers to discard visions of police investigators and courtroom proceedings, showing that amid impunity, much of the daily practice of justice falls on citizens. In her account, victims’ families—not the state—are the lead detectives soliciting cellular phone records, interviewing witnesses, and searching for the dead. By linking these activities with interlocutors’ political and legal consciousness, Gallagher likewise invites readers to broaden their conceptions of political action. She shows how mundane tasks of holding the state to account form a repertoire of contentious politics that conventional theories of social movements and political participation might miss.
Bootstrap Justice is part of a growing literature about the relationship between victimization and political participation. While abundant in empirical evidence, the field has generally been slow to develop robust theoretical explanations for why victims take political action. Predominant explanations suggest that trauma motivates prosocial behavior. Yet, such explanations struggle to account for why trauma is tied to the specific outcome of political engagement, rather than other prosocial behaviors. Gallagher makes important headway in resolving these unanswered questions by theorizing how, among all forms of victimization, disappearances exact a distinct trauma, and by outlining the logical links between that experience and mobilization.
Future research would benefit from following that thread and exploring additional variation within victimization experiences. For example, victims’ evolving relationship with the law and state are at the center of Gallagher’s account. Yet, it is conspicuous that she tells this story through just three sets of victim-family members. Not because these accounts are insufficient for advancing the argument, but because Gallagher has such a rich body of evidence to share, which surely holds information about the broader landscape of victimization and political transformation. The text would benefit from greater discussion of how these cases reflect that larger body of evidence. For instance, all three family members occupy some position of power or prominence in the victims’ movements. Do those who reach such positions vary systematically from those who do not? How might their leadership status shape their legal consciousness or their calculations of mobilization costs differently from less prominent victims? Understanding how these dynamics shape different victims’ political trajectories in distinct ways begs more research. Bootstrap Justice provides solid theoretical ground upon which future scholars may forge that line of inquiry.
This book is both heart wrenching and heartening. It is simultaneously an important academic text and a testament of a human rights crisis. While large-scale criminal violence becomes increasingly common throughout the region, Latin Americanists across disciplines will find Gallagher’s ethnographically informed descriptions of life amid criminal violence invaluable. Its recounting of rights mobilization born of violence, meanwhile, will be of urgent interest to scholars of violence and human rights and those researching social movements and political participation.
