Dennis Rodgers

Living in the shadow of death: gangs, violence and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002

The past two decades have seen crime increasingly recognized as a critical social concern. Crime rates have risen globally by an average of 50 percent over the past 25 years, and the phenomenon is widely considered to contribute significantly to human suffering all over the world (Ayres 1998). This is particularly true in Latin America, where contemporary violence has reached unprecedented levels due to rising crime and delinquency (Londono et al. 2000). This trend has been widely linked to a perceived shift in the political economy of violence in post-Cold War Latin America, with the most visible expressions of brutality no longer stemming from ideological conflicts over the nature of politics, as in the past, but from more “prosaic” forms of everyday violence (Caldeira 1996: 199). Violence in Latin America has arguably “democratized,” ceasing to be “the resource of only the traditionally powerful or of the grim uniformed guardians of the nation and increasingly appear[ing] as an option for a multitude of actors in pursuit of all kinds of goals” (Kruijt and Koonings 1999: 11). These new dynamics are seen to be linked to a regional “crisis of governance,” whereby economic liberalization, weak democratization, and intensifying globalization have undermined states and their ability to command a monopoly over t he use of violence. The emergence of “disorderly” forms of criminal violence epitomizes this declining political authority, and signals a rising social chaos (de Rivero 2001).

“Disembedding” the city: crime, insecurity and spatial organization in Managua, Nicaragua

This paper explores the emergence of a new pattern of spatial segregation linked to rising urban insecurity in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, during the past decade and a half. Rather than fragmenting into an archipelago of isolated “fortified enclaves”, as has been the case in other cities around the world, Managua has undergone a process whereby a whole layer of the metropolis has been “disembedded” from the general fabric of the city through the constitution of an exclusive “fortified network” for the urban elites, based on the privatization of security and the construction of high-speed roads and roundabouts. This pattern of urban governance diverges significantly from Managua’s historical experience, and rests upon new urban developments that have explicitly favoured the urban elites, both directly and indirectly. These raise critical questions about the nature of relations between social groups within the city.

Gangs, Urban Violence, and Security Interventions in Central America

Urban violence is a major preoccupation of policymakers, planners and development practitioners in cities around the world. Public authorities routinely seek to contain such violence through repression, as well as through its exportation to and containment at the periphery of metropolitan centres. Yet, urban violence is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon and not amenable to reified diagnosis and coercive intervention. Muscular state-led responses tend to overlook and conceal the underlying factors shaping the emergence of urban violence, as well as the motivations and means of so-called violence entrepreneurs. This is very obviously the case of urban gangs in Central America, which are regularly labelled a ‘new urban insurgency’ threatening the integrity of governments and public order. This article considers both the shape and character of Central American gang violence and attempts to reduce it, highlighting the complex relationship between these two phenomena. We advance a threefold approach to measuring the effectiveness of interventions, focusing in turn on discursive, practical and outcome-based criteria. In this way, the article demonstrates how, contrary to their reported success in diminishing gang violence, repressive first-generation approaches have tended instead to radicalize gangs, potentially pushing them towards more organized forms of criminality. Moreover, although credited with some modest successes, more preventive second-generation interventions seem to have yielded more rhetorical advances than meaningful reductions in gang violence.

The state as a gang : Conceptualizing the governmentality of violence in contemporary Nicaragua

This article explores the nature of state violence in contemporary Nicaragua. It begins by considering the premise that Latin America has undergone a ‘crisis of governance’ during the past decade, due to the rise of multiple forms of non-state violence, proposing a means of visualizing how forms of ‘state sovereignty’ and ‘social sovereignty’ can viably coexist. With reference to the example of Nicaraguan youth gangs, it then explores the underlying basis of forms of ‘social sovereignty’, focusing in particular on the role played by their violent practices in the constitution of different modes of social ordering. It then uses the analysis developed in relation to gangs heuristically to consider the transformation of state governmentality in Nicaragua, before offering some concluding thoughts about what this might imply for future anthropological explorations of the state’s role in contemporary landscapes of violence.

Infrastructural violence: Introduction to the special issue:

This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of ‘infrastructural violence’. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of ‘infrastructural violence’ can nuance our analyses of the relations between people and things that converge daily in urban life to the detriment of marginalized actors, while also proposing a normative reflexivity that can provide a concrete means through which to talk, imagine and build towards greater regimes of quality and collective benefit. Finally, we conclude with a summary of each of the contributions to this special issue.

The fiction of development: Literary representation as a source of authoritative knowledge

Abstract This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority and representational form, and explore these by comparing and contrasting selected works of recent literary fiction that touch on development issues with academic and policy-related representations of the development process, thereby demonstrating the value of taking literary perspectives on development seriously. We find that not only are certain works of fiction ‘better’ than academic or policy research in representing central issues relating to development but they also frequently reach a wider audience and are therefore more influential. Moreover, the line between fact and fiction is a very fine one, and there can be significant advantages to fictional writing over non-fiction. The article also provides an Appendix of relevant works of fiction that we hope academics and practitioners will find both useful and enjoyable.

Gangs as Non-State Armed Groups: The Central American Case

Gangs are popularly considered to be the major security threat facing the Central American region. In focusing on the origins and dynamics of gangs in the region, this article seeks to broaden conceptualizations of non-state armed groups by expanding the theoretical optic from a narrow focus on war and post-war contexts to a wider spectrum of settings, actors, and motivations. It highlights a category of actors that does not explicitly seek to overthrow the state, but rather progressively undermines or assumes certain state functions. The article also reveals how efforts to contain and regulate gangs flow from their imputed motives, with interventions influenced by whether they are conceived as a criminal or political threat. At the same time, coercive regulation tend to be favoured even when such repressive interventions exacerbate gang violence, for reasons that reveal the deeper underlying political, social, and economic challenges facing the Central American region.

Cities and Conflict in Fragile States in the Developing World

The articles presented in this Special Issue draw on five years of research by the Cities and Fragile States programme of the Crisis States Research Centre, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This programme, funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), was an exploratory ‘blue skies’ endeavour that set out to examine the relationship between cities, states and conflict in conflict-affected parts of the developing world. Our starting-point was the neglect of cities in contemporary discourses of state-building and state fragility, despite the fact that it is widely accepted that cities have historically played a critical role in processes of state consolidation, transformation and erosion (see, for example, the work of Charles Tilly, 1989, 1992, 2010). Our research has found that cities are still central to such processes, but in much more complex ways. The articles that make up this Special Issue represent a sample of the larger research output of the programme, which we also refer to throughout this introductory article. We begin by exploring the relevance of Tilly’s ideas for cities in fragile and conflict-affected areas of the contemporary developing world, highlighting how these constitute a useful starting-point for analysis, but also how cities, states and conflicts in these contexts differ significantly from those characteristic of the period examined by Tilly. Focusing particularly on the changing nature of conflict, we then outline an original tripartite typology of contemporary conflicts, distinguishing between sovereign, civil and civic conflict. We draw on the research presented in this Special Issue and beyond to explore the ways in which cities are incorporated into these different forms of conflict as either targets, spaces of relative security, or incubators of further strife and antagonism

Contingent democratisation? The rise and fall of participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires

The implementation of participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires following the crisis of December 2001 was a highly unlikely event. The different parties involved had competing and contradictory agendas that did not coincide with participatory budgetings stated aims of extending citizen participation in government, but these interacted in a way that contingently created a space for a viable process to develop. Subsequent political shifts led to the demise of participatory budgeting, but the Buenos Aires case is nevertheless important because it highlights the way in which such processes can emerge in the absence of strong programmatic politics, thereby potentially opening new avenues for the promotion of democratic innovation.

Haussmannization in the tropics: Abject urbanism and infrastructural violence in Nicaragua

This article considers the underlying dynamics of the elite-oriented urban transformation that Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, has undergone during the past decade and a half. It begins by drawing a cross-historical comparison between Managua’s metropolitan makeover and a paradigmatic case of planned urban change, that of 19th-century Parisian Haussmannization, in order to highlight the systemic and purposeful nature of the former’s transformation from a top-down perspective. It then focuses ethnographically on the grassroots consequences of specific instances of infrastructural development that have affected two poor neighbourhoods in the city, providing a bottom-up view on the way that these have constituted the poor communities as ‘pacified spaces’, to the extent that their inhabitants can be said to have internalized a form of ‘abject urbanism’ that actively contributes to sustaining the unequal spatial order of the city. When seen from this perspective, the planned urban transformation of Managua emerges as a systemic form of violence mediated by the workings of infrastructure, a process that I suggest can be termed ‘infrastructural violence’.