Cultures of security, cultures of rights: Security, rights activism, and the growth of anarchism in Catalunya (1896--1909)

This dissertation analyzes and explains the transformation of local political culture and the legitimation and implantation of anarchism in Catalunya in the years 1896-1909. It accounts specifically for the defeat of state security projects and the emergence of a local culture of collective rights defense which coincided with and formed the basis for anarchist mobilization in the region. Challenging existing accounts of the success of anarchism, it develops an alternative explanation which places practical action in the context of rights activism at its center.; This study develops a new conceptualization of state security as a complex of discourses and practices characterized by three related dimensions: dangerousness, prevention, and exception. The historical analysis finds that security measures in Catalunya in this era were not merely the province of the central state but rather their development was embedded in civil society, in political struggles, and in the construction of political identities. This research contributes to theoretical development concerning the origins and logic of the contemporary security state and the complex relationships among state security, civil society, and liberal governance.; This research also speaks to current debates concerning the relationship between rights activism and collective projects of political transformation. Rights campaigns were central to the construction of a local culture of rights defense which both constrained the advance of security projects and was expanded upon by anarchists and used, in a radicalization of rights protest itself, as the basis for their own success in the region. The evidence in this case argues for a practice-centered explanation for the radicalization of rights activism, revealing the role of republicanism in the process of cultural change that paved the way for anarchism. It was not the political ideology local republicans espoused but the forms of practice deployed in the construction of rights that they encouraged that provided a cultural opening to the anarchists. Specifically, the collective, direct defense of rights promoted by the republicans had the unintended effect of subverting their own legalist-constitutionalist rights project and laying the practical groundwork for the anarchists' radical rights vision and challenge to state-legal authority.