NORM AND THE USE OF TERRITORY

REFLECTIONS ON PUBLIC SECURITY POLICY FROM THE PERIPHERY

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to discuss public security policy from the perspective of the territorial dynamics of the periphery, proposing a critical reading that shifts the traditional focus—centered on police repression—towards a geographical understanding of territory as a lived, practiced, and regulated space. Based on the categories of “used territory” and “regulated territory,” derived from Milton Santos’s theory of geographic space, and in dialogue with the Epistemologies of the South, the study adopts a qualitative, theoretical-analytical approach grounded in bibliographic review and documentary analysis of normative public security frameworks. The findings indicate that security policies designed in a top-down manner and disconnected from territorial dynamics tend to reproduce inequalities and inefficiencies, particularly in peripheral spaces. The article concludes that a public security policy oriented from the South requires the recognition of territorial specificities, locally embedded forms of regulation, and practices of resistance, incorporating social participation as a central element in the construction of interventions that are more just, effective, and adequately attuned to the lived realities of territories.