Chapter 7 Armed legitimacy in Mexico Self-defence groups against criminal violence Irene Álvarez-Rodríguez, Denisse Román-Burgos and Sasha Jesperson 1 Not all crime prevention strategies are consistent with national normative codes or international human rights standards. However, in contexts where the state is complicit in criminal violence (Flores, 2009) and access to justice is severely impeded (Azaola, 2009), private or civilian initiatives can emerge: initiatives which Goldstein (2005) has framed within the notion of ‘neoliberal violence’ or that Montoya (2018, p. 117) calls the “economy of violence”. The emergence of a variety of actors offering security in contexts occurs where it is a scarce resource.These private security companies, organised crime groups or self-defence groups obtain financial, political or moral benefits in exchange for the promise of protection. This has been the case in the Mexican state of Michoacán, where armed civilian groups have sprung up to protect their communities from the criminal violence embodied by the Knights Tem- plar – one of the most powerful criminal organisations of recent years. The Knights Templar cartel was engaged primarily in drug trafficking and extortion, with a level of oppressive violence upon the areas in which they operated to the extent that it closed down public space. There were also non-violent responses to the impact of cartel violence, but the self-defence groups that emerged in Michoacán, the focus of this chapter, posed the most direct challenge to cartel violence, providing protection to the communities where they operated. As a result, several definitions of justice and legitimate violence now exist in Micho- acán, proposed by actors who pursue specific economic and political ends. The Leviathan concept, proposed by Thomas Hobbes, notes that a strong state provides the best protection to a state of nature and, therefore, the means to provide individual security (see McDonald & Wilson, 2017). Generally, the state has become the primary provider of security and, in most contexts, has the monopoly on the use of force (Weber, 2015). The promise of security can- not be isolated from the exchange relationships and systems of reciprocity that regulate social life (Lomnitz, 2000; Leeds, 1996), is not beyond local moral codes (Misse, 2013) and does not escape class distinctions (Arias, 2006). Equally, we can consider the state to be just one of the many actors that can unlawfully provide protection through the use of violence against the population. In this context, it is appropriate to understand ‘legitimacy’ as a justification consistent 15031-3700d-1pass-r02.indd 84 3/11/2020 5:01:02 PM