Urban Violence, Resilience and Security: Governance Responses in the Global South 1800379722, 9781800379725

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Urban Violence, Resilience and Security

Urban Violence, Resilience and Security Governance Responses in the Global South

Edited by

Michael R. Glass Senior Lecturer and Director, Urban Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Taylor B. Seybolt Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director, Ford Institute for Human Security, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Phil Williams Professor of International Security and Former Director, Ridgway Center for International Security, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© The Editors and Contributors Severally 2022 Cover image: Julie Ricard on Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952134 This book is available electronically in the Geography, Planning and Tourism subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800379732

ISBN 978 1 80037 972 5 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80037 973 2 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents List of figuresvii List of tablesviii List of contributorsix Forewordxi Ariel C. Armony Acknowledgmentsxiii 1

Introduction to Urban Violence, Resilience and Security1 Michael R. Glass, Taylor B. Seybolt and Phil Williams

PART I

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO URBAN VIOLENCE, RESILIENCE AND SECURITY

2

Urban violence in the Global South: drug traffickers, gangs, and organized crime Phil Williams

3

Urban resilience for the 21st century Savannah Cox

4

Urban governance in conflict zones: contentious politics, not “resilience” Daniel E. Esser

5

Building effective and acceptable security-driven urban resilience Jon Coaffee

6

Fragility and pernicious resilience in urban Latin America and the Caribbean Enrique Desmond Arias

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21 39

53 72

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PART II

DIMENSIONS OF URBAN VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

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Feral cities and the normative dimension of violence: Caracas and the Latin American city Roberto Briceño-León

8

Xenophobic violence, displacement, and reintegration: a case study of female migrants in Isipingo, Durban, South Africa Kim Gounder and Brij Maharaj

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120

9

Shoot first, ask later: violence and anti-crime policies in Mexico’s Cuidad Juárez and Pakistan’s Karachi Vanda Felbab-Brown

138

10

Strain between two worlds: a sociological approach to the rise and fall of crime and violence in Guatemala City Daniel Núñez

160

11

Criminal victimization and social resilience in Latin America Eduardo Moncada

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Index193

Figures 3.1

Contact tracing for COVID-19 in Dharavi

8.1

Isipingo and Chatsworth in Durban

48 122

10.1 Percentage of people working in upper-level occupations in Guatemala City by municipal zones, 2002

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10.2 Homicides in Guatemala City, by municipal zone, 2001–09

168

10.3 Neighborhoods with presence of both gangs (MS-13/ Barrio 18) in Guatemala City, 2018

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10.4 National population vs. prison population in Guatemala, 2018

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11.1 Typology of response to criminal victimization

181

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Tables 1.1

Dimensions of governance and urban space 

11

4.1

Reported participation in collective action in response to violence in Ciudad Juárez, 2008–12

61

4.2

Perceived prevalence of collective action in response to violence in Ciudad Juárez, 2008–12

62

7.1

Chronology of key events affecting Venezuela’s institutional framework

107

7.2

National survey results about Venezuela’s urban structure and institutionalism

113

8.1

Challenges in the Isipingo and Chatsworth displacement camps

126

10.1 Population growth in the department of Guatemala, by municipality, 1950–2018

164

11.1 Manifestations of social resilience in response to criminal victimization185

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Contributors Enrique Desmond Arias is Austin Marxe Professor of Western Hemisphere Affairs at Baruch College and Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Roberto Briceño-León is Professor Emeritus at Laboratorio de Ciencias Sociales (LACSO), Universidad Central de Venezuela & Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil. Jon Coaffee is Professor in Urban Geography based in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. Savannah Cox is a PhD candidate in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Daniel E. Esser is Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service and Senior Researcher at the German Development Institute. Vanda Felbab-Brown is Director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and a Senior Fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Michael R. Glass is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Kim Gounder is a PhD candidate in the Geography discipline in the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Brij Maharaj is Professor of Geography at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Eduardo Moncada is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Daniel Núñez is a researcher at the Asociación Civil Diálogos and a lecturer at the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala. Taylor B. Seybolt is Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Ford Institute for Human Security at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Pittsburgh. ix

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Phil Williams is Professor of International Security and Former Director of the Ridgway Center for International Security at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh.

Foreword Ariel C. Armony In this book, a diverse group of scholars seeks to conceptualize and understand the current development and future trajectories of urban and suburban space in an era of rapid globalization that is characterized by economic growth and social integration but also by growing inequality and violence. Global urbanization improves the lives of millions of people and provides a physical space for the technological and informational development needed to propel our societies forward. At the same time, cities can display a dystopian nexus of congestion, grinding poverty, crime, and public health dangers, all exacerbated by political instability. Urban space shapes and is in turn shaped by social hierarchies that underlie systems of stratification that reflect long-standing, structural inequalities, and newer forms of exclusion. That duality is inherent in urban landscapes around the globe. The critical research presented in this volume tackles topics ranging from female migrants and the challenges to reintegration in Durban, South Africa, to the violence and vulnerabilities present in Latin American cities such as Caracas and Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez. With continual population movement from rural to urban living, the topics explored in this book are increasingly important. It is fitting, therefore, that the University of Pittsburgh convened this international, interdisciplinary project. This book is the product of a two-year project developed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, the Ford Institute for Human Security, and the Dietrich School of Arts and Science’s Urban Studies Program, with financial support from the Global Studies Center at the University Center for International Studies (UCIS). The University of Pittsburgh continually aims to strengthen interdisciplinary research and curriculum development on global themes, with an emphasis on fostering ties between international scholars. It is through these international ties and dialogues that our university hopes to prepare researchers and practitioners to address our world’s most important challenges. As the Vice Provost for Global Affairs, I am constantly impressed by the breadth of research and insights created through these networks of international scholars and how they uphold the goals for global leadership that our university aims to cultivate. The volume’s editors and authors intend for the book to become a key resource for academic and policy audiences working at the intersection of xi

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urbanization, civil society, and human security. It is my hope that this publication helps to inspire a continued dialogue on the challenges and opportunities facing many of the world’s cities in the years to come. Ariel C. Armony Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Director, University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Acknowledgments This book is the result of a project at the University of Pittsburgh that was made possible by a Global Academic Partnership (GAP) grant provided by the University Center for International Studies and the Global Studies Center. The University of Pittsburgh was the epicenter of sustained scholarly exchanges where the themes of urban violence, vulnerability, and resilience were explored and developed. We want to acknowledge the key contributions of Mike Batty, Nancy Condee, Sabina Deitrick, Sera Linardi, Scott Morganstern, Tyeshia Lashae Redden, Jennifer Salahub (IDRC), and early contributors Dan Bisbee, Colin Clarke, David Connolly, John de Boer, Alexander Halman, Marcelo Korc, Anine Kriegler, Agnese Macaluso, and Andres Sevstuk. We want to thank Ariel Armony (Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Director of UCIS) and Belkys Torres (Executive Director of Global Engagement) for their earnest support of the GAP scheme, and especially this project. The support and advice of the Global Studies Center staff, including Director Michael Goodhart, Jessica Pickett, Associate Director Veronica Dristas, and Program Manager Maja Konitzer were influential in shaping the core scholarly engagements that occurred during the GAP period. We also wish to acknowledge the UCIS support that enabled Michael Glass to participate in the European Forum for Urban Security Conference in Barcelona, Spain, November 15–17, 2017. Further support for our project was enabled by our schools and centers. We would like to acknowledge the support of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, including Deans John Cooper and Kathy Blee, as well as the former Director of the Urban Studies Program Bill Chase. The support of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs was also crucial, and we want to thank Deans John Keeler and Carissa Slotterback for their encouragement and support. Thanks to John Richard for his early work on the original GAP proposal. Thanks also to Lindsey S. Anderson, Genia Andrews, Kathy Buechel, Unini Odaibo Campbell, Louise Comfort, Adame Frances, Charles Gochman, Kevin Kearns, Denise McCloskey, David Miller, John Patrick Miller, Cesar Gabriel Cedeno Monce, Jennifer Murtazashvili, Mamadou Ndiaye Jr., Camila Polinori, Alisha Shane-Cuniff, Jessica Smith, Tiffany Tse, Rachel Vinciguerra, Stephen Worman, Rose Wooten, and Xuyue Xu. The Ford Institute and Ridgway Center’s Fragile Cities Working Group provided a space to test ideas throughout the project, and we wish to thank graduate xiii

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students Emily Francis, Jessica Smith, Stephanie Sweat, Meagan Yost, and Shutong Zhang for their participation. We also want to thank Edward Elgar Publishing for their cooperation. Commissioning Editor Alan Sturmer, Assistant Acquisitions Editor Caroline Kracunas, Senior Desk Editor Christine Gowen, and Editorial Assistant Stephanie Mills were steadfast in their enthusiasm for this project and have helped immeasurably in shaping the final product. Thanks also to Karen Chapple, Reece Jones, and Megan Kappel for their advice as the project neared completion, and to Rikki Li, Ronna Edelstein, Shena Cavallo, and Gill Wheatley for their proofing assistance. Michael Glass was part of the Dietrich School Institute for Writing Excellence, and would like to thank Olga Klimova Magnotta, Taylor Coughlan, and Georgia Bedford for their support during the writing process. Finally, we want to give particular thanks to Diane Roth Cohen and Sandy Prigg-Monteverde. This project would not have reached completion without their tolerant, gracious, and consistent support. From budgeting and logistics to note keeping and time management, Diane and Sandra could always be counted on to keep us pointed in the right direction!

1. Introduction to Urban Violence, Resilience and Security Michael R. Glass, Taylor B. Seybolt and Phil Williams URBANIZATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CITY: PROCESSES AND PATTERNS The Janus-Faced City Urbanization is clearly one of the megatrends of the twenty-first century. According to Demographia, as of 2020 there were 36 built up urban areas in the world with more than 10 million inhabitants. Moreover, 11 of these areas had populations that exceeded 20 million and 22 of them had over 15 million inhabitants. There were 259 cities with over 2 million people, 510 over 1 million, and 1,055 with populations of 500,000 or more (Demographia 2020, pp. 23–39). While the figures are clear, the consequences of urbanization remain deeply uncertain, even as research in the field expands (Moncada 2013; Post 2018). Are these figures and the trends they represent positive, negative, or, as in so many things, a mix of both? Are cities safe or insecure, fragile or robust, brittle or resilient? This volume seeks to address these questions, even while recognizing that definitive answers remain elusive, that contributors disagree both methodologically and substantively, and that different cities yield different answers. Indeed, as Williams and Selle argued, it is possible to find urbanization optimists, especially among the development community, urbanization pessimists among the security community, as well as urbanization pragmatists who fall into neither camp and typically take a more holistic approach (Williams and Selle 2016). At their best, urban areas provide unparalleled social and economic advantages. Metropolitan regions across the globe continue to grow because of the advantages granted by urban processes, and the term ‘extended urbanization’ is now used to describe how most—if not all—of the world’s population is now influenced by the twin processes of urbanization (the processes of urban growth and change) and urbanism (the ways of life experienced by city dwell1

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ers). Cities and suburbs across the world can be places of optimism and opportunity, and the twenty-first century is witnessing urbanization at an accelerated pace as more people seek the benefits of urban life. Urban areas are widely seen as engines of economic growth, repositories of wealth, power, and entrepreneurship, and centers of culture, scholarship, and innovation. Economist Edward Glaeser describes this as the “triumph of the city” because urban areas provide economies of scale in service delivery, offer varied and many employment opportunities, and facilitate high levels of social and economic creativity (Glaeser 2011). Urban areas also provide many of the key nodes in a globalized world, acting as major hubs and transmission belts for the flows of goods, people, ideas and capital associated with globalization. Indeed, Saskia Sassen elucidated the notion of the global city, arguing that cities such as London, New York, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong were critical hubs in globalization networks, and especially in facilitating flows of capital (Sassen 2005). In the years since she articulated this concept, the number of global cities has increased significantly and now includes major cities in the Global South. In fact, urbanization and globalization are inextricably linked in ways that are mutually advantageous and contribute to global advancement and economic and social development. This vision was encapsulated in the UN Habitat Report of 2012/13 on the State of the World’s Cities. Although the report acknowledged that prosperity was not always evenly distributed within urban space, it described urban areas as “the home of prosperity. It is the place where human beings find satisfaction of basic needs and essential public and private goods, where commodities can be found in sufficiency and their utility enjoyed. Cities are where material and immaterial aspects of life are realized, providing contentment and happiness and increasing the prospects of individual and collective well-being” (UN-HABITAT 2013, p. x). The report also noted that urban areas are “becoming not just the dominant form of habitat for humankind, but also the engine-rooms of human development as a whole” (UN-HABITAT 2013, p. v). In effect, the report argued, urban areas are continuing to play—albeit on a larger scale than ever before—their time-honored role as centers of prosperity. This urban optimism has a particularly important variant in the notion of smart cities in which information and communication technologies are “merged with traditional infrastructure” to manage all dimensions of the city in an optimal manner (Batty et al. 2012). Such optimistic perspectives on the city are challenged, however, by the persistent unevenness which bedevils the urban world. Among those whose expectations about urban futures contrast most dramatically with the urbanization optimists are R.H. Liotta and James Miskel, Richard Norton, and David Kilcullen (Norton 2003; Miskel and Liotta 2012; Kilcullen 2013, p. 29). These authors present variations on the theme of dystopian urbanization that are powerful, haunting, and compelling. At the

Introduction

3

very least, these visions of current and future trends in urbanization capture an emerging inescapable reality for large cohorts of people, particularly in parts of the Global South. Wiig and Wyly note that the increasing integration of rhetorical and material elements of ‘smartness’ is fraught with challenges as some—but not all—cities incorporate smart governance technologies unevenly across their territory (Wiig and Wyly 2016). Perhaps for every smart city, however, there will be dozens of dysfunctional cities, with widespread slums, high levels of crime, violence, and instability, congestion, environmental degradation, and a large informal economy that serves as an indispensable coping mechanism. “Grinding poverty, environmental degradation, income inequalities, historical socio-economic inequalities, marginalization and various forms of exclusion” are just some of the problems facing rapidly expanding cities in the twenty-first century (Tibaijuka 2008). When they are inter-related with drugs, weapons, and the youth bulge, these problems and challenges become even more formidable. In some cities, these problems have become so pervasive that they have led to the creation of fortified communities. Norton has characterized cities that become highly violent and ungovernable as “feral cities” (Norton 2003). There is a third perspective that recognizes both the potential of cities and their vulnerabilities. Sassen, for example, noted that although the rise of global cities contributed significantly to economic development, the issue of inequality had not been addressed (Sassen 2005). In subsequent work she articulated how the operation of the global economy had led to the brutal expulsion of many people, including those in urban environments (Sassen 2014). This tightly bound relationship between potential and despair is classified by David Harvey as the “accumulation by dispossession” that rests at the heart of late-capitalist development. In his analysis, urbanization at the global scale is a crucial element of what enables capital surpluses, and yet it has come at the cost of dispossession and the loss of rights for the urban masses (Harvey 2012). The active frontier of processes of dispossession is located in the Global South, where Swapna Banerjee-Guha notes the rhetorical pablum of the ‘global village’ ignores how “the premise of this [global] equalization rests on innumerable divisions of relative space into myriad absolute spaces tuned to the requirement of international capital” (Banerjee-Guha 2010, p. 8). Robert Muggah also encapsulates these competing assessments of vulnerability and opportunity in an astute analysis of what he termed the “urban dilemma”—a dilemma that, in his view, is “exemplified by the paradoxical effects of urbanization in the twenty first century: as a force for unparalleled development on the one hand, and as a risk for insecurity amongst the urban poor on the other” (Muggah 2012, p. vi). Moreover, different risk factors

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help to determine where cities fall in terms of the positives and negatives of urbanization: countries exhibiting rapid urban population growth are statistically more likely to experience violent conflict. Likewise, social and income inequalities are highly correlated with differential rates of violence across and within cities, as compared to per capita income, which does not have a clear effect. Legacies of armed conflict, political authoritarianism and repressive policing are also all routinely associated with the onset and persistence of urban violence. (Muggah 2012, p. vii)

This helps to explain why Latin America—which has the highest levels of inequality in the world—also has most of the cities with the highest level of violence as measured by homicides per hundred thousand people. John de Boer has cast the issue in terms of risk, noting that in “fragile cities,” it is “plausible that the capacity of their governments to deliver services, respond to disasters, provide security, and govern will be pushed to the brink and collapse” (de Boer 2015). Urban Development Processes: Formal and Informal De Boer’s point about state capacity is valid for all cities regardless of their relative fragility. The profound challenge facing all urban areas is that the complex and dynamic nature of cities and related urbanized areas can generate change at rates exceeding the capacity of local or national government to respond (Friedmann 1986). This feature of urbanization is present in both historic and contemporary accounts of cities. For example, the rapid changes that occurred in European and American cities during the Industrial Revolution brought about massive disruptions. Attracted by the economic and social opportunities afforded by the radical urban innovations of the nineteenth century and pushed from rural life by the mechanization of farming, people flocked to the industrial city in unprecedented numbers, creating contradictions of wealth creation and social problems that were chronicled by observers like Friedrich Engels and Jacob Riis. The term “shock city” was coined to describe how certain cities embodied the rapidity and uncertainty of urban change (Briggs 1993). Migration into cities like Manchester and Pittsburgh provided the labor necessary for industrial development, but also created strains on urban infrastructural systems, leading to waves of public investment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Graham and Marvin 2001). Political dissonance could also arise, with the social and spatial configuration of urban governance poorly positioned to attend to the challenges of modernizing cities and urban populations that aspired to new urban amenities, rights, and security (Staeheli 2018).

Introduction

5

Global cities in the post-industrial era face similar challenges in response to rapid urban change. The opportunities afforded by living in a city like London or Singapore compels a bifurcated movement of migrants into those cities: both high-wage and high-skilled workers attracted by well-compensated jobs, and low-wage and low-skilled service workers who support them through household and community-based jobs. In all instances, urban change creates challenges for the state. Developing housing solutions, transportation and education systems, and urban planning systems to accommodate population growth is a time and capital-intensive proposition that can challenge the most capable government. Cities facing disinvestment or decline create different issues as local and central states are confronted with hard choices regarding service allocation and redevelopment strategies. In cases of either growth or decline, urban governance is shaped by the formal responses of the state, the informal responses of local communities, and by the negotiation between state and local visions for the city (Glass 2018a; 2018b). Absent conditions of urban violence, the intersection of formal and informal urban development shapes the city, creating the form of urban life that characterizes the modern city. The policy formula used by urban governments for city planning and development in the twenty-first century is shaped by neoliberalism, globalization, and the residual effects of twentieth-century development. Cities across the putative Global North were shaped during the post-1945 period by the Keynesian context that featured formal modernist planning and muscular local and state government. The ideological goal of governments during the time was fostering an optimistic and growth-oriented society; in the United States the frequent consequence of this approach to postwar growth was the rise of geographically expansive cities oriented around the private automobile, suburban developments and single-use zoning, and publicly subsidized transportation infrastructures (Addie et al. 2020). The urban landscapes that were created during this period endure, yet the political ideologies that undergirded their construction were gradually supplanted by a different approach that eschews the Keynesian perspective of strong government involvement in national and subnational development. Beginning in the 1970s, governments across the Global North began to recoil from the centrality of state-led development in favor of market-based solutions. Known as neoliberalism, this policy approach is now the paradigmatic ideology to governance in capitalist economies that emphasizes the economic development benefits arising when state authority, regulation, and central planning is rolled back in favor of greater private sector involvement with functions previously considered the domain of the public state. The rise of neoliberal governance occurred synchronously with the rise of globalization as a key economic and political process. The greater connectivity of the world’s cities as centers for commerce and innovation, and the capacity

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for the rapid transfer of information, capital, and people across the world shapes urban development in significant yet uneven ways. Cities in the Global North are characterized (in often exaggerated terms) by stable governance, high degrees of internal and external connectivity, modern infrastructural systems, and a reliance on higher-order economic functions. The central urban policy goal of governments in cities of the Global North is often to preserve or enhance their comparative position in the global economy by developing new place-based assets or strategies that enhance their competitive advantage. There is an observable degree of policy replication across cities, as successful strategies undertaken elsewhere are transferred and translated into different urban contexts—a process defined as “policy mobility” (Temenos and McCann 2013). The consequence of the twin processes of globalization and neo-liberalization is formal development in cities of the Global North compelled by similar motives, manifested by similar built environments, and potentially destabilized by similar threats. The enduring hegemony of cities across the Global North also provides an aspirational target for other cities to follow. Of course, narratives about urban development that focus on the policies and processes of state and market actors risk presenting an overdetermined view of the city. Whereas privileged actors wield significant power in constructing the trajectory for city-regions, cities are also constructed through informal actions. The individual actions of citizens and the collective action of social groups can confound the goals of formal planning and urban development. Classic examples of these actions include the citizen protests that rallied against modernist planning in mid-twentieth-century cities across North America and Europe. Urbanist Jane Jacobs became an acclaimed antagonist of top-down urban planning in the 1960s, when she mounted a sustained defense of neighborhoods threatened by the construction of urban highways and blight removal. Henri Lefebvre raised similar critiques of formal planning and top-down development, arguing that the urban poor needed to raise a “cry and a demand” against plans for the city made by people who did not consider the perspective of marginalized groups (Lefebvre 1996). Such protests reflected a significant gap in the capacity or willingness of state actors to negotiate or engage with the public and led to sporadic attempts to create more collaborative and responsive forms of urban governance. There are global examples of these events over the past decade, including the mobilization of dissent during the Arab Spring that has spurred new rounds of scholarly research (Allegra et al. 2013). Urbanization takes on different forms when perceived globally, and some of the sharpest distinctions and contradictions are evident when examining cities across the Global South. This is especially significant if the normative vision of what cities should look like (or how they should function) is a city in Europe or North America: places characterized by comparative privilege and wealth

Introduction

7

and shaped by hegemonic dominance within the world system. Within the Global South, urbanization is characterized by the legacy of shifting priorities and colonial relationships. For example, in Southeast Asia the pattern of urban growth was shaped by indigenous ideas about settlement but was subsequently altered by the imposition of colonial ideologies about urban form that were shaped by racial prejudices and economic imperatives. Cities like Jakarta, Bangkok, and Singapore carry the place names, urban infrastructures, and patterns of development that arose during the colonial period. As Rimmer and Dick note, periods of post-colonial nationalist development from the 1950s onward failed to eradicate traces of the colonial past yet often reoriented parts of the city (Rimmer and Dick, 2009). For instance, Malaysia’s former capital city of Kuala Lumpur underwent significant transformation as the Mahathir administration promoted a new Malaysian identity for the city by developing a new central business district located miles away from the colonial epicenter of the city. The new administrative capital of Putrajaya was developed south of Kuala Lumpur in the 1990s as part of a project reflecting the religious and nationalist identity of the country. Even in an era of globalization, cities across the Global South resemble and yet do not replicate the cities of the Global North. In wealthier cities like Singapore or Hong Kong, the architectural forms and global connectivity of the cities suggest the aspiration of city developers supported by developmentalist states to surpass the urban forms found in North America or Europe. The general periods and patterns of indigenous development, colonial subjugation, post-colonial nationalism, and global interconnection hold constant across the Global South. And so, the tension between state-led and bottom-up modes of urban development is recurrent across the globe, and ideas about the city are often broader than the standard definitions provided for by planners, theorists, or urban politicians. At the same time, Seth Schindler reminds us that our attention must return to the “life and death issues that animate sociality and contestations in many cities around the world,” where life and death struggles are waged over fundamental issues like security and sanitation (Schindler 2017; see also Datta and Ahmed 2020). The materialities of human life and the innovative solutions that spring up in the most ordinary locations mean urban researchers need to retain an openness to the innovative forms of urban life or aspiration that specific communities construct for themselves (Simone 2016). It also means that evaluating urban problems should be open to the prospect for non-standard solutions to emerge, as we see in the solutions to urban violence that are represented in the chapters of this book.

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URBAN VIOLENCE AND ALTERNATE MODES OF GOVERNANCE Urban violence can take many different forms (Tyner 2015). Perhaps the most destructive and devastating forms of violence occur when cities become battlegrounds among competing entities in large-scale interstate wars. The Battle of Stalingrad in World War II is perhaps the ultimate example of cities devastated by land warfare. Air power added another dimension to the vulnerability of cities during wartime as exemplified by the Blitz on London, the fire-bombing of Dresden and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons. Cities were also at risk during the Cold War, but policies of deterrence and the prospect of mutual assured destruction kept them out of harm’s way. Since the end of the Cold War, however, several cities have been devastated by war, insurgency, and ethnic or sectarian conflict. These include Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, where Russian forces fought Chechen militias in 1995–96 and 1999–2000. Another city profoundly disrupted by conflict was Baghdad, where U.S. and allied occupation forces faced both a Sunni insurgency led by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and Shia violence, led by Muqtada al Sadr and his militia force Jaish-al-Mahdi. Ironically, the Sunni and Shia factions sometimes seemed to coalesce against the Coalition Provisional Authority, while at other times they engaged in vicious forms of sectarian cleansing against each other that precipitated fears of a full-scale civil war in Iraq. Although it appeared in 2008 and 2009 that AQI had been defeated, the Sunni insurgency morphed into Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In 2014, ISIS captured Mosul as the Iraqi Army disintegrated and fled; the city was eventually recaptured by Iraqi forces in 2017–18 after a nine-month struggle. The liberation of Mosul, however, involved what one observer described as “unimaginable” damage including that incurred from airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition that “crumbled” some “areas in the city the size of football fields” (Hopkins 2020). Cities also provide a rich array of soft targets for terrorist organizations. The most dramatic and costly terrorist acts directed at urban targets remain the September 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center. The vulnerability of urban targets was subsequently underlined by attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, and Brussels. Few cities, however, have suffered as much from terrorism as Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Suicide attacks using car and truck bombs have resulted in large-scale death and destruction. An al-Shabab truck bomb in October 2017 killed an estimated 500 people and destroyed and damaged buildings over a wide area (Reuters 2017). Horrific as such attacks are, use of weapons of mass destruction in a city would be even more disastrous. The consequences of the use of sarin gas on the Tokyo subway by Aum Shin-Rikyo in 1995 were mitigated to some degree

Introduction

9

by amateurish delivery systems—sharpened umbrellas piercing plastic bags and releasing the gas. In contrast, a nuclear or radiological attack would make large parts of a city uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. More immediately for most city inhabitants, especially in Latin America and South Africa, security problems revolve primarily around the violence used by drug traffickers, criminal organizations, mafias, and gangs—entities that engage in a mix of cooperation on the one side and violent conflicts on the other (Berg and Carranza 2018). Gang-on-gang violence is often a mix of turf wars, identity protection and promotion, self-aggrandizement and self-protection, both at the individual and the group level. This is a particular problem in Central America, where the enmity between Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio-18 is deeply entrenched. Factional divisions within gangs have also resulted in outbreaks of intense violence in cities and in prisons. Similar gang wars have blighted parts of Cape Town—especially the Cape Flats—as well as other cities in South Africa and in several countries in West Africa. As well as being innocent bystanders who are inadvertently killed or wounded, citizens, along with businesses, are also targeted for extortion payments. This has become an important source of funding for the gangs that perpetuates their predatory behavior. Gangs and criminal organizations, however, are not exclusively predatory. On occasion, they provide alternative governance, offer real protection, resolve disputes, and even provide services (Kuldova 2018). In this connection, Vanda Felbab-Brown has persuasively argued that some criminal groups not only seek profit but also engage in “a competition in state-making” (Felbab-Brown 2010). Strong legitimate states that effectively engage in social provision, make the competition one sided and ensure criminal organizations make few inroads. Where these conditions are absent, however, “non-state entities do often outcompete the state and secure the allegiance of large segments of society” providing what are in effect, alternative forms of governance (Felbab-Brown 2010). Alternative governance can range from simply the provision of security and stability where one criminal group controls territory, avoids directly confronting the state and keeps out competitors, to a much more expansive range of activities. The former Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in Brazil offers a prime example. Some of the areas under PCC control “have gradually seen the substitution of an inefficient state monopoly of force by a violent non-state actor operating with a parallel law respected, and sometimes feared, by the population, who sees the group as more reliable than an oppressive state represented by police” (Ferreira 2019, p. 56). Conversely, when there are multiple criminal organizations competing for control over the territory, governance is fragile at best and often overtly and violently contested (Arias 2017; Duran-Martinez 2018).

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There is also a “Robin Hood” component in at least some organized criminality in Latin America. Pablo Escobar initiated a house-building program called “Medellin without Slums.” Equally striking, if less well-known, the Lorenzana family in Guatemala moved cocaine through to Mexico but was also paternalistic toward the local community, providing jobs, a medical clinic, flood relief, and gifts for children at Christmas (Williams 2016, pp. 35–6). Chapo Guzman in Mexico cultivated a similar image. Perhaps even more surprising is that in San Pedro Sula, as Farah and Babinou have pointed out, MS-13 involvement in drug trafficking has provided enough funding to engage in service provision to local communities. MS-13 has kept “the neighborhood relatively violence free” and prevented predatory behavior by rival gangs and police and offered some basic meal provision to children and the elderly, created “rudimentary literacy programs” and provided basic justice and conflict resolution through “hearings held twice a week to resolve local disputes (charges of domestic violence, property theft, vandalism, violating gang rules)” (Farah and Babineau 2017, pp. 65–6). A similar phenomenon has long been visible in the Cape Flats where, as André Standing has noted, “the criminal economy delivers employment and goods to thousands of individuals who are socially excluded.” In addition, the “criminal elite provides … ‘governance from below’ … by performing functions traditionally associated with the state” (Standing 2003). These functions include dispute settlement, a degree of social protection, and even private philanthropy, which is at least a partial substitute for the state provision of welfare (Standing 2003). Similarly, in the slums of Kingston, Jamaica the “dons”—who typically mix the roles of community leaders and criminal entrepreneurs—provide employment, services, and protection. None of this is meant to argue that alternative governance mechanisms are motivated by altruism. On the contrary, they are intended to gain public support, launder money or, at least, mitigate reputations, and create safe, low-risk operating spaces for the criminals (Kuldova 2018). Even if it is done out of self-interest, however, the provision of governance by criminals can play a positive role when the state is absent. Criminal paternalism—whatever the motivations—has provided benefits to communities long ignored by the state, and at times this informal governance has become more important than formal governance. Sometimes there might even be tacit agreement whereby the state provides some services while criminals or other violent armed groups provide others. This results in a form of mixed or hybrid governance, well described by Enrique Desmond Arias in his study of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Arias 2006). Even though violent armed groups sometimes provide alternative forms of governance, they are often in competition with one another for territorial control, and for the control of markets, both licit and illicit. At times, therefore,

Introduction

Table 1.1

11

Dimensions of governance and urban space

Formally Governed Spaces—

Hybrid Governed Spaces—by

Alternatively Governed Spaces—

where the state is dominant and

mix of both state and armed

where armed groups are dominant

armed groups play a relatively

groups

and the state is absent or at best minimally present

modest role that is restricted to illicit markets and does not involve governance Confrontational Spaces—between

Multilayered Conflict Spaces—

Contested Spaces—among

the state and violent armed

that are both confrontational and

violent armed groups where the

groups The Mano Dura policies

contested Major cities in Mexico

state is either absent or largely

that characterized Central

fit this category as rival drug

a bystander The conflict between

American responses to the gangs

trafficking organizations vie for

gangs in close proximity to one

created confrontational spaces

power while the Mexican military

another in Central American

in cities

is trying to suppress them

cities

Note This table represents different configurations of governance and space found in cities of the Global South.

spaces within the city are bitterly contested as rival groups vie for supremacy; at other times or in other parts of the city the struggle is between the forces of the state and these violent armed groups, resulting in what can best be termed confrontational spaces. Given this diversity, one way to think about spaces within the city is in terms of a matrix involving governance and conflict and state and non-state actors. Table 1.1 focuses on the dimensions of governance and its providers in the top row and conflict and the belligerents in the bottom row. The left-hand column focuses on the state as primary actor while the right-hand column is about non-state actors. The middle column is messier, involving mixed or shared governance at the top level and multi-layered conflicts at the bottom. The typology of spaces within cities has been significantly shaped and influenced by the work of both Enrique Desmond Arias (2017) and Angelica Duran-Martinez (2018). Although this matrix provides insight into both governance and violence in cities in the Global South, it remains uncertain how such an assessment might hold up given the massive impact of COVID-19. It bears emphasis, however, that, even in the pre-COVID-19 world, states through much of the Global South suffered from all sorts of deficiencies. In many countries the state was weak, with legitimacy deficits, capacity gaps and functional holes, limited availability of collective or public goods, high levels of inequality and marginalization, pervasive corruption and a pronounced lack of a monopoly on the use of force. The pandemic and the responses to it have not only thrown these existing conditions into bold relief, but also exacerbated existing state weaknesses and pathologies. Moreover, responses have in many cases failed dismally because of poor preparedness, lack of capacity, the emphasis on economic streamlining

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Urban violence, resilience and security

and efficiency rather than resilience, and government indifference to public health expertise. Not surprisingly, therefore, the global pandemic has extended its impact far beyond public health, creating profound economic dislocation, ripping open the fabric of social cohesion, and testing governance systems to an extent rarely experienced outside large-scale and widespread warfare. The spread of the virus in the Global South has exacerbated dismal governance, highlighted the massive scale of economic inequality, and placed marginalized and disenfranchised populations even more at risk. The result is that the legitimacy of states throughout Latin America and Africa has been deeply corroded. Indeed, it will be hard to avoid an intense crisis of state governance with concerns about competency and capacity accompanying those about inequality, elite parochialism, self-interest, and corruption, and pervasive levels of violence. As part of this crisis, there is likely to be a widespread debate about the nature and responsibility of the state to its citizens and a fundamental challenge to neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of the state and the city.

THE SEARCH FOR RESILIENCE AND URBAN SECURITY Rather than being an external force impacting on the urban fabric from the outside looking in, [urban violence] is one that very much permeates the urban universe, and is interwoven into the social relations of cities. (Rodgers 2016, p. 104)

Urban violence and urban security are closely connected and mutually reinforcing processes. In the above epigraph, Dennis Rodgers is evaluating the relationship between urban violence and cities based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Managua. Rodgers evokes Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” to remind us that urban violence is not monolithic, and may either be lawmaking, law-preserving, or law-destroying (Benjamin 2017). In Benjamin’s framework, lawmaking violence establishes the basis for rules, law-preserving violence (including the threat of violence) functions to preserve the status quo, and law-destroying violence creates space for a new social order. As a case in point, the U.S. invasion of Baghdad in 2003 was lawmaking violence, the U.S. occupation of Iraq was law-preserving violence, and the rise of ISIS was a form of law-destroying violence. Rodgers adapted Benjamin’s framework and demonstrated at a local scale how a small-time drug dealer leveraged urban violence in different ways at given points in time, creating advantageous outcomes. How, Rodgers asks, “do different types of articulations of violence emerge in cities, when are they destructive, when are they productive, and why it is that violence can play such contrasting roles in our lives?” (Rodgers 2016, p. 105). Such questions are profound, since the

Introduction

13

responses to violence will influence the physical, political, and social infrastructures of cities. The threat or reality of urban violence has shaped cities across the Global South. Elfversson and Höglund (2019) found that violence in Nairobi led to the Kenyan government taking measures to securitize the city, including new security architecture, a hardening of formerly public spaces, and greater latitude to the police for counter-violence measures. Similar circumstances are seen in Latin American cities, such as in San Pedro Sula where the urban environment is reconstituted as a “Defended City” of gated communities and hardened security infrastructure for those with the means to live there (Villarreal 2020). In her work on planning in Latin America, Diane Davis argues convincingly that responses to urban violence have involved state reordering of territory and social relations, and that the police have exacerbated the problems of violence through their uneven enforcement of security efforts that tend to stigmatize informal settlements (Davis 2014). Her depictions of state-led planning and the use of modernist techniques to enhance the government’s capacity to control and restructure space will come as little surprise to readers of David Harvey and James C. Scott, both of whom describe the selective implementation of planning methods to legitimize state control over space and to facilitate capitalist development (Scott 1998; Harvey 2004). As the state masters its authority and ability to protect and enhance preferred spaces within the city, groups including the police, gangs, and mafias take control of other sectors, and the public maneuver to protect themselves through any means necessary or available to them (Simone 2016; Jenss 2019). Resilient urbanization and urban security are currently promoted in the context of these turbulent processes of human insecurities. In his earlier work on the topic, Jon Coaffee has highlighted the promise of everyday resilience policy and outlines the challenges of an interdisciplinary concept that has shifted in both meaning and in practice (Coaffee 2013). The Building Resilience in Cities under Stress report indicates one way that resilience is mobilized for human security, linking individual cases to measures of urban fragility (Mancini and Ó Súilleabháin 2016). The solutions to enhance resilience the report presents are broad, including targets such as dynamic planning, better governance, community participation, and reducing inequalities. Such strategies are like those represented in urban security recommendations for European countries (EFUS 2016), and it is questionable whether such targets hold value for situations where social and political capacity does not reflect the practices of cities in the Global North. Whereas the goal of secure human futures is a necessary goal for every citizen regardless of location, the target for surmounting urban violence should reflect the relational conditions of given societies.

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Urban violence, resilience and security

PLAN OF THE BOOK Urban areas are not merely the physical containers for social ills or opportunities. Following work on the relational nature of cities, we accept the premise that urban space both shapes and is shaped by the socio-political conditions that are all too often characterized as order versus disorder, or by resilience versus vulnerability. Such binary logics are understandable heuristic devices for researchers and policymakers, but they can obscure the geographically contingent processes that are shaping the material conditions of specific neighborhoods in and across cities. Moving beyond oversimplified signifiers used by analysts to define the urban condition may create greater complexity for research or classification of risk, and yet our goal of constructing a nimbler framework for understanding the roots of urban violence and the opportunities for creating more sustainable and just urban futures seems more generative than point-in-time indicators of either urban fragility or resilience. Such a framework can also decenter the logics of community resilience in a way that avoids normativity and attends to the ‘ordinary’ interactions between citizens, the state, and non-state actors (Staeheli et al. 2012). We are pursuing an approach to urban violence, resilience, and security that avoids an understanding of human security that is bound to Westphalian principles of democracy, or that considers cities of the Global North to epitomize conditions of security, safety, and sustainability. If the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21 indicated anything, it is that vulnerability does not respect broad categorizations of ‘developed’ versus ‘developing’ city status, with cities in the United States faring much worse than spaces in the Global South for whom ‘crisis’ is a familiar condition. In addition, since resilience can and does look different based on the vantage point of the observer then policymakers need to take care to reconcile global best practice models that promote human security with an appreciation for non-standard solutions that function in certain contexts. By focusing on a sampling of cities from the Global South we endeavor to learn from the successes and failures of urban responses to violence, identifying resilience that emerges in conditions that would seem untenable from the privileged perspective of city-regions in the Global North. The contributors to this volume are committed to understanding the interconnections between urban violence, resilience, and security, and feature emerging and established scholars with a deep familiarity about the urban condition in the Global South. Originally based on sustained conversations that occurred at the University of Pittsburgh during 2016 and 2017, the volume has evolved in response to the broad socio-political dynamics that have shaped debates around our core themes of urban violence, resilience, and security. Part I of the book involves conceptual approaches to the themes described

Introduction

15

above. This section provides five conceptually based chapters that examine the problems and prospect of the signifiers used to define urban conditions in the Global South. Part II of the book provides detailed case studies of the foundations, consequences, and coping mechanisms related to urban violence in cities across the Global South. Taken together, we aim to push the debates about urban violence and disorder beyond simple indicators of vulnerability and resilience to instead provide a deeper and more geographically grounded perspective on the twenty-first-century’s urban condition across the Global South. In Chapter 2, Phil Williams questions what urban violence looks like, and critiques the perspective that urban violence is global. Rather, Williams argues that the condition of urban violence is more nuanced, with some places suffering more than others. Evaluating violence in the Global South, Williams concludes that while neoliberal urbanization creates the necessary conditions for urban violence, they are not sufficient to explain high levels of violence: the role of gangs, organized crime, and drug violence is crucial in transforming the potential into the reality of high levels of violence. If urban violence is considered a symptomatic feature of urban disorder, then resilience is frequently cited as a solution. The remaining chapters in Part I question the resilience discourse pertaining to urban violence, raising the question about whether the rhetoric of resilience provides a mere palliative to conditions of urban violence. In Chapter 3, Savannah Cox critiques the current usage of resilience, arguing that the term has suffered from a privileged positionality that has constructed a restrictive sense of what it means to be resilient. She argues that our knowledge about resilience needs to be decentered to avoid reproducing the flawed ‘solutions’ to vulnerability that have occurred in the past. In Chapter 4, Daniel E. Esser provides a separate critique of resilience rooted in a study of Ciudad Juarez. Esser notes that resilience has become depoliticized and argues that plans to create resilience are instead safeguarding the neoliberal international order, noting that a lack of empirical material exists linking resilience to the mitigation of urban violence. Given the capacity of resilience to affect urban violence is questionable, Jon Coaffee argues that urban security policies must be evaluated based on whether new urban security techniques lead to a more open or obtrusive city. Chapter 5 describes this tension using examples drawn from Rio de Janeiro and other cities in Latin America and draws our attention to the necessary intersections between security, planning, and community risk. To conclude Part I, in Chapter 6, Enrique Desmond Arias draws on his research in Kingston and elsewhere to critique the fragility discourse that accompanies scholarly work on resilience. He argues that the focus on fragility places too much weight on deficits and conflict. Finding that gangs function in important ways due to the failure of the local state, Arias notes that we should look to determine the durable relationships behind what he coins “pernicious

16

Urban violence, resilience and security

resilience.” These chapters hence point us beyond resilience as a sufficient response to urban violence, and toward the more challenging work of developing local security in the context of global structural inequalities. Part II provides five rich empirical chapters that contribute to our understanding of vulnerability and resilience in the Global South. Drawn from interdisciplinary scholarship and encompassing cases from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, these chapters reinforce the need to develop geographically contingent perspectives on the problems associated with urban violence. The chapters also indicate the need for community-engaged scholarship on urban violence, as the lessons learned from these chapters could not have occurred with a singular focus on quantifiable indicators of vulnerability or resilience. Chapter 7 by Roberto Briceño-León reflects on the dismantling of Caracas’ social norms by Hugo Chavez’s administration. Reflecting a deep appreciation for the spatial structure of Latin American cities, Briceño-León demonstrates the relationship between urban order and the validity of the social pact. Chapter 8 by Kim Gounder and Brij Maharaj turns to the circumstance of foreign female migrants in the resettlement camps of Durban, South Africa. Their rich ethnographic account of xenophobic violence concludes that the urban policies established to reduce urban violence presumed the male subject as normative, and hence did not create sufficient protections for displaced migrant women. Chapter 9 by Vanda Felbab-Brown reflects the differences between Ciudad Juarez and Pakistan’s Karachi. In a similar way to Arias, Felbab-Brown found that local populations preferred criminal or militant order to intense violence or neglect by the state, indicating that the shape and character of resilience in any given case requires closer evaluation. Chapter 10 by Daniel Núñez examines crime and urban violence in Guatemala City. Núñez assesses the structural causes of declining violence in the city and argues that integrated policy solutions that target structural challenges are necessary to ensure that reductions in violence are sustained over a longer term. Chapter 11 by Eduardo Moncada draws upon his fieldwork in Latin America to argue that the relationships between the urban victims of crime and the perpetrators of urban violence are more complicated than commonly considered in research on urban violence. By evaluating the agency of victims in conditions of urban violence, Moncada brings our attention to the need for engaged research that acknowledges on-the-ground relationships that composite indicators of resilience and vulnerability might conceal.

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Allegra, M. et al. (2013). “Rethinking Cities in Contentious Times: The Mobilisation of Urban Dissent in the ‘Arab Spring.’” Urban Studies, 50(9). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 0042098013482841. Arias, E.D. (2006). Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janiero. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Arias, E.D. (2017). Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Banerjee-Guha, S. (ed.) (2010). “Introduction: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order,” in Accumulation by Dispossession. New York: Sage Publications. Batty, M. et al. (2012). “Smart Cities of the Future.” European Physical Journal: Special Topics, 214(1). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1140/​epjst/​e2012​-01703​-3. Benjamin, W. (2017). “Critique of violence,” in Deconstruction: A Reader. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.4324/​9781315824512. Berg, L.A. and M. Carranza (2018). “Organized Criminal Violence and Territorial Control: Evidence from Northern Honduras.” Journal of Peace Research, 55(5). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0022343317752796. Briggs, A. (1993). Victorian Cities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coaffee, J. (2013). “Rescaling and Responsibilising the Politics of Urban Resilience: From National Security to Local Place-making.” Politics, 33(4). https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1111/​1467​-9256​.12011. Datta, A. and N. Ahmed (2020). “Intimate Infrastructures: The Rubrics of Gendered Safety and Urban Violence in Kerala, India.” Geoforum. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​ .geoforum​.2020​.01​.016. Davis, D.E. (2014). “Modernist Planning and the Foundations of Urban Violence in Latin America.” Built Environment. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2148/​benv​.40​.3​.376. de Boer, J. (2015). “Resilience and the Fragile City: Reducing Vulnerability to Complex Urban Crises.” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 4(1). https://​collections​.unu​.edu/​eserv/​UNU:​3226/​unu​_cpr​_resilience​_and​_the​_fragile​ _city​.pdf. Demographia (2020). “Demographia World Urban Areas.” http://​www​.demographia​ .com/​db​-worldua​.pdf. Duran-Martinez, A. (2018). The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops, and Politicians in Colombia and Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press. EFUS (2016). Methods and Tools for a Strategic Approach to Urban Security. Paris: EFUS. Elfversson, E. and K. Höglund (2019). “Violence in the City that Belongs to No One: Urban Distinctiveness and Interconnected Insecurities in Nairobi (Kenya).” Conflict, Security and Development. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14678802​.2019​.1640493. Farah, D. and K. Babineau (2017). “The Evolution of MS 13 in El Salvador and Honduras.” Prism, 7(1). https://​cco​.ndu​.edu/​Portals/​96/​Documents/​prism/​prism​_7​ -1/​5​-Farah​.pdf​?ver​=​2017​-09​-14​-133607​-060. Felbab-Brown, V. (2010). “Conceptualizing Crime as Competition in State-Making and Designing an Effective Response.” Brookings Institution. https://​www​.brookings​ .edu/​on​-the​-record/​c onceptualizing​-crime​-as​-competition​-in​-state​-making​-and​ -designing​-an​-effective​-response/​. Ferreira, M.A.S.V. (2019). “Brazilian Criminal Organizations as Transnational Violent Non-state Actors: A Case Study of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC).” Trends in Organized Crime, 22(2). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s12117​-018​-9354​-7. Friedmann, J. (1986). “The World City Hypothesis.” Development and Change. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1467​-7660​.1986​.tb00231​ x.

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Glaeser, E. (2011). Triumph of the City. New York: Penguin. Glass, M.R. (2018a). “Navigating the Regionalism–Public Choice Divide in Regional Studies.” Regional Studies. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​00343404​.2017​.1415430. Glass, M.R. (2018b). “Seeing Like a City through the Singapore City Gallery.” City, pp.  1–21. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13604813​.2018​.1451458. Graham, S. and S. Marvin (2001). Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2004). Paris: Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2012). The New Imperialism. London: Verso. Hopkins, T. (2020). “Mosul after ISIS: A Conversation with Omar Mohammed.” GW Today. https://​gwtoday​.gwu​.edu/​mosul​-after​-isis​-conversation​-omar​-mohammed. Jenss, A. (2019). “Authoritarian Neoliberal Rescaling in Latin America: Urban In/Security and Austerity in Oaxaca.” Globalizations. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14747731​.2018​.1502493. Kilcullen, D. (2013). Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla. New York: Oxford University Press. Kuldova, T. (2018). “When Elites and Outlaws Do Philanthropy: On the Limits of Private Vices for Public Benefit.” Trends in Organized Crime, 21(3). https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1007/​s12117​-017​-9323​-6. Lefebvre, H. (1996). “The Right to the City,” in E. Kofman and E. Lebas (eds.), Writings on Cities, chapter 14. London: Wiley. Mancini, F. and A. Ó Súilleabháin (eds.) (2016). Building Resilience in Cities under Stress. New York: International Peace Institute. https://​www​.ipinst​.org/​2016/​06/​ building​-resilience​-in​-cities​-under​-stress. Miskel, J. and P.H. Liotta (2012). The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security and the Map of the Future. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books. Moncada, E. (2013). “The Politics of Urban Violence: Challenges for Development in the Global South.” Studies in Comparative International Development, 48(3). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s12116​-013​-9133​-z. Muggah, R. (2012). Researching the Urban Dilemma: Urbanization, Poverty and Violence. Ottawa: IDRC. Norton, R.J. (2003). “Feral Cities.” Naval War College Review, LVI (Autumn), pp.  97–106. http://​www​ nwc​ navy​ mil/​press/​Review/​2003/​Autumn/​pdfs/​art6​-a03​ .pdf. Post, A.E. (2018). “Cities and Politics in the Developing World.” Annual Review of Political Science. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1146/​annurev​-polisci​-042716​-102405. Reuters (2017). “Death Toll from Somalia Truck Bomb in October now at 512: Probe Committee.” https://​www​ reuters​.com/​article/​us​-somalia​-blast​-toll/​death​-toll​-from​ -somalia​-truck​-bomb​-in​-october​-now​-at​-512​-probe​-committee​-idUSKBN1DU2IC. Rimmer, P. and H. Dick (2009). The City in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Rodgers, D. (2016). “Critique of Urban Violence: Bismarckian Transformations in Managua, Nicaragua.” Theory, Culture and Society. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 0263276416636202. Sassen, S. (2005). “The Global City: Introducing a Concept.” Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11(2), pp. 27–43. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schindler, Seth (2017). “Towards a Paradigm of Southern Urbanism.” City, 21(1). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13604813​.2016​.1263494.

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Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simone, A.M. (2016). “City of Potentialities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0263276416666915. Staeheli, L.A. (2018). “Learning to Be Citizens: Exploring Social Cohesion and Security in Times of Uncertainty.” Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​04353684​.2018​.1434938. Staeheli, L.A. et al. (2012). “Dreaming the Ordinary: Daily Life and the Complex Geographies of Citizenship.” Progress in Human Geography, 36(5). https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1177/​0309132511435001. Standing, A. (2003). “The Social Contradictions of Organised Crime on the Cape Flats.” Institute for Security Studies, (74). https://​www​ files​.ethz​.ch/​isn/​112163/​74​ .PDF. Temenos, C. and E. McCann (2013). “Geographies of Policy Mobilities.” Geography Compass. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​gec3​.12063. Tibaijuka, A.K. (2008). “Introduction,” in UN-Habitat State of the World’s Cities 2010/11: Bridging the Urban Divide. London: Earthscan. Tyner, J. (2015). “Violence,” in J. Agnew et al. (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography, pp. 114–26. 1st edn. New York: John Wiley & Sons. UN-HABITAT (2013). State of the World’s Cities 2012/13. New York: Routledge. Villarreal, A. (2020). “Reconceptualizing Urban Violence from the Global South.” City and Community. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​cico​.12506. Wiig, A. and E. Wyly (2016). “Introduction: Thinking through the Politics of the Smart City.” Urban Geography. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​02723638​.2016​.1178479. Williams, P. (2016). “The Global Crisis of Governance,” in H. Matfess and M. Miklaucic (eds.), Beyond Convergence: World Without Order, pp. 21–45. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army War College. Williams, P. and W. Selle (2016). Military Contingencies in Megacities. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, United States Army War College.

PART I

Conceptual approaches to urban violence, resilience and security

2. Urban violence in the Global South: drug traffickers, gangs, and organized crime Phil Williams INTRODUCTION1 In writing about urban violence, it should be acknowledged that both urban and violence are, to some degree, contested concepts. Indeed, Pavoni and Tulumello argue very persuasively that it is necessary to “unpack the notion of urban encapsulated within that of urban violence, neither stopping at observing the event of violence, nor assuming the urban as the passive container in which this occurs, but rather understanding it both as the background out of which violence becomes manifest as an event, as well as the process constitutive to violence itself” (Pavoni and Tulumello 2020, p. 51). In other words, Pavoni and Tulumello see violence in large part as a function of the urbanization process itself, as being “endogenous to the sociospatial processes that produce the urban” (ibid.). There are certainly several features of the contemporary urbanization process in the Global South that are conducive to violence. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is the speed of population growth in cities throughout the developing world. Miskel and Liotta, for example, note that although London grew by sevenfold in the nineteenth century, Kinshasa’s growth between 1950 and 2015 approached a factor of 50, Lagos a factor of 25, and Karachi grew by 2,000 percent (Miskel and Liotta 2012, pp. 144–7). Closely related to the speed of population growth in cities is what might be termed sequencing. Cities in the developed world generally had infrastructure and basic amenities in place prior to—or at least in tandem with—the expansion of their populations. The massive population surge into the cities of the Global South, however, not only preceded the building of new infrastructure but swamped existing infrastructure and overloaded the capacity for service provision—whether in terms of water, sanitation, or power. Subsequent efforts to extend infrastructure and

21

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Urban violence, resilience and security

services have been wholly inadequate to the needs of the new urban migrants, resulting in the massive growth of slums and informal settlements. Much of the urbanization in the developing world can be described as chaotic rather than planned. This is evident even in Central America where the cities are much smaller than elsewhere in Latin America. Guatemala City, which is discussed more fully in Chapter 10 by Daniel Núñez, has “twenty-two zones that coil outward, like a snake, from the city’s center, Zone 1. Urban sprawl and suburban developments hug the outer zones, making the capital’s metropolitan area slightly uneven and, at times, obviously unplanned” (Véliz and O’Neill 2011). Moreover, “the new precarious settlements have had to locate further and further away. This situation has provoked, in a sustained form, the poverty and social precariousness which continues to be one of the most serious national problems” (Cerezo 2003). According to several assessments, the city is highly segregated economically and socially, with roughly one-third of the population in precarious settlements, while wealthy urban elites tend to live in “more exclusive zones” that have private protection and have become “fortified enclaves” of security (Véliz and O’Neill 2011). Business districts and commercial centers are thriving in some areas, while the inhabitants survive by scavenging on garbage dumps in other areas. This kind of segregation is also evident in major cities in Brazil where there are large and highly visible disparities of wealth. As one report noted, “The rich are often unfathomably rich, and the poor are disastrously poor. Crime and violence flourish any place where jobs are few, youth are many, and the chasm between rich and poor becomes too deep and too obvious” (Zwingle 2002). Although this comment was made specifically about São Paulo, it characterizes Brazil and other cities in Latin America. And although crime and violence stems from spontaneous urbanization, it has also led to what can be described as a consolidated or even an institutionalized form of economic apartheid. The lack of planning and the inability of planning to respond effectively and equitably to the rapidity of urban growth are closely connected to issues of land and property ownership. Many of those who come to the expanding cities of the developing world live in homes within urban settlements, and neither the individual homes nor the community settlement has a legal basis, something that adds a degree of precariousness to lives that are already full of hardship. Irregular land occupation, and the vulnerability that goes with it, pose serious problems that are replicated, to one degree or another, in cities throughout the developing world. In addition, urban environments have become petri dishes for exclusion and stark displays of inequality, developments to which political and economic elites appear indifferent. As sociologist Mike Davis observed, “The idea of an interventionist state strongly committed to social housing and job development [in much of the developing world] seems either a hallucination or a bad joke, because governments long ago abdicated any serious effort

Urban violence in the Global South

23

to combat slums and redress urban marginality” (Davis 2006, p. 62). Davis also argued that the minimalist role of national government was reinforced by neoliberal economic orthodoxy and the structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is hard to disagree with this: neoliberalism has both encouraged and legitimized state abdication of responsibility to its citizens in favor of a market logic that puts profits before people. As a result, public spaces have largely been transformed into commercial spaces, public goods subordinated to private economic opportunities, and traditional vendors pushed to urban venues where their opportunities are seriously constricted (Véliz and O’Neill 2011). Perhaps even more important, the role of the state in providing security has been largely abandoned in favor of private security for protective enclaves for economic and political elites. Even in cities where police forces have a role, they are often predatory rather than protective—and more interested in rent-seeking opportunities than fulfilling the obligations of public service and the maintenance of public order. The dominance of neoliberalism and the rise of the neoliberal city are linked to a more general process of expulsion from the global economy, a concept articulated by Saskia Sassen. According to Sassen, “The move from Keynesianism to the global era of privatizations, deregulation, and open borders for some entailed a switch from dynamics that brought people in to dynamics that push people out” (Sassen 2014, p. 211). In some countries, the state has tried to deal with urban slums through programs of destruction and relocation; in many others, however, large numbers of poor and marginalized people remain stuck in shanty towns where life is often nasty, brutish, and short and the prospects for any kind of economic or social advancement are dismal. In other words, the rapid and chaotic nature of contemporary urbanization in the Global South has created a set of conditions and dynamics that increases the risk of violence. Not surprisingly, therefore, the fear of violence seems to have become an endemic, if unwanted, component of urban life. In some cities, fear has become so pervasive that it has led to the creation of fortified communities and “protected enclaves” in an “architecture of fear” (UN-HABITAT 2006, p. 147). Cities have become segmented with these fortified enclaves representing one type of no-go zones and slums, and high violence areas representing another. In some instances, as discussed more fully below, there is good reason for fear. In many cases, however, there is a divergence between the pervasiveness of fear and the level of risk that exists for most of the inhabitants. This discrepancy compels us to inquire as to whether or not there is anything inherent in or distinctive about urban spaces that encourages both violence and fear of violence. Part of the answer, at least, is that urban violence involves the com-

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pression of violence into a finite if large space, and many of those who inhabit this space believe themselves at risk. This is compounded by the presence of recently urbanized populations dislocated from environments they associate with safety. In other words, fear spreads throughout a city because the inhabitants have a collective sense of being part of the same dangerous urban space. Even though the violence that occurs might be concentrated in a few specific localities in the city, there is a psychological ripple effect encompassing the city as a whole. With a concentration of people in compressed and dense—if often large—spaces, and with constant television, radio, and social media, news of violence travels fast, creating fear about the environment even for people who are not linked to the violence or even likely to be subject to it. Although Pavoni and Tulumello make a powerful argument about the relationship between the urbanization process itself and the growth of violence, the evidence for this is not wholly compelling. While the characteristics of spontaneous, chaotic, and neoliberal urbanization might provide necessary conditions for violence, they are not in themselves sufficient to explain high levels of violence. Indeed, one of the challenges to the Pavoni and Tulumello thesis is that contemporary global urbanization shares certain characteristics but has not resulted in uniform levels of violence in cities throughout the Global South. This suggests that other factors might be at work. Pavoni and Tulumello acknowledge this variation in violence in passing with the comment that “quantitatively similar cities have very different patterns of violence,” but do not explain the variation (Pavoni and Tulumello 2020, p. 51). It bears emphasis, therefore, that levels of violence within cities vary enormously from city to city, just as they do from country to country and even across continents. When one looks globally at homicide figures, several things stand out: the prominence of the Americas and southern Africa both in terms of aggregate homicides and in terms of homicide rates per 100,000 population. Delving further, the problems and challenges of highly violent cities are confined to Latin America, the Caribbean, a few cities in the United States, cities in southern Africa and, to a lesser degree, cities in West Africa. Most cities in Europe have relatively modest levels of violence as do those in Asia, with very low levels in Oceania. In other words, to identify violence as a central component of cities throughout the Global South is a mistake. There is not a global pandemic of urban violence: high levels of violence are endemic in some, but not all, cities. Moreover, although urbanization has its own challenges, the problem might be less to do with the urban than it is to do with organized crime and street gangs—although the latter, by their very name, are an urban phenomenon.

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THE ROLE OF GANGS, ORGANIZED CRIME, AND DRUG TRAFFICKERS Descriptions of violence in cities often use labels such as senseless, random, or wanton, suggesting that violence is out of control, and even cast the violence in quasi-apocalyptic terms by using such phrases as anarchy, chaos, and epidemics of violence. Moreover, some cities are characterized as the “homicide capital” of a specific country, or, in some instances, the homicide capital of the world. These terms are dramatic and compelling but offer very little analytic clarity. Moreover, as the Marshall Project noted, “Sensational media reports and misleading statements from politicians can blow the degree of violence out of proportion and make the public believe that crime is increasing, even when it isn’t” (Li 2020). As noted above, such reports create what might be termed a diffusion effect, with people believing that violence is widespread and pervasive within a city, when in fact it is highly concentrated and localized. That parts of the city are unsafe, especially at night, does not necessarily mean that the entire city is unsafe. Indeed, even in cities that are characterized as among the most dangerous in the world, there are areas that are not only safe and secure but also in which violent crime is minimal or nonexistent. Despite its apparent ubiquity throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, violence is concentrated “in place, time and among specific people. Not only is criminal violence especially concentrated in specific subregions—it is also hyper-clustered in specific cities, neighborhoods and households. Researchers often refer to this phenomenon as hot places and hot people” (Aguirre and Muggah 2018, p. 22). The corollary, of course, is that other places are free of such violence and can just as easily be designated as cold places and cold people. As Stacia George pointed out, even when San Pedro Sula had the highest homicide rates of any city in the world, it was not uniformly dangerous and was better described as “a city that contains some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world” (George 2014). Similarly, when Guatemala in 2014 had the fifth highest homicide rate in the world, 53 of Guatemala’s 335 municipalities had no murders (Hernandez 2014). Nevertheless, most of the focus is on the hotspots. In this connection, there is also a natural but fully justified tendency to focus on the violence that is perpetrated by gangs, organized crime, and drug traffickers. In this connection, the problem of exaggeration is often accompanied by an even greater problem—mischaracterization. Many of the labels, such as senseless violence, mentioned above ignore a fundamental reality: much of this violence including, and perhaps even especially, violent homicide, is highly functional, offering a variety of rewards to those who routinely use it—gangs, organized crime groups, and drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). It is no

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accident, therefore, that the cities of Latin America, the continent with the largest, most fully developed, and most sophisticated criminal organizations, have some of the highest levels of urban violence and homicide rates in the world. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that Latin America, even before the last several decades of urbanization and the rise of criminal organizations and gangs, was characterized by higher levels of violence than most other parts of the world. Perhaps part of the reason for this has more to do with the nature of the state in Latin America than the nature of the city. For a variety of reasons, the Latin American state has never been truly Westphalian and has never succeeded in developing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. As several authors have observed, Latin America, for the most part, did not suffer from the large-scale interstate warfare that led to the development and consolidation of the state in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia (Tilly 1985; Centeno 2002; vom Hau 2014). With states that are endemically weak, governments consisting largely of self-serving elites, and the marginalization of indigenous populations, Latin America has become a host to some of the greatest social and economic inequalities in the world as well as astoundingly high homicide rates. Part of the problem stems directly from the weakness of the state. “Underpinning nearly every killing is a climate of impunity that, in some countries, leaves more than 95 percent of homicides unsolved. And the state is a guarantor of the phenomenon” (Ahmed 2019). It should not be surprising, therefore, that the following was noted in 2018: Latin America is home to just 8 percent of the world’s population, but 33 percent of its homicides. In fact, just four countries in the region—Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela—account for a quarter of all the murders on Earth. Of the 20 countries in the world with the highest murder rates, 17 are Latin American, as are 43 of the top 50 cities. (Erickson 2018)

In 2020, Latin America and the Caribbean provided 42 of the 50 cities with the highest murder rates per 100,000 inhabitants—with the United States and Puerto Rico providing five cities on the list and South Africa the other three (Statista 2021). Though a few states such as Chile and Costa Rica have homicide rates that are low even by global standards, Latin America has the dubious honor of the highest homicide rates in the world. It is followed closely by Africa, which faces similar challenges in confronting high levels of violence. The significant number of homicides in Latin America compared to that in Europe and Asia is also evident in the world of gangs, mafias, and criminal organizations. This is underlined in Vanda Felbab-Brown’s comparison of Cuidad Juárez and Karachi in this volume (Chapter 9). An analysis of organized crime violence in Hong Kong, and a comparison of Naples and the

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surrounding region of Campania with key regions in Mexico, also highlights the disparate levels of homicidal violence. Hong Kong has had an impressively low level of homicides; during the 1990s, the city had fewer than 100 victims a year and a rate of 1.5 killings per 100,000 people (Lee 2004). King-Wa Lee’s analysis of Triad-related homicides in Hong Kong between 1989 and 1998, however, reveals that, within this, Triad violence was significant: about one in every eight homicides involved a Triad member as victim or perpetrator—or, in some cases, both (Lee 2004, p. 1). Moreover, 13.5 percent of homicide victims died as a result of Triad violence (ibid.). Of the 805 homicide cases, 95 cases involved Triads, with 124 victims (ibid., p. 13). “The risk of homicide for a Triad member was estimated to be 12.8 times than a non-Triad member” (ibid.). Lee noted that some of the killings were the result of a rational instrumentality related to business, while others were linked to contests over honor or status (ibid., pp. 279–80). Yet, even homicides over honor and status involve issues of credibility and reputation that are essential for the effective conduct of criminal business. Whether it was part of a competition for control or about status and honor, the killings were largely instrumental and, in effect, rational. They were also far less pervasive and frequent than those in Latin American countries where criminals and gangs were present. This was also true of violence used by the Camorra clans that operate in Naples and the surrounding region of Campania. In a comparison of homicides carried out by the Camorra and those perpetrated by Mexican DTOs in Baja California, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua, James Creechan stated that the 3,600 Camorra-related killings between 1979 and 2005 were eclipsed by the levels of homicides in each of the three Mexican states (Creechan 2007). He focused on an eight-year period between 1997 and 2005, finding that during this period executions in Sinaloa were over five times higher than those in Campania, while those in Chihuahua were almost five times higher, and those in Baja California well over four times higher (ibid., p. 8). When population rates were considered, the contrast in homicide numbers was even more startling, with Campania at 1.6 per 100,000 compared with 14.7 in Chihuahua, 18.1 in Baja California, and 19.3 in Sinaloa (ibid.). Whether organized crime and gang-related homicides are rare or commonplace, violence and the threat of violence are integral to criminal organizations. This is not surprising: criminal organizations and gangs operate outside the law and, therefore, are not subject to the protection of the law in relation to their business operations, their relationships with rivals, or the ways in which they maintain internal discipline. In effect, they exist in a predatory world in which power accrues to the strongest and most ruthless. In this sense, the world of organized crime and gangs is very similar to the world of states in the international system: the environment is anarchic in that there is no single over-riding

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authority; survival can only be achieved through self-reliance; altruism is rare; and violence and threats of violence are the ultimate arbiters of disputes. Consequently, a willingness to use violence is essential both to survival and to well-being.

COERCION AND VIOLENCE AS BUSINESS STRATEGIES A starting point for any serious analysis of violence and coercion as key elements in criminal strategies is what Thomas Schelling termed “the power to hurt” (Schelling 2008, p. xiii). He claimed the following: “[The] power to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief, is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often” (ibid.). He added that “the power to hurt is most successful when held in reserve. It is the threat of damage, or of more damage to come, that can make someone yield or comply. It is latent violence that can influence someone’s choice-violence that can still be withheld or inflicted, or that a victim believes can be withheld or inflicted” (ibid., p. 3). The targets of the potential violence, however, must also know that they can avoid it by accommodating the demands accompanying the threat. As Schelling succinctly observed, this “is the basis for blackmail, extortion, and kidnapping” (ibid., p. xiii). Extortion has long been a major activity of mafias, which are typically in the business of what is euphemistically called private protection. Payoffs from businesses large and small, and even local family businesses are one of the staple money-makers for many criminal organizations. Extortion can take various forms, but generally involves payoffs by those who are targeted to avoid disruption of their activities, destruction of their property, or harm to their directors or employees. Although extortion depends on a credible threat of violence to work effectively, credibility is readily established by a few dramatic acts of violence that as exemplars become the basis for intimidating others. Extortion has also become one of the staples of street gangs or maras that have become particularly prominent in Central America but are also present elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, in the United States, and in several African countries including South Africa, Nigeria, and Côte D’Ivoire. In Latin America, one of the sectors most vulnerable to gang violence and extortion has been urban transportation—something that is particularly pronounced in Central America. The case of Guatemala City is discussed elsewhere in this chapter, but Honduran cities have also suffered from widespread extortion and violence. As one commentary noted, “Taxi drivers are required to pay quotas, usually weekly” to either MS-13 or Barrio 18 “and sometimes to both” (Paley 2014). “The consequence for not paying is simple: death” (ibid.).

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Although most drivers seem willing to pay, driving buses and taxis has become a high-risk profession. Many of the extortion demands have come from members of gangs who are imprisoned but have associates on the outside who can inflict violence in the event of non-compliance. According to the National Observatory of Violence in Honduras, between January 2010 and September 2014, 738 people working in the transportation sector were killed, including nearly 400 taxi drivers, over 100 bus drivers, over 200 despatchers and three directors of transportation companies (IUDPAS 2014). By 2018, this figure had more than doubled with 1,647 people in the transportation sector falling victim to homicidal violence (IUDPAS 2018). The violence peaked in 2015 with 290 homicides; 246 deaths occurred in 2016 (ibid.), while over 30 buses were torched. The murder figures were lower in 2017 with 163 homicides in the transportation sector; the number fell to 149 in 2018 (ibid.). Although this decline in violence appears to suggest a gradual improvement, this conclusion might be premature. There is some evidence that the extortion has become more regularized and even institutionalized, with workers in the transportation sector “acting as intermediaries” to collect the payments (Papadovassilakis 2019). Insight Crime reported in July 2019 that 21 transportation sector employees had been arrested for collaborating with the gangs in collecting extortion payments. This arrangement developed “after increased police presence at transport terminals made it more difficult for gang members to shake down bus drivers and owners through phone calls or handwritten notes” (ibid.). Possibly of even greater long-term significance, La Prensa reported in June 2019 that “MS13 in Honduras has gone from shaking down motorcycle taxi drivers to owning fleets of the bikes and controlling the organizations that license them, showing the evolution of the gang’s extortion rackets” (Robbins 2019). While this might be a harbinger of the gangs moving into legal enterprises, it also reflects high levels of impunity, political corruption and inaction, and possibly collusion between the gangs and the authorities. A similar situation seems to exist in El Salvador, where, according to a 2016 report by Insight Crime, “Extortion demanded by gangs has become so normalized that there is a bus company that deducts the cost of extortion directly from drivers’ payroll in order to make an annual payment to the Barrio 18” (Avelar 2016). The other major gang, the Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, is equally involved in extortion and, according to one commentary, bus and taxi drivers are such easy targets that MS-13 earns “an estimated USD600,000 per month by extorting public transport drivers” (Drake 2019). Because the power to hurt has become so obvious in Central America, the extortion process, in effect, has been quasi-institutionalized. Consequently, it seems plausible that overt violence has become less necessary and less pervasive. This does not mean that violent competition between MS-13 and Barrio 18 has ceased. Nor does it imply that the maras have become less predatory. It

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does mean, though, that homicide rates throughout the countries of the northern triangle of Central America have declined significantly. Most striking in this respect was El Salvador, which in 2020 enjoyed “one of the most significant homicide declines in the country’s recent history.” The 1,332 homicides meant that the murder rate was cut “by more than half to 19.7 per 100,000” (Asmann and Jones 2021). However, the extent to which this reflected a permanent trend as opposed to a temporary truce between the government and the maras remained uncertain. Moreover, in 2020, several other Latin American and Caribbean countries, especially Jamaica, Venezuela, and Honduras, continued to exhibit high rates of violence (ibid.). Caracas was second only to Los Cabos in Mexico; of the top twelve cities in terms of homicide rates, six were in Mexico, two in Venezuela, and four in Brazil (Statista 2021). Homicides in Mexico have increased due to the continued strategic competition between major DTOs as well as by divisions, factionalism, and splits within these organizations. Violence in Mexico has revealed some interesting patterns over the last two decades or so. The loss of monopoly power by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000 cracked open a political criminal nexus that had been regularized, contained, and largely controlled by the PRI (Godson 2003). Moreover, during the 1990s, Mexican DTOs became major players in the cocaine trade, assuming a critical role in the transportation of drugs from Colombia into the United States. This raised the stakes and exacerbated a competitive dynamic among the leading drug trafficking organizations. Much of this competition resulted in a series of violent conflicts to control cities on the U.S.–Mexican border. These cities had two features that helped to precipitate violence. First, they contained strategic warehouses in which small cocaine shipments that had been moved from Colombia through Mexico to its northern border were reconstituted into larger loads, ready for cross-border trans-shipment. Second, the cities offered access to the major border crossings and routes into the United States, and, in particular, to the interstate highway system that allowed for easy travel to hubs such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and New York from which cocaine could be easily and widely distributed. The first of what developed into a succession of wars between major DTOs in a series of strategic border cities was that between the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) based in Tijuana and the Sinaloa Federation led by Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman Loera and Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada. In part, this conflict stemmed from a tax that the AFO sought to impose on other Mexican trafficking organizations seeking to move drugs through Tijuana and into California. In 1993, the feud resulted in the killing of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo and six other people at Guadalajara airport as AFO hitmen were seeking to kill Chapo Guzman. Subsequently, the conflict led to the death

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of family members on both sides. As a result, a blood feud replaced the strategic rationale, causing the violence in Tijuana to increase significantly in the late 1990s and again in 2008. As Angelica Duran-Martinez wrote, “In 2008, Tijuana experienced a historic explosion of violence” with homicide rates increasing “by 245 percent going from 13 in 2007 to 42 in 2008 and to 72 in 2009” (Duran-Martinez 2018, p. 191). Part of the reason was that the Arellano Felix Organization, after the killing or imprisonment of several of the brothers, “finally split … between two factions, one led by Teodoro Garcia Simental (El Teo), a high-level killer, and the other led by Fernando Sanchez (El Ingeniero)” (ibid.). Almost inevitably, Guzman’s organization took advantage of this by backing El Teo, who was not a member of the Arellano Felix family. By this time, the Sinaloa Federation had become what can only be described as a revisionist power seeking to expand its base and its area of operations. This had already been manifested in the violence in Nuevo Laredo from 2004 to 2007. After the arrest and incarceration of its leader Osiel Cardenas in 2003, the Sinaloa organization had moved into the city to challenge the Gulf DTO. In December 2005, the New York Times described Nuevo Laredo as a war zone (Thompson 2005). By 2009, however, the city had obtained a degree of normality as the Sinaloa forces, having been repelled by the Zetas, former Special Forces that had acted as enforcers for the Gulf organization, came to some kind of agreement with the Gulf organization’s leadership. Another factor was that by then the Sinaloa Federation had moved to Cuidad Juarez to challenge the dominance of the Carillo–Fuentes organization (also known as the Juarez Cartel). This led to what Duran-Martinez described as “the perfect storm of violence” between 2008 and 2010 (Duran-Martinez 2018, p. 196). Indeed, homicide rates jumped from 15 in 2007 to 117 in 2008, 170 in 2009, and peaked at 262 in 2010 before falling to 100 in 2011 and 58 in 2012 (Calderón et al. 2019, p. 24). The reduction in violence reflected the fact that Sinaloa had become the dominant force in the city. Ironically, however, as violence fell in Cuidad Juarez in 2012, it increased significantly in Nuevo Laredo. In part this reflected a realignment among the DTOs as the Zetas split from the Gulf, which then allied with its former enemy Sinaloa against its former employees. The homicide rate spiked to 132 but as the Zetas were defeated, Nuevo Laredo fell out of the top ten Mexican municipalities with the highest rates of homicides. In yet another twist, by 2018 focus had shifted back to Tijuana where the Sinaloa Federation was being challenged by an emerging revisionist power, the New Generation Jalisco Cartel (CJNG). According to one report, the CJNG teamed up with remnants of the AFO and the Juarez organization against a Sinaloa organization that had lost its leader, Guzman, who had been arrested and extradited to the United States (ibid., p. 25). This reflected a broader problem of leadership decapitation strategies pursued by the authorities.

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Mexican government arrests and extraditions disturbed the status quo and inadvertently created multiple “vacancy chains” that intensified the competition for control of routes, markets, and territory (Friman 2004). A kingpin approach based on opportunism rather than a coherent set of strategic objectives fractured major DTOs, leading to defections and factionalism, splintering, and internecine struggles. Messy as they were, however, these faction fights generally had strategic intent and were defensively or offensively oriented, seeking either to consolidate and maintain established groups or to develop independent entities that thought increased wealth would result from increased autonomy. The violence still maintained a degree of rationality. As this author has written elsewhere, “The violence associated with drug trafficking in … Mexico … is not irrational—it is the result of capitalistic competition that is totally ruthless and unfettered by laws or regulations” (Williams 2012). At the same time, there have been other notable trends. Border cities, for example, no longer dominate the homicide rankings. Indeed, for the years 2012 through 2016, Acapulco had the highest number of homicides of any city in Mexico as well as the highest homicide rates per 100,000 population (Calderón et al. 2019, p. 24). As Joshua Partlow stated, the large powerful drug trafficking organizations in Acapulco have given way to something less regularized and even more dangerous: The criminals now in charge resemble neighborhood gangs—with names like 221 or Los Locos. An estimated 20 or more of these groups operate in Acapulco, intermixed with representatives from larger drug cartels who contract them for jobs. The gang members are young men who often become specialists—extortionists, kidnappers, car thieves, assassins—and prey on a largely defenseless population. (Partlow 2017)

This is also connected to another trend. The diffusion of violence through more cities is inextricably linked to the broadening of organized crime beyond drug trafficking to include extortion, kidnappings, and theft—especially of petroleum. The emergence of what are known as huachicoleros, groups that specialize in fuel theft, has had particular significance in the spreading violence though municipalities in states such as Puebla, which historically has had low homicide rates (Jones and Sullivan 2019). Given this trend, it should not be surprising that some violence has become less rational and selective. In all too many cases, it has become both callous and careless, with far less concern for innocent bystanders. In Juarez, in January 2010, for example, gunmen burst into a party, apparently looking for a rival gang member. He was not there, and they were clearly in the wrong place but they still killed 15 teenagers—none of whom had anything to do with drugs, crime, or gangs—simply because they could.2 Some murders in Mexico have become a form of self-expression, providing a gratuitous sense

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of power even though purposeless and without strategic rationale. This is best understood in terms of anomie, a concept developed originally by Durkheim and refined by other scholars (Davis et al. n.d.). Anomie involves a disregard of behavioral rules, and violations of ethical norms and standards. Some of the excesses of the Mexican drug violence certainly fit this model. So, too, does a portion of violent behavior of several gangs in cities in both Latin America and some African countries. Yet, for the most part, violence is highly functional—even when used by street gangs. A compelling example of this comes from gangs in Abidjan, capital of Côte d’Ivoire (Akindes 2018). The gangs, with some members as young as ten years old, are known as microbes or germs—terms that are both dismissive and distasteful. The operations of the gangs typically involve the swarming of victims and the use of knives and machetes to rob them or extort from them. As one close observer noted: In 2010 and 2011, amid the country’s post-election crisis, a new form of criminality and criminal identity emerged: the enfants-microbes, or “germ children”. These ultra-violent children and teenagers are criminals of a new breed. They are younger delinquents than their predecessors, and as a group they specialize in the violent group extortion of goods and money. Nobody seems to know quite how the name Microbe originated; it seems to have arisen spontaneously. But it’s an accurate description: they act on society like germs in the human body, seriously harming the individuals they attack. (ibid., p. 161)

Dismissal of the “microbes” is combined with fear and the desire of many elements of the society to eradicate them. Yet, as Akindes shows, criminal violence has many positives for the microbes. Violence offers a livelihood for the marginal and dispossessed; in some cases, the money they steal not only provides for them but also their families. This is especially important when their parents are sick or unemployed, and the children have to become the breadwinners. In addition, violence gives status; proficiency in its use typically leads to enhanced status within the group. Violence also cements belonging and provides a sense of identity—visibility to the otherwise invisible and a sense of status. In sum, violence fulfills a set of critical functions for the perpetrators for which there are few, if any, nonviolent alternatives. This explains why violence and criminality have what Enrique Desmond Arias discusses elsewhere in this book as “pernicious resilience” (Arias, Chapter 6). Collective violence of the kind described here is highly resilient because it is highly functional and acts as the great leveler; its use provides opportunities for the disenfranchised, marginalized, and excluded. This is also the case in several cities in South Africa. Cape Town, especially, has long had a problem with gangs. As early as 1984, Cape Town was being described as one of the most violent cities in the world with more murders than

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the whole of the United Kingdom (Hallett 1985). It was estimated that there were 280 gangs and that about 80,000 youths were members of gangs (ibid.). In subsequent decades, the gang problem in Cape Town has become even more pervasive and intractable. Today’s gangs include the Americans, the Hard Livings, and the Numbers (a gang that resembles those in Central America in that it has its headquarters in prisons), along with the Sexy Boys, the Mongrels, and the Junky Funky Kids (Tenpas 2020). The situation became so bad in 2019 that the South African government sent in military units to some of the most dangerous areas in the city (de Greef 2019). Although repressive actions of this kind can alleviate the situation, they are not long-term solutions, especially given what Simone Haysom described as “state neglect and social dysfunction” (cited in de Greef 2019). In 2020, however, there were reports not only of gang truces but also of gangs providing food parcels and the like to the local populace amidst the COVID-19 pandemic (CBS 2020). “In some instances, the ‘benevolent’ gestures undertaken by gangs” furthered their illicit activities. “Food parcels distributed under lockdown have sometimes been used to conceal and smuggle drugs and guns” (Stanyard 2020, p. 15). The parcels were also used “to buy favor from the communities” where the gangs were active, or “serve as a reward to loyal gang members and drug dealers” (ibid.). In other instances, the seemingly generous act of giving a food parcel came “at a heavy cost to needy families, with gangs recruiting the children of these families to deliver illegal goods, carry guns and act as lookouts” (ibid.). Having used the opportunity to expand illicit cigarette and alcohol sales as well as increase recruitment, especially of children, the post-pandemic gangs emerged stronger than ever (ibid., p. 20). Ultimately, even if the balance between predatory behavior and paternalism shifted temporarily toward the latter, the gangs will likely be even more destructive in the long term. In terms of the pervasive despair and the intractable nature of urban violence, large areas of Cape Town resemble many of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Having revisited Rio de Janeiro 30 years or so after her initial pioneering work on the favelas, Janice Perlman concluded that the prospects for economic mobility for the inhabitants had diminished: what had been largely a myth of marginalization had become a harsh reality for a population that lived in greater fear than ever amid what she termed a “stew of violence” (Perlman 2010, p. 174). Gangs, drugs, guns, a lack of state control, corrupt police services, and extensive poverty conspired to create communities that were excluded from legitimate economic opportunities as well as the rule of law (ibid.). This description applies as much to Cape Town as it does to Rio. As if the situation were not dire enough, the spread of COVID-19 and the economic and social disruption that accompanied the pandemic can only make the outlook even more dismal. The economic impact has wiped out over a decade of economic progress in Central and South America. It has also had

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a major impact on many African states. Recovery is likely to be slow, partial, and sporadic—and organized crime and gangs are likely to flourish in such an environment.

CONCLUSION The main theme of this chapter is that the contemporary urbanization process might be a necessary condition for high levels of urban violence but is not a sufficient condition. Inequality, exclusion, and segregation in cities create contexts conducive to violence. However, it is organized crime and gangs that turn the potential into reality, often resulting in extraordinary levels of homicides. Illicit markets in urban areas encourage struggles for “competitive control” that are almost invariably accompanied by intense violence (Kilcullen 2013). At the same time, it is hardly surprising that in many neoliberal cities, organizations, traffickers, and gangs create high levels of insecurity. Organized crime, which can be understood as a continuation of business by criminal means, is the ultimate, if distorted, neoliberal entity, embracing market dynamics without scruple, restraint, or inhibition. Organized criminal activities and violence can also be understood in Lillian Bobea’s phrase as the “revenge of the periphery”—whether at the global level or at the urban level in many cities in Latin America, the Caribbean, southern Africa and West Africa.3

NOTES 1. The author would like to thank Michael Glass for his helpful comments and suggestions on this chapter. 2. The author is grateful to Alfredo Corchado for several helpful discussions on these killings. 3. This phrase was used by Lilian Bobea at a Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Meeting on Organized Crime in Latin America, Mexico City, June 2008.

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3. Urban resilience for the 21st century Savannah Cox INTRODUCTION On October 31, 2020—World Cities Day—senior United Nations officials issued a joint statement on cities and the roles they played in the COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic started in cities because of their connectedness,” United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator Achim Steiner and UN-Habitat Executive Director Maimunah Mohd Sharif declared (UNDP 2020). Cities also bore “much of the burden of fighting the pandemic,” from developing lockdown plans and makeshift hospitals to shouldering most of the economic fallout from the implementation of said plans. For these officials, developing resilience to future shocks like the pandemic required not disconnection but the rapid—and routine—dispersal of resources and decision-making authority to cities, which will continue to stand at the “front lines” of crises that are increasingly global in scope. In many ways, the words of these officials concretized visions of 21st-century life—highly urban, highly interconnected, highly fragile—that global security experts had been developing for years by the time the pandemic struck (see, e.g., de Boer et al. 2016). As projections estimate that more than half of the world’s population lives in cities (and is expected to reach two-thirds by 2050), and that metropolitan regions generate more than 80 percent of global gross domestic product, experts have routinely dubbed the 21st century as an urban century (UN Habitat 2016). If the 21st century is indeed an urban century, it is one fraught with complex challenges that cities around the world will face head-on. As the pandemic so quickly and crudely laid bare, 21st-century cities are sites of intersecting risks, such as cyber-attacks, climate change, natural disasters, extreme pollution, inequality, crime, and terrorist threats. For many scholars and practitioners of urban security, a chief concern is that these risks can converge and cascade across systems that sustain cities and those that live in them (Kitchin and Dodge 2019). In the face of such challenges, an ever-growing chorus of actors from diverse industries and scales of government has called for the development of urban resilience, which influential international organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation (2015) define 39

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as the capacity of a city to anticipate, recover from, and transform amid shocks and stressors. But what if one equally important challenge facing 21st-century cities relates to how—and where—authoritative knowledge about urban resilience is produced? As with other policy responses to “general” urban conditions, such as globalization, might urban resilience be yet another panacea to so-called global problems that are ultimately specific to, and built on, the concerns of certain areas of the world and exported elsewhere? Moreover, and as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, could the supposed models of urban resilience—London, New York City, Paris—be as fragile as their more “vulnerable” counterparts in the Global South? How, for that matter, might this latticework of fragility and resilience call into question conventional policy wisdom on resilience, which tends to treat the North–South binary as metonymical for resilience and fragility, and views policy pathways from fragility to resilience in linear terms? These questions are not abstract, academic concerns. As Borie et al. (2019, p. 204) argue, because urban resilience is a “deeply normative” term, how and by whom urban resilience is narrated matters. Narratives of urban resilience frame official climate adaptation and disaster risk-management policy, giving legitimacy to some forms of knowledge and expertise on resilience while foreclosing others. Building on work in southern theory, this chapter suggests that where knowledge about urban resilience is developed and narrated also matters. If, for instance, knowledge about urban resilience is not democratically produced—that is to say, made in practices of mutual learning by relevant players in the North and South—subsequent urban resilience efforts may ultimately reproduce uneven geographies of authoritative knowledge production, where cities of the North are considered home of generalizable theory that can be “applied” to an exotic mine of “raw facts” and cases in cities of the South (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, p. 114). Moreover, if devised and drawn exclusively from the experiences, knowledges, and concerns of institutions and organizations of the North, urban resilience may reproduce stereotypes: policy-oriented applications of highly particular thought on urban resilience may very well not work elsewhere, but nevertheless have the effect of making cities in the South appear to be in “deficit” and in need of order (see Coaffee, Chapter 5, this volume; Roy 2009). As important, urban resilience advocates may pass over key insights regarding the management of complex challenges that have been developed by residents in urban regions of the Global South (see, e.g., Bhan et al. 2020). In keeping with the arguments of scholars contributing to the “southern” turn in social science research, the basic contention of this chapter is that there is much general and generalizable knowledge about urban resilience that cities and residents of the Global South have to offer. Thus, inasmuch as the challenges facing cities of the 21st century may require the development of resil-

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ience, it is also the case that these challenges may require the democratization of global knowledge production on resilience. The epistemological “opening up” that democratizing knowledge production on urban resilience entails has multiple benefits. In addition to broadening scholarly and practical understandings of the numerous forms that urban resilience can take, democratization also allows for the development of more sophisticated and ultimately more useful ways to assess and evaluate urban resilience. Crucially, and as expounded upon in the conclusion, these indicators are not derived from top-down “normative expectations” of resilience alone (see Glass et al., Chapter 1, this volume) but from practical experience in numerous, heterogeneous geographies, which can in turn lead to the generation of more robust, flexible ways to value and achieve resilience in an increasingly insecure, urbanizing world. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it outlines the geographies of knowledge production on urban resilience in the past decade. It then discusses the significance of these geographies for popular understandings and perspectives on urban resilience in the present. The outline sketched is suggestive of a broader pattern to which scholars of southern theory have pointed for decades: authoritative knowledge on a given issue, in this case urban resilience, is developed within a very particular geographical context, but “[leaps] straight to the level of the global” (Connell 2007, p. 55). To develop a global understanding of urban resilience that is based on concrete experiences in managing shocks and stressors around the world (not just specific parts of it), the chapter then rehearses key arguments and interventions made by scholars of the “southern” turn and discusses how they may be applied to the case of urban resilience. It zooms in on recent works by Gautam Bhan, Teresa Caldeira, Kelly Gillespie, and AbdouMaliq Simone (2020) that highlight the ways residents of Delhi, São Paulo, Jakarta, and Johannesburg have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also reflects on the analytic of collective life that the authors introduce to understand the pandemic and the world that is attuned to southern urban processes and experiences. This analytic may offer scholars and practitioners concerned with developing urban resilience a clarifying lens into the complex, interconnected shocks and stressors of the 21st century. It is important to note at the outset that none of these arguments marks an attempt to dismiss the many important contributions of existing work on urban resilience—be it scholarship, policy recommendations, or indicators meant to measure urban resilience. Nor, for that matter, do the arguments suggest that this work is irrelevant to cities in the Global South. On the contrary, and in line with Roy’s (2009, p. 825) remarks on the utility of northern theory for thinking about southern cities, this existing body of work is entirely useful for southern cities. Instead, the main concern is that existing work on urban resilience may be overlooking important developments taking place elsewhere, specifically in cities and urban regions long considered “recipients” of general knowl-

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edge and not producers of generalizable knowledge. Moreover, the chapter is motivated by the basic belief that knowledge on urban resilience is at its most valuable—and actionable—when the geographical scope of intellectual inquiry and contribution is substantively widened.

THE BOUNDARIES OF URBAN RESILIENCE As resilience initiatives have rolled out around the world since the early 2010s, scholarship on the meaning(s) and form(s) of resilience has proliferated. The term “resilience” has multiple and competing definitions (Meerow and Newell 2016). In the field of urban security, for instance, resilience refers to infrastructure hardening to prevent significant disruptions from disaster events such as terrorist attacks (Coaffee and Rogers 2008; Coaffee 2013). For scholars of political economy, urban resilience is aligned with rationalities of neoliberal governance, wherein the management of catastrophic risks is transferred to private markets and the burden of security is shifted from national governments to individuals and/or increasingly “entrepreneurial” cities (see, e.g., Hodson and Marvin 2009; Leitner et al. 2018). In urban ecology, resilience refers to infrastructural and institutional changes designed to allow a city— taken as a coherent socio-ecological system—to absorb, withstand, and adapt to unpreventable disruptions (Brand and Jax 2007). The latter understanding has become the basis for mainstream urban resilience efforts, particularly those promoted by international organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the United Nations. For those taking an ecological perspective on the matter, urban resilience gives us much to be optimistic about. As per Brand and Jax (2007), resilience functions as a boundary object. Such a designation suggests that although the meanings of resilience vary in accordance with the equally various social worlds of actors who deploy the term, the structure of these meanings is common enough to allow for heterogeneous actors to work together (Star and Griesemer 1989). On the one hand, claims that resilience is a boundary object hold true in many cases. As resilience initiatives become operationalized in cities, efforts undertaken in its name have often convened the experiences, knowledges, and concerns of multiple, differentially situated actors to identify the complex challenges facing cities and draft solutions to them. The synthesis of multiple knowledges and experiences is particularly salient in design-driven resilience initiatives, which emphasize changing the processes through which governments define problems rather than simply applying externally developed best practices to a given problem (Collier et al. 2016; Grove 2018). On the other hand, with respect to the geographies of authoritative knowledge on urban resilience, existing boundaries do not blur so much as they hold. Just as boundary objects such as resilience may in fact conceal disagreements (Borie

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and Hulme 2015), they may also hide historical and ongoing practices of exclusion: that is, the ways in which certain knowledges and experiences are deemed worthy of ethical and political consideration in official processes of problem definition—or devalued such that they are kept out of said processes (Grove et al. 2020). These practices do more than exclude; they also legitimate particular forms of resilience and sites of intervention in its name (such as prioritizing the construction of a sea wall around a central business district and/or the purchase of catastrophe insurance due to defining resilience as a problem of economic (in)security). But, and as we will soon see in a brief case study of top-down COVID-19 responses applied to cities of the Global South, the efficacy of these interventions, as constituted in part through specific discourses on resilience, is by no means guaranteed. That is because the very legitimacy of resilience programs—as an ensemble of exclusive and excluding discourses, knowledges, practices, and experiences, and so on—rests on its contingent authorization among affected populations, who may ultimately resist said programs or strategically engage them to support their own interests (Rose-Redwood and Glass, 2014). In any case, when we examine where first-order knowledge on resilience is produced, we see that it is largely confined to major institutions, consultancies, and governance organizations founded in and funded by actors of the Global North. Unsurprisingly, in many ways the major producers of resilience knowledge and policy development—namely, the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the United Nations—are entirely familiar (and sometimes derided) among development scholars (see, e.g., Escobar 2011 [1995]). The prominence of these organizations in the production and dissemination of resilience knowledge and policies, as most popularly seen in the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities” initiative, has understandably led some researchers to argue that urban resilience efforts are ultimately meant to promote long-championed policies of market-oriented growth in developing contexts—this time in “green” clothing (Bigger and Webber 2021). Taken together, the numerous resilience policies, expert conferences, assessment tools, and indicators that these organizations produce and deploy around the world form what Leitner et al. (2018) call an urban resilience complex. While often premised on the belief that urban resilience should be “open and inclusive,” the programs that comprise this complex render resilience technical while simultaneously excluding or suppressing what the authors call “alternative understandings” of resilience developed outside of the urban resilience complex (ibid., p. 1276). Authors who take up such a critical disposition toward urban resilience efforts as they are circulated globally offer key insights into how resilience may (re)produce inequitable outcomes across familiar geographic lines (see, e.g., Watts 2015). In analyzing urban resilience this way, these authors still risk

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reproducing colonial narratives about relations between the North and South— namely, that cities in the South are “different”—victims of exploitation, at best capable of producing “alternative” understandings of taken-for-granted concepts (as opposed to producing general understandings of such concepts), and so on. As Roy (2009, p. 820) reminds us, “Such forms of benign difference-making keep alive the neo-orientalist tendencies that interpret third world cities as … the other.” While these authors examine a wide range of geographies, the arguments are alike in their construction of cities and regions of the Global South as static case studies—be it of neo-colonial, capitalist plundering around the world, exceptions to the rule, or extreme vulnerability (see, e.g., Rizzo 2020). These authors remain critical of urban resilience given its stated tendency to produce unjust outcomes (Fainstein 2015); yet, they ultimately do not engage with the crucial issue of authoritative knowledge production that shoots straight to the heart of the historical, hierarchical distinctions between the Global North and South, and which has played a pivotal role in yielding such unjust outcomes in the first place. Might there, then, be other ways to think about city regions of the Global South and their significance when it comes to urban resilience?

URBAN RESILIENCE “GOES SOUTH?” A substantial body of literature within what can be referred to as the “southern” turn in the social sciences would suggest so. As it relates to questions of epistemology—how and why we know what we know—authors contributing to this body of literature seek to both unsettle and underscore what Connell (2007, p. viii) calls “periphery-center relations in the realm of knowledge.” As Connell explores in her book on the subject, modern social science tends to embed the particular viewpoints, perspectives, and problems of metropolitan society—which she takes to mean the social “homeland” of colonial empires—into its theories about the world while presenting itself as universal knowledge. This embedding and extrapolating process is historically rooted in imperial projects: the social sciences as we know them today were founded on the notion of progress, which can only be defined in relation to areas without progress—namely, the “primitive” peripheries which are “rarely seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, p. 113). Over time, the naturalization of progress (and its supposed absence in other parts of the world) justifies empire, wherein “underdeveloped” societies fall and remain under the control of a comparatively “developed” metropolitan authority. Thus, for authors taking a southern approach in their work, the North–South dichotomy is not a “permanent geographical fact,” but a necessary, historically situated relation in the devel-

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opment and expansion of colonial and imperial projects across time and space (Olds 2001, p. 129). Roy (2009) and Robinson (2002) identify similar principles at work with respect to theories of global city regions, which they suggest are historically rooted in the Euro-American experience. The “model” cities of the Global North—namely, first-world “global” cities—generate knowledge and policy that can and should be applied to the unruly “megacities” of the South, which, by way of necessary contrast, are “usually assembled under the sign of under-development” and treated as “sites of apocalyptic imaginaries” in need of discipline and reform (Roy 2009, p. 820). Beyond reproducing colonial center-periphery relations, theories of global city regions that are built on Euro-American contexts and concerns are flawed in what they cannot do: account for and analyze the multiple forms of modernity that exist around the world (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). Somewhat ironically, then, in their efforts to catapult a particular experience or perspective to the level of the general, metropolitan thinking “[results] not in minor omissions but in major incompleteness, and a profound problem about the truthfulness of arguments framed as universal problems” (Connell 2007, p. 226). Neither the reproduction of these colonial relations nor the “major incompleteness” of social scientific thought is inevitable, however. For southern scholars, both issues can be dealt with through the democratization of knowledge production, which Connell (2007, p. 224) refers to as basic practices of mutual learning: engagement, critique, respect, and recognition. Crucially, such democratization does not mean simply adding “interesting” cases of the Global South into the mix and stirring. Nor does democratization mean dismissing Euro-American thought on cities as irrelevant to cities in the South. Rather, for Connell (2007) and Roy (2009, p. 820), democratization of knowledge production entails “[blasting] open” the geographies from which authoritative knowledge about cities and their conditions can be made and made to travel, such that the actors within the metropole and periphery are learning “as actively” as each other and thus reconfiguring the global circuits through which knowledge moves and accumulates over time. The rationale for rewiring existing networks of knowledge production and circulation is quite practical: conventional thinking and policymaking related to cities, when based exclusively on the experiences and concerns of the metropole, miss out on key developments taking place outside the frame of the metropole. If we live in a century whose problems and appropriate solutions are global in scope—and many authors situating their work within the southern turn would agree that this is so—conflating a partial view for a full view is not only a relic of colonial thought; it also actively harms expert efforts to prepare for and respond to the ample, complex challenges that the 21st century portends for cities and those that live in them. In taking in these “peripheral”

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developments, it is important to note that the goal is not to shrink away from general theory building in favor of the intellectual modesty of local particularisms. On the contrary, and as Roy (2009) suggests, the goal is to develop more complete and general theories about all cities by directing analytical focus to the southern hemisphere. Why generalize from the South? Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) persuasively argue that the South is the direction in which many parts of the world are headed. Citing recent developments in capital markets, the flexibilization of industrial manufacturing and labor, and the soaring growth of informal economies in regions of the Global North and South, events of the 21st century are “visibly altering received geographies of core and periphery” (ibid., p. 117). The South, for these authors, is not only a relation, but also, and increasingly, a bellwether of 21st-century life. Because regions in the South are among the first to feel the concrete effects of what they call “world historical processes,” the recent pasts of these regions presage events and concerns to come in the former metropole, the cities and regions of the Global North. In other words, to study the South is not to study difference so much as it is to study the common, whose unifying threads are primarily separated by time. What general and generalizable insights, then, might the recent pasts and ongoing presents of cities in the Global South offer scholars and practitioners concerned with the resilience of cities in the face of the challenges of the 21st century? Moreover, from what contemporary world-historical events might researchers and policymakers around the world engage in practices of mutual learning on urban resilience? That is to say, how might knowledge about urban resilience be democratized and thus, hopefully, made more substantive? A look at recent work by Bhan et al. (2020) on how residents of Jakarta, Johannesburg, Delhi, and São Paulo navigated the COVID-19 pandemic can help begin to address these questions. Drawing on their decades-long work in these cities, the authors argue that many of the top-down “best practice” interventions initiated by governments to manage the pandemic—such as lockdowns and social distancing—have been largely incompatible with the basic conditions and arrangements in which residents of these cities live, and thus have generally been ineffective in grappling with the pandemic over the medium to long term. While well-intentioned, these interventions are based on a “serious misreading of urban life” in these cities. Moreover, and contrary to the stated goal of top-down interventions, this misreading ultimately “deepen[s] the fault lines of inequality” through criminalization of residents who fail to comply with the rules. For the authors, this misreading happens, at least in part, because top-down efforts to manage COVID-19 do not take into account what they call collective life: the basic practices and arrangements that “make everyday life possible in the southern urban,” whose features are built on and shaped by vast structures

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of inequality. By way of example, the authors offer up the simple task of getting groceries. In lieu of easily available cash, credit cards, internet access, or cars to buy food quickly and in bulk, the majority of residents in these cities engage in numerous formal and informal exchanges with nearby neighbors and distant market attendants, and through equally vast processes and devices— rickshaws, ATM lines, and bus fares, among others—to engage in the basic act of eating. The authors suggest that this complex ensemble of relations, efforts, and practices to meet essential needs will not simply disappear in the face of lockdown regulations. Furthermore, that government actors may assume otherwise is not just an intellectually interesting oversight but a significant practical problem. As the authors note, while some basic elements of welfare provision—such as public food programs and cash transfers—do and did matter in containing some of the worst impacts of the pandemic, these provisions do not address the majority of residents within these cities and thus offer limited support in official disaster preparedness and response efforts. In light of the above, the authors argue that the development of “new ways of paying attention” is of paramount importance. Specifically, they suggest that existing forms of data collection (and knowledge on urban life)—such as statistics, indicators, and so on—should be complemented with close, longitudinal, and ethnographically informed studies of how and why specific types of collective life persist throughout the pandemic. Results from these studies should be integrated into future disaster response plans, which should be motivated by and sensitive to what they call the “urban realism of the majority”: Any pandemic response would have to search for a relevant scale of isolation and a notion of distancing that retained existing arrangements of the urban majority. Homes, offices, firms are not the vocabulary of the response. Instead, a wider geography and social imaginary would be at play: the street, the community kitchen, the market, the queue for the collection of cash transfers and water supply. (Bhan et al. 2020)

Bhan et al. cite developments in Dharavi, a massive slum located in Mumbai, India, as exemplifying why taking the analytic of collective life into account in official disaster response efforts matters. On paper, the slum should have been one of the most negatively impacted sites of the COVID-19 pandemic. The approximately one million people living within just 2.1 square kilometers and the paucity of resources make Dharavi one of Asia’s largest slums and one of the most densely populated areas in the world (Golechha 2020). Social distancing in the slum, as many experts have noted, is impossible (Kaushal and Mahajan 2021). Yet, as Bhan et al. write, Dharavi has “[emerged] as an example of resilience rather than vulnerability,” having largely succeeded in containing the virus through practices that have drawn both praise and sub-

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sequent imitation from global health organizations and experts (Bhan et al. 2020).1

Source Creative Commons Licence Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC by 2.0), https://​ creativecommons​.org/​licenses/​by/​2​.0/​.

Figure 3.1

Contact tracing for COVID-19 in Dharavi

What happened in Dharavi? In many ways, the pandemic response there followed standard public health practices and procedures seen around the world: lockdowns, surveillance, and contact tracing, among others (Figure 3.1). However, the Dharavi pandemic response was also marked by the essential roles that everyday knowledge, intimate inter-connections, and experiences of residents played in ensuring that the basic needs of other residents were met in efforts to flatten the curve. That is to say, collective life was taken into account by officials charged with drafting and implementing COVID-19 containment plans. As Bhan et al. (2020) note, because many of the residents involved in response efforts already possessed a wealth of knowledge regarding the “details of household arrangements, occupations, and mobility,” they were well disposed “to adapt to new conditions without explicit organization or deliberation” and aid in official—and ultimately successful—efforts to contain the virus.

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CONCLUSION What are we to make of these insights as they pertain to urban resilience? As has been stressed throughout the chapter, the point in introducing arguments from southern theory as they relate to existing work on urban resilience has not been to suggest that this work is unsuitable for cities throughout the Global South, or to argue that general policy ideals should be eschewed for an emphasis on local particularisms. On the contrary, and as many scholars whose work we have discussed in this chapter have underscored, the complex, interconnected problems that promise to shape the 21st century—many of which the COVID-19 pandemic has just recently brought to the fore—must be dealt with “at scale” (Bhan et al. 2020). The times indeed call for an ambitious universalism, and the insights and methods generated by metropolitan policymakers and academics are as profound as they are well-honed (Connell 2007, p. 226). The central challenge for advocates of urban resilience, then, is how to act at scale in ways that do not reproduce existing relations of domination— specifically, conflating the particular for the universal and demanding “progress” in cities and urban regions that have been systematically and necessarily denied it given their received, historically situated roles in and relations to imperial projects. For critical resilience scholars, it is equally important to rethink the agency of cities and metropolitan regions in the Global South. If we are to take seriously the claims offered by scholars of the “southern” turn, these cities and regions should not be treated simply as case studies of urban resilience—be they perennial victims of the global “resilience complex” and ongoing efforts in capital accumulation, “exotic” exceptions to the rule, or static sites of extreme, enduring vulnerability (Leitner et al. 2018; Rizzo 2020; Watts 2015). Instead, scholars and practitioners alike should work to “blast open” received geographies of authoritative knowledge production on urban resilience such that they are more attuned to existing arrangements and practices to which, however imperfect, the urban majority turns to sustain themselves, and from which significant, general knowledge on urban resilience must be produced going forward (Bhan et al. 2020; Roy 2009, p. 820). This chapter has also attempted to offer up some practical ways to accomplish such an endeavor. In particular, it has echoed Bhan et al. (2020) in their belief that it is of urgent importance to pay attention to the forms of collective life that endure amid the shocks and stressors of the 21st century, and integrate insights gained from these longer-term, ethnographically informed studies into official disaster response and preparedness policies. These insights may help enhance existing indicators of urban resilience and fragility because they are more flexible and attuned to the diverse forms of resilience and fragility as they appear in cities and urban regions around the world. Moreover, and even more

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substantially, insights gleaned from these longer-term studies may prompt a collective re-appraisal of existing mechanisms of monitoring and evaluating urban resilience and fragility—key to the democratization of authoritative knowledge production on resilience, another action item for which we have advocated in this chapter. To reiterate, this approach refers to processes of mutual learning across the Global North and South: engagement, critique, respect, and recognition (Connell 2007). Such processes necessarily entail the disruption of narratives that regard the relationship between fragility and resilience in linear terms, which have long been critiqued on empirical grounds by scholars of urban security (see, e.g., de Boer et al. 2016). These narratives, as indicated previously, are also premised on colonial binaries—failure and progress, under-development and development, primitivity and modernity, fragments and totality—that do more to obscure existing knowledge, experiences, and developments on urban resilience than they do to reveal them. Processes of mutual learning also allow us to understand more concretely why “model” cities of resilience and “progress” more generally—New York, Paris, London—have been more vulnerable to COVID-19 than conventional wisdom would lead us to believe, and why slums like Dharavi have been more resilient to the pandemic, despite what conventional wisdom would suggest. This chapter takes seriously the notion that the challenges of the 21st century are complex and increasingly global in their reach; that cities around the world are more fragile than one might imagine; and that investment in comprehensive “solutions” to address this fragility through resilience programming are necessary. The basic argument has been that the production of such comprehensive solutions requires not just technical know-how, but also a kind of epistemological reflexivity: asking ourselves why we look where we look when thinking about urban resilience and its forms, and then being curious enough to look to, and learn from, elsewhere.

NOTE 1. As per the Director of the World Health Organization: “… even in Dharavi, a densely packed area in Mumbai, a strong focus on community engagement and the basics of testing, tracing, isolating, and treating all those that are sick is key to breaking the chains of transmission and suppressing the virus” (Twitter/World Health Organization).

REFERENCES Bhan, G., Caldeira, T., Gillespie, K., and Simone, A. (2020). “The pandemic, southern urbanisms and collective life.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Available at: https://​www​.societyandspace​.org/​articles/​the​-pandemic​-southern​ -urbanisms​-and​-collective​-life.

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Bigger, P. and Webber, S. (2021). “Green structural adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(1), 36–51. Borie, M. and Hulme, M. (2015). “Framing global biodiversity: IPBES between mother earth and ecosystem services.” Environmental Science & Policy, 54, 487–96. Borie, M., Pelling, M., Ziervogel, G., and Hyams, K. (2019). “Mapping narratives of urban resilience in the Global South.” Global Environmental Change, 54, 203–13. Brand, F.S. and Jax, K. (2007). “Focusing the meaning(s) of resilience: resilience as a descriptive concept and a boundary object.” Ecology and Society, 12(1), article 23. Coaffee, J. (2013). “Rescaling and responsibilising the politics of urban resilience: from national security to local place-making.” Politics, 33(4), 240–52. Coaffee, J. and Rogers, P. (2008). “Rebordering the city for new security challenges: from counter-terrorism to community resilience.” Space and Polity, 12(1), 101–18. Collier, S., Cox, S., and Grove, K. (2016). “Rebuilding by design in post-Sandy New York.” Limn, 5(7). Available at: https://​limn​.it/​articles/​rebuilding​-by​-design​-in​-post​ -sandy​-new​-york/​. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. (2012). “Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa.” Anthropological Forum, 22(2), 113–31. Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge University Press. de Boer, J., Muggah, R., and Patel, R. (2016). “Conceptualizing city fragility and resilience.” United Nations University: Centre for Policy Research. Available at: https://​i​.unu​.edu/​media/​cpr​.unu​.edu/​attachment/​2227/​WP05​.02​_Conceptualizing​ _City​_Fragility​_and​_Resilience​.pdf. Escobar, A. (2011 [1995]). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Vol. 1). Princeton University Press. Fainstein, S. (2015). “Resilience and justice.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(1), 157–67. Golechha, M. (2020). “COVID-19 containment in Asia’s largest urban slum Dharavi-Mumbai, India: lessons for policymakers globally.” Journal of Urban Health, 97(6), 796–801. Grove, K. (2018). Resilience. Routledge. Grove, K., Barnett, A., and Cox, S. (2020). “Designing justice? Race and the limits of recognition in greater Miami resilience planning.” Geoforum, 117, 134–43. Hodson, M. and Marvin, S. (2009). “‘Urban ecological security’: a new urban paradigm?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(1), 193–215. Kaushal, J. and Mahajan, P. (2021). “Asia’s largest urban slum-Dharavi: a global model for management of COVID-19.” Cities, 111, 103097. Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2019). “The (in)security of smart cities: vulnerabilities, risks, mitigation, and prevention.” Journal of Urban Technology, 26(2), 47–65. Leitner, H., Sheppard, E., Webber, S., and Colven, E. (2018). “Globalizing urban resilience.” Urban Geography, 39(8), 1276–84. Meerow, S. and Newell, J.P. (2016). “Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why?” Urban Geography, 40(3), 309–29. Olds, K. (2001). “Practices for ‘process geographies’: a view from within and outside the periphery.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19, 127–36. Rizzo, A. (2020). “Megaprojects and the limits of ‘green resilience’ in the Global South: two cases from Malaysia and Qatar.” Urban Studies, 57(7), 1520–35. Robinson, J. (2002). “Global and world cities: a view from off the map.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(3), 531–54.

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Rockefeller Foundation (2015). “City resilience framework.” Available at: https://​www​ r​ockefeller​foundation​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​100RC​-City​-Resilience​-Framework​ .pdf. Rose-Redwood, R. and Glass, M. (2014). “Geographies of performativity.” In Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space, 1–36. Routledge. Roy, A. (2009). “The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory.” Regional Studies, 43(6), 819–30. Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. (1989). “Institutional ecology, translations and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. UN Habitat (2016). “Urbanization and development, emerging futures: key findings and messages.” Available at: https://​wcr​.unhabitat​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2017/​02/​ WCR​-2016​_​-Abridged​-version​-1​.pdf. UNDP (2020). “Joint statement, UNDP and UN Habitat on World Cities Day.” Available at: https://​www​.undp​.org/​content/​undp/​en/​home/​news​-centre/​speeches/​ 2020/​joint​-statement​-​-undp​-and​-un​-habitat​-on​-world​-cities​-day​ html. Watts, M. (2015). “Adapting to the Anthropocene: some reflections on development and climate in the West African Sahel.” Geographical Research, 53(3), 288–97.

4. Urban governance in conflict zones: contentious politics, not “resilience” Daniel E. Esser One of the most troubling assumptions in resilience talk … is the assumption that systems that are resilient will necessarily have some kind of justice component built in … It is quite easy to imagine, frankly, highly undesirable socio-natural systems that are resilient, just as it is easy to imagine fragile democratic utopias. Given that we are inhabiting the former and nowhere near the latter, resilience talk seems dangerous to me. (Derickson 2016, p. 164) [R]esilience can only be redeemed in so far as it is critically engaged with the everyday and actually existing urban politics and processes. (Taylor and Schafran 2016, p. 142)

RESILIENCE, EVERYWHERE In a recent report, the OECD postulates that the enduring popularity of “resilience” among policymakers is “due to growing recognition of the interconnections among different types of risks, such as violence and conflict, climate change, disasters, and specific risk factors such as urbanization and ageing populations” (OECD 2021, p. 27). With origins in psychology, engineering, and material science, the concept of resilience has also established itself in the social sciences. In research on climate change, it is invoked to stress the importance of adaptation amid at least locally limited options to mitigate negative effects of a changing global climate (Adger 2000; Pezzoli 2002; Davies and Bennett 2007; Gaillard 2010). This application of resilience to human ecologies has attracted mounting criticism from scholars, inter alia for its “celebration of the status quo—and [it] is in this sense a conservative term” (Derickson 2016, p. 162). Nonetheless, its scope has continued to widen, and contemporary global policies prescribe it as a remedy for myriad challenges framed to supposedly threaten the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; Esser and Ha 2015), with SDG 11’s provision to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” being most significant in the context of this book. 53

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“Resilience, whatever it is, appears now to be everywhere,” Anderson (2015, p. 60) observed in the same year the SDGs were launched, seeing in it “the latest iteration of the promise of security, enacted in diverse policies and programmes, offered as a desperate hope of survival in a world of roiling crises, and demanded of subjects, populations and systems” (ibid.). Soon after, the World Bank’s City Resilience Program “was established in 2017 as part of a push to ‘make urban resilience a formal product line, so that it can become something that we [the Bank] do as business as usual’” (Bigger and Webber 2021, p. 43). Private funders such as the Rockefeller Foundation have leveraged resilience’s inscription into global policy by rolling out their own approaches in cities facing “endemic violence” (Rockefeller Foundation 2013). As a result, it indeed seems “unlikely that urban resilience will disappear from the agenda of philanthropic and multilateral organizations” (Webber et al. 2021, p. 358) unless its vacuousness in the context of violence becomes plainly obvious. Urban resilience as a narrative justifies priorities, legitimates expertise, and mobilizes financial resources globally as well as locally. To borrow from David Harvey (1982), it thus offers a “spatial fix” for organizations—both for-profit and non-profit—struggling to extract resources from contested cities. Invoking resilience aides in the creation of “investable enclaves” (Bigger and Webber 2021, p. 48). At the same time, it serves as an antithesis to the purported global rise of “failed” and “feral” cities (Norton 2003; see also Briceño-León in this book, Chapter 7). These “f-labels” extend policies’ tendency to reduce complexity (Call 2008a; Esser 2016) to the urban scale and resonate, first, with longstanding and widespread skepticism against urban growth, e.g., Émile Durkheim’s (1997 [1893]) proposition that rapid urbanization increases the incidence of homicide; second, with “the current model of urban warfare, defined … as a growing colonization of urban space and the everyday life of cities by a military rationality” (Fix and Fiori Arantes 2021, p. 18); and third, with a neoliberal conceptualization of citizenship that distinguishes between “successful” and “failed” urban citizens (Anderson 2013, pp. 4–5). Aside from reflecting a stubborn shortage of supporting evidence and a legacy of misconceptions of cities—urban populations in the Global South are, in fact, less concentrated in megacities than in the Global North (Randolph and Deuskar 2020); there still is little support for the notion that high and increasing urban population pressure leads to a higher risk or frequency of social disorder (Buhaug and Urdal 2013); and cities of one million residents or more actually have lower rates of homicide than smaller ones (Clement et al. 2019)—exercises in branding cities also achieve little in terms of enhancing our understanding of the causes of, and remedies for, urban violence. Notably, while “the conditions and socionatural relations to which communities and regions are expected to be resilient to … are often extra-local

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processes” (Derickson 2016, p. 163; emphasis in the original), most violence is local. Short of slow violence (Nixon 2011) and physical violence in the context of international conflicts, the sources of violence affecting city dwellers can often be located in their vicinity. This is not to deny the transnational architectures of an increasing number of nefarious organizations. Yet, unlike many of the causes of global climate change, which lie beyond the reach of city-based actors, causes of immediate physical violence are frequently rooted in socioeconomic hierarchies and political institutions with ties to the urban fabric. Slums, favelas, and villas miserias bordering on gated communities and luxurious high-rise developments visualize resulting inequities and render urban injustice both legible and actionable (Hoff and Blanco 2020). Should we have confidence in urban resilience effectively addressing the violence accompanying such injustice? The following section traces resilience’s rise to prominence and surveys relevant strands of scholarly criticism to help us appraise the concept’s practical potential more realistically. Resilience, Violence, and Cities: A Genealogy and Critical Review “[U]rban resilience has taken off dramatically since 2002” (Leitner et al. 2018, p. 1276), and its allure has enraptured local, national, and global policy elites (Campbell 2004). Together with late modern narratives about “sustainability,” “civil society,” “social capital,” “empowerment,” and “ownership,” resilience has joined the ranks of depoliticized signifiers of neoliberal visions and action plans safeguarding the liberal international order undergirding global capitalism and its resulting divisions of labor, profits, and vulnerabilities (Cornwall and Eade 2010; Esser 2014). According to Leitner et al., this development has been facilitated decisively by: a dense network of public, private, non-profit sector actors that together form an urban resilience complex, producing norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools that render urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes an integral part of urban development planning and governance. In short, what is rolled out is a neoliberal governance agenda in resilience clothing. (Leitner et al. 2018, pp. 1276–7)

Exemplifying global norm diffusion of “the logic of contemporary ‘fast policy’ regimes and globalized ‘best practice’ formulations” (Webber et al. 2021, p. 345, quoting McCann and Ward 2011; see also Peck and Theodore 2015), the now-dominant conceptualization of resilience hails coping and adaptation at the scales of bodies (Scheper-Hughes 2008; Bosher and Dainty 2011), households (Manyena 2006; Wamsler and Lawson 2011), and communities (Campanella 2006; Baade et al. 2007; Ernstson 2008; Leach 2008; Turner 2009; Hawkins and Maurer 2011; Henry 2011; Tierney 2015). Therein,

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coping denotes the ability of individuals and communities to “carry on” in the face of adversity, and adaptation refers to tweaks enabling the prevention or reduction of adverse influences. Communities are “characterized by high resilience [when they] show high ability to prevail and cope with highly stressful situations” (Kimhi and Eshel 2009, p. 72). This dominant rendering of “resilience captures the ‘autonomous initiative [and] recuperation’, the ‘getting by’, protection, care and mutualism that ensure survival in circumstances that disallow changes to the frameworks that dictate survival” (DeVerteuil and Golubchikov 2016, p. 143, partially quoting Katz 2004, p. 242). Scholarly criticism of this ontology of resilience is abundant. As Schwanen (2016, p. 15) has argued, “[F]or critical urban scholars and geographers it is an easy target to aim at, given its co-optation by neo-liberalism and its complicity in making crisis ubiquitous, uncertainty perennial and securitization the putatively natural response.” Similarly, Leitner et al. (2018, p. 1277) lament that “resilience thinking puts emphasis on the need to manage and adapt to current shocks and stresses, rather than seeking to redress or rework existing political and economic formations that are complicit in their production.” Echoing Derickson (2016) (cited in the epigraph to this chapter), they worry that the dominant notion of resilience in the context of urban governance “ignores the question of social justice [and] forecloses alternative understandings of resilience that are already practiced by citizens on the ground, drawing on local and community-based perspectives” (Leitner et al. 2018, p. 1282). This chapter—as well as many others in this book—provides an opportunity to widen our gaze with a view to learning from such local experiences. Applications of resilience specifically to violent conflict are relatively recent and—at least until 2006—did not use the term explicitly (Lautze and Raven-Roberts 2006; Webersik 2006; Radan 2007; Biong Deng 2008; Sharkey 2008; Kimhi and Eshel 2009; Bakonyi 2010; Fitzpatrick and Barnes 2010; Ibañez and Moya 2010; Larkin 2010; Raeymaekers 2010; Brodsky et al. 2011). While several early studies focused on resilience in and of urban spaces (Churchill 2003; Schwartz 2007; Boege 2009), Beall’s (2006) and Coaffee and Murakami Wood’s (2006) articles possibly constituted the first to apply resilience specifically to urban security concerns. Their respective objectives were to assess how “the very properties of urban life—diversity, cosmopolitanism and creativity—can contribute to a defiant resilience and progress towards peace” (Beall 2006, p. 116) and to propose more resilient urban planning against terrorism targeting cities in the Global North. Subsequent articles by Coaffee and Rogers (2008), Furedi (2008), and Gleeson (2008) helped facilitate the entry of resilience into the imaginary of those who, as Pieterse (2006, p. 285) quips, hold the “assumption that somehow urban challenges must be stabilized, brought under control through analytical or policy tools and then the ideals of urban integration and holism can come to pass.”

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In most of these early iterations of violence-related urban resilience, resilience is framed as local entrepreneurialism spawning initiatives that enable city dwellers to recover from shocks. Such an operationalization reflects the “now sustained epoch of neoliberal economic restructuring which has stripped down universalized systems of social protection (as and where these existed in the first place) and directed ever more emphasis towards encouraging people to extricate themselves” (Chant 2016, p. 3). Forging resilience in urban communities ostensibly promises that effects of porous social safety nets and ineffective public security infrastructures in cities might be tenable if only individuals are able—or enabled—to ‘bounce back.’ Yet, when residents are framed as entrepreneurs in their own security and thus tasked with helping to provide certain public goods as the state focuses on other priorities such as investability and accelerated resource extraction, social relations are depoliticized (Brooks 2017). The result is an atomization of coping and adaptation and a decreased potential for political agency that challenges the state in its complacency amid, and in some cases complicity with, organized violence. Akin to Gilbert Rist’s (2008, p. 13) alternative definition of development, which juxtaposes economic growth with its deleterious effects on social relations and the environment, an empirically grounded conceptualization of urban resilience in the face of violence could thus read as follows: “Urban resilience” denotes the capacity of individuals and the social networks they form to carry on in the face of exclusion and violence resulting from state authorities’ inability or unwillingness to include and protect them. Its aim is to stabilize global capitalism by tasking poorer city dwellers with their own survival through adaptation, and to thus mitigate the risk of political contestation and systemic change from below.

Before we turn toward an exploration of whether political contestation and systemic change from below actually occur amid chronic urban violence in order to understand how, if at all, they work differently from the dominant model of urban resilience outlined above, we should consider what is already known to date about the efficacy of collective action against urban violence. The next section provides an overview of extant literature. Whither Collective Action against Urban Violence? Urban violence is not merely the sum of random assaults on the physical integrity of city dwellers. Much of it is functional: violence provides livelihoods and status; it cements psychosocial belonging to a group, thus offering ontological security (Giddens 1991) through internal cohesion and external competition; and it grants visibility to the otherwise invisible (Goldstein 2004). It thus fulfills a set of critical roles for perpetrators for which there are few if any

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nonviolent alternatives (Wolseth 2011).1 This is not to exonerate perpetrators or their violence; it is necessary to comprehend why violence—in particular, but not only, in cities—has been so persistent. What, then, are victims’ choices in the face of being victimized?2 How can we introduce agency into our understanding of victims without falling in with an atomized conceptualization of adaptation along the lines of conformist social entrepreneurship (see also Moncada in this book, Chapter 11)? Victimization and political participation are not necessarily antipodes. Bateson (2012) has shown that victimization increases local political activism across a large sample of countries; however, it also exacerbates dissatisfaction with democratic governance, most prominently in Latin American countries.3 Considering that class identity, historically a conduit of urban collective action in the Global North (Klemek 2009) and South (Nelson 1970; Gutkind 1973; Walton 1998), has since been weakened by urban informality and changing employment relations (Amin 2000; Beall 2002; Gugler 2004; Stren 2009), this is an important finding as it highlights potential causal effects between high levels of violence and civic action. At the same time, collective responses are oftentimes not conducive to increasing all city dwellers’ security and well-being. Sociologists have shown that “the regulatory effects of collective efficacy on violence are substantially reduced in neighborhoods characterized by high levels of network interaction and reciprocated exchange” (Browning et al. 2004, p. 503), indicating that high levels of social capital can in fact be problematic. For instance, communities actively supporting organized crime as a coping mechanism in the face of economic hardship risk confrontation or costly negotiation with state agents (Brioso et al. 2015). Other practices of such “pernicious resilience”4 can result in a return to ethnic fragmentation (Varshney 2003; Adetula 2005; Simone 2006), a rise of discriminatory private security services (Abrahamsen and Williams 2007; Simelane 2008), and the institutionalization of vigilante groups and urban militias that exacerbate conflict dynamics (Baker 2008). In addition, differences in socioeconomic status complicate collective action. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of data from Mexico, Zizumbo-Colunga (2021, p. 195) warns that “individuals are more likely to victim-blame homicide victims when they come from a low socioeconomic stratum. Moreover, they show that rather than being homogeneously distributed across the population, individuals’ biases against the poor are concentrated among wealthier citizens and elites.” Urban residents in higher socioeconomic strata also frequently engage in exclusive actions that increase their own security—or sense

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thereof—but exacerbate others’ vulnerabilities. Reporting from Brazil, Fix and Fiori Arantes argue that: the maintenance of the Brazilian pattern of strong urban social inequality has always depended on strategies of physical, legal or symbolic segregation between classes, races and territories. … The elites and the middle class use self-defence systems: walls, railings, guardhouses, private surveillance, cameras, biometric reading, laser beams, armoured cars, etc., with the production of fortified enclaves. (Fix and Fiori Arantes 2021, p. 18)

As we shall see, a certain degree of socioeconomic stratification of collective countermeasures and their spatial effects can also be observed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Collective Action against Violence in Ciudad Juárez Since at least 2007, Ciudad Juárez, the largest city in the northeastern Mexican state of Chihuahua, has served as an example of spatial coexistence of globally embedded production, on the one hand, and regionally entrenched terror, on the other. In 2008, Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturer, decided to build a “mega maquiladora” (large manufacturing plant) in San Jerónimo, eight miles northwest of Juárez’s urban center but still within its metropolitan area. This plan projected a net gain of up to 30,000 jobs for the region. Around the same time, Juárez had been selected as the 2007/08 “North American City of the Future” by a cross-national investment magazine published by the Financial Times. Yet, as the city was garnering such positive attention from abroad, a spiral of violence had begun to form, accelerated by a decrease of economic opportunities in the city. The Mexican national statistical institute INEGI estimated a contraction exceeding 40,000 local jobs during the same year (Molzahn et al. 2015), much of it driven by earlier shifts in the loci of export-oriented manufacturing (Davidson 2000; Marchand 2004). Unfolding against the backdrop of this structural decomposition, a combination of regional cartel rivalries, limited state capacity at municipal and provincial levels, and a national government enmeshed in the transnational drug trade drove the city’s murder rate to the top of global rankings: in both 2009 and 2010, it was the highest of all cities worldwide. Thirty murders over the course of twenty-four hours in a city of 1.3 million residents were common, with many homicide victims only being discovered in the surrounding desert months or years after being killed. Between 2009 and 2011, the total number of homicides in Juárez equaled the number of all homicides occurring in the top ten most violent cities in the United States combined during the same period (Molzahn et al. 2015). Within a few years, Juárez had turned into “the most murderous city in the world” (Vulliamy 2011).

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Data compiled by the Fiscalía (public prosecutor’s office) for Chihuahua as well as the local newspaper El Diario de Juárez show that homicides in the city surged from 320 in 2007 to 1,632 in 2008, 2,754 in 2009, 3,622 in 2010, and 2,086 in 2011 (Molloy 2014a). While Juárez appeared to be a lucrative site for international investment to some, the city’s social fabric was deteriorating at a rapid pace, and “[t]aking life for granted [had become] impossible” (Powell 2012, p. 256). Local police forces were regarded as corrupt and in cahoots with either local or regional cartels, and federal support came primarily in the guise of masked soldiers earning a reputation for random arrests, torture, rape, and extrajudicial killings (Molloy 2014b). Juárez had turned into Mexico’s epicenter of “a land so intrinsically plagued by violence and blood, and so frequently on the verge of drifting out of control” (Castañeda 2012, p. 81). Local responses to this unprecedented intensification of violence varied. Dannemiller (2010, p. 136) urges us to “[p]icture a city where some 200,000 citizens have fled […]; where close to 30% of homes are abandoned; where 100,000 jobs […] have been lost.” Residents with cross-border social ties to relatives and former colleagues in the United States and the requisite financial means relocated north; a small fraction successfully applied for U.S. American citizenship and moved to urban centers across Texas. Nonetheless, most residents stayed put. Unable to exit due to economic constraints or their lack of immigration status in the U.S., some of them engaged in a range of activities aimed at limiting physical vulnerability and allowing for coping with personal experiences and ubiquitous victimization in the city. Field research carried out in late 2012 with the help of a four-person team of household surveyors based at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez exemplifies the range of these activities aimed at prevention, coping, and relaying demands to state officials. They included vigils, non-violent protests and spontaneous demonstrations, voluntary night patrols, erection of physical barricades and community-funded fences, as well as communally financed private security guards and covert payments to extortionists in the hope that those who paid would be spared. Tables 4.1 and 4.2 provide an overview of these actions and the prevalence of participation in them at the time. Table 4.1 captures reported participation in these activities; Table 4.2 summarizes the perceptions of randomly selected respondents of the prevalence of different types of collective action in the eight neighborhoods covered by the survey instrument. Despite a relatively small sample size, the random selection of respondents suggests that even at the height of the violence, collective action in Juárez was ubiquitous. Moreover, events shortly after the completion of data collection show that such action was not confined to the micro level. In 2013, a “Justice Articulation Group” comprising eight civil society organizations published a declaration in another newspaper, El Mexicano (Molloy 2013), urging the

Contentious politics, not “resilience”

Table 4.1

61

Reported participation in collective action in response to violence in Ciudad Juárez, 2008–12

During the last five years, have you participated in any of the following collective-action activities

n=320

to promote peace and reduce the violence in your zone or neighborhood? Community initiatives to take back community spaces from violent groups

94

Other activity

81

Monitoring of streets

78

Peaceful marches/protests

53

Vigils

41

Arrangements with the police

28

Rallies directed towards the local government

25

Complaints/editorials in local newspapers

09

Deals with groups that promote violence in the neighborhood

06

Deals with groups that sell drugs

03

Acts of vengeance

00

I don’t know

44

I prefer not to respond

22

“Other activity” included: forge ties and speak regularly with neighbors, be more alert to protect my business, stay out of neighborhood troubles, prioritize education of my children, be more tolerant, take care of ourselves, care for my family, participate in prevention workshops, speak with one voice during encounters with government officials, denunciations, cooperate to erect roadblocks to close down streets, attend church, check on vacant homes

Note

Figures shown are percentages.

Chihuahua state legislature and the new mayor of Juárez to “be sensitive to the citizens.” They requested an end to the repression and torture brought on primarily by military forces and stressed that most of the victims had been “poor people, social activists, and journalists” (ibid). Other city-wide initiatives by business leaders and civil society organizations also emerged, such as the Comité Médico Ciudadano (CMC) and the movement Juarenses Por la Paz (JPP). Created partly in response to the failure of earlier participatory planning exercises launched and led by the local government (Padgett 2011; Conger 2014), most of these groups were eventually integrated into the top-down initiative “Todos Somos Juárez” and its “Mesa de Seguridad” taskforce orchestrated by the national government (Conger 2014). Notably, the latter received financial support through the U.S.-led Merida Initiative’s “four-pillar strategy [that] focused on combating transnational criminal organizations; institutionalizing the rule of law while protecting human rights; creating a 21st-century U.S.–Mexican border; and building strong and resilient communities” (Justice in Mexico 2020: 59; italics added).

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62

Table 4.2

Perceived prevalence of collective action in response to violence in Ciudad Juárez, 2008–12

What collective actions have the people in your zone or neighborhood taken during the last five

n=320

years to minimize the effects of violence? Demanded government intervention

14 1

Organized community-watch brigades during the most dangerous times of the day

12 5

Closed certain areas or streets within the community to take them back under community control

91

Paid extortionists for personal protection

78

Hired private security

75

Formed self-help community groups

72

Decried the situation in local newspapers

44

Public marches/protests

41

Taken justice into their own hands by going after delinquents

22

Sought help from drug dealers to take action against delinquents

13

Sought help from armed groups to intercede against other violent groups

06

Other initiative

06

Negotiated with drug traffickers to sign a peace treaty

03

I don’t know

56

I prefer not to respond

00

Note

Figures shown are percentages.

Collective action was thus possible even under the most adverse of circumstances. However, survey respondents rarely pointed at a causal connection between state- and business-led initiatives, such as Todos Somos Juárez, and a reduction in violence. While many respondents were aware of these initiatives, only a handful credited them with improving the situation for residents. Instead, “resilience” manifested itself as a mix of social practices straddling apolitical coping and political action. The latter often took the shape of resistance, most commonly against the physical intrusion of suspected perpetrators but also when pushing back against political abandonment by local politicians, bureaucrats, and security forces alike. It is in these defensive acts of resistance that the political dimension of collective mitigation and adaptation in the face of endemic violence becomes most obvious. While these insights illustrate Pieterse’s (2008, p. 170) claim that “the biggest asset a poor community has is its stock of social capital that allows it to carry out collective action on the basis of solidarity,” such collective action should not be equated with resilience but rather with “hidden forms of resistance” (Scott 2009, p. 168)—though, in Juárez, as an expression of counter-anarchic communal governance (Bergh 2009; cf. Fukuyama 2013). Lacking the financial resources to purchase homes in gated communities or

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63

employ professional security companies, poorer dwellers in Juárez turned to collective improvisation, some of which substituted for functions previously performed by state organizations while others transgressed the boundaries of legality to render even graver transgressions by aggressors less probable. This then suggests that self-directed local security governance in violent cities such as Ciudad Juárez fills spatial and legal voids created by under-resourced and often complicit state authorities. If and when state entities attempt to reclaim initiative and leadership, communally led initiatives founder easily, not least because trust is frayed and personal risks run high. Collective action against urban violence thus stands in tension with state-led governance, and the “best” approach—at least in the short run—may have rather little to do with fostering “resilience” and more with limiting the reach of groups who benefit from the violence and its underlying transnational economy. As already pointed out above, we do not know to what extent—or even whether—any of the actions undertaken by Juárez residents contributed to a reduction in violence or physical vulnerability. Nonetheless, Juárez can be considered a critical case in that its relatively large share of transient residents, its poverty rate, and its intensity and chronicity of violence render collective action least likely when compared to other troubled cities elsewhere. It is entirely possible that an institutionalization of violence as a facet of de facto urban governance has already taken place, rendering collective action from below largely edentulous. Yet, the case of Juárez suggests that residents at the time felt that certain forms of collective action were indeed worth engaging in, even if only hic et nunc.

CONCLUSION This chapter has posited that a propagation of “resilience” in the context of human insecurity in cities shifts the burden of protection from state authorities to actual and potential victims. The chapter concurs with other contributors to this book that urban political economies act as place-specific determinants of the effectiveness of political action (cf. Moncada 2016). Reflecting on the case of Ciudad Juárez, the chapter has sought to highlight the potential of context-dependent openings for collective action even in the most violent urban spaces. It has shown that city dwellers can engage in selective exploration and navigation of the murky depths of political spaces for insurgent citizenship (Holston 2008; Pal 2008; Trounstine 2009) in ways that balance individual and collective human security needs, albeit not necessarily in a Pareto-optimal way. In the best of scenarios, such dialectic probing constitutes local peacebuilding as state-building from below (Call 2008b; Boege et al. 2009; Clements 2009; Debiel and Lambach 2009; Esser 2012; Esser 2016). In any case—and echoing current scholarship on resilience in the context of

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economically induced urban crises (Hu and Yang 2019)—the role of outsiders in forging these social processes remains strictly limited. Juxtaposed with the ontological critique of “resilience,” these insights from Juárez should also caution against hyperbolic urban doomsday scenarios projected by some scholars and specialized agencies (Kaplan 1994; Norton 2003; Virilio 2004; UNOCHA 2007; Miskel and Liotta 2012; Kilcullen 2013). As much as cities attract violence due to their spatial density of populations and economic and political resources (Levchak 2016), they also constitute more conducive sites for collective action, even enabling “a kind of citizen participation that is impossible at the larger scale of the nation-states” (Fung 2011, p. 858). This is not trivial given the persistent “Cassandra tendency of writing about cities” (Thrift 2012, p. 20) epitomized by some of the chapters in this book as well. There has yet to be an empirical study that proves that deliberate efforts to foster resilience in the context of urban violence have borne fruit. Confronted with this dearth of “best practices,” researchers and policymakers must remain curious about the resourcefulness of locally contingent dynamics (MacKinnon and Derickson 2013). Taylor and Schafran’s (2016, p. 142) conclusion that “resilience can only be redeemed in so far as it is critically engaged with the everyday and actually existing urban politics and processes” may offer some hope to its advocates if they are willing to reconsider their eagerness to bring both the state and the private sector into the fold. After all, state withdrawal and the privatization of public goods and services commonly rank among the root causes of urban violence. Instead of somehow attempting to render city dwellers more “resilient” against such violence without knowing how, the focus of research and policymaking ought to lie on perpetrators of violence and the structures that enable and protect them. To the extent that those responsible for human insecurity in cities are embedded in local, national, and transnational political and economic networks and the liberties, layers of protection, and impunity these networks afford, any concern about real-existing vulnerabilities of city dwellers facing elevated levels of violence must first and foremost be a concern about the hierarchies that produce insecurity. How “resilience” with its downplaying of political action would be capable of catalyzing such a shift remains unclear. While it is understandable that those invested in system maintenance have so far shown little enthusiasm for replacing a neatly depoliticized operative term with an embrace of bottom-up politics, resilience will eventually fall out of fashion, much like earlier neoliberal buzzwords. That will be good news for nearly everyone—in Ciudad Juárez and beyond.5

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65

NOTES 1. Intellectual credit for this functional analysis goes to Phil Williams (Pittsburgh, April 22–24, 2018). 2. I owe this analytical perspective to Eduardo Moncada (Pittsburgh, April 22–24, 2018). 3. This ambivalent effect has also corroborated by Carreras’s (2013) research. 4. Desmond Arias coined this phrase during one of the workshops leading up to this edited book (Pittsburgh, November 13–15, 2016). 5. I thank E. Desmond Arias, Eric Hershberg, Eduardo Moncada, Jennifer Erin Salahub, Taylor B. Seyboldt, Phil Williams and especially Michael Roy Glass for their intellectual inspiration, collegial feedback, and boundless patience during the evolution of this chapter. Research assistance by Mukkedes Omer is also gratefully acknowledged. Survey research in Ciudad Juárez was generously supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Drugs, Security and Democracy (DSD) program. Remaining errors are mine.

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Pezzoli, Keith (2002). Sustainability, livelihood, and community mobilization in the Ajusco ‘ecological reserve’, in: Peter Evans (ed.), Livable Cities: Urban Struggles for Livelihood and Sustainability, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 195–221. Pieterse, Edgar (2006). Building with ruins and dreams: some thoughts on realising integrated urban development in South Africa through crisis. Urban Studies, 43: 285–304. Pieterse, Edgar (2008). City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development, London: Zed Books. Powell, Robert Andrew (2012). This Love Is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez. New York: Bloomsbury. Radan, Angela (2007). Exposure to violence and expressions of resilience in Central American women survivors of war. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 14(1): 147–64. Raeymaekers, Timothy (2010). Protection for sale? War and the transformation of regulation on the Congo–Ugandan border. Development & Change, 41(4): 563–87. Randolph, Gregory F. and Chandan Deuskar (2020). Urbanization beyond the metropolis: planning for a large number of small places in the Global South. Journal of Planning Education and Research. Available at https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 0739456X20971705. Rist, Gilbert (2008). The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, 3rd edn., London: Zed Books. Rockefeller Foundation (2013). 100 resilient cities. Available at https://​www​r​ockefeller​ foundation​.org/​100-resilient-cities/ [accessed March 22, 2021]. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (2008). A talent for life: reflections on human vulnerability and resilience. Ethnos, 73(1): 25–56. Schwanen, Tim (2016). Rethinking resilience as capacity to endure. City, 20(1): 152–60. Scott, James C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schwartz, Michael (2007). Neo-liberalism on crack: cities under siege in Iraq. City, 11(1): 21–69. Sharkey, Donna (2008). Contradictions in girls’ education in a post-conflict setting. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 38(5): 569–79. Simelane, Hamilton Sipho (2008). Security for all? Politics, economy & the growth of private security in Swaziland. Review of African Political Economy, 35(118): 599–612. Simone, AbdouMaliq (2006). Pirate towns: reworking social and symbolic infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala. Urban Studies, 43(2): 357–70. Stren, Richard (2009). Globalisation and urban issues in the non-Western world, in: Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio (eds.), Theories of Urban Politics, Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, pp. 153–68. Taylor, Zac and Alex Schafran (2016). Can resilience be redeemed? Introduction. City, 20(1): 142. Thrift, N. (2012). “But malice aforethought”: cities and the natural history of hatred, in: R. Bishop, G. Clancey and J.W. Phillips (eds.), The City as Target, London: Routledge, pp. 19–43. Tierney, Kathleen (2015). Resilience and the neoliberal project: discourses, critiques, practices—and Katrina. American Behavioral Scientist, 59(10): 1327–42.

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5. Building effective and acceptable security-driven urban resilience Jon Coaffee INTRODUCTION Conceptually, this chapter sits at the intersection of security studies, urban planning, and emergent practices of resilience, and seeks to illuminate implementation challenges faced by city managers and security processionals as they attempt to keep the public realm and civil society safe and secure. The chapter takes the documented experiences in Western cities and generates normative ideas that can be transferred, albeit carefully, into the governance of urban violence in Latin America and the Global South. A vast academic literature has developed in recent years around the concept of “securitizing” cities and, in particular, the policy responses to the occurrence of crime, fear of crime, and the evaluation of cities as strategic sites for a spectrum of large-scale increasingly destructive perturbations in everyday urban life such as violence, protests, riots, and acts of terrorism (Davis 1998; Caldeira 2000; Coaffee 2004; Graham 2010). Increasingly, policy and governance interventions in response to such perceived threats have embodied policies of “resilience” as attempts have been made to anticipate, mitigate, respond, and recover from such disruptive challenges (Coaffee et al. 2008; Coaffee 2019). An array of legislation and regulation that seeks to control particular activities deemed unacceptable or inappropriate often does so through the discourse of resilience, and has led to militarized strategies being punitively deployed within public places and neighborhoods or embedded within the design of urban space. In many cases this has also resulted in a range of urban stakeholders, including urban planners and local communities, being “enrolled” in a co-productive fight with the forces of law and order to improve resilience against crime and violence. These trends further amplify the pressure upon cities to keep citizens safe, yet, to date, comprehensive and holistic approaches to improve the resilience and security of cities against such violent incidents 72

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have not been thoroughly developed in either the developed or developing world. The remainder of this chapter proceeds in three main sections. First, the juxtaposition and blending of ideas of security and resilience are unpacked within an urban context, and an argument is made that the “resilience turn” in urban policy and practice is motivated by concerns for fighting violent crime and terrorism. Second, the implementation of urban safety and security initiatives under the aegis of resilience is discussed and their evolution over time noted. Drawing on examples from Rio de Janeiro and other cities in Latin America, this section highlights the surfacing of increasingly local and technological methods of resilience that correspond to human and smart security approaches that have proved influential in the political sciences. The third section reflects upon the implication of urban resilience strategies for the secure design and governance of the city, and questions how far such largely Western concepts can, and should, transfer to other contexts. While resilience as a concept is embedded within the Western tradition of scholarship and policymaking, its ideas have, in many instances, come to dominate security and disaster management practices in the Global South, further flowing into the broader discourse of sustainable development in poorer regions. Here, local tacit knowledge is often overlooked, as overseas researchers and decision-makers filter the reality of developing countries through their own cultural assumptions and values. This has commonly led to local explanations and traditional coping and response mechanisms being usurped and replaced with policies and projects based on imported concepts like resilience that do not meet local needs and expectations. Within individual territories, there is also a further disconnect between how resilience is viewed by state actors and emergency professionals and perceived by local communities. As they are currently arranged, security policies usually frame risk in ways that are highly technical, not sensitive to local needs, and are thus unable to capture highly localized aspects of neighborhood vulnerability that are crucial for effective violence-reduction measures to be implemented on the ground.

SECURITY AS RESILIENCE Since the early 2000s, the language of resilience, although contested, has permeated a range of disparate disciplinary areas and policy narratives, multiple worlds of professional practice, and also the popular media. Whilst the broader resilience literature has focused on policy arenas connected with the so-called “resilience turn” in urban policy (Coaffee 2013; Coaffee and Lee 2016), the emergence of resilience concepts and practices in the field of urban security have developed markedly in the twenty-first century, fueled by the 9/11 attacks. These urban security responses are driven by an overarching

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requirement to secure the future from an array of disruptive, and often violent, events and to mobilize collective action to make a city area more physically, socially, and economically resilient. Here, urban resilience might be defined as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience” (100 Resilient Cities 2018). The growing importance of urban resilience is further underpinned by the political prioritization of the safety and security of communities against an array of perceived threats; it has also become an increasingly central organizing metaphor within the policymaking process and in the expanding institutional framework of national security and emergency preparedness. For some, this represents hierarchical “command and control” governance and makes the public chiefly passive recipients within a controlled and regulated society where the knowledge of professional and expert stakeholders appears to be excessively privileged. Paradoxically, though, a premium is now being placed upon how individuals and local communities might become more responsible for their own risk management. The stated aim is often articulated as the need to develop “community resilience” that might reinforce broader institutional security strategies. This policy dynamic raises critical questions regarding how anti-violence resilience strategies are reframing both how a place looks and feels, how it is governed for all, and how citizens are being mobilized in pursuit of this goal. There exists an urgent need to identify key stakeholders, understand their roles and requirements, and investigate how existing risk assessment processes or material designs can be utilized or amended to increase the resilience of urban areas through crime prevention, security, and planning policy and practice (Coaffee and Clarke 2015). Everyday Urban Resilience The relationship between security and resilience, and the subsequent linkages to urban management, became starkly illuminated in the wake of 9/11. Security policy began to evolve into more proactive and pre-emptive solutions at sub-national spatial scales. Here the meanings and practices of security were seen as a potent driver and shaper of contemporary resilience practices in which resilience policy became increasingly driven by security concerns and, at the same time, security policy adopted the softer and more palatable language of resilience (Coaffee and Fussey 2015). On the one hand, the emergence of these new security logics and rhetoric within predominantly Western resilience policy at multiple scales supports an array of national policy guidance and strategies; on the other, ostensibly decentralized power and responsibility to the local scale has inverted traditional security logics based on state-level control. By localizing security-driven

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resilience practices and focusing on the needs of people and populations, the embodied ideas of “human security” are pulling security away from its institutional bias and remapping scale in security. Such approaches have utilized a different frame of reference than that of the realist state-centric security studies orthodoxy, “placing the needs of the individual, not states, at the center of security discourses” (Chandler 2012, p. 214). As has been argued, “security is becoming more civic, urban, domestic and personal: security is coming home” (Coaffee and Murakami Wood 2006, p. 504). The resultant security-driven “resilience” policy responses have however, in many cases amounted to little more than extrapolations of ongoing trends for reducing the occurrence and perception of violent crime and terrorism, with several techniques being deployed by security agencies and city administrators to protect perceived urban vulnerabilities. The first method involves the growth of digital surveillance and automated software-driven systems, in particular within public and semi-public urban spaces. 9/11 proved a catalytic event for the mass introduction of hi-tech surveillance systems—a “surveillance surge” with the intensification and expansion of existing systems and the adoption of ever more refined technologies initially developed for military purposes. Electronic surveillance is now inherently linked to the notion of ensuring urban resilience (Coaffee et al. 2008). The second technique reflects the increased popularity of physical or symbolic notions of the boundary and territorial closure, such as gated residential communities, airports, fortified civic buildings, or major financial districts into which access is restricted. After 9/11, many commentators hypothesized that fears linked to the threat of terrorism would speed up the fragmentation of the city into safe and unsafe zones as communities sought the sanctuary of purpose-built enclosures. Based on the vast literature on fortress cities in the 1990s, this is not a new trend. Notably, in Latin America—often considered the most violent region at least in terms of homicide rates—Teresa Caldeira (1996) illuminated how such fortress developments were altering the physical and cultural landscape of Brazil. In her further work City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (2000), she demonstrated how violent crime, fear of crime, and the abuse of citizens’ rights are intersecting with the process of urbanization, producing a splintered city of fortress enclaves and high crime zones. More recent work in Lima, Peru, has also shown similar trends as rich and poor, formal and informal, are divided by a large 10 km concrete wall topped with barbed wire that was constructed to provide security in the face of violence and crime, and differentiate social classes (Bayona 2018). The third way everyday security has been embedded in cities is through the increasing sophistication and cost of security and contingency planning undertaken by organizations and different levels of government to decrease their

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vulnerability to crime or attack and increase their preparedness in the event of disruption. Most institutions have reviewed and re-evaluated individual risk assessments to become safer and more resilient and to create more effective emergency planning, including city-wide and state-wide focused strategic resilience partnerships. Such resiliency planning is also tied into the projection of safety and security as a promotional tool to aid attraction of tourism and foreign direct investment.

SECURITY-DRIVEN URBAN RESILIENCE The types of urban safety and security interventions noted above have developed incrementally to reflect the emergence of different policy priorities and more sophisticated interactions between a range of urban stakeholders and those responsible for safety and security. In many contexts, the initial imprints of security-driven urban resilience were a top-down reaction to large-scale shock events and were commonly exemplified by fortress-like security features, such as security barriers and crash-rated bollards at high-risk sites that during the twenty-first century have become a global blueprint (Coaffee 2004; Benton-Short 2007). Such approaches have been largely driven by the need for protection against shock events and, under the guise of policing or emergency management, premised on a command and control approach from the central government and actualized through national-level strategies. Over time, emerging lessons from security and urban policy discourse, alongside contemporary policy drivers connected to enhanced localism and “smart” technological solutions, have combined to signal a shift in the nucleus of urban resilience policy away from nationally driven and highly protective securitization and toward locally integrated and digitally mediated place-based outcomes. In recent years, there has undoubtedly been a “social turn” in how policymaking communities and civil society groups now utilize concepts of resilience in a positive and transformational way in respect to an emphasis away from “state variables” to community and local municipal agendas. As a result, the focus of urban resilience policy has been directed toward smaller spatial scales and local and community-centered crime-reduction activities. In many respects, such security-driven resilience practices mirror broader trends in public governance of the past 20 years, where the “regulatory state steers” via strategy and the “rowing” of implementation is carried out locally (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). This process has enabled security concerns to become further consolidated as the central concern of resilience practice, while national security has played out in the local realm under the aegis of resilience and community-building, providing a fit with government ambitions to create a new, more community-driven social contract between citizens and the state.

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Smart Resilience Running in parallel, and sometimes complementing the localist trend in the evolution of urban resilience, is the increased importance of digital technology that presents a number of opportunities to city managers and urban planners to enhance security-driven resilience by producing more effective urban flows and crowdsourced data. Through the use of emergent information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures, advanced system monitoring, and analytical capabilities, urban managers can better coordinate the information flow between multiple public agencies and utilize a greater amount of data and information more quickly to aid resilience-focused practices—so-called “smart urban resilience” (Coaffee 2014). As urban studies scholars Marvin et al. (2016) have further noted, “All over the world, an emerging form of smart urbanism is increasingly presented as a vital response to meeting the future challenges of the urban condition.” Such a push toward high-tech solutions to current complex urban problems and challenges are blending the narratives of resilient and smart cities as urban managers seek ways to envision a safer and more secure future metropolis. The idea of a smart city—centered upon combining ubiquitous computing and urban management—is characterized by pervasive wireless networks and distributed sensor platforms, which can provide a wealth of real-time information to aid city operations. Both resilience and smart narratives are becoming more concerned with providing the “adaptive capacity” that will allow future cities to cope with an increasingly complex and uncertain future and to monitor urban areas to proactively anticipate risks (Coaffee 2019). The parallel development of urban resilience and smart city narratives has seen technological innovation as a part (if not the major component) of solutions for coping with current and future urban challenges. This viewpoint presents a vision of the digitally enhanced and optimally functioning city, where urban managers can deploy predictive technologies to alert them to possible dangers, hazards, and service disruption. It is assumed that adopting such an approach will subsequently allow the city to “bounce back” to normal as soon as possible after disruption. Bringing together ideas of technological functioning and localized pre-emptive resilience in visions for a smarter city allows, in theory, for the anticipation of problems and enhances the ability to resolve them proactively and to effectively coordinate resources. Smart resilience planning can add to knowledge as city managers gather and analyze data on a city’s vulnerabilities through easily available real-time, geo-referenced databases. In the smart and resilient city, such big-data monitoring via dashboard-enabled control rooms, fed by an array of sensors, field devices, new technologies, and social media analytics, provide “new mediating points through which knowledge about the urban context is coor-

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dinated, produced, and enacted” (Marvin et al. 2016, p. 7). Emblematically, Rio de Janeiro linked ideas of smart cities with urban resilience and broader transformational urban goals, and invested in strategic-level technologies to coordinate and control its various security and disaster management processes in the build-up to the 2016 Olympic Games. Rio’s 2016 Candidate file noted the following: “The Games will act as a major catalyst for long-term systemic improvements in safety and security systems in the City of Rio, representing a genuine opportunity for transformation.” In Rio, security practices were prioritized toward long-term crime prevention programs and, to a lesser degree, international terrorism (Coaffee and Fussey 2010) and involved active cooperation between different levels of government in Brazil and the transfer of knowledge from the international community of security specialists. The immediate concerns in Rio were specifically related to the city’s homicide rate and fears of theft against tourists with “solutions” having to couple Olympic security standards and Rio’s tradition of delineating “high-value” spaces from their urban context though crime prevention measures (Coy 2006). In so doing, this reinforced the risk of further splintering Rio’s divided landscape, providing a significant challenge to its regenerative aspirations and Olympic legacy. Security planning in Rio began after the city was awarded the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games on October 2, 2009. On October 17, 2009, firefights between rival drug gangs resulted in a police helicopter being shot down and eight buses set on fire. This led public authorities to resolve to significantly enhance security ahead of the Olympic Games (and the 2014 FIFA World Cup). Resources were poured into programs to reduce crime and modernize emergency planning organizations, and city authorities prepared to mount an overwhelming security presence at the sporting events to ensure safety. Such operations served to widen the security perimeter around Rio’s residential and tourist areas and led to the deployment of specially trained police pacification units (UPPs) in over 30 local areas to deal with violence in communities that drug traffickers and paramilitary militias had ruled for years. The extra impetus and funding given to the extended favela “pacification” program as a result of the 2016 Games made it possible for the policing units to purchase more advanced surveillance equipment with some local claims that Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio, had the most expansive CCTV surveillance in the world (BBC News 2013; Oosterbaan and van Wijk 2015). These attempts resulted from a police pacification program launched in 2008 that was viewed as a successful urban violence reduction policy that led to 65 percent fewer homicides in “pacified areas” between 2008 and 2012 (Muggah and Szabó de Carvalho 2014). Moreover, Rio also invested in strategic-level technologies to coordinate and control its various security and disaster management processes in the

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build-up to the Olympic Games. The much-celebrated IBM-built “Intelligent Operations Center,” opened in 2010, was able to integrate the vast majority of the city’s management functions, including transport data from the subways and roads, vehicle accidents, weather patterns, crime statistics, grid updates, and more. It also provided real-time social media updates to its citizens in what many have hailed as the model for “smarter city” development (New York Times 2012). The need for this big-data center was generated by a history of fragmented government operations and the need to bring together diverse information held by different government departments in a single amalgamated data set that could be utilized in one central place to improve emergency response management and collaboration across the city. However, critics of the center wondered “if it is all for show” to reassure Olympic officials and foreign investors; they also questioned whether the more intense surveillance capabilities would curb freedoms or invade privacy, and ultimately, would end up enhancing security inequality and benefiting well-off neighborhoods more than the favelas. As Gaffney (2010, p. 7) noted, “The uneven geographies caused by mega-events are now a concrete part of the infrastructure planning that ‘impose a neo-liberal shock doctrine,’ installing temporary regimes of extra-legal governance that [will] permanently transform socio-space in Rio de Janeiro.” The Operations Center was central to Rio’s overall security plan that focused on the “legacy” of the citizens of the city and of the citizens of Brazil in general. The Federal Police Chief observed in March 2013 that the Rio Olympics was an opportunity to create a safety and security legacy following a history of gang-related violence. He noted that crime was falling, and the divided city image associated with Rio was diminishing: For so long Rio has been divided, but this is our chance to bridge the gap … We are already seeing huge success because crime rates have dropped, and we are recovering areas that had never been part of society before. This is a legacy from the Olympic Games that is happening right now and after the Olympics are gone, it will leave a legacy of safety and security after so many years of violence. (Inside the Games 2012)

Another emblematic Latin American example of tech-driven smart urban resilience comes from Mexico City, where a state-of-the-art surveillance center was built in 2011 by Telex, the Mexican telecoms giant, and Thales, a French military supplier. Here, the control center amalgamates data feeds from up to 47 municipal agencies and provides an array of advanced tools for surveillance, crisis response, and day-to-day city operations. Thales, whose self-proclaimed objective for the project was to “simplify complexity,” argued that this center empowered strategic decision-makers by “delivering clear, timely and operationally relevant information about their environ-

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ment” (Thales 2014). Most notably, the military-inspired C4I4 control center (Commando, Control, Comunicaciones, Cómputo, Inteligencia, Integración, Información e Investigación), patterned after Thales’s C4ISTAR defense systems (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance), has the capability to monitor the city’s thousands of surveillance cameras to assess crowd density and movements, as well as to track vehicles in the city’s main streets due to its automatic number plate recognition technology. Additionally, the operations room can monitor and activate the city’s system of panic buttons, loudspeakers, and a range of environmental sensors, all in real time (Mushkin 2016). The C4I4 center is the cornerstone of Ciudad Segura—one of the world’s most ambitious urban security programs, established to help the city cope with spiraling crime rates and improve security against violence across the metropolis. “Smart” safety and security approaches such as those in Rio and Mexico City are increasingly complemented by social media technologies that enhance data availability to police and security forces; they also offer a range of possibilities for citizens to be empowered in their own safety management by opening up new channels of communication with other citizens or with the police. Mobile applications, such as WhatsApp, allow citizens a direct line of communication with which to report risks to the police and enable local communities to establish online neighborhood watch-type groupings. Other apps based on crowd-sourced data are also being utilized to help citizens avoid dangerous situations. For example, the “Happin” app, that has become popular in Beirut, Lebanon, uses news and crowd-sourced data to geo-tag disruptive events and allows users to mitigate risks or simply save time by avoiding them. While new data-driven tools have been welcomed by many police forces and municipalities, they are not necessarily citizen-friendly; instead, they have raised concerns among civil society groups about privacy and automated surveillance. One well-documented example of the fusion of new technologies with traditional policing is the realm of predictive policing that first emerged in the United States and is now seeping into policing practice worldwide (Ferguson 2017). Critics warn that predictive policing—an intelligence-led computer program that uses an algorithm to pinpoint zones where crime is most likely to occur—has significant civil liberties’ concerns and marks particular locations as higher risk. Moreover, while new predictive and real-time social media technologies promise crime reduction, they also threaten the extension of policing biases; this leads to privacy risk as a result of the data gathering required and neglects alternative interventions that address the root causes of crime. For example, the CityCop application released in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2014, and based on crowd-sourced data, ran into problems as it tackled an immediate problem—the under-reporting of crime—but failed to set in motion official legal, investigative, or palliative responses that make

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reporting crime useful in the first place. In this case, the crime data had significant policy and political implications, creating incentives for manipulating information; for example, it had the capability to make real estate prices in a neighborhood rise or fall. There were also concerns over the trustworthiness of the statistics generated due to a lack of guidelines to ensure some uniformity of analysis (Timerman 2014). Other examples of fast-growing crowdsourced social media mobile apps come from Rio, where a growing number of residents contribute real-time information to several applications that aim to help citizens navigate the increasingly violent city. Apps like Onde Tem Tiroteio (OTT, or Where the Shootouts Are) or Fogo Cruzado (Crossfire), set up with the support of Amnesty International in 2016, send out alerts for gun and gang violence incidents based on residents’ reports and/or cross-check gang violence reports from multiple sources—including journalists, police officers, and residents. Other apps like CrimeRadar use artificial intelligence to sift through the official crime statistics to predict patterns of crime across the metropolis. To date, nearly five million residents receive updates from these apps. Not unsurprisingly, Rio’s military police have argued that such apps can cause misinformation and lead to rumors that circulate like digital wildfire; they have pleaded with residents to only consult their official social media accounts. Others have argued that the data collected by such apps may unintentionally lead to the stigmatizing of certain favelas as overly violent due to biased reporting rates of gunfire and data that are additionally skewed by a surge in reporting of police actions involving firearms (Garcia 2020). Strategic Resilience Concerns for safety and security have further been incorporated into wider urban resilience strategies through a range of governance programs run by global governance coalitions or the private sector. For example, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s “How to Make Cities More Resilient” campaign aims to support public decision-making in urban affairs, while between 2013 and 2019, the Rockefeller Foundation ran its “100 Resilient Cities” campaign “dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century” (UNISDR 2012). Such approaches highlight how an overarching and strategic view of resilience needs to consider not only the material built environment but also social, economic, and decision-making processes. In such holistic approaches, public safety and security are key components. For example, Rio’s overarching “100 Resilient Cities” strategy (Rio Resiliente, see City of Rio de Janeiro 2017) highlighted that “safety and public order are key elements to the resilience of a city, because they are linked directly to the

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preservation of life, property and the physical and psychological well-being of citizens” (p. 25). Attempts are being made to mainstream concerns for violence reduction into a wide variety of city-wide policies linked to a reduction of criminal acts in urban spaces for a number of reasons, notably “the (violent) actions of criminal groups can affect the resilience of the city in many ways, causing abrupt shocks, like crime waves; but also chronic stresses, like increasing the sensation of insecurity” (ibid.). Similarly, other cities in Latin America that have undertaken strategic resilience initiatives are also attempting to use practices of resilience-building to improve urban safety and security, as well as to transform the formerly violent image of the city. Most notable is Medellín, Colombia—known as the most violent city in the world at the end of the 1980s because of an urban war set off by the drug cartels. Here, the city’s authorities are also using the Rockefeller “100 Resilient Cities” program to advance a vision for a “Safe and Peaceful Medellín” where “resilience is part of the capacity that the city (as an urban, social and political system) that its inhabitants have developed to resist, overcome and learn from the causes and effects of national violence” (Resilient Medellín, see City of Medellín 2016, p. 13) and where the core aim is the following: To achieve the dream of a safe and peaceful city, [by] preventing crime, [and] creating strategies that permit access to justice, comprehensive care of victims, and remembrance. To transform the city … we also need to raise people’s awareness of what transpired in the past to prevent the cycle of violence and insecurity repeating in the future. Knowing fully the history of what happened will help people understand how not to repeat the events that led to acts of violence. (ibid., p. 9)

REFLECTIONS ON THE URBAN RESILIENCE “TURN” FOR URBAN SAFETY AND SECURITY The current pronouncements on the importance of crime, violence, and conflict for future urbanism are sharply divided. On the one hand, pessimistic accounts see a fragmented city controlled, highly surveilled, and with security often obtrusive and based on protectionist reflexes. On the other hand, more optimistic accounts view the resilience turn as leading to a more open city—one that is collaboratively designed, where social justice is privileged, and where safety and security interventions are informed by community needs. Concomitantly, some see the growth of social media, as well as other hi-tech approaches, as one way in which crime and disorder of all kinds can be mitigated by direct monitoring or through the gathering and analysis of crowdsourced intelligence. Within this evolving context, urban resilience policies have emerged to secure the future from disruptive challenges and security threats. Increasingly, safety and security are embedded in an array of policy priorities ranging

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from local to global pronouncements. For example, in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goal 11 is dedicated to Make(ing) cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable; the discourse of resilience is utilized to highlight how we should respond proactively to a variety of shocks and stresses and how a diversity of stakeholders might collectively operationalize a joined-up response and extend the ways in which professionals think about the future (Coaffee and Lee 2016). Moreover, the discourse of urban resilience, although now in common usage in response to environmental and economic challenges, is also being increasingly deployed in thinking about how crime can be reduced. As a recent “100 Resilient Cities” feature on Safer and Stronger Cities noted, resilience should also mean the ability of our cities and communities to “withstand and prevent social tensions” rather than merely seeking to cure its symptoms: “Resilient cities advance public safety and strengthen communities by simultaneously reducing crime and incarceration rates, while supporting victims of crime, building social cohesion, and providing second chances.” The key to such an approach is the development of more trustful and legitimate relationships between the forces of law and order and local communities that help solve—and prevent— crimes. This move to blend crime prevention, urban policy, and resilience agendas is not an easy task, and essential issues emerge in operationalizing such a hybrid strategy. First, and in line with SDG 16 that promotes “just, peaceful and inclusive societies,” there are social and spatial justice concerns that must be considered, despite evidence from many existing large-scale urban resilience strategies suggesting they are not utilitarian—that the poor and socially marginalized suffer more than the rich and powerful who can barricade themselves away (Caldeira 2000). Here, security planning represents an opportunity to enhance urban resilience while also showing a tension between rapid restoration and longer-term sustainable and equitable change in overall planning processes. This poses two key questions: how do planning and strategic resilience programs ensure social justice amidst a post-political landscape that marginalizes alternative voices and approaches, diverting attention from questions of justice, power, or alternative futures? And, what are the spatial impacts of security-driven urban resilience policy across different scales and for equitable urban development (Matin et al. 2018)? Second, who are the beneficiaries of security-driven urban resilience? Is it the citizens of the city, or is security being ramped up as a key selling point for investors and external audiences? In a climate of high crime/high fear of crime, the way in which the state communicates risk to citizens and external audiences has significant implications for harnessing or allaying fears about the current level of perceived risk as well as inviting citizens and other urban stakeholders to be given responsibility toward ensuring collective safety. More

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critically, though, the wider implication of such collective working to reduce urban violence is that certain non-governmental stakeholders can be co-opted into delivering state-driven resilience agendas without adequate funding, training, or safety guarantees when partnering with the police. Third, there should be no uncritical transfer of Western ideas and approaches. This emphasis on more localized adaptive resilience follows disillusionment with liberal internationalist understandings that Western or international actors could resolve problems of development through the export of liberal institutions and processes of grand planning. Transference should be context specific and pragmatic—in other words, what matters is what works— with learning and experimentation encouraged rather than the adoption of universal concepts, standards, and meta-narratives. Often such processes are facilitated by “transfer agents” in the “transnationalization of policy” who order and explain knowledge in broad terms such as through external frameworks of security and policing, and a global culture of control, where leitmotifs of security are replicated (counter-terrorism, mega-event security, predictive policing, etc.) (Stone 2004). More locally, contextual and holistic approaches should be formed between those who build, those who manage, those who secure, and those who use the city. Ideally, this should be undertaken using local approaches—such as the dialogical approach inspired by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed developed by the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire (1970), in order to develop an approach that reframes citizen experiences as a critical pedagogical process. Such grounded perspectives will enable researchers and policymakers to leverage the realities, world views, and epistemologies of marginalized and disadvantaged people in situ; citizen engagement will not merely be a means to gather data, but an opportunity for social learning for citizens and researchers alike. Fourth, we need to acknowledge the dangers caused by the exceptionalism inherent in many existing security approaches and its execution through policing and surveillance practices. These security approaches have become a key mode of organizing contemporary society in both the Global North and South. Logics of protection, reassurance, adaptation, preparedness, and prevention can be identified; pre-managed risk, control, and security feed into an ever-increasing range of national and local policy and practice that can see domestic security environments generated and sustained though the lens of resilience. Most recently, we can chart the enhanced use of digital technologies and big data in the provision of security, but we need to acknowledge the challenges of such approaches—their veracity and questionable accuracy, what they mean for the governance of policing and security, how citizens contribute to safety agendas, and the extent to which such technological fixes actually help security governance.

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Overall, security-driven urban resilience can be seen as a collective responsibility that “is most effective when it involves a mutual and accountable network of civic institutions, agencies and individual citizens working in partnership towards common goals within a common strategy” (Coaffee et al. 2008). This resilience, therefore, shapes the way we perceive the multiple challenges cities face from insecurity, provides a framework by which to respond, and highlights the need to apply largely Westernized practices contextually and in a culturally sensitive way so as to keep the public realm safe and secure for all. More specifically, in many Latin American countries and cities, the relative absence of effective governance and inherent spatial and social inequalities has meant that the reality of approaches to security-driven urban resilience have benefited only certain sections of society, with the self-organization of security in low-income communities still a common practice. For example, in Rio de Janeiro, security programs aimed at securitizing the favelas, reducing violent crime rates, and breaking up criminal networks, despite early accomplishments in enhancing feelings of security, have only been minimally successful, despite much pre-Olympic hype (de Souza 2019). Most recently, the relationship between formal and informal security actors took a further twist during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that swept across Brazil. This revealed underfunded and inadequately organized state-level responses being actively taken over by armed gangs, with militia in Rio controlling access to and from a number of favelas in an attempt to impose strict curfews and limit the spread of the virus (Reuters 2020). This situation starkly illuminated the problems of developing sustainable security governance in conditions of high inequality, with the fragmented nature of existing programs of city security and resilience that primarily focus upon high income and commercial areas and are operationalized through smart solutions; simultaneously, self-policed low-income neighborhoods continue to export violence and the fear of crime to the wider city.

REFERENCES 100 Resilient Cities (2018). Safer and stronger cities: strategies for advocating for federal resilience policy, New York. Available at: http://​ 100resilientcities​ .org/​ wp​-content/​uploads/​2018/​03/​100​-Resilient​-Cities​-Safer​-and​-Stronger​-Cities​-Final​ -PDF​.pdf. Bayona, D. (2018). On the other side of the wall of shame in Lima, Peru. Arch daily, March 30. https://​www​.archdaily​.com/​890132/​on​-the​-other​-side​-of​-the​-wall​-of​ -shame​-in​-lima​-peru. BBC News (2013). Rio favela has “more CCTV cameras than London.” January 11. http://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​news/​world​-latin​-america​-20992062. Benton-Short, L. (2007). Bollards, bunkers, and barriers: securing the National Mall in Washington, DC. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25(3): 424–46.

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Caldeira, T.P.R. (1996). Building up walls: the new pattern of spatial segregation in São Paulo. International Journal of Social Science, 48(1): 55–66. Caldeira, T.P.R. (2000). City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chandler, D. (2012). Resilience and human security: the post-interventionist paradigm. Security Dialogue, 43(3): 213–29. City of Medellín [Alcaldía de Medellín] (2016). Resilient Medellín: a strategy for our future. https://​re​silientcit​iesnetwork​.org/​downloadable​_resources/​Network/​ Medellin​-Resilience​-Strategy​-English​.pdf. City of Rio de Janeiro (2017). Rio Resiliente: resilience strategy of the City of Rio de Janeiro. https://​re​silientcit​iesnetwork​.org/​downloadable​_resources/​Network/​Rio​-de​ -Janeiro​-Resilience​-Strategy​-English​.pdf. Coaffee, J. (2004). Rings of steel, rings of concrete and rings of confidence: designing out terrorism in central London pre and post 9/11. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28(1): 201–11. Coaffee, J. (2013). From securitisation to integrated place making: towards next generation urban resilience in planning practice. Planning Practice and Research, 28(3): 323–39. Coaffee, J. (2014). The uneven geographies of the Olympic carceral: from exceptionalism to normalization. The Geographical Journal, 3(181): 199–211. Coaffee, J. (2019). Futureproof: How to Build Resilience in an Uncertain World. London: Yale University Press. Coaffee, J. and Clarke, J. (2015). On securing the generational challenge of urban resilience. Town Planning Review, 86(3): 249–55. Coaffee, J. and Fussey, P. (2010). Olympic security, in J. Gold and M. Gold (eds.), Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning, and the World’s Games, 1896 to 2016, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, pp. 167–79. Coaffee, J. and Fussey, P. (2015). Driving resilience through security: the practices and impacts of security-driven resilience. Security Dialogue, 46(1): 86–105. Coaffee, J. and Lee, P. (2016). Urban Resilience: Planning for Risk Crisis and Uncertainty. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Coaffee, J. and Murakami Wood, D. (2006). Security is coming home: rethinking scale and constructing resilience in the global urban response to terrorist risk. International Relations, 20(4): 503–17. Coaffee, J., Murakami Wood, D. and Rogers, P. (2008). The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Coy, M. (2006). Gated communities and urban fragmentation in Latin America: the Brazilian experience. GeoJournal, 66(1–2): 121–32. Davis, M. (1998). Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books. de Souza, S. (2019). Pacification of Rio’s favelas and the “pacification of the pacification police”: the role of coordinating brokerage in police reform. Sociological Forum, 34(20): 458–82. Ferguson, A. (2017). The Rise of Big Data Policing. New York: NYU Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Gaffney, C. (2010). Mega-events and socio-spatial dynamics in Rio de Janeiro, 1919–2016. Journal of Latin American Geography, 9: 7–29.

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Garcia, S. (2020). In Rio, mapping gunshots can backfire, Citylab, September 20. https://​www​.bloomberg​.com/​news/​articles/​2020​-09​-29/​the​-apps​-that​-map​-rio​-s​-gun​ -violence​-can​-backfire. Graham, S. (2010). Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. New York: Verso. Inside the Games (2012). Rio 2016 Olympics will leave legacy of safety and security says city police chief, March 15. http://​www​.insidethegames​.biz/​olympics/​summer​ -olympics/​2016/​16233​-rio​-2016​-olympics​-will​-leave​-legacy​-of​-safety​-and​-security​ -says​-city​-police​-chief. Marvin, S., Luque-Ayala, A. and McFarlane, C. (eds.) (2016). Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? London: Routledge. Matin, N., Forrester, J. and Ensor, J. (2018). What is equitable resilience? World Development, 109: 197–205. Muggah, R. and Szabó de Carvalho, I. (2014). Fear and backsliding in Rio. New York Times, April 15. https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2014/​04/​16/​opinion/​fear​-and​ -backsliding​-inrio​.html. Mushkin, H. (2016). Reconnaissance: inside the Panopticon: a low-tech visit to Mexico City’s high-tech urban surveillance center. Places Journal, February. https://​ placesjournal​.org/​article/​inside​-mexico​-citys​-c4i4​-surveillance​-center/​. New York Times (2012). Mission control, built for cities: I.B.M. takes “smarter cities” concept to Rio de Janeiro, March 3. http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2012/​03/​04/​business/​ ibm​-takes​-smarter​-cities​-concept​-to​-rio​-de​-janeiro​ html​?pagewanted​=​all​&​_r​=​0. Oosterbaan, S. and van Wijk, J. (2015). Pacifying and integrating the favelas of Rio de Janeiro: an evaluation of the impact of the UPP program on favela residents. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 39(3): 179–98. Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1993). Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. New York: Plume Publications. Reuters (2020). Gangs call curfews as coronavirus hits Rio favelas, March 24. https://​ uk​ reuters​.com/​article/​us​-health​-coronavirus​-brazil​-favelas​-fea/​gangs​-call​-curfews​ -as​-coronavirus​-hits​-rio​-favelas​-idUKKBN21B3EV. Stone, D. (2004). Transfer agents and global networks in the transnationalisaton of policy. Journal of European Public Policy, 11(3): 545–66. Thales (2014). Mexico City: Telmex and Thales selected to double the capacity of world’s most advanced urban security system. www​.thalesgroup​.com/​en/​worldwide/​ security/​press​-release/​mexico​-city​-telmex​-and​-thales​-selected​-double​-capacity​ -worlds​-most. Timerman, J. (2014). Uruguay’s hot new crime app is a bit of a hot mess. http://​www​ .citylab​.com/​crime/​2014/​06/​uruguays​-hot​-new​-crime​-app​-is​-a​-bit​-of​-a​-hot​-mess/​ 372622/​. UNISDR (2012). How to Make Cities More Resilient: A Handbook for Mayors and Local Government Leaders. Geneva: United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

6. Fragility and pernicious resilience in urban Latin America and the Caribbean Enrique Desmond Arias INTRODUCTION Even more than a decade later it is clear that 2010 was a challenging year for Latin America and the Caribbean. Through much of that year factions of Medellín’s Oficina de Envigado squared off against one another for control of criminal operations; this pushed homicide rates close to 100 per 100,000 population and raised such substantial questions about hosting that year’s South American Games that civic leaders sought to broker a truce between warring factions. Kingston, Jamaica, fared no better. In May, following more than a year of intense pressure from the Obama administration, the government of then Prime Minister Bruce Golding initiated a military operation to arrest gang leader Christopher “Dudus” Coke. These actions led to a state of emergency in the city and, eventually, resulted in over 70 deaths in the neighborhoods where Coke’s gang operated. In November of that same year, Rio de Janeiro suffered a wave of bus bombings as the Comando Vermelho prison faction sought to resist advances of policing policies that were reducing their access to drug sales points. Perhaps most troubling of all, Ciudad Juárez was deemed the most violent city in the world that year, recording a homicide rate of 200 per 100,000 inhabitants, as powerful drug trafficking organizations faced off in their efforts to control that city’s narcotics plaza amid some of the worst moments of Felipe Calderón’s “drug war.” These events drew an immense amount of domestic and international attention. Not only did these incidents leave many dead, but they also disrupted life sometimes for months at a time, creating in the minds of many a crisis of governance eminently reflective of urban fragility. The attention these specific events received, however, overshadowed the complex, violent, and much more repressive conditions that often preceded and succeeded them. These explosions of violence occurred in complex urban governance contexts 88

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that were both fragile and resilient. The disordered conditions that emerged in these moments were the outcome of and the precursor to urban governance settlements that tended to involve a long-term collaboration among politicians, security officials, civic leaders, and criminal organizations. Understanding these moments of disorder involves examining the resilient orders that preceded them and the factors that led to the dissolution of these settlements. We are fortunate in recent years to have left behind the normatively laden language of the “feral” city (Norton 2003). Nonetheless, as I will discuss in this chapter, urban fragility often focuses our attention on the wrong things. The urban systems of the Global South face immense challenges ranging from rapid population growth and concentrated poverty to large-scale housing informality and imprecise maps of informal settlements. Amid all of this, these systems evolve informal arrangements among various stakeholders to make these social, economic, and political systems viable. The discourse of fragility focuses our attention too strongly on deficits and conflict at the expense of the durable relationships that support these systems, what I call here pernicious resilience. This does not mean, of course, that there are no fragile points or moments within these systems but that understanding these sites or times of fragility involves also understanding the strength of these systems and the dynamics that provoke the emergence of violence at particular times. This chapter focuses on the varied micro-level political settlements that underlie urban systems in Latin America and the Caribbean, how the mixture of settlements in these systems creates different types of order and disorder, and what types of events generate violence and apparent fragility.

A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING FRAGILITY AND RESILIENCE Discussions of state failure and urban fragility typically require various measures of problems that a particular locale faces before aggregating those data through an indexing scheme and then producing a measure of relative fragility across the universe of cases for which the index was gathered (Muggah 2016). These exercises enable researchers to engage in a systematic comparison across cases that, without the indexing exercise, would have been merely speculative. As a result, these exercises provide us with important insights that can become the basis of understanding the relative challenges one sovereign or urban space suffers—and can also provide a foundation for considering policy interventions to respond to the challenges facing such spaces. These approaches, however, come up short in several ways. While these efforts do important work in building comparability, they reduce differences in their efforts to establish comparison. Thus, while such indexes provide an image of how Bogotá might be more or less fragile than Barranquilla, they tell

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us very little about how the fragility of Bogotá differs from the fragility that Barranquilla endures. To be sure, these indexes are based on multiple factors, yet they deliberately flatten these factors. We may know that Bogotá has a higher homicide rate than Barranquilla but not why those homicides are happening which, as I will show later in this chapter, is an important consideration in understanding both how fragility emerges and crises erupt but, conversely, the nature of pernicious resilience, defined as the dynamics that lead to and support a local fragility that leads to frequent eruptions of violence and other crises, in the locale. Perhaps more importantly, such efforts render the urban or sovereign space as a homogeneous whole when, in fact, both urban and sovereign terrain is highly diverse. For example, the experience of fragility in Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema neighborhood is dramatically different from the experience of fragility in the Bangu neighborhood. While this is an important issue in understanding urban fragility issues, it is a problem that is orders of magnitude greater in understanding sovereign fragility. All these indices provide very little information about the complex informal arrangements that keep urban systems functioning and make them resilient in ways that produce ongoing fragility. While there are numerous ways in which to understand informal strategies to address urban challenges, the analytical framework I offer here focuses on my own area of research—urban violence. In Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean, I argue that criminal organizations play important roles in governance processes (Arias 2017). These governance actions, however, do not reflect so much a breakdown of state power but different ways in which organized crime groups collaborate with government officials in establishing order within neighborhoods and urban regions. Different patterns of armed hybrid governance reflect different types of pernicious resilience and, consequently, eruptions of fragility. Since these conditions vary systematically across different types of urban space, their implications for order across a city vary because of the frequency with which different hybrid urban orders emerge across that city and the ways these structures are organized at the municipal, regional, and national levels. My approach to understanding these dynamics builds on analyses of civil conflicts. Over a decade ago, Stathis Kalyvas argued that the degree of violence occurring in civil conflict in a particular locale is driven by the nature of armed control over particular areas (Kalyvas 2006). Similarly, Claire Metelits has suggested that the nature of armed control in particular areas generates different forms of localized governance processes (Metelits 2010). Zachariah Mampilly claims that the nature of civil conflict governance structures depends not just on local territorial control but also on the historical nature of civil society–state interactions in particular locales (Mampilly 2011). Finally, Paul Staniland has stated that the form of armed control and the relationship

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between insurgencies and state actors generate different conflict and governance patterns (Staniland 2012). My analysis applies these approaches to criminal territorial dominance in urban areas. I contend that a combination of competition among armed non-state actors and the relationship between those actors and the state produce different localized governance outcomes in cities with high levels of organized criminal activity. My research (Arias 2017) yields four principal categories of hybrid urban governance from the confluence of different types of criminal organizations and the relationships that they maintain to the state. • Criminal disorder develops when armed groups in a particular space engage with one another or in ongoing and direct confrontation with state actors. These types of activities draw immense amounts of attention and lead to cities attracting attention for their “fragility.” Such conditions frequently have the countervailing effect of allowing civic groups to organize in response to violence, thereby creating space for changing the underlying shape of hybrid governance relationships. These types of conditions are usually short-lived and, in the long-term, unsustainable. For every extended event of criminal violence, such as the Ciudad Juárez war or the Medellín cartel’s confrontation with the Colombian state in the 1980s and 1990s, there are many more examples of extended collusion between criminal organizations and the state and broader neighborhood and city-level political settlements that, while empowering criminal groups, put significant limits on violence (Durán-Martínez 2018). • Divided governance emerges when a consolidated criminal group maintains a somewhat competitive relationships with state actors. The result is not only confrontation between state officials and criminal groups, but also confrontations between powerful criminal groups that can lead to explosions of violence. These events are generally contained by pre-existing agreements. Under these conditions, armed groups and state officials divide authority over different spheres of local governance with the state taking responsibility for certain aspects of governance and the armed group taking responsibility for others. Divided governance is negotiated both clandestinely and indirectly between the state and armed actors. Good examples of this can be found in my first book, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro, where drug gangs in two of the favelas in which I worked exercised control over some aspects of social and political life in the communities where they operated and used their contacts in government and civil society to influence other political activities (Arias 2006; see also Arias and Rodriguez 2006). • A third form of hybrid governance is collaborative governance where armed groups in the state directly work together to manage different urban

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spaces. This can involve the public contracting of armed groups, armed actors occupying public posts that manage policies in particular areas, and armed group leaders publicly controlling policymaking. Overall, armed actors tend to lead state policymaking under these circumstances. These conditions occurred in Medellín during the period of paramilitary demobilization when Diego Murillo Bejarano simultaneously controlled criminal and right-wing armed structures and engaged in negotiations with the government (Arias 2017; Serrano 2010, 106–12). Similarly, these conditions have also existed in some neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica, where powerful criminal groups maintained strong relationships with political leaders (Grillo 2016, 116–20). • A final case is tiered or layered governance. Here, multiple armed groups cohabit in a particular space with the state to mediate relationships among these organizations. Under these conditions, states generally determine the shape of policy with armed groups aiding in implementing such policies. This set of arrangements can emerge when governments seek to negotiate ceasefires or truces among armed factions. For example, the 2013 Mara ceasefire in El Salvador may provide an example of this as do the Jamaican government’s efforts to control gang conflict in Kingston (Cruz and Durán-Martínez 2016). In many cities in the Global South, different types of armed groups play important roles in neighborhood-level governance processes (Davis 2006; Kilcullen 2013). The four cases listed above, while by no means exhaustive, provide a sense of the varied forms of governance that can emerge in urban areas with active armed groups. These groups emerge because of challenges the cities face, the history of national-level political violence, the nature of urbanization, and the role of illegal markets in these spaces. The hybrid forms of governance that develop in particular neighborhoods and how they are knitted together across the city reflect different underlying accommodations between state actors and criminal groups. Such settlements enable state actors to engage with these groups in the urban governance process and to contain conflict between armed groups and elements of the state. Thus, these hybrid governance systems reflect an element of informal resilience built into systems that, despite ongoing violence, enable these systems to persist. Critically, the varied instances of hybrid governance in a particular city are knitted together by broader factors affecting these urban spaces. In Jamaica, the relationship between gangs and political parties is a particularly important dynamic that shapes urban terrain, the likelihood of conflict, and how neighborhoods are governed. On the other hand, individual gangs in Rio de Janeiro are left to work out their own relationships with the state, and different types of criminal groups choose among the options available to them. Relationships

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between drug gangs in that city are partially governed by the affiliation of gang leaders with one of the city’s main prison factions, such as the Comando Vermelho, the Terceiro Comando, or the Amigos dos Amigos (Downdey 2003). Rio’s extortion rackets have much more direct connections with the state because of the participation of police in these enterprises. In Mexico, varied arrangements among armed actors, mayors, governors and local, state, and federal police forces affected urban governance dynamics. These dynamics in Colombia are driven not just by complicity between armed groups and the state but by the ways that national-level conflict actors intersect with specific local-level criminal actors. These various urban- and national-level dynamics result in patterns of urban hybrid governance. In some cities, armed groups are well-organized, leading to greater levels of divided and collaborative governance and less visible disorder. In other cities, the reverse is true. Government officials in some cities have more pervasive contact with armed groups leading to more persistent conditions of collaborative and tiered governance than divided governance and disorder. Given the ways that each of these systems generates order and disorder and augments or controls fragility, the systems’ aggregation across a particular city generates a particular pernicious resilience. Thus, the nature of hybrid governance does not reflect the overall level of fragility but its dynamics of resilience that underlie these systems. In general, while certain settlements persist, fragility is less apparent and governance functions tend to move forward. To put it another way, the persistence of distributions of hybrid governance generates ongoing informal orders that govern cities—and promotes some level of violence and sets the stage for outbreaks of disorder. These disorder events cause governance functions to temporarily collapse. Understanding the origin of persistent patterns of hybrid governance, the implication of these patterns for governance, and why they change is critical for comprehending both the fragility and resilience of urban areas in the Global South.

ORIGIN OF PATTERNS OF HYBRID GOVERNANCE Patterns of hybrid governance are highly dependent on two critical factors: the local history of violence and the nature of contemporary illicit markets in that city. Every country and every city has its own particular history of political violence and popular inclusion, the process by which different social classes and groups are brought into the local political systems as voters, beneficiaries, and representatives (Collier and Collier 1991). The experiences of both internal and external conflict are critical factors in laying the groundwork for these systems of hybrid governance (Tilly 1985; Centeno 2002). The complex and often violent ways that the population becomes connected into the political

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system generate dynamics that promote different experiences of both insurgent violence and organized crime. Of particular interest in understanding urban violence, fragility, and resilience is how poor and working-class populations are integrated or not integrated into the political system. In some cases, this integration occurs through state institutions reaching out to the population and building policies through which health care, housing, and basic income support is distributed to the population. However, this process varies across the globe. In other cases, governments do a less effective job of including these populations. Without effective programmatic policies, cities develop haphazard and ersatz policies of inclusion that offer populations a partial means of assistance in some areas. For example, a government may not regularize land title but may, instead, simply allow occupiers to remain on land as a way of dealing with a housing crisis. In other cases, political parties or politicians may play an important role in extending resources to populations and bringing them into the political system. Finally, in another set of cases, conflict dynamics may be important in bringing a population into a political system. Here, insurgent groups, paramilitaries, and security forces seeking to control urban space play important roles by giving the population access to the political system. These different dynamics provide criminals and other armed structures with varied opportunities to exert power over urban space and develop hybrid governance relationships with state officials. The less complete the institutionalization and the greater the degree of popular exclusion of urban services, the more likely it is that armed groups will play roles in providing services. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, however, will define the roles that armed groups play in these processes and, as a result, the nature of fragility and resilience in urban spaces. The role armed groups play in popular inclusion and the nature of local illicit economies define the impact these armed groups have on urban life. The size of the local illicit economy and how those economies are governed drives hybrid governance structures and their concomitant forms of pernicious resilience. Illicit economies dominated by trade in forbidden or illegal goods produce highly focused armed groups that face challenges interacting with state officials and that can lead to explosions of violence. Alternately, illicit economies resulting from the management of extortion markets tend to generate stronger ties to state officials (Bailey 2014). Although this can lead to moments of violence, these systems tend to operate in such a way that defers violence for extended periods. Finally, the illicit structures also affect the nature of local criminal markets by shifting relationships among armed groups. In some cases, prison gangs may drive these dynamics, while in other cases there may be some sort of broader extortion racket, such as a city-level mafia that coordinates among gangs.

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These factors generate different types of armed dynamics and, hence, varied forms of pernicious resilience and associated fragilities. Armed actors can generate highly resilient and relatively low violence systems for extended periods. Yet, when the systems break down more frequently, greater fragility results.

WHY FRAGILITY EMERGES FROM PERNICIOUS RESILIENCE Given the existence of persistent patterns of hybrid governance in many cities, why does violence erupt in these systems? On one level, it is important to recognize that all systems contain some degree of violence and that many of the cases we are discussing involve places where violence may be elevated on a persistent basis. At the same time, there is evidence from around the region that at certain moments all systems of urban governance yield moments of violence that disrupt local life, attract wider attention, and cause observers to label these systems as fragile. Research that I have conducted, outlined in the subsequent paragraphs, points to five factors that generate outbreaks of conflict. The first driver of conflict is the breakdown of settlements among organized crime groups themselves. While in most places these groups will seek to establish some basic consensus that can endure for years or decades, occasional moments emerge when such arrangements unwind. One immediate cause of these types of activities is some sort of generational change. Roberto Saviano has written about this in the Neapolitan context (Saviano 2008). This occurred in Medellín when the Uribe government chose to extradite Diego “Don Berna” Murillo Bejarano to the United States. As a result, new gangsters were able to move to the fore in Medellín’s Oficina de Envigado, a protection racket managing illicit agreements among organized crime groups in that city (Serrano 2010). A variety of new gangsters wanted to take over control of illegal activities resulting in an extended period of conflict that was eventually resolved by the emergence of a new pact among armed groups in the city that contributed to violence reductions in the years after 2010 (Semana 2011). A second driver is a change in the nature of criminal activity. When the economics of crime change in a particular city, it questions the underlying nature of the local criminal settlement similar to the way changes in economics can contribute to revolutionary activity (Skocpol 1979). The process of one economic model failing and a new one rising that changes the dynamics of organized crime, this process produces dislocations that can result in violence as gangs compete with one another for power in the new market and use those resources to build alliances with state officials. Jamaica in the 1990s and 2000s offers an example of this. Over the course of the 1990s, Jamaica’s participation in the international drug trade declined as a result of improved maritime interdiction and the rising role of Mexican

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drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) (United Nations 2011). As a result, Jamaica’s gangs shifted a substantial portion of their criminal activities away from international drug trafficking to local extortion rackets. This shift had the contradictory effect of increasing murder rates while, at the same time, rendering portions of the city more secure. Thus, across the 1990s through 2010, Jamaica encountered progressively growing homicide rates associated with the fragmentation of gangs that had earlier dealt in narcotics as they moved their energies into extortion. Smaller groups engaged in extortion enterprises leading to increasingly micro-level turf conflicts and the decline of the extortion process and extortion-related murders. At the same time, agreements among gangs eventually led to at least working security arrangements in certain portions of the city. Thus, the core downtown business and government district area where several powerful gangs were involved in state-sanctioned contracts rackets became a relatively safe place to visit during business hours. This effort was so successful that then mayor and now MP and Minister of Local Government, Desmond McKenzie, praised the efforts of one gang leader in a meeting with officials at the United States embassy (The Guardian 2010). A third driver, which often may emanate from the second, is a change in gang structures themselves. Angélica Durán-Martínez has shown that gangs that outsource their violent activities tend to engage in higher levels of violence as a result of their lack of control over the groups that undertake conflict activities (Durán-Martínez 2018). The emergence of gang structures that outsource violence dramatically increases instability in a particular urban context. Systems where such gangs persistently exist experience more conflict and more violent conflict as armed groups seek to constantly rearrange local settlements. A fourth driver of eruptions of urban violence is the changing relationships between armed actors and the state. Assuming similar levels of criminality, systems with high levels of state-armed actors’ collusion tend to be less violent than ones with less collusion (Durán-Martínez 2018). States, however, are complex and contain multiple competing sectors, some of which may collaborate with criminal groups and some of which may not. Even under conditions of substantial collusion, this can lead to policies that undermine criminal interests. In 2009 and 2010, the government in Rio de Janeiro advanced the implementation of the Unidades de Policia Pacificadora (UPP) plan. This plan resulted in a week of bombings and other disorder around the city during November 2010 as the government progressively encroached on a group of favelas at the center of one gang faction’s operations. Eventually, the military restored order and established control over this set of neighborhoods, which generated a new settlement that lasted for several years but which has frayed significantly since in recent years.

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A final driver, connected to the preceding one, is external intervention in the local state–armed actor settlement. Under a host of conditions, a foreign power might intervene in a local settlement and generate violence. This was the case in Kingston when the United States, under the terms of a treaty, demanded the extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke. While the Golding government, which was in many ways close with Coke, sought to avoid arresting Coke, eventually treaty obligations forced the prime minister’s hand. This led to an intervention by security forces and the murder of 72 Jamaicans who were not involved in criminal activity. Afterwards, the government established a new settlement by demanding that major gang leaders turn themselves in to the police. While these leaders were in detention, the government negotiated a reduction in conflict with them that resulted in a significant lessening in homicides throughout 2010 and 2011. This new settlement endured until the end of the Jamaica Labour Party government in December 2011. When the opposition took office, there was a dramatic increase in homicide rates.

FRAGILITY AND RESILIENCE All of the cases discussed above reflect conditions under which violence is expressed as a result of the breakdown of pre-existing urban security settlements. These cases, however, eventually rearranged themselves in new patterns of pernicious resilience. Therefore, while these cases reflect a great deal of fragility, they also reflect substantial persistence. These conditions continue because they work for the power holders in these cities. These arrangements help to control—as well as perpetuate—the deleterious effects of the system, all the while providing working governance through hybrid governance structures. The general result is that certain cities follow their own patterns of hybrid governance with armed actors organized in particular ways due to the nature of illicit trade in the city and their specific (or unique) histories and contacts with the state. These embedded conditions reproduce these conditions over time. These arrangements are critical in moving forward with improvements at the neighborhood level and controlling conflict in high-crime environments. Ongoing agreements between armed actors and the state open up space for the government to undertake improvements. In addition, as Claire Metelits has noted, more secure armed actors tend to invest in improvements and building local legitimacy (Metelits 2010). Indeed, my own research has shown that powerful armed groups often divert resources earned in illicit markets into making improvements and social services (Arias 2017). Well-organized armed groups even have success in generating state investment in their communities. The effect of all this is to create a type of pernicious resilience that is abetted not just by state forces but also by the development agencies and external

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non-profits that seek to address some of the most serious public problems of fragility without dealing with the complex reciprocal conditions that tend to generate these types of urban dynamics. As Thomas Carothers has eloquently observed, efforts to promote the rule of law often fail because while they promote investment in programs pertinent to the interests of external actors, local actors who benefit from persistent disorder will tend to spend the funds in such a way that these programs have relatively little effect (Carothers 2009). In the context of urban hybrid governance, external investment and even government programs often have a tendency to reinforce the power of armed groups that benefit from these ongoing settlements.

CONCLUSION The concept of urban fragility is limiting. It draws the attention of the observer away from various factors critical to understanding governance processes in urban environments. These include broad generalizations about urban conditions, at the expense of understanding underlying broad dynamics at the neighborhood level as well as why these systems of pernicious resilience often persist and function to support a certain type of governance broadly across these cities. In the end, the fragile cities paradigm offers an image of urban order that focuses on how particular policy interventions can strengthen governance in a city without asking why such seemingly pernicious conditions exist. Without addressing hybrid governance, the incentives for hybrid governance, and how hybrid governance produces governance outcomes, improvements to underlying conditions are likely to take place only at the margins. Moreover, understanding fragility involves perceiving what the real sources and moments of disorder are in these systems and the sources of this disorder.

REFERENCES Arias, Enrique Desmond. 2006. Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Arias, Enrique Desmond. 2017. Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Cambridge University Press. Arias, Enrique Desmond and Corinne Davis Rodrigues. 2006. “The Myth of Personal Security: A Discursive Model of Local level Legitimation in Rio’s Favelas.” Latin American Politics and Society, 48 (4): 53–81. Bailey, John. 2014. The Politics of Crime in Mexico: Democratic Governance in a Security Trap. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press. Carothers, Thomas. 2009. “Rule of Law Temptations.” Foreign Affairs, Winter/Spring: 49–61. Centeno, Miguel Angel. 2002. Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

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Collier, Ruth Berins and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cruz, José Miguel and Angelíca Durán-Martínez. 2016. “Hiding Violence to Deal with the State: Criminal Pacts in El Salvador and Medellín.” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59 (8): 197–210. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Downdey, Luke. 2003. Children of the Drug Trade: A Case Study of Children in Organised Armed Violence in Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras. Durán-Martínez, Angelíca. 2018. The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops, and Politicians in Colombia and Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press. Grillo, Ioan. 2016. Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America. New York: Bloomsbury. Kalyvas, Stathis. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kilcullen, David. 2013. Out of the Mountains: The Coming of Age of the Urban Guerilla. New York: Oxford University Press. Mampilly, Zachariah. 2011. Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Metelits, Claire. 2010. Inside Insurgency: Violence, Civilians, and Revolutionary Group Behavior. New York: New York University Press. Muggah, Robert J. 2016. “How Fragile are Our Cities?” World Economic Forum, February 9. https://​www​.weforum​.org/​agenda/​2016/​02/​how​-fragile​-are​-our​-cities [accessed November 4, 2016]. Norton, Richard J. 2003. “Feral Cities.” Naval War College Review, 56 (4): 98–106. Saviano, Roberto. 2008. Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples Organized Crime System. New York: Picador. Semana. 2011. “La Otra Paz que Vive Medellín.” Semana, November 30. http://​ www​.semana​.com/​nacion/​articulo/​pacto​-de​-paz​-en​-medellin/​366521​-3 [accessed October 27, 2014]. Serrano, Alfredo. 2010. La Multinacional del Crimen: La Tenebrosa Oficina de Envigado. Bogota: Random House Mondadora. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. New York: Cambridge University Press. Staniland, Paul. 2012. “States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders.” Perspectives on Politics, 10 (2): 235–64. The Guardian. 2010. “US embassy cables: the dangers in extraditing Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke from Jamaica.” The Guardian, December 22. http://​www​.guardian​ .co​.uk/​world/​us​-embassy​-cables​-documents/​223424 [accessed November 21, 2011]. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In, 169–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations [Office on Drugs and Crime]. 2011. World Drug Report 2011. New York: United Nations.

PART II

Dimensions of urban vulnerability and resilience in the Global South

7. Feral cities and the normative dimension of violence: Caracas and the Latin American city Roberto Briceño-León INTRODUCTION In Caracas, formal urbanization expanded on the plain regions of the valley, whereas informal urbanization—called barrios—emerged on the high mountains or along the rivulets that come down from the mountains. The metropolitan areas of Caracas, which are home to more than three million inhabitants, have a history and trajectory of violence. Caracas once was a secure, prosperous city. Some publicists called it “heaven on earth”—a place of admiration and the destination of immigrants who arrived from Colombia, fleeing from violence, repressive dictatorships, and from the southern cone countries (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). In the late 1980s, after a great boom, the oil growth and social peace began to crack. Homicide rates that had hovered around 20 per 100,000 population remained high. Richard Norton’s taxonomy that summarizes what he calls the health of cities sheds insight into the situation in Caracas. Norton constructs the taxonomy from four dimensions of urban life: government, economy, services, and security, and uses them to present three types of cities to which he assigns traffic light colors: green cities are healthy, yellow cities are marginal, and red cities are decaying (Norton 2003, p. 101). At the end of the 1980s, Caracas was a healthy green city. Thirty years later, Caracas had transitioned from green to red and has one of the highest homicide rates in the world (UNODC 2019). Despite strict government censorship about the criminality data, the rates are estimated at between 122 and 155 homicides per 100,000 people. The victimization survey conducted by the national government in 2010 showed for the metropolitan area a rate of 232 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2010).

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Understanding what happened in Caracas helps to comprehend vulnerabilities, violence, and quality of life issues in all cities (Nussbaum and Sen 1993; Caldeira 2000; Del Olmo 2000; Briceño-León 2005; Pedrazzini 2005; Guerrero 2009; Carrión 2011; Sassen 2011; World Bank 2011; de Boer 2015). What happened in Caracas can help us overcome the optimism and pessimism dilemma about urbanization and move forward with pragmatic measures that are theoretically substantiated to reach secure and inclusive cities. This chapter suggests that the growth of violence in Caracas is caused by political and social confrontations between the population, and the destruction of the social norms that ruled urban life, without a substitution for new rules.

LATIN AMERICAN CITIES AND THE ORILLAS Latin American cities emerged with a foundational will and with strict rules of organization and urban structure (Bagu 1992; Quijano 1997). The Felipe II King of Spain ordinances set out the details of the cities’ organization: a checkerboard shape with 100m blocks and a street orientation related to the solar transit to share light and shade. The town square, located in the city’s center, was surrounded by the church, the head office of the city government, and the houses of the nobility and the “advanced.” The city grew by the addition of new blocks that replicated this pattern. This form of growth placed the powerful in the middle and the artisans and new inhabitants on the orillas (the city’s edges). As houses improved and more distant houses appeared far from the town square and its power symbols, the orillas integrated into the city. The orillas of the Latin American city represented a place of urban expansion and social exclusion. Customs and manners that were typical of the city were called urbanity (urbanidad). Residents of the orillas did not have the fine manners associated with urbanity or access to formal education; less than 10 percent of the population was literate. Urban life education was one of sensibility, according to Norbert Elias (1987), but the orilleros lacked such “rules” of social relations. Hence, orillero described the origins in an urban space of the city, and branded a social type of person as uneducated and having harsh manners with little attachment to the rules.1

THE FAST URBANIZATION OF LATIN AMERICA AND THE PARALLEL CITY This process of gradual growth of the city’s edges changed with the increase of the urban population in the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, about 10 percent of the population of Latin America lived in cities; over the first half of the century, that percentage had risen to 43 percent of the total population; by the end of the century, 80 percent of the population was urban

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(CELADE—División de Población 2004). In half a century, the population grew four-and-a-half times, and 230 million new people joined the cities of Latin America. This represented a major transformation of traditional urban structure that changed the urban landscape. More people required that new land be incorporated into the city. Shantytowns—the favelas—emerged. Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the population lived in these areas of informal urbanization; social and political literature called them either marginal (Vekemans 1969) or “relative population surplus” with a Marxist approach (Nun 1969). Integration into the city meant challenges that extended beyond physical integration. The new inhabitants required land, houses and streets, and water and electricity. When the city could not provide these necessities, the residents acquired them without asking permission or abiding by urban or property laws. They erected their own informal and illegal city beside the formal, legal city (Abramo 2003; Calderón 2005). The normative and co-existing urban forms created two parallel modes that regulated the city: laws that are good to the formal city but do not address the needs of the informal city.

FIVE AREAS OF URBAN STRUCTURE Urban growth and regulatory duality created a new structure for Latin American cities. These areas differ along physical, social, and normative dimensions. These zones may vary in their specific expression from one city to another but perceiving them as an ideal type is useful for understanding urban dynamics. It is a development and adaptation of the analysis of the internal organization of the city carried out by the concentric theories of Ernest Burgess (Burgess and Lucke 1953) and Jane Jacobs (1973) for American cities and Oscar Yujnovsky (1971) and Oscar Camacho (2016) for Latin American ones. Despite some differences, this urban structure is repeated in most of the cities in Latin America. Each of these areas represents society; as claimed by Lefebvre (1974), the city is society expressed in the territory. The Traditional Town This area has been built over time, using various mechanisms of building production. It has a varied area, as the houses of the colonial city remain, with adjoining houses and courtyards, next to buildings of varying heights. The town has many functions: integrating housing activities, trading, producing, and providing public and private services. Its social composition is heterogeneous since employees and owners co-exist and can range from the lower-middle-class sectors to upper middle class; however, social extremes do not interact (Briceño-León 1986).

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Formal Urbanization Areas of Private Production With the growth of the city emerged private developers who expanded the city to the outskirts based upon the pattern of the garden city or American suburbs. The elite, a name given by Peter Amato (Amato 1970), sought to escape the traditional town for better environmental conditions and the establishment of a distinct pattern of housing and urbanization, which placed the yard around, not inside, the house. This change forced the creation of an urban normative that adapted to these designs. With time and an increased demand for housing, these areas shifted toward multi-family buildings, with the consequent mobilization of the elite to more remote areas, which relied on the existence of roads and the private car, or even helicopters, as is the case in São Paulo. In these sectors, the middle and upper classes of the city owned the houses and land. Formal Urbanization Areas of Public Production The high demand for housing for low-income sectors led to national or local government policies of mass housing production. The programs were of different sizes, depending on the government resources available, and had very different impacts in cities (Rodriguez and Sugranyes 2006). In some cases, they were built in the middle of the city, on land that was expropriated due to the eviction of the former inhabitants; in other cases, they were built on the outskirts of the city, where it was possible to access large plots of land. State intervention in the production of urban areas concentrated more on housing supply than in the construction of urban life and integration into the city. Because the state built the houses, many areas became isolated ghettos. The ownership of the land or housing was heterogeneous, because the transfer of property from the state to the inhabitants varied, depending upon the countries and governments in power. Consolidated Areas of Informal Urbanization Favelas were spaces spontaneously built by the population that invaded public or private land and urbanized to its liking. This urbanization process usually happened without planning or design constraints, but it did have the technological ability to adapt to the terrain and to agreements or conflicts occurring in the process of occupation and densification (Bolívar 2011; 2016). Latin America has a century of informal housing (Zaluar and Alvito 1998), which began as an extension of rural housing and which now constitutes urban communities of high density and height (Bolivar et al. 1994; Ziccardi 2008). In the early 1980s, slum houses of Caracas had one floor and were built of zinc and cardboard or

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wood; today, buildings of four to six floors replace these “urban huts.” They are communities consolidated in their physical structure and social relation. Non-Consolidated Areas of Informal Urbanization Many areas have not been consolidated due to financial or physical difficulties that have hindered access to family or state resources. In some areas, the process of creating new areas of informal urbanization has been an ongoing process as new inhabitants arrive or housing requirements evolve (Cravino 2006). These places also lack social relations, rules, and the power or leadership of any group (Rosas et al. 2014). The form of social integration is different because, unlike the consolidated areas, inhabitants do not come from rural areas or small towns but were born and raised in the big cities.

THE EMERGENCE OF FERAL CARACAS Caracas became one of the most violent cities in the world due to a breakdown of the social life governed by norms in Caracas and Venezuela. Although this broad dimension implies many factors, the central process is that of an induced anomic process in the city and country. This process is a consequence of public policy that promotes the loss of institutions, of the rules that regulate co-existence, of the rights and duties of citizens, of the way to solve conflicts, and of the way to sanction those who do not comply with social agreements. According to Durkheim (1978; 1999), anomie is the absence of moral and normative orientations and, more recently, as the non-existence of the rule of law. Anomie does not refer to a perennial vacuum, but rather to a social life in which the capricious will of force and weapons, whether of criminal groups or of the government itself, replaces social norms. Anomie has several phases. It begins with destruction of the moral foundations for both formal laws and informal social norms. Then, law enforcement disappears as a generalized practice. Consequently, criminal impunity expands in a generalized manner—both for the police due to their limited capacity to arrest thieves and for those who commit homicides. The fourth phase of anomie applies to the laws that emanate from the will of power, creating or shifting laws or norms without any control, regulation, or invocation of legitimacy. Social lives governed by norms disappear (Briceño-León 2017), and the only possible social orientation in this phase is to try to guess the changing will of the individual in power.

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HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT In February 1989, a few weeks after Carlos Andrés Pérez took office for the second time as President of the Republic, the government authorized an increase in the price of gasoline. What began as a protest by drivers and residents of a dormitory town near Caracas later turned into three days of looting that led to confrontations, some lethal, between store owners and looters (Table 7.1). Clashes over loot between professional criminals and common citizens then erupted, followed by strong military repression accompanied by a curfew to impose order in the cities. In those years, the revolt and subsequent repression led to the death of several thousand people—at least 534 dead in one week (Briceño-León 1990) and many deaths that were not registered due to the haste of the health and political emergency. Even so, 534 violent deaths in one week in one city was a staggering number, since the previous year had registered just over 1,700 homicides in the entire national territory. In that week, looters and the military ignored the rules of respect for property and respect for life; the use of force was imposed as a means of action. The homicide rate, which for several decades had been around eight deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, increased to 13 victims. It was the first major institutional break in the country. Three years later, in February 1992, Caracas awoke to a battle between soldiers loyal to the government and those participating in a coup d’état. After 40 years of democratic exercise and civilian governments, this attempt of a military coup d’état to overthrow a government was unimaginable for the population. The coup failed and its promoter was imprisoned, but Hugo Chávez emerged as a new political leader. Nine months later, in November 1992, the scene was repeated, but this time Caracas was not only the site of fighting on the ground but also from the air, as the military planes of the coup perpetrators bombed a military base located in the middle of the city. President Pérez managed to overcome both military attempts to overthrow him, but that year political institutionalism broke. These three events, the 1989 looting and the 1992 coup attempts, provoked a deterioration in the political climate that led to the removal of President Pérez and the appointment of a temporary president by Congress, who appointed historian Ramon J. Velazquez to complete the constitutional term and lead the country to new elections. These circumstances led to an increase in violence and homicides in the years following the coups d’état, with the homicide rate reaching 20 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. At the end of 1993, the country elected Rafael Caldera, the founding leader of one of the country’s two traditional parties, as president for the second time. Caldera’s government achieved institutional stabilization, tried to create

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Table 7.1

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Chronology of key events affecting Venezuela’s institutional framework

Year

Event

1989

Looting in Caracas and other cities of the country Curfew and militarization

1992

Two failed coup attempts in February and November

1993

Impeachment of President Pérez by the Congress

1998

Election of Hugo Chávez as president Collapse of traditional political parties

1999

Change in the Constitution and creation of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

2002

Large demonstrations and attempted coup d’état

2003

National oil strike and dismissal of 18,000 oil industry workers

2007

Failed attempt at Constitutional Reform for the indefinite re-election of the president and reduction of property rights Announcement of socialism as a goal

2009

Approval of Constitutional Reform for the indefinite re-election of the President of the Republic

2013

Announcement of the death of Hugo Chávez and presidential succession outside constitutional norms

2015

Triumph of the opposition in the National Assembly obtaining a qualified majority

2016

Declaration of contempt of the National Assembly by the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) The Executive Branch does not comply with the Legislative Branch

2016

Presidential Decree of State of Emergency attributing special powers to himself

2017

Unconstitutional creation of a National Constituent Assembly (ANC) to draft a reform project, the ANC declaring itself plenipotentiary to change or make laws

2017

Rulings of the TSJ by which it assigns itself the functions and powers of the legislative branch Removal by the ANC of the Attorney General who denounced the unconstitutionality of the rulings of the TSJ Appointment of a new Prosecutor by the ANC

2020

Alteration by the ANC of the provisions of the Constitution to elect the representatives: it increases the total number and eliminates the election in first degree for the indigenous populations

2020

After four years of the State of Exception, a law is decreed allowing the government to sign pacts and make sales or purchases in secret and the president of the republic to “un-enforce” any law in force

an environment of reconciliation by pardoning the leaders of the 1992 coup d’état, and even incorporated some of them into his administration. This institutional stability from 1994 to 1998 resulted in a stabilization of the homicide rate, which remained at around 20 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the country and 90 per 100,000 inhabitants in Caracas.

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THE DESTRUCTION OF THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK The military leader of the failed 1992 coup attempt, Hugo Chávez, won the 1998 election. Although his presidency was framed around respect for the country’s institutions, his actions were oriented toward destroying the existing institutions that allowed him to achieve power. Chávez wanted a revolution, not a transitory democratic government, and he thus proceeded to alter the rules of the game, creating a climate of confrontation, polarization, and the dissolution of social norms. Caracas became divided: one part controlled by the government that could not be entered by government opponents and one led by opposing political parties allowed to hold rallies or marches in other sections of the city. However, without any prior legal process and to the surprise of his own allies, the president announced on television that he would not allow the opening of a large shopping mall or the arrival of consumer capitalism in that part of the city. The arbitrariness of political power destroyed the urban norm that permits free transit and free commerce throughout the city. Something similar happened with civil society organizations. In the low- and middle-income areas of the city, local organizations called Juntas de Vecinos (Neighborhood Councils) that provided local leadership and offered mediation in internal conflicts and between the neighborhood and the public authorities began to be ignored and excluded by the national government. The government created a parallel organization that granted recognition and economic resources to the party and government supporters or officials. They were first called “Bolivarian Circles,” but the name changed several times, to Communal Councils, Battle Units, and CLAP; despite different names, they always sought to destroy the previous social pacts and end autonomous organizations to form other organizations that functioned as instruments of the government. The fragmentation of Caracas created territories that escaped the law and the control of the police. In several areas of Caracas where paramilitary groups called colectivos operate, police forces are prohibited from entering; if they do, they are attacked with guns and grenades. These groups function as the “state” by imposing rules and punishment, making public demonstrations with their rifles and machine guns, and establishing a system of surveillance cameras, radios, and local television financed by the national government. In one of these zones in Caracas, a statue was built to the founder of the Colombian guerrilla group FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia); parliamentarians from the government party attended the inauguration ceremony. Subsequently, the government adopted a policy of territorial agreements with criminal gangs, which it called “Peace Zones,” guaranteeing local criminal

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gangs that security forces would not enter these urban territories in exchange for their reducing violence and homicides. As a result, these urban spaces became protected sanctuaries for criminal gangs. Ruling party groups invaded unoccupied housing and office buildings without any response from the authorities. In some cases, the invasions were linked to expropriation measures announced by the government, before or after the occupation, but most of them did not materialize either in legal action or in payment to the owners. The national government has continuously disrupted urban housing rental, altering the basic rules of that market. First, it has “frozen” rental rates for almost two decades, making it impossible for landlords to increase the nominal amount of rent to be paid; in a country whose inflation has ranged between 30 percent and 3,000 percent per year, the amounts of rent became ridiculous. The government then enacted a rental law whereby even if the tenant does not pay rent for years, it is not possible to evict him until he finds another place or the government provides him with housing. The consequence of this is that the formal rental market has been destroyed and an informal market has expanded, regulated by social ties or the use of force, not public laws. After spending more than a decade with little interest in building social housing, the national government launched a major citywide housing construction operation in 2012 as the presidential election approached. This action was for election purposes, since the offer of free housing could attract many voters and offered employment to people required by this industry. Hundreds of buildings to be built on occupied land without a legal expropriation process and without complying with urban regulations on setbacks from the street or parking lots for vehicles, which are required for other buildings in the city, were contracted to Russian, Belarusian, Chinese, and Turkish companies. This led to a spatial division and an organizational and normative duality, which resulted in Caracas becoming a feral city.

THE MORAL DESTRUCTION OF THE POLICE From the beginning of his administration, Hugo Chávez dedicated himself to the moral and practical destruction of the police forces. The country had been trying to control many problems of police abuse with the application of a new Criminal Procedural Code that came into effect in the first year of Chávez’s mandate. However, it became clear that his attacks on the police forces were not aimed at improving their performance and protecting the population, but rather at increasing his political control and reducing the threats he could find in these armed groups. At the beginning of the 2000s, the official television station broadcast an advertisement announcing the presentation of a short promotional film. Some

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scenes were to focus on the Caracas police being charged with crimes of abuse and murder perpetrated against the poorest population segments. The propaganda announcing the screening of the film continued for several months, but it was never released. In 2002, during a massive demonstration against government policies estimated at more than one million participants, clashes between armed groups of the ruling party and city police officers protecting the demonstrators took place. Once the situation ended and an investigation into the events was initiated, the police officers were sentenced to prison for up to 20 years, while the civilians who shot at them were not only acquitted, but were honored with a monument built by the national government. They were later declared “national heroes.” In the following years, the national government stripped several local police forces of their equipment and high-powered weapons. The Caracas Metropolitan Police was disarmed and then eliminated when the government’s candidate for mayor of the city was certain to lose his re-election. The new president of the republic, designated by Chávez as his successor shortly before his death, was confronted with the growing problem of increasing violence and the murder of policemen. Policies continued to be erratic until 2015 when, in the midst of an electoral campaign for the election of deputies to the National Assembly, an extensive military and police operation called Operation Liberation of the People (OLP) was launched. This was the same acronym used for the Middle Eastern political movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization. The operation consisted of the military and police seizure of large urban areas, either shantytowns or state-built housing. At night and without a warrant, the police or military entered and searched houses, detained men, and confronted alleged criminals. The police action publicized the number of criminals who had been killed in the operations to produce a favorable electoral impact for the government that was dedicated to freeing the people from crime. However, the government effort failed as the opposition overwhelmingly won the elections and obtained a qualified majority of two-thirds of the parliament. From that moment on, the security policy changed; it became common practice to assassinate alleged criminals in extrajudicial actions by the police. In the official language, those killed by police actions died for having “resisted authority.” In 2017, 5,535 people were killed for “resisting authority”; in 2018, the number was 7,523; it lowered to 5,286 in 2019, and decreased even more in 2020 to 4,231, perhaps due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, it is not surprising that in 2020, deaths caused by police violence were four times higher than deaths caused by COVID-19 (Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia 2020). It seems that these measures and policies lack coherence, especially if the objective is to achieve a better urban life or greater security for citizens.

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However, if the objective is political control and permanence in power in an authoritarian manner, then there is coherence, since institutions were destroyed and the population divided. That is why Caracas became a feral city dominated by the violence of criminal and/or government gangs.

BREAKDOWN OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT IN THE CITY What is common to the above examples is the collapse of the normative and legal apparatus of society—the destruction, both by action and omission, of societal game rules. The breaking of the social pact can occur in societies for different reasons: external wars, internal subversive groups, or natural disasters that devastate a territory. The Venezuelan case is unique because it occurred by the actions of a democratically elected government that set out to destroy the social pact and democracy to perpetuate a “revolution.” The purpose of destroying the social fabric of the past was to create a wasteland on which they could build the new republic and the “new man” (Briceño-León 2016). Since 1999, the government’s discourse has promised a better society of happiness and welfare where all citizens would have greater equality before the law, since there would no longer be any discrimination based on social class, race, or ethnicity. The society and city would consist of citizens who respected each other and joined together to create a harmonious co-existence with neighbors. Citizens would respect the law because it represented the will of the people, not the wishes of the dominant elite that exploited others for its own benefit. In 2015, we researched how the country’s population interpreted the achievement of these four social goals—to discover whether people consider that the promised and desired improvements had taken place. The study consisted of a national survey of 3,500 respondents distributed in seven sample domains corresponding to seven regions of the country. A stratified sample of households was selected in three stages. The instrument consisted of closed-ended questions with multiple choice or Likert scales. It was administered face-to-face to those over 17 years of age in the selected households. A similar number of men and women were interviewed, with an average age of 39 years. Two percent of those interviewed were illiterate, 16 percent had a basic education (elementary), 46 percent had a high school education, and the rest had some college education. Sixty-five percent said they were Catholics, 14 percent were Christians of various denominations, and 10 percent said they did not believe in or belong to any religion. Fifty-eight percent were paid workers; of these, 87 percent of them had incomes of less than three minimum monthly salaries (LACSO 2015).

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The results, which can be seen in Table 7.2, were overwhelming. When comparing the situation at the time of the interview with a time horizon of ten years earlier, between 76.5 percent and 82.8 percent of those interviewed disagreed with the idea that Venezuelan society had improved in any of the four dimensions studied. These four-fifths of the population did not feel more equal before the law, did not perceive a more harmonious co-existence, and did not believe that citizens had more respect for each other and the law. When reviewing the results by urban structure zone, the highest degree of disagreement is found in the non-consolidated informal urbanization zone, that is, in the poorest sector of the cities where the government’s policy was supposedly directed during the previous 15 years. Moreover, urban areas that were built during invasions and usually outside the formal law are the ones that reflect the greatest disagreement (89.1 percent) and the greatest complaint because the law is not respected. The direct impact on citizens of the perception that co-existence is less harmonious, that there is less respect among people, or that the law is less respected, is fear. The city and society have begun to be dominated by it. This fear translates into inhibition; people stop doing some activities or restrict the places or times in which they carry out their work or leisure activities. Withdrawing from urban life and feeling unprotected on visits to the city has turned the streets of Caracas and other cities into lonely places: offices, stores, and places of entertainment close earlier, and public transport stops running after dark for fear of crime directed at both drivers and passengers. Schools on all levels have ended their evening classes, and entertainment venues, restaurants, cinemas, and music venues operate on a restricted schedule. A perverse circle has been produced: fewer people in public spaces causes more fear, which in turn leads to fewer people in those spaces, and, therefore, creates anxiety about becoming a victim. The consequences of fear and inhibition are a process of privatization of security. The middle and upper classes have barricaded and isolated themselves in their neighborhoods; sentry boxes are placed in the streets to restrict vehicle access, and houses are fortified with higher fences and more aggressive electric fences. The fiefdoms of a walled city have been boosted. Meanwhile, state-built housing sectors and consolidated neighborhoods have become anarchic due to the lack of a police presence and their complicity with organized crime. In the absence of the rule of law, criminal gangs substitute for the state and take over law and order in low-income communities (Briceño-León 2016). Although there are some differences in the modes and magnitude of victimization, all sectors of the city suffer from the breakdown of the social pact. However, it is the lower-income sectors that have suffered the most, since the alternative to public security has been privatization with private resources, which the lower-income sectors have not been able to afford. None of the

Notes Source

80 2

80 8

82 8

76 5

Mean

77 7

81 5

81 4

70 1

downtown

Traditional

77 0

78 3

80 5

74 3

built by the state

Social housing

80 7

83 5

83 7

81 6

high-class zones

Middle- and

80 5

79 3

82 9

76 0

informal urbanization

Consolidated areas of

National survey results about Venezuela’s urban structure and institutionalism

Survey results from the national survey of opinions regarding government goals (n = 3,500 respondents). LACSO (2015).

respected more

Today the law is

coexistence

a more harmonious

Today there is

each other more

Today we respect

equal under the law

Today we are more

years ago …

Compared to ten

Table 7.2

89 1

87 8

86 6

79 8

urbanization

areas of informal

Non-consolidated

Pearson

0 0000

0 0000

0 0000

0 0000

Chi-square

Feral cities and the normative dimension of violence 113

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four goals have been achieved in the country; the result is more violence and anomie on devastated terrain: Caracas became feral.

CARACAS GOING FERAL In his description of the health of cities, Norton offers a brief characterization of the features that define the four variables he uses to classify cities as healthy (green), marginal (yellow), and going feral (red): government, economy, services, and security. In red cities, he argues, important parts of the city are not under government control or it only exercises control over negotiated territory. In the city’s economy, only a few local industries or businesses based on illegal trade remain. As for city services, electricity and water are intermittent or nonexistent, and those who have money to pay for them deal privately with the provision of such services. Finally, public security is practically non-existent, and private security services are the ones that can offer protection to individuals (Norton 2003, pp. 101–2). All four of these features are present in Caracas—and, in some cases, reality surpasses the model. In Caracas, the national or local government does not have control over large areas. After the city was fragmented for reasons of political partisanship, several areas of the territory were left in the hands of criminal gangs or politically oriented paramilitary organizations—or armed groups that are a combination of both. In a large mountainous area connecting two of Caracas’ valleys to the south, known as “la Cota 905,” criminal gangs that control the shantytowns prohibit the entry or proximity of police or military forces. Police officers and patrols are not allowed to circulate in the streets surrounding the area; if they do appear, the officers have to be out of uniform and in private vehicles. Without police identification, they will be shot by the vigilantes of the criminal gang. In the west of the city, in an area called “23 de Enero,” where there are tall social housing buildings, armed groups of Marxist and pro-government gangs control commerce, prevent political demonstrations, and regulate the entry or exit of people or vehicles. They act in a more sophisticated way, since they have a closed-circuit television that was financed by the government. At the other end of the city, to the east, is “Petare,” an area that has been described as the largest favela in Latin America, with more than half-a-million inhabitants. The leader of the gang that controls the area decided in 2019 to support the protests of families for the lack of water and food, contrary to what other criminal groups have done. A few months later, the government launched a military operation to subdue the gang; after several days of major armed confrontations, they were unable to control the area or arrest the leader. Caracas’ economy has been destroyed by expropriations, price controls, sales controls (for years it was necessary to have biometric fingerprint identi-

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fication to buy two kg of rice), and the practical disappearance of the national currency as a means of exchange due to hyperinflation of several thousand percent. At the beginning of 2021, the government announced the printing of new bills. The highest denomination was one million bolivars, the equivalent of 0.50 cents of a dollar; with that bill, a person could not even buy a coffee. The reduction of opportunities has led to changes in the modalities of crime in the city. Assaults linked to the use of ATMs or bank robberies have disappeared; the value of the bills that the robbers could obtain was so insignificant that a large truck would have been necessary to carry away anything that could represent worthwhile booty. The city’s economy has shifted to illegal markets: food that cannot be found in stores can be bought on the street at unregulated prices, housing rents are established outside of government regulations and enforced with the threat of force, and business transactions are conducted in U.S. dollars, although their use is legally prohibited. The dollar reigns in the streets, but it is a forbidden word in the media. For more than a decade, public water and electricity services have been rationed in all the cities of the country; Caracas, being the capital and seat of government, has had the least restrictions. The lack of investment in and maintenance of dams and hydroelectric and thermoelectric plants, and failures in distribution channels, have meant a significant reduction in the supply of water and electricity. Cities spend between four and 12 hours a day without electricity and up to weeks without receiving water. In March 2019, two blackouts left Caracas without electricity for five consecutive days; in other cities, this situation has lasted longer. The population’s response to this breakdown of public services has been the privatization of services, both in terms of provision and maintenance. Families and businesses opt to buy private electricity generation plants to make up for the lack of electricity. Offices and middle-class residential complexes have begun to build wells to reach the aquifer and extract groundwater. Others with fewer resources opt to fetch water from the streams that flow down from the mountains that form the city’s valleys. Maintenance is also privatized, and shantytowns or middle-class areas that require repair of the water or electricity distribution network privately hire and pay state workers to do the work and buy the necessary spare parts for them to do the job. Finally, the police have drastically reduced their capacity to offer protection. The national government decided to abandon the municipal or state police forces dedicated to the care of the common people and to strengthen the police forces dedicated to political repression and defense of the government. In 2019, one of the municipal police stations of Caracas, which owns more than 150 patrol cars, had fewer than 10 operational vehicles; the others could not be driven due to a lack of tires or batteries. Because of low salaries—less than 20 dollars per month—police or military officers have resigned, choosing to work in the private security sector. When, in some cases, the government declines

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to accept a resignation, many officers simply leave both their post and the country. Consequently, the business of armoring vehicles and offering bodyguard services has flourished. The government has neither the capacity nor the resources to solve the problems of lack of water, electricity, or security, but it has the means to repress citizen protests. Caracas became feral.

CONCLUSION Caracas demonstrates that changes do not depend on the wealth or poverty of a city, but are the result of the validity of the social pact, of public policies and of the norms that strengthen or weaken co-existence in society (North, Wallis and Weingast 2009). What has happened in Caracas is destruction of the socially normed life—the formal norms derived from laws and the informal ones that are not written but exert their force of containment and regulation of behavior, of the stabilization of expectations. Cities have regulatory arrangements that make the functioning of the different sectors of the urban structure compatible. What is unique is that for several years politicians and urban planners thought of the parallel city as the place of anomie. Our research results suggest that this is not the case. Instead, informal urbanization zones have their complex rules with which they govern their life; when they can, they develop or demand the application of more rules and miss the application of the law, as our 2015 study shows. The problem has been that urban laws were not made with the population’s social and urban singularity in mind, but rather excluded them. What Caracas shows is that it is necessary to strengthen formal and informal regulations in the city and thus strengthen the autonomous exercise of citizenship. In Caracas, the opposite happened in a paradoxical way, because it was promoted by the government, which became the main supporter of the destruction of norms, of anomie. However, this paradox can be comprehended if it is understood that the anomie caused by the government sought to turn a co-existence governed by rules into a personality power that destroyed the autonomy of the citizens (Alarcón, Álvarez and Hidalgo 2016). Normativity ceased to be based on laws, formal or informal, and became the mutant will of the ruler. Norton argues that in an authoritarian government, the chances of the city becoming feral are low, and he is right, because in traditional authoritarianism the laws are applied with rigor and even cruelty (Linz 1978). The singular thing is that authoritarianism in Venezuela and Caracas has been personalistic; the power of the caudillo, which is a figure closer to what political theory qualifies as sultanism (Chehabi and Linz 1998), causes the laws to lose validity and the figure of the sultan to remain. In such circumstances, the explicit normativity disappears, but there is no legal vacuum, since it is quickly filled by the will of the boss, who can make and remake the law at will

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and turn it into a living law. In 2019, an unconstitutional constituent assembly subjugated to the government enacted an “anti-blockade” law in which the president was authorized to “un-enforce” any law of the republic he deemed necessary (article 19). Thus, the institutionalism of a city and society governed by norms disappeared. It is not surprising, then, that according to the Worldwide Government Indicators in 2000, the rule of law index in Venezuela (21.1 points) was higher than that of Colombia (19.5 points), and ten years later, in 2010, it was the opposite: Colombia’s index had increased significantly to reach 45 points, while Venezuela’s had fallen to 1.4 points. For the year 2020, the index prepared by the World Justice Project Rule of Law for 128 countries places Venezuela in 128th place, at the bottom of the list, with an index of 0.27 points, while Colombia is ranked 77th with 0.50 points. Urban well-being is not the result of a city’s wealth or poverty, but of the normative conditions that allow the city to be a place where civilized life is lived, that is, where a social life is governed by rules that allow the autonomy of citizens and permit the different and unequal to exercise and defend their rights in a structured symbolic context that makes the future foreseeable for everyone.2

NOTES 1. Another expression used was that of arrabal (slum), which also related to the edges of the city, the poor, and, by inference, arrabalero was a rough or rude person. 2. The research on which this text is based was carried out with financial support from the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. The opinions expressed in this work do not necessarily reflect those of DFID or IDRC.

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Bolívar, Teolinda, Mildred Guerrero, Iris Rosas, Teresa Ontiveros, and Julio Freitas. 1994. Densificación y Vivienda en los Barrios Caraqueños. Caracas: Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda. Briceño-León, Roberto. 1986. “El Futuro de las Ciudades Venezolanas.” Cuadernos Lagoven. Serie Siglo XXI. Briceño-León, Roberto. 1990. “Contabilidad de la Muerte.” In El día que bajaron los Cerros. Caracas: Ateneo de Caracas. Briceño-León, Roberto. 2005. “Urban Violence and Public Health in Latin America: A Sociological Explanatory Model.” Cadernos de Saúde Pública, 21 (6): 1629–64. Briceño-León, Roberto (ed.) 2016. Ciudades de Vida y Muerte. La Ciudad y el Pacto Social para la Contención de la Violencia. Caracas: Alfa Editoria. Briceño-León, Roberto. 2017. “Qué enseña el fracaso en la reducción de homicidios en Venezuela?” Revista CICOB dÄfers Internacionals, No. 116, pp. 53–76. Burgess, Ernest and Glenn Lucke. 1953. The Family: From Institution to Companionship. New York: American Book Company. Caldeira, Teresa Pires. 2000. Cidade de muros. Crime, segregação e cidadania em São Paulo. São Paulo: Edusp. Calderón, Julio. 2005. La Ciudad Ilegal, Lima del Siglo XX. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Camacho, Oscar Olinto. 2016. “Las Ciudades Venezolanas y la Exclusión Social.” In Roberto Briceño-León (ed.), Ciudades de Vida y Muerte, 39–57. Caracas: Alfa Editorial. Carrión, Fernando. 2011. “Hacia una nueva comprensión de la violencia y la seguridad.” In Alfonso Valenzuela Aguilera (ed.), Ciudades Seguras. Cultura ciudadana, eficacia colectiva y control social del espacio, 17–40. México: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos. CELADE—División de Población. 2004. “Transformaciones Democráticas en América Latina y el Caribe y Consecuencias para las Políticas Públicas.” Panorama Social de América Latina, CEPAL (Cepal). Chehabi, H. E. and J. J. Linz. 1998. Sultanistic Regimes. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cravino, Maria Cristina. 2006. Las Villas de la Ciudad. Mercado e informalidad urbana. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento. de Boer, John. 2015. “Resilience and the Fragile City.” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 17. https://​www​.stabilityjournal​.org/​articles/​10​.5334/​ sta​ fk/​. Del Olmo, Rosa. 2000. “Ciudades duras y violencia urbana.” Nueva Sociedad, 167: 74–86. Durkheim, Émile. 1978. De la division du travail social. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Durkheim, Émile. 1999. Le Suicide. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Elias, Norbert. 1987. El Proceso de la Civilización, Investigaciones Sociogenéticas y Psicogenéticas. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Guerrero, Rodrigo. 2009. “La ciudad y la seguridad: Balance de experiencias locales en seguridad en América Latina. Comparación de las experiencias de Bogotá y Cali.” Municipal Strategies of Crime Prevention, 1–12. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow International Center for Scholars. Instituto Nacional de Estadística. 2010. Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción de Seguridad Ciudadana 2009. Documento Técnico, Vice-Presidencia de la República, Caracas: INE.

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8. Xenophobic violence, displacement, and reintegration: a case study of female migrants in Isipingo, Durban, South Africa Kim Gounder and Brij Maharaj INTRODUCTION Forced migration is linked to exclusion, hostility, and violence, in areas of both displacement and destination. Traditionally, explanations of migration (including forced displacement) have been presented from a male perspective. However, female migration and vulnerability have become a rising global concern (Indra 1999; Harrison 2005; Amelina and Lutz 2018). In the early 1960s and 1970s, the phrase “migrants and their families” specifically referred to male migrants with their immediate family (Boyd and Grieco 2003). This patriarchal bias portrayed the invisibility of females, the issues they faced as migrants, and their exclusion from decision-making (Indra 1999). In contrast, this chapter focuses directly on women and their experiences without a male mediator. In Africa, forced female migration is linked to destitution, repression, political conflict, and violence (Ruyssen and Salomone 2018). One specific focus of the feminization of migration is on the vulnerability and destitution of females, their social deprivation, and their victimization due to xenophobic violence. Xenophobia becomes evident as nationals within a country discriminate against and attempt to marginalize foreigners from social, health, and welfare benefits. In South Africa, female migrants endure insidious forms of xenophobia and gender-based violence, such as rape, battery, ethnic discrimination, and emotional abuse (Sigsworth 2010; Akinola 2017; Memela and Maharaj 2018). The rise of xenophobia is associated with the increasing number of undocumented migrants in South Africa since 1994. This migration resulted from political changes in the country and serious social, economic, and political problems in the subcontinent. South Africans have been accused of being 120

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“Afro-phobic,” as they target foreign African nationals in the country. Xenophobia is attributed to socio-economic inequalities, relative deprivation, apartheid legacy, and the failure of the African National Congress (ANC) government to deliver promised services and facilities for the poor (Neocosmos 2010; Pineteh 2018; Hiropoulos 2020). The government and citizens accused foreigners of taking away the jobs of locals, lowering wages, competing for land and housing, increasing crime, spreading diseases, and intensifying the pressure on health, welfare, and other social services (Maharaj 2009; Desai 2010; Neocosmos 2010). Female migrants were not spared; instead, they were especially vulnerable to xenophobic attacks and subjected to human rights abuses due to their political status (Memela and Maharaj 2018). A very serious outbreak of violence occurred in May 2008; it started in the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg and subsequently spread to major informal settlements in the country for almost two weeks. At least 62 people lost their lives, about 40,000 foreign nationals left the country, and 50,000 were internally displaced and faced challenges in terms of reconstructing their precarious livelihoods and reintegrating into the host societies (Human Rights Watch 2009). From March to April 2015, several xenophobic attacks occurred against foreigners in Durban and surrounding areas, including Isipingo. Migrants were targeted because they were assumed to be benefitting from already stretched public services, such as hospitals, schools, and social grants. This perception is particularly associated with female migrants who were viewed as representing a permanent settling of foreigners as they gave birth and created families (Sigsworth 2010). Female migrants were victimized to “humiliate” the foreign enemy and instill fear in women and their offspring (Lutz 2010). This chapter focuses on the displacement and reintegration of female migrants following the 2015 xenophobic attacks in Isipingo, Durban. Two major concerns were the health and safety conditions in displacement camps and the special challenges encountered by female migrants. This chapter consists of six sections. The first section describes the study area and explains the methodology adopted. This is followed by an overview of the context and background to the study. We analyze factors that influenced the displacement of female migrants from Isipingo in the third section. The fourth section discusses the difficulties (including safety and sanitation) encountered by women in the Isipingo and Chatsworth camps, and we describe reasons for the return to Isipingo in the fifth section. The final section assesses challenges relating to reintegration of women in Isipingo. Following Galtung (1969), we illustrate that female migrants in Isipingo experienced physical as well as structural violence that included displacement, job loss, psychological fear, and trauma.

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LOCATION OF ISIPINGO AND CHATSWORTH Isipingo is located along the coast of the Indian Ocean, approximately 19 kilometers south of Durban’s Central Business District (CBD). Designated as an Indian group area under apartheid, Isipingo is a heterogeneous conglomeration of suburbs, including Isipingo Beach, Isipingo Hills, Isipingo Rail, Lotus Park, Malukazi, and Orient Park (Figure 8.1). Known for its busy industrial zones, the Isipingo industrial hub provides substantial informal and formal job opportunities attracting several female migrants. Isipingo is also home to many foreign-owned businesses and small, medium, and micro-enterprises that provide migrants with low-income and menial employment opportunities. Vulnerable migrants were forced to accept lower wage rates than salaries of the South African employees to survive. This created the impression that foreigners were responsible for the economic woes of locals (Crush et al. 2017). Government amenities such as clinics, education facilities, and basic services were also available in Isipingo. However, the increasing population exceeded the capacity of the available urban services. Locals began to blame foreigners for the lack of basic services. Isipingo became one of the major hotspots for the 2015 xenophobic violence for these reasons.

Source

Kim Gounder and Brij Maharaj.

Figure 8.1

Isipingo and Chatsworth in Durban

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STUDY AREA AND METHODOLOGY This study adopted a qualitative research approach. The research was conducted during the months of June and July 2016. Female migrants from Isipingo between 20 and 50 years of age who were displaced by the 2015 attacks were selected via the chain referral sampling method. This method invited the participants to open their social networks and refer female migrants who could contribute to the study (Creswell and Clark 2008). Thirteen female migrants participated in the study. An in-depth or intensive interview approach was adopted, and a flexible interview guide was prepared (DeMarrais 2004). Structured and unstructured/open questions probed for detailed, deeper information about the displacement of female migrants in Isipingo, their experiences in the camps, and the challenges associated with return and reintegration that these females faced. The interviews were supplemented with reports from the media, government, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Conducting research on undocumented migrants is very sensitive (Bracken-Roche et al. 2017). The study received ethical approval from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The well-being of the participants was always a priority, and they had the right to terminate the voluntary session at any time. As part of the informed consent agreement, the identities of the female interviewees were kept confidential and pseudonyms were used where necessary.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT In March 2015, South Africa experienced yet another series of nationwide xenophobic attacks. Bekker (2015) emphasized that the attacks had a higher magnitude of violence and displacements than the first nationwide attack that occurred in 2008. The forces that propelled the 2015 xenophobic violence were related to the conjecture that foreigners were “stealing” local opportunities and consuming already strained resources (Crush and Ramachandran 2015). During the 2015 violence, locals were involved in a wage strike in Isipingo. Misinformation and rumors insinuated that locals would be replaced at work by foreigners who had accepted lower wages. This rumor sparked outrage among the locals who gathered in groups to attack foreigners. Foreign-owned shops and homes were burnt and looted, and many foreigners sustained injuries. Female migrants emerged as one of the most vulnerable groups in Isipingo. Globally, most internally displaced persons (IDPs) are women and children (Newman et al. 2018; Ruyssen and Salomone 2018). In South Africa, IDPs result from xenophobic violence and forced displacement. During the 2015 xenophobic attacks, foreign women were displaced from their homes and forced to remain in limbo, while the provincial government discussed the

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prospects of creating a safe zone for all displaced persons until the xenophobic violence dissipated. The decision to establish displacement camps in Isipingo, Chatsworth, and Phoenix was announced on April 1, 2015, by the Executive Council of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government (Pillay 2015). The experiences of female migrants at the displacement camps differed from those of male migrants, yet special provisions for the needs of women remained scant.

DISPLACEMENT OF FEMALE MIGRANTS IN ISIPINGO The attacks had commenced on March 31, 2015, after warnings of physical violence. The sudden attacks appeared to be pre-planned as the violence began at night when the migrants least expected it. Two key violent strategies influenced displacement of women in Isipingo. The first was the throwing of items at the women’s houses and scattering of dirt along the streets. Bins and tires were also set alight and thrown at houses (Andrea, interview, June 25, 2016). Most of the women recalled hearing some noises before the violence erupted. They believed that these were tactics to scare them out of their houses. Nala was convinced that a conspiracy had been planned against her and that it was the main reason she was targeted during the xenophobic violence. She explained in an interview on July 3, 2016 that a burning tire was left at her front door. “Because they knew we are from Burundi, so they came to burn our house. They left that tire as a warning.” Some of the foreign women attempted to be proactive by leaving their homes before the violent protesters forced them out. The second strategy was to threaten female migrants at their workplace. For Khanya and Gloria, the news of violence reached their work environment. Khanya had been notified of the violent protests, but she still risked commuting to work until violent protesters entered the factory where she was employed. She recalled being told to leave immediately, but most of the employees resisted, which led to them being forced out: They came to the factory and told us leave before they burn us … one of them (protesters) pulled another lady’s arm so much that her shirt (sleeve) tore. Everyone got scared and started running outside because now they knew the protesters were really going to burn us. (Khanya, interview, July 10, 2016)

Protesters invaded the homes of foreign women, intending to inflict physical harm on them and their children. The angry protesters brandished weapons such as wooden batons, metal rods, and illegal firearms. The weapons were used to physically assault women and children when they attempted to flee

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from the assailants. Displaced women and children sought safety outside local police stations (Bekker 2015). The consequences of these violent strategies were profound. Some of the foreign women came face-to-face with violence, and their homes and belongings were damaged during the protests. Siya was a victim of a traumatic experience; during an interview on July 10, 2016, she recalled waking up at night to the sound of shattering glass. She immediately packed a few possessions, evacuated her home, and joined other migrants on the street for safety until dawn. On April 1, 2015, the Executive Council of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government announced the establishment of three temporary camps as a response to the displacement of migrants and overcrowding at police stations (Pillay 2015). The camps were located south of the Durban CBD in Isipingo and Chatsworth (the focus of this study), and in Phoenix, north of the CBD.

DISPLACEMENT CAMPS: ISIPINGO AND CHATSWORTH The initial aim of the displacement camps was to provide a temporary, safe zone for migrants until the xenophobic violence had subsided. The Isipingo displacement camp was opened on April 2, 2015, in the Isipingo Beach area. A 24-hour security service was provided, and the demarcated area was fenced off with steel barricades to prevent the violent protesters from entering the camps. The Isipingo camp was open for a total of 35 days. However, the female migrants entered the camps on different dates; hence, the number of days they spent there varied. Initially, the camp contained five portable toilets and three large marquee tents. One tent and three toilets were allocated for women and children, and the other tent and two toilets for men. Foam mattresses were provided, which female migrants complained were very uncomfortable (Pillay 2015). As the population at the camp started to increase (peaking at 400), a strain on the resources was evident. The government closed the Isipingo camp on May 6, 2015, to ration limited resources. Government officials had deliberately disconnected the water supply at the Isipingo camp to force migrants to move. The displaced migrant women were forced to relocate to the Chatsworth camp. Most of the migrant women confessed to being unaware that buses were transporting them to another camp. “The Isipingo camp just closed, and I followed the people to the bus. If I knew it was going far, no … I would have never gone,” said Siya. The buses transported the migrant women from Isipingo to the Westcliff camp in Chatsworth (Figure 8.1). The living conditions in both the Isipingo and Chatsworth camps presented new, gender-specific challenges for female migrants (summarized in Table 8.1).

protesters ” Siya said she still felt that living among men was a hazard for women and children in the camp

Andrea However, some women felt unsafe as men lived among

them in the designated camp area (Gloria, interview, July 10,

Note

Food

Health

Viruses were easily spread because of close proximity Thando, interviewed on July 3, 2016, had contracted pink

to experience nausea and eventual vomiting

Yesenia explained in an interview on June 10, 2016 that food was in the form of donations Nala exclaimed that she was “not lucky” as she did not receive many food donations The food supply was inadequate for the population at the Chatsworth camp

Those who had packed food items could prepare meals Sometimes

the camps received private donations Astur stated in an interview

on June 25, 2016 that “there were scraps ” Food was inadequate,

and many of the foreigners were starving Nala said she left the

camp to find a shop to purchase something to eat

was another major problem for the women and children

eye from another infected person in the camp Dehydration

too,” said Irene during an interview on June 25, 2016

unavailability of sanitary napkins and water Stress caused Khanya

that their intimate sanitary needs were compromised

facilities ”

“A child was coughing and the three of us started coughing,

“bathing was not possible ” Many of the women complained

“We had to wait in the lines [queues] to use the bathing and toilet

signs of ill-health Siya and Hani had health issues pertaining to

Chatsworth camp were inadequate Nacala contended that

inadequate Nacala mentioned in an interview on June 25, 2016,

Sinus infections, rashes, and dehydration were the most common

The population was too large and water and sanitation at the

As the population grew, the water and sanitation facilities became

Based on ethnographic data in the Durban displacement camps.

Water and sanitation

was safer Andrea exclaimed that “it was far away from

Isipingo camp: “I know this area and the police are here,” said

2016)

Most of the women felt that being far away from Isipingo

Feelings of safety were expressed by some women within the

Chatsworth

Isipingo

Safety

Challenges in the Isipingo and Chatsworth displacement camps

Challenges in the camps

Table 8.1

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Sigsworth (2010) used the term “double jeopardy” to describe the unique problems and challenges experienced only by female migrants. Although females were affected by the same atrocities as men, their experiences differed due to the gender-specific nature of their needs. For example, poor sanitation facilities at the camps prevented females from maintaining good feminine hygiene during their menstrual cycles. Basic sanitary pads and tampons were provided at the camps; however, females also required clean and private latrine facilities, underwear, and anti-inflammatory medication specific to period pain. These items were vital to prevent women from contracting bacterial and yeast infections. Chatsworth camp, which was filled to capacity, held an estimated 3,500 people. Around 20 percent of the camp consisted of children under five years old who were very vulnerable (MSF 2015). Resources in both camps were inadequate. Migrant women’s experiences were traumatic in both the Isipingo and Chatsworth displacement camps. One woman almost lost her life after giving birth in the Isipingo camp: Here in the camp there was a lady who was pregnant, and she was about to deliver. The policemen that were guarding us, they refused to help us till the lady delivered [at] the gate [of] the hospital. The mother still had the cord inside the placenta, and somebody was carrying the baby without any glove[s]. The nurses said, “Put the mother on the bed.” They didn’t even come and cut the cord. The mother was bleeding; she could have died. (MSF 2015)

Water was in short supply, which led to dehydration. The sanitary needs of migrant women were compromised in the Isipingo and Chatsworth displacement camps. There were also other health issues as viruses spread rapidly because of the confined space. Women also complained about the shortage of food in both camps. Female migrants constantly worried about their safety and security. Moreover, they feared the men who were in the same camps with them. Migrant women in both displacement camps were vulnerable to sexual harassment in the communal latrines and wash areas, especially at night (Siya, interview, July 10, 2016). Working in partnership with the KZN Department of Health, Doctors without Borders/Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) provided daily medical care with mobile clinics (1,800,800 consultations), water and sanitation services, and “help for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence” (MSF 2015). The Chatsworth camp was officially closed on June 30, 2015, and government officials encouraged the female migrants to return to the original locality from which they had been displaced.

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RETURN TO ISIPINGO AND REINTEGRATION Most interviewees revealed that they had returned to their homes in Isipingo after being informed that the xenophobic violence had stopped. The decision to return was fueled by a desire to retrieve their personal belongings from their abandoned dwellings. There was also an urgent need to return to work or to seek alternate employment. Some returned to Isipingo because they had no other option. Seeking Personal Possessions The interviewees stated that given the threats of violence, their first priority was to get their children and themselves to safety. While they did not have time to look for personal effects or other valuable items as they fled, female migrants later returned to Isipingo to assess the state of their homes and scavenge for lost or damaged possessions. Andrea stated that she had left her identity document, migration papers, and money, and this motivated her to return to Isipingo. In an interview on June 25, 2016, Grace explained that she left her valuables behind: “For my things … I left it all here. We had to leave fast. We don’t have time to pick it all up. They will come and break things if they see you inside.” She also explained that she was worried about the state of her house, as she had left it empty for such a long period. Her identity document was also among the forgotten items; without it, she feared that she would be stranded in South Africa. Employment Prior to the xenophobic attacks, female migrants were concentrated in the informal employment sectors. Foreign women were largely involved in menial and below average income-earning employment (Boyd and Pikkov 2005). Sometimes, these jobs provided the only income that female migrants received. Therefore, they were a vital component of the women’s livelihoods. The decision to return to Isipingo was largely influenced by the need for income-earning opportunities: “I needed the money, I had a job so I had to go back … I had to buy things again for the house. They had taken things of mine from my house,” said Pemba during an interview on June 25, 2016. Many of the migrants feared that the xenophobic violence would cause them to lose their jobs. Thando suffered from a disability in her leg that restricted her employment options. Being foreign and female was already a double jeopardy (Sigsworth 2010). However, being foreign, female, and disabled was a triple

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threat that limited her job opportunities. Thando stated that her reason for returning to Isipingo was to reclaim her job and collect the wages owed to her before the displacement. Nowhere Else to Go Social networks are critical for migration and were especially beneficial for females during displacement. Such networks provided food, temporary residence, information about employment, and moral support for female migrants (Kuschminder 2013). When such support networks were disrupted, female migrants were left with no option but to return to their pre-displacement location in Isipingo and face the brunt of reintegration challenges as they tried to rebuild their lives. Irene explained that she returned to start her life again and continue with her previous work and life. Hani, when interviewed on July 3, 2016 about her reason for returning to her former location in Isipingo, replied sarcastically: “They [displacement camp officials] said it’s over and we can go back now. The newspapers were saying that I was happy. I could go back now and live in my own house.” Gloria explained in an interview on July 10, 2016 that she had no family support in South Africa and returning to Isipingo was her only option. Still, she faced many challenges, as will be described in the next section.

REINTEGRATION CHALLENGES IN ISIPINGO Female migrants encountered many challenges as they tried to reintegrate into their local community in Isipingo. Reintegration challenges included protection from physical violence, vandalism, and verbal abuse. Foreign women faced prejudice and also suffered from lack of employment, no government support, and post-displacement trauma. After the xenophobic attacks, social interaction and cohesion were almost impossible between foreign women and local citizens. Locals’ limited tolerance for migrants had all but disappeared in the aftermath of the xenophobic attacks, and tensions continued after the violence dissipated. Local Tensions Locals attempted to intimidate vulnerable female migrants to prevent them from resettling in the area. The migrants contended that their lifestyle had changed since the attacks. They were now more aware of their surroundings and as far as possible, avoided direct contact with the local citizens.

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Nacala explained that there was a perception that foreigners were now the untrustworthy group and were the root cause of increased crime and violence in the area. She felt that the xenophobic attacks had created mistrust, and she was more afraid of the local citizens: “We go to shops, they look at us funny … they check the money, if it is real. They were hitting us, but we are not the criminals here.” Siya related her experience with her former community members: “They act funny, they see you walking, they look at you … I greeted my neighbor one day, like before, and she didn’t talk back.” She contended that once she moved back to the area, she did not feel that it was the same area in which she had previously lived. Yesenia stated that she had as little interaction with local people as possible: “I try not talking to anyone, they might hear my accent, or they might tell someone how I travel and where I live. I just work and be home.” This response demonstrates her isolation from local people as well as her fear of being targeted by the violent xenophobic protesters. Gloria mentioned that finding a suitable area to build an informal dwelling was a problem for foreigners: They [South Africans] do not want you near them anymore, they believe that the land you’re on belongs to them and you are taking away all their rights, so they want to fight and show you that it is theirs. (Gloria, interview, July 10, 2016)

Some migrant women were surprised to learn that neighbors, with whom they had fostered good relationships, were part of the violent mobs. Irene explained that there were sinister forces external to the community that fueled the xenophobic violence: They don’t start this nonsense alone … they need to be told we do not take their jobs before they start killing and raping people. Someone is telling them that, their own people in the government think we are stealing jobs, but they don’t want the jobs we do. We want it then. (Irene, interview, June 25, 2016)

Irene believed that political organizations with hidden agendas fueled/sparked the xenophobic attacks. Andrea was not sure if the tension was politically ignited or created by local people who were not satisfied with service delivery. Khanya described her experience with locals after returning to Isipingo, saying that even taking a taxi became a problem for her as the locals felt that they should have first preference. “They don’t want any foreign people here and the local people don’t want me in the taxi. I had to wait and wait for a taxi to take me to work and then I got late,” she said. Gloria said she believed that the local people were only threatening the female migrants. “They told me I must go home; they said that by nighttime

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I should be gone, or they will come back, they will beat me, and they will beat my children … I’m still here!” She believed that locals did not act individually. They gathered in groups to threaten and intimidate foreign migrants. Elvira from Burundi, a woman of faith, emphasized the need to recognize the common humanity in all, above and beyond national and ethnic identities: God loves refugees. I believe it’s because Jesus was a refugee. For me, I don’t feel that I am a Burundian or [a] South African. I am a human being, a creation of God. So, I cannot separate myself from a South African or a Burundian. The same blood is flowing in us and we are unique. No one is able to give or take life away from somebody. So, we [are] all the same. (MSF 2015)

Grace still faces altercations with her neighbors who dismantled her fence that served as a boundary between them: “The fence there, it is always down … and it is the South Africans who are damaging it. They push the wire down when I go to work,” she said. She explained that she previously had arguments with her neighbors. She was warned that they wanted her to move out so that they could take over her house. Employment Loss of employment opportunities and earnings was a serious challenge for the female migrants in Isipingo. Female migrant employment was concentrated in domestic work and in the informal sector. According to Irene, after the xenophobic outbreaks, it was difficult to find employment. Tensions between migrants and locals resulted in restrictions in employment opportunities for foreigners. Due to the long period of absenteeism, Khanya was replaced at work and sought new employment for lower pay. Her new job as a janitor in a factory did not help her cover all her expenses or restore the lifestyle she had formerly enjoyed before being displaced. Nacala and Astur were also fired from their previous employment. Nacala was unable to call her employer and explain her situation. Therefore, her sudden disappearance from work led them to believe she had quit. “I got a new job, in a small company. The other company was bigger, so they paid more money, but the small company pays less,” she said. Astur explained in her interview that she also found new employment, but the pay was less, and she was now working for a smaller company. Pemba had previously lived near her workplace; however, due to the xenophobic violence, she had relocated to another area away from Isipingo: I don’t have enough money to live how I used to … I live with my cousin now. She lives far from my work. Before I was taking one taxi to work and now, I’m taking

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two taxis to work. That’s too much money and I don’t have it. (Pemba, interview, June 25, 2016)

Although her job paid well, Pemba said most of her money was spent on transport. Those women who had managed to retain their former jobs faced issues of wage cuts and demotion. Siya lost wages for the days she did not work during the xenophobic protests. She had to work during weekends to make up for her financial loss. Moreover, female migrants had to pay for the damage that the xenophobic protesters caused to their houses, and this exacerbated their financial crisis. “The window, it had a plastic over it for so long, who paid for that? I had to fix it myself. I worked every day to buy another glass. It’s not right,” Siya exclaimed. She added that the window had been broken by a piece of coal that was thrown at her house. Employers began checking the background of their employees to avoid any problems with the law and to avoid violence in factory premises as individuals who employed migrants were targeted by xenophobic protesters. Gloria explained that her company employed many female migrants, making them vulnerable to the attacks that took place in their work environment. Thando stated that she was afraid of being fired and left destitute. The company for which she currently worked had initiated a process of registering migrant employees and checking for correct documentation. She was not in possession of the legal paperwork and documentation. Gloria recounted a different, more positive experience with her employer. She worked in a restaurant for a local woman who had shown compassion after Gloria’s encounter with xenophobic violence and the repercussions that followed. Gloria said that her employer allowed her to recuperate: “She gave me the weekends off. I was able to go to church after a long time … It felt nice.” Poverty among female migrants increased as employment opportunities were minimized. As Hani commented, “So many months later and I still do nothing. I’ll get more money if I beg, but even if I do that, I might die with these protesters.” She was pessimistic about finding employment in Isipingo, as most migrants were no longer being employed in the industrial hub. Government Support The government’s role in the 2015 xenophobic attacks was to provide safety for the migrants in the form of displacement camps, which experienced their own set of challenges. The Department of Community Safety and Liaison had claimed that it had initiated a successful, collective dialogue between locals and foreigners in the Isipingo area (Pillay 2015).

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However, Yesenia contended that these dialogues were not followed by action. “They should have done more for Isipingo people to prevent the female migrants from being victims of violence and injustice … all the world is seeing how they treat us,” she said. Andrea explained that while the government attempted to “clean the mess” by reintegration, the actual problem of xenophobia was still persistent, and violent attacks against foreigners continued. Ainslie McClarty, an MSF nurse and deputy project coordinator, also articulated this concern: People remain fearful and they have not had time to adjust to a process that will determine their future. They need to build trust in the authorities, but progress is slow. Any progress is easily undermined when people are not directly involved in consultations and decisions affecting their future. (MSF 2015)

Khanya said that she believed the government was not monitoring its reintegration policies and processes. She felt that she and women like her were placed back into society with an illusion about protection, rights, and resources. However, they had to fend for themselves. Siya stated that the foreign women needed more protection and facilities, which were in short supply. She was disappointed that local women did not support foreign females. “It was their own people doing this … even the local women were against other migrant women working and living here,” she said. Irene felt that migrant women, who were forced to return to Isipingo without any protection or security, needed more government support. Hani contended that the government’s lack of sufficient monetary resources resulted in sparse services. She further explained that the government knew that providing adequate services would increase xenophobic incidents: “If they [government] gave us more things (facilities and protection), then the local people would continue to fight so they tried to stop that.” Post-Displacement Trauma Reflecting on her treatment as a woman in South Africa, Nacala said, “They do not respect you anywhere.” Thando expected to be treated with more respect because she is a disabled female migrant. “If something happens to me, no one will check, no one will help me if I’m sick,” she said. She feared that her neighbors, who usually cared for her well-being, were no longer concerned about her. This was a constant worry. Astur had lost some of her money during her displacement. Because her new employment paid less, she worried about her financial well-being in the future. Astur explained that she endured sleepless nights because of her experience with the protesters. Their banging on her door and shouting remained etched

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in her mind. These traumatic events recurred as nightmares or post-traumatic stress disorder. Females also faced humiliation and trauma due to the limited access to menstrual materials and clothing. Trauma counseling was not easily accessible to migrant women and children due to the cost of these services. Once again, the MSF team stepped in to heal the breach. Since early May 2015, the MSF team “has provided more than 200 psychological counseling sessions for groups and for individuals, including children.” MSF provided medical assistance as well as mental health support for female migrants. Psychologists from MSF identified high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder among displaced migrants. They used the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, an internationally approved screening instrument, to assess how often migrants experienced hallucinations about violent displacements and felt a “sense of hopelessness and helplessness.” Gail Womersley, an MSF psychologist, stated: The kind of trauma I saw in the Chatsworth camp is similar to what I’ve seen in displacement camps in the Central African Republic and South Sudan where people have been exposed to active conflicts. From our interviews with these camp residents, it’s clear that some have suffered cumulative traumas. They have experienced violence in their country of origin—during the 2008 xenophobic violence and again in 2015. However, they also tell us about the daily level of discrimination and alienation they endure—at hospitals, in minibus taxis, and from police elsewhere. (MSF 2015)

Although women usually prioritized the safety of their offspring and other dependents, children were also traumatized by the violence they witnessed. Irene, who had to make decisions that were best for her child, moved to the displacement camp because she felt it offered the safest option for her child. Despite the tensions in the displacement camp, Irene believed it was safer than the streets where angry xenophobic protesters dragged and beat people. After receiving news of the xenophobic attacks, for example, Gloria attempted to protect her children by leaving work early to fetch them from school before the violence escalated. However, she had nowhere else to go after the violent attacks stopped, and she had to return to Isipingo. She mentioned that the attacks also caused her children fear and stress. Other mothers were also concerned about the future of their children. According to Passy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “We feel very bad. We think about the future of our children. For us we can say our future is finished, but what about our kids. There are a lot of kids who have a future [ahead]” (Harrison 2015).

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CONCLUSION This chapter has analyzed the trials and tribulations of migrant women in Isipingo during the outbreak of xenophobic violence from March to April 2015. It has focused on the displacement and reintegration of female migrants who were exposed to xenophobic violence in Isipingo. Violence took various forms—threats of physical attacks, psychological fear and anxiety, vandalizing of property, and displacement. The latter three categories can be viewed as forms of structural violence (Galtung 1969; Farmer 2004). Internal displacement often worsens pre-existing vulnerabilities, creates specific needs for assistance and protection, and severely tests the resilience of people forced to leave behind their homes, communities, and livelihoods (Ruyssen and Salomone 2018). Initially, female migrants were allocated to a camp in Isipingo Beach, but they were then forced to relocate to the Chatsworth camp. The xenophobic experiences of female migrants were different from those of males. Women faced difficulties such as access to water and sanitation, and they were vulnerable to harassment in both camps. They also experienced harsher emotional and psychological challenges. Stress, either directly or indirectly, encountered during resettlement contributed to the development of mental illness. After the camps were closed, migrants were encouraged to reintegrate into their original neighborhoods. However, returning to their homes in Isipingo was deemed unsafe and risky. The hostility of local citizens posed a larger problem for the peaceful reintegration of migrant women into their original localities. Women in Isipingo faced a “double jeopardy”—being foreign and female (Sigsworth 2010). Reintegration of migrants should focus on larger structural factors of protection, law and order, property restitution, reconciliation and peace building, and restoration of livelihoods (Davies 2004). Once xenophobic violence surfaced, migrant women were marginalized from resources and employment opportunities, which hindered their ability to earn their livelihoods. The human rights of female migrants were ignored during xenophobic attacks, and the government’s initiatives to prevent migrant abuse have not been effective in protecting women from xenophobic threats. This was evident in reports of unfair arrests, deportation, and victimization of foreigners by South African police services (Pillay 2015). Reintegration strategies and policies were ineffective as migrant women were still facing xenophobic threats. Gender sensitivity must be incorporated in policies and program interventions. The programs that were implemented to neutralize the 2015 reintegration process were generalized and did not highlight the need for special attention to female protection from further acts

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of xenophobic violence, child welfare, and fair access to amenities. Migrant women require—and deserve—special support from governments during and after displacement and reintegration.

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Human Rights Watch. 2009. “World report 2009.” https://​www​hrw​.org/​world​-report/​ 2009/​country​-chapters/​south​-africa. Indra, D.M. 1999. Engendering Forced Migration: Theory and Practice. New York: Berghahn Books. Kuschminder, K. 2013. “Female return migration and reintegration strategies in Ethiopia.” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Maastricht University. Lutz, H. 2010. “Gender in the migratory process.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36: 1647–63. Maharaj, B. 2009. “Migrants and urban rights: politics of xenophobia in South African cities.” L’Espace Politique, 8: 2–15. Memela, S. and Maharaj, B. 2018. “Refugees, violence and gender: the case of women in the Albert Park area in Durban, South Africa.” Urban Forum, 29: 429–58. MSF [Médecins sans Frontières]. 2015. “Providing psychological care to people displaced by xenophobic violence in South Africa.” https://​www​.d​octorswith​outborders​ .org/​what​-we​-do/​news​-stories/​news/​providing​-psychological​-care​-people​-displaced​ -xenophobic​-violence. Neocosmos, M. 2010. From Foreign Natives to Native Foreigners – Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa: Citizenship and Nationalism, Identity and Politics. Oxford: African Books Collective. Newman, A., Bimrose, J., Nielsen, I., and Zacher, H. 2018. “Vocational behavior of refugees: how do refugees seek employment, overcome work-related challenges, and navigate their careers?” Journal of Vocational Behavior, 105: 1–5. Pillay, N. 2015. Report of the Special Reference Group on Migration and Community Integration in KwaZulu-Natal. https://​reliefweb​.int/​sites/​reliefweb​.int/​files/​ resources/​Special​%20ref​%20group​%20on​%20Migration​%20and​%20Community​ %20Intergration​%20in​%20KZN​.pdf. Pineteh, E.A. 2018. “Spatial contestation, victimisation and resistance during xenophobic violence: the experiences of Somali migrants in post-Apartheid South Africa.” International Migration, 56(2): 133–45. Ruyssen, I. and Salomone, S. (2018). “Female migration: a way out of discrimination?” Journal of Development Economics, 130: 224–41. Sigsworth, R. 2010. “Double jeopardy: foreign and female.” Johannesburg: Heinrich Böll Stiftung Southern Africa. https://​www​.boell​.de/​sites/​default/​files/​assets/​boell​ .de/​images/​download​_de/​2010​-07​-01​_Analysis​_Double​_Jeopardy​_Foreign​_and​ _Female​_(4)​.pdf.

9. Shoot first, ask later: violence and anti-crime policies in Mexico’s Cuidad Juárez and Pakistan’s Karachi Vanda Felbab-Brown INTRODUCTION Since the turn of the twenty-first century, both Mexico and Pakistan have struggled with delivering security to urban spaces. From 2008 to 2015, Mexico’s Cuidad Juárez and Pakistan’s Karachi each experienced a highly intense wave of violence. Homicides surpassed 2,000 a year in each city, with war-like firearm exchanges on the streets. Extortions and kidnappings skyrocketed. The poor and the affluent endured altered living conditions, with many businesses shutting down and many of the elite decamped. The governments scrambled for a response. This chapter explores the sources of insecurity and violence in both cities since the 1990s; it is based on fieldwork I conducted between 2009 and 2016. Through interviews with security and police officials, military and paramilitary forces officers, politicians, civil society and business community representatives, members of criminal gangs, and security experts, the chapter examines and assesses the effects and effectiveness of anti-crime measures. The cities are somewhat similar—both are economic engines of their countries, highly dependent on and intermeshed in global trade. Because of their role as legal trade transportation hubs (and key manufacturing production areas), they are also deeply plugged into global smuggling networks. In some dimensions, particularly terrorism and militancy, crucial differences emerge between Cuidad Juárez and Karachi. Cuidad Juárez, Mexico’s fifth largest city, has a population of only 1.3 million, while Karachi is a megapolis of between 20 and 25 million people. The 2,000–3,000 homicides a year suffered by each city, while shocking, is (in relative terms) twenty times higher in Cuidad Juárez than in Karachi. Terrorism and militancy are absent in Cuidad Juárez, but have been a critical feature of Karachi’s violence since 2008.

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Cuidad Juárez and Karachi struggle with providing public safety and social services because of the pace of urbanization. Instead, the state has at times either yielded—or sometimes purposefully outsourced—the delivery of order and public goods to nonstate actors. Order and public goods delivery, including security by criminal and militant groups, often outcompetes the provision of such public goods by the state, with the nonstate actors thus acquiring political capital with local populations. Local populations often prefer a criminal or militant order to intense violence, persisting violent contestation, or marginalization and neglect by the state. Both cities applied similar tools to the problem and had to confront the same deficiencies. Police forces in both cities are historically under-resourced, incompetent, corrupt, politicized, and penetrated by criminal groups, while the justice systems in both countries and cities are inadequate. The cities deployed military and/or paramilitary forces to address the violence, but the military/paramilitary forces and the police turned out to be highly violent and engaged in extensive egregious human rights violations. Both cities mobilized the business community and civil society in response to violence, yet the responses varied. In Cuidad Juárez, the community sought to reinforce and assist federal and local police forces; in Karachi, the business community established an essentially private police force, extraordinary in its scope of activities. The repression in Karachi also gave rise to the mobilization of the repressed Pashtun minority that suffered from law enforcement’s dragnet repression. In two respects, the policy approaches differed significantly—unlike Karachi, Cuidad Juárez launched a $300 million anti-crime socio-economic development effort. In Karachi, the law enforcement forces, particularly the paramilitary forces, completely redesigned the political landscape of the city, selectively arresting and dismantling some political parties and extra-legally empowering and privileging a new political party. In Cuidad Juárez, the law enforcement strategies, civil society mobilization, and socio-economic approaches had only small and ephemeral effects, not robust enough to significantly suppress violence. Violence did decrease, but it was because one criminal group—the Sinaloa Cartel—won the fight over the city’s criminal markets, smuggling routes, and corruption networks. When another criminal group arrived in the city three years later, the narcopeace collapsed and violence escalated again. The policy measures failed to deter this re-escalation. In contrast, the state-sponsored repression and interference in civilian and political life in Karachi has held off violence since 2015. Whether this repression of violence will be effective in keeping homicides down remains to be seen—a similar eruption in the 1990s fizzled out. However, even if the turbulence is kept under control, the price that human rights and civil liberties have had to pay makes the violent crime suppression accomplishment questionable.

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Moreover, the extensive and long-term presence of paramilitary groups in Karachi has also resulted in their increasing involvement in the city’s illegal economies, such as land grabbing, and criminalized service delivery, including of water.

CASE STUDY 1: CUIDAD JUÁREZ Ciudad Juárez became a symbol of Mexico’s drug wars in 2009. With 3,766 homicides in 2010, more than ten per day (escalating from a low 137 in 2007), Juárez became one of the most violent cities in the world (Molzahn, Ferreira, and Shirk 2013; Valencia and Chacon 2013). Feeling vulnerable to attacks and extortion from the drug-trafficking organizations, many government officials, business owners, and community leaders moved out of the city, crossing the border into El Paso. Spreading extortion forced many businesses to go bankrupt, especially as undiminished contestation by criminal groups over the criminal market left many businesses with no alternative but to pay protection fees to multiple criminal groups. Prominent bars, discos, and restaurants were charged $2,000 in some months; kidnapping-ransom fees for family members of prominent businessmen went for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.1 Others chose to pay the extortion fees instead of taxes or bills for electricity, water, or licenses. The extortion did not affect only large businesses and the rich; small shopkeepers and informal vendors had to pay as well—often a hefty portion of their income.

DRIVERS OF VIOLENCE The violence between 2008 and 2013 was motivated by contests between two drug trafficking organizations—the Sinaloa Cartel and a divided Juárez Cartel and its enforcers and affiliated gangs—La Línea and Los Aztecas—over the city’s trafficking corridors to the United States. Having repeatedly sought to wrestle Cuidad Juárez’s smuggling networks and corridors from the Juárez Cartel during the previous two decades, the Sinaloa Cartel mounted another effort in 2007, creating mayhem. Two other gangs—Artistas Asesinos and Los Mexicales—emerged as important actors in the war, switching sides between the Juárez and Sinaloa Cartels (“Capturan” 2011). The Juárez Cartel had two important advantages. For decades, it was deeply intertwined with the city’s politics, with many of the city’s politicians on its payroll and the Cartel instrumental in their elections. The Cartel also permeated and corrupted the city’s municipal police that served the Cartel’s purposes. Between 2008 and 2013, 11,500 documented homicides occurred in

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Ciudad Juárez; other crimes, such as extortion, kidnapping, and car theft, also exploded during that period (ibid.). As the war progressed, murders increased from 1,589 in 2008, to 2,399 in 2009, reaching a high of 3,766 in 2010 (INEGI 2019). After that peak year, homicide numbers declined to a low of 440 in 2015, though they remained higher than homicide rates in the city during the 1990s (Burnett 2015). What explains the reduction in violence?

POLICY RESPONSES Starting in 2008, policies on crime suppression were adopted. They included experimentation with different policing models and actors, such as the military and the Federal Police and Municipal Police. Anti-crime approaches involved the adoption of socio-economic programs and a pushback from civil society, closely intermeshing with both the socio-economic approaches and some of the policing methods. The policies ultimately coincided with, and were in fact enabled by, the victory of the Sinaloa Cartel in the fight over the city’s crime markets. Because of the difficulty of disentangling the causal impacts of these various policy interventions from factors endogenous to the criminal market and battlefield and attributing separate effectiveness levels to them, it is difficult to assess how much each factor contributed to the decrease in violence that occurred between 2013 and 2015. Law Enforcement In March 2008, the Federal Police, together with Mexico’s military, was deployed to Ciudad Juárez since the local police force was judged by federal and state authorities unable to cope with the violence. “Joint Operation Chihuahua” deployed 7,500 soldiers and 2,300 federal police officers on the streets of Juárez. At first, the military and Federales took over day-to-day policing, including in the city center, but their effectiveness was questionable. In phase two, by September 2009, the military had moved to the city outskirts and limited the number of checkpoints, while the Federales continued patrolling in the city center and beyond. Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón’s military response strategy was well-articulated. The military was deployed to crisis areas where police forces, corrupted and hollowed out by criminal groups’ penetration spanning many decades, could not provide public safety. Once the local police forces were retrained and strengthened, the military would be pulled back. This strategic concept, however, was not translated into specific operational and tactical guidelines. The Mexican military was sent to the streets of Juárez

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with soldiers having little understanding of their specific objectives. Were they supposed to push the narcos out of the city or out of particular neighborhoods? Were they charged with apprehending the narcos for prosecution? Were they to concentrate on reducing violence in the city’s main avenues during daylight? The military failed to develop adequate local intelligence due to its lack of knowledge about the city and its criminal element (WikiLeaks 2009). Without a clear mandate and with little practice in urban policing and criminal investigations, the military in Ciudad Juárez was soon accused of using disproportionate force and engaging in serious human rights violations, such as breaking into people’s houses without a warrant and extensive extrajudicial killings and disappearances. The Federal Police also struggled to mount a more effective law enforcement response. They made it a priority to reduce criminal violence in Zona Pronaf, the border industrialization zone that also contained popular restaurants and bars. This area had come under huge extortion pressure from the multiple cartels and gangs. Groups demanded payments from the same business operators, paralyzing the business community with expenses and fear. The ground-level context of the decision to withdraw the Federales from Ciudad Juárez included significant tension between the Federales and the Juárez municipal police, perhaps because of their different loyalties to the Sinaloa and Juárez Cartels. Civil Society Mobilization Amidst the traumatic violence in Ciudad Juárez, leaders of civil society mobilized to encourage attention to the plight of the city and the adoption of better government responses. The most visible among the NGO–civil society efforts and the principal interface with both the federal and local governments was the Mesa de Seguridad y Justicia, composed of prominent business people, academics, and human right representatives from the city. The Mesa monitored and published crime statistics on homicides, extortion, kidnapping, violent and nonviolent theft, and human rights violations. It created subgroups to analyze each of these crimes, and it brought in experts to feed the analysis to police and government decision-makers. The Mesa also pushed for more training, better salaries, and new equipment for the municipal police force. Eventually, the business community in Cuidad Juárez self-imposed a 5 percent payroll tax to collect funds to support anti-crime activities, such as citizen crime observatories, and for local policing efforts. Yet, by the end of 2013, many of the policing efforts stalled. Ciudad Juárez still has no police academy.

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Socio-Economic Anti-Crime Programs An ambitious socio-economic package to “build resilience” in communities against participation in illicit economies and organized crime—Todos Somos Juárez—was unveiled in the city in the spring of 2010. The Nieto administration then enacted the National Program for Social Prevention of Violence and Delinquency (Programa Nacional para la Prevención Social de la Violencia y el Delito, PRONAPRED), informally referred to as the Polígonos (polygon) program. The goals of Todos Somos Juárez were to replace the authority-role of the criminal groups, redress the physical structural deficiencies in the poor neighborhoods, stimulate legal economic growth, and strengthen the community’s organizational capacity. The United States, in its so-called Fourth Pillar of its Beyond Merida aid package to Mexico, restructured its anti-crime aid to Mexico to synchronize with Todos Somos Juárez. Out of the $1.9 billion appropriated by the U.S. Congress to the Merida Initiative and its phase II Beyond Merida, about $100 million, approximately 5 percent, was allocated to socio-economic anti-crime efforts between 2007 and 2013 (“Joint Statement” 2011; “The Merida Initiative” 2011; Dibble 2013; Seelke and Finklea 2013). For the first year of the program in 2010, the Federal government appropriated the equivalent of $260 million for urban development. More money was added for a total of $380 million for both 2010 and 2011 (Hinojosa 2014). The programs included funds to deliver social services and infrastructure upgrades, create and modernize businesses, lower micro-enterprise interest rates, and train small business owners. Several impressive community centers and public parks were built in the city, modeled on similar anti-crime approaches in Palermo, Sicily, in the 1990s, and in Medellín, Colombia, in the middle of the 2000s. The centers, meant to keep children occupied and away from the streets and gangs, provided extracurricular programs, such as sport and music activities. Yet, many of these programs could not be sustained during the Calderón Todos Somos Juárez era. By 2014, funding started dwindling. The Enrique Peña Nieto administration significantly reduced the flow of money to anti-crime socio-economic programs in Cuidad Juárez. The resulting anti-crime socio-economic efforts in the city were inevitably very small in both size and scope, and addressed only a tiny fraction of need. They sought to rebuild the social structure in the selected areas through urban regeneration, education, employment initiatives, and a culture of lawfulness by primarily focusing on the needs of young people and women. The projects included everything from increasing social and health services to preventing bullying at school, family violence, and drug use; they encouraged non-violence through dance, youth orchestras, and the teaching of self-control.

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They built and renovated public centers, established day-care centers in the Cereso prison for women, equipped three public libraries, and created job opportunities for single mothers.

VICTORY OF THE SINALOA CARTEL AND THE SUBSEQUENT COLLAPSE OF THE NARCOPEACE As the Sinaloa Cartel won in the city, the criminal groups burned themselves out. Sadly, the various policy actions—aggressive law enforcement efforts to civil society mobilization and anti-crime socio-economic policies—turned out to be of limited and ephemeral effectiveness. A crucial factor in the ultimate victory of the Sinaloa Cartel in the city was the response of U.S. law enforcement institutions to the attack on U.S. Consulate employees. The U.S. operation captured members of Los Aztecas and La Línea and dismantled the two groups’ U.S. networks. The fundamental problem of a narcopeace is that it exists through the might, and at the discretion, of criminal groups—not as a result of the deterrence capacity of the state. If the strength of the dominant criminal group weakens vis-à-vis rivals, or if another criminal group redevelops the taste for aggression, the fighting can again erupt, and the state may lack the capacity to deter the resumption of violence. When power contestation among criminal groups fails to produce a dominant victor in the criminal market, violence persists (Felbab-Brown 2011; 2014).

CASE STUDY 2: KARACHI Like Cuidad Juárez, Karachi (Pakistan’s largest city) was also caught up in a wave of intense violence between 2010 and 2015. In 2012, 2,174 were reported killed;2 2013 turned out to be the city’s worst year on record, with 2,700 dead in targeted killings by political parties; warfare by and among jihadist and organized crime groups often linked to politicians and political parties (Felbab-Brown 2014). Compounding the sense of insecurity was a dramatic terrorist attack on Karachi’s airport in July 2014 (Mallet and Bokhari 2014). Karachi is up to 25 times as populous as Cuidad Juárez, but its highest murder rate remains a mere twentieth of that in Cuidad Juárez where the same annual numbers of homicides took place during that period. By 2017, homicides, targeted killings, terrorist attacks, kidnappings, and extortions perpetrated by non-state actors declined often as much as 90 percent in the various categories. What explains the decline?

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BACKGROUND Karachi experienced massive and uncontrolled population growth, expanding to its enormous size from a mere 435,0000 residents in the early 1940s (International Crisis Group 2017, p. 2). Some 70 percent of Karachi residents are poor, and half of the population lives in squatter settlements known as katchi abadis (Hasan 2015). Though less squalid than slums, these informal settlements nonetheless lack pumped water, sewage, and formal legal electricity hookups (Felbab-Brown 2012). Karachi is also the hub of Pakistan’s economic elite, despite long-term problems due to poor governance and insecurity. With its large financial, textile, and manufacturing sectors, Karachi generates approximately 50 percent of Pakistan’s economic revenue (about $290 billion annually) and 90 percent of the province of Sindh (International Crisis Group 2017). It also handles 95 percent of Pakistan’s foreign trade and 30 percent of its manufacturing. Ninety percent of the heads of the country’s banks’ offices, financial institutions, and multinational corporations operate out of Karachi (Asia Development Bank 2005). The city’s economic development, urban planning, and governance—as well as its instability, violence, and organized crime—are shaped by demographics and the changing ethnic composition of the megapolis. Karachi’s decades-long poor exclusionary governance has gutted the city’s planning, organizational capacities, and provision of public goods. Instead, the delivery of public goods has, to a large extent, become privatized. Both in the public and private domains, or when delivered by what Karachi residents call mafias—a combination of organized crime groups and politicians—the delivery of essential services is politicized. Deep ethnic rivalries generating ethnic community competition over legal and illegal rents and bureaucratic appointments have often produced—and indeed purposefully generated and utilized—criminal and street violence.

DRIVERS OF VIOLENCE Waves of violence in Karachi, including the 2010–13 wave that set off the latest law enforcement operations, have been driven by multiple factors: inter-communal hostility provoked and exploited by the campaigns of ethnically oriented politicians and political parties; violence by the state, exacerbated by the weakness of the city’s police; organized crime and political competition over illicit economies and the provision of public services in the city; and the belligerence of jihadi militants and terrorists.

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Violence by Political Parties Much of Karachi’s violence results from the strategic use of violence by ethnically based political parties to secure electoral votes, government appointments, and economic rents. Between 2007 and 2013, almost all of the city’s ethnic groups and their political parties indulged in violence against their political, ethnic, and business opponents, resulting in the deaths of over 7,000 people (Malik and Siddiqui 2019). The political–ethnic violence has often taken place between the Mohajirs and the Sindhis and between the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns and Baloch. Once the most numerous ethnic group in Karachi, Sindhis are still dominant in the rural areas of the Sindh Province of which Karachi is the capital. The Mohajirs (literally refugees), the city’s ethnic majority after the partition of India, are the Urdu-speaking migrants from India and their descendants. Federal politics also shaped these endless battles. The 1970s government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, with his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), favored the Sindhis, while the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq (1977–88) sought to weaken the PPP by supporting the creation of a Mohajir political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) (Verkaaik 1994). The tension set off waves of violence in the city during the 1980s and 1990s as the Mohajirs sought to control governing structures and appointments (such as the lucrative Karachi Port Trust, Karachi Municipal Corporation and Karachi Development Authority). To obtain patronage and political capital, they often used street violence by armed wings (Ahmed 1997; Verkaaik 2004). Since the 1980s, many Pakistani Pashtun migrants and Afghan refugees further altered the ethnic balance in the city and its conflict for power. By 2025, Pashtuns will outnumber the Mohajirs, and overall, the Pashtun currently represent about 15 percent of Pakistan’s 200 million people. However, the Pashtun population is now the most politically and economically underrepresented ethnic group in Karachi (International Crisis Group 2014, p. 25). While the Mohajir–Sindhi violence declined in the 1990s, ethnic violence escalated between the Mohajirs and Pashtuns and Balochs, particularly after the 2008 elections (Khan 2010). In addition to having their own armed wings, the political parties established clientelistic relationships and alliances with organized crime groups to secure votes and engage in extortion and racketeering in the city, known in Karachi as the bhatta economy. As in Mexico, the power relationships between the politicians and organized crime in Karachi came to be reversed. Like many other criminal gangs and militant groups, including the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, the Peoples Aman Committee (PAC) in Karachi sought to cultivate political capital by investing some of its proceeds from the drug trade and extortion in public welfare schemes in Lyari (Gayer 2014, p. 255). Since

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the 2011 battle with Karachi’s police, the PAC would distribute water and food to Lyari’s residents. Like the Sinaloa Cartel, it also regulated street crime in the subdivision by advancing its own rackets. Carjacking, cellphone snatching, and robberies decreased compared to previous periods and other parts of the city (Felbab-Brown, Trinkunas, and Hamid, 2018). The PAC supported and sponsored non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to bring hospitals and schools to Lyari, one symbolically located in a gang’s former torture house (Aikins 2015). During the Musharraf era when the Muttahida Quami Movement’s star shone, nothing had been built in Lyari in retaliation against the PPP. The PAC sought to cultivate the city’s business and political elite while also extorting them as well as top police officials and corrupt Rangers (ibid.). With its political capital rising, the PAC kept cutting significantly into the PPP’s electoral power base and insisted on selecting PPP candidates for Lyari (Desmukh 2012; Temple-Raston 2013).3 Illicit Economies Not surprisingly, as a crucial port and gateway to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a megacity of many poor and unemployed, Karachi is also a significant hub of illicit economic activities and organized crime. The annual overall size of Karachi’s illicit economy is estimated at $3 billion (International Crisis Group 2017, p. 5). Illicit economies in Karachi, to various degrees dominated by organized crime groups and militant actors, include drug smuggling, arms smuggling, human smuggling, land theft, extortion, gambling, and kidnapping (Hussain and Shelley 2016). Because of its location as a strategic port, Karachi has been a major transportation hub for Pakistan’s cultivated opiates in the 1980s and Afghan heroin since the 1990s (Haq 1996; Felbab-Brown 2016). The under-delivery and privatization of basic services have provided further opportunities for criminalization and violence. Informal and outright illicit economies and extensive theft have emerged in land access, electricity and water delivery, and transportation. “Mafias”—organized crime groups connected to politicians and political parties—dominate water delivery and the extraction and transport of timber. Both public and private land is frequently stolen and usurped by criminals, politicians, and/or state agents such as the Rangers and the military, whether directly or for their benefit, or by the city’s many squatters (Khan 2018). Land has thus become the city’s most prized and contested commodity, with federal, provincial, and local land-owning agencies, military cantonments, corporate entities and formal and informal developers fighting for land rights. Public transportation is largely defunct. Medical services are equally underprovided, delivered to many by charities or Islamist parties and the political proxies of Jihadist groups, such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (after state pressure

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renamed Jammat-ud-Dawa). In the political contestation surrounding the 2008 elections, the PPP and MQM used their political heft to get access for their clients to the city’s hospitals and clinics (Gayer 2014). Meanwhile, the rich receive their medical treatment in Dubai, London, or the United States. Jihadist Militancy and Sectarian Conflict Multiple and highly dangerous jihadist terrorist groups operate in the city and compete over turf and illicit rackets, fundraise, organize violent operations, and take shelter from operations by the Pakistani military during the periods when the military decides to confront, not coddle, some of them (Felbab-Brown 2018). The groups include the anti-India and Kashmir-focused Laskhar-e-Tayyaba (LeT)/Jammat-ud-Dawa (JD), Jaish-e-Mohammad (that, along with LeT, carried out the 2001 attack on India’s parliament), and the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Since its arrival in Karachi more than a decade ago, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has fought organized criminal groups for control over illicit rents, and hired local criminals for the same purpose and to finance jihad. In turn, criminals allied with TTP have used the alliance to strengthen their hand against local police (mostly in on the illicit take) and criminal rivals.

POLICY RESPONSES Much of the state’s response to the 2010–13 violence in Karachi, as well as historically, has centered on heavy-handed law enforcement and military crackdowns. Anti-crime socio-economic components or other structural and institutional reforms were non-existent in the policy package, unlike in Mexico’s Cuidad Juárez. Similar to Cuidad Juárez, civil society mobilization played an important role in the policy response toward the violence in the city; such mobilization was heavily skewed toward the interests and safety of the elite. However, the shape of the civil society response and the creation of an essentially privatized version of a police force for the elite in Karachi significantly exceeded the roles and functions of civil society mobilization in Cuidad Juárez. Law Enforcement In 2012 and 2013, the police force in Karachi found itself unable to cope with the rising violence, extortion, jihadism, and sense of panic in the city. Nominally, the police force has 29,000 officers, but perhaps only 8,000 work at any one time (Hodge and Hasan 2015).4 Moreover, 162 police officers, including one of Karachi’s top counterterrorism officials, were killed in

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the city in the first part of 2013, severely undermining already poor morale (International Crisis Group 2014, p. 41). For decades, the police force in the city (as elsewhere in Pakistan) has also been subject to intense politicization, from the highest senior level appointments to beat cops. Pakistan’s federal government authorized the paramilitary Sindh Rangers to take charge of law enforcement in the city in September 2013 and to focus on terrorism, political killings, extortion, and kidnapping for ransom. Since the Sindh Rangers, who nominally fall under Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior, follow the military’s command, they were going to respond to Pakistan’s military chiefs, even had the committees functioned. The resulting law enforcement operation, running from 2013 through the current period, targeted various organized crime groups, some jihadi groups (particularly the TTP), the military wings of political parties, and the entire structures of the political parties themselves, especially the MQM. Rangers, Police, and Law Enforcement Operations In 2013, the 11,000 Rangers deployed to Karachi received special police powers. Under the 2013 Protection of Pakistan Ordinance, made law in 2014 as the Protection of Pakistan Act, the Rangers were authorized to shoot-to-kill, shoot-on-sight, and to detain suspects for 90 days without charge. They did not have actual investigation and prosecution mandates. A subsequent anti-terrorism act, the December 2014 National Action Plan, expanded the military’s role in internal policing. It shifted counterterrorism judicial processes to the opaque unaccountable military justice system and reversed the burden of proof for alleged terrorists—the accused had to prove that they were not terrorists.5 Although the operation was to be time-bound, the Rangers’ mandate was repeatedly extended. Officially, the law enforcement efforts in Karachi were defined as a targeted operation focusing on a list of 450 designated killers (i.e., hitmen for political parties), terrorists, kidnappers, and leaders of extortion rings. Quickly, however, the law enforcement actions became a much broader dragnet scheme. As of mid-2018, the Rangers claimed to have arrested and handed over to police or the courts almost 11,000 people in 14,327 raids since September 2013 (Ur-Rehman 2018). Yet, many detainees were released without charge; others disappeared, perhaps still held in detention or killed. MQM became a primary target of the Rangers’ operation. Instead of diligent investigations and evidence-based arrests, the law enforcement forces sought to destroy the armed wings of the party and the party itself through extrajudicial killings and disappearances (International Crisis Group 2014, p. 14). The PPP was also targeted, with its members, including prominent officials,

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arrested on various charges, and some of its buildings raided, though to a lesser degree than those of the MQM. The law enforcement operations also sought to establish a Ranger and police presence in areas that were previously banned from police forces, such as Lyari, and targeted gangs there. As in other parts of Karachi, the operations were repressive and abusive, consisting of cordoned-off and search–arrest operations. Residents who dared protest against law enforcement heavy-handedness or other problematic policies, such as the intimidation of fishermen by police and Rangers or government seizures of coastal land, were labeled supporters of Lyari gangs or terrorist groups and arrested (Tanoli 2016). The Rangers’ dragnet approach compounded Pakistan’s long-standing problem: the weakness of prosecution. However, the police frequently lacked investigative capacities—they used torture to extract confessions. In response to human rights complaints, the Rangers and police claimed that they had no alternative to killing terrorists and criminals because the courts would free them.6 Overwhelmed, under-resourced, politicized, and militarized, Pakistan’s justice system harbors cases not adjudicated for 20 years. A popular saying goes: “In Pakistan, you hire a lawyer and buy a judge.” Only rarely do courts take up human rights protection issues or indict police or Ranger officials for even egregious human rights violations. Absence of Police Reform Beyond reshuffling individuals, no serious attempt to reform the police in Karachi or in Sindh has been undertaken. In May 2016, the Sindh government authorized the recruitment of 8,000 additional police officers for Karachi; the army was going to train them, but only some were recruited and joined the force. Many top officers and beat cops embraced repressive ways. Karachi’s police chief, superintendent Anwar Ahmed, going by the nom de guerre Rao Anwar, was notorious for his bloodlust for encounter killings. Rao Anwar had risen through the police ranks in the city since the 1980s due to his penchant for such killings, particularly of MQM members.7 Senior police officials were also alleged to offer cash rewards to subordinates for extrajudicial killings. Karachi police killed “184 criminals and 7,373 terrorists” in 480 police encounters in 2017 alone (Ahmad 2018). Outcomes Overall, the violence perpetrated by nonstate actors has declined dramatically and swiftly. Targeted killings diminished from 965 in 2013 to two in 2018; reported extortion cases from 1,524 in 2013 to 31 in 2018; and kidnapping for

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ransom from 174 in 2013 to five in 2018 (Ur-Rehman 2018). From January to April 2019, Karachi experienced 12 targeted killings (“Karachi’s Ranking” 2019). Yet, the Rangers and police continued to mount raids, such as in Lyari in May 2019. Terrorist incidents also decreased—from a 2015 peak of 199 (when TTP responded to counterterrorism actions with intensified aggression of its own) to 16 in 2016 and zero in 2017 (“Karachi Operation Report” 2019). Two significant terrorist incidents, nonetheless, took place in Karachi in 2018. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, al-Qaeda, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) were the terrorist groups principally targeted in the five years of operations. LeJ, which became a target because it was not sufficiently anti-India-oriented, killed Pakistani security officials. Other groups, such as the bloody sectarian Sunni Ahle Sunant Wal Jammat (formerly Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan) were not targeted. Similarly, the Rangers did not conduct operations in areas of LeT/JD. Another outcome of the Rangers’ and police operations was the strengthening of Rangers’ control over the city’s various illicit economic rackets. Widespread allegations emerged about the Rangers’ and police involvement in extortion in areas of their operations and of their illegal appropriation of valuable resources, such as real estate (International Crisis Group 2017). In various parts of the city, vendors complained that they had to pay much higher extortion rates to the police than to the MQM, with the former monthly rate becoming a weekly one (ibid.). At the same time, the Rangers also demanded greater budgets from the government for salaries, equipment, schools, and health care for their families. The Rangers expanded their already extensive involvement in the lucrative water management and illicit water economy in the city. Yet, in May 2019, Karachi was in the midst of another water crisis or, more precisely, its continual water crisis hit one of its peaks.

CIVIL SOCIETY MOBILIZATION Similar to Cuidad Juárez, civil society in Karachi mobilized in response to the violence engulfing the city and debilitating the life of the community and business activities of the economic juggernaut of Pakistan. The civil society mobilization featured a mix of activism to defend human rights and significant business community efforts to protect the economic interests of the elite. Unlike in Cuidad Juárez, the business community’s response was not only to assist Pakistan’s law enforcement forces in beefing up their capacity, but also to support the creation of a private police force for the elite, supplementing and supplanting regular police forces in the city. While elites around the world react to intense urban violence by hiring private security companies, the Citizens’ Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), a de facto private elite police unit, stands in a class of its own.

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The Business Community Response: Private Police and Applause for Repression The CPLC was established in 1989.8 Despite its intent, it became appropriated by the city’s affluent, and began to function as their private police force. Since its inception, it has focused on extortion and kidnapping of Karachi’s rich. The CPLC successfully tackled extortion rackets in the city targeting the affluent during the 1990s. However, like other institutions in Karachi, the CPLC was not able to withstand the hardening political and ethnic pressures and divisions in the city.9 When it started to perform effectively, it became a valuable asset to compete over politically and to seek to appropriate. Thus, in the latter part of the 1990s, it became closely aligned with the MQM.10 My interviews with CPLC staff and advisory board members in 2016 found that the CPLC had developed a highly organized and sophisticated system for tracking criminal activity. Police stations reported their crime statistics to the CPLC on a daily basis, with the statistics computerized since the 1990s, unlike those police who still handle only pieces of paper. With a paid staff of 100 and an additional 80 volunteers, the CPLC has access to cellphone company data, knows which phone numbers are registered, and claims to have the capacity to authorize cell phone tracking. The CPLC has also developed extensive supplemental police capacity and essentially functions as a private police force for the rich. Not only does the Committee support the police and cooperate closely with the Rangers, but it also conducts independent investigations and surveillance, particularly during anti-kidnapping operations for the affluent and their political clients, as well as homicide investigations. From 1989 to 2017, the CPLC claimed to have handled over 1,300 cases; it primarily dealt with kidnapping cases of the city’s affluent residents. Overall, the business community endorsed both the CPLC’s efforts and the military’s involvement in operations, despite the extensive human rights violations.11 Pashtun Human Rights Movement The post-2016 decline in terrorist violence and the weakening of TTP in Karachi did not result in a reduction of dragnet repression by Pakistan’s law enforcement against the Pashtun community in Karachi. In 2018, the continual paranoid claim by law enforcement forces in Karachi that Pashtuns in the city were terrorist suspects hit a peak, as did pervasive police impunity. In January 2018, four young Pashtun men were killed by Karachi police in an encounter killing and were subsequently accused of belonging to a militant group (Ahmad 2018). The operation might easily have turned out to be only one of

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many such encounter killings, but it set off a large-scale human rights mobilization by the Pashtun community—the Pashtun Protection Movement (PTM). In the wake of widespread outrage at the killings, Anwar Rao was indicted on murder charges. Since 1984, he had been frequently suspended for encounter killings, but no charges ever stuck, and he always resumed his post within weeks of such suspensions. This time, however, the charges appeared to stick, causing Rao to leave Pakistan. After weeks in hiding, he was arrested.

MANIPULATING POLITICS: THE ELECTIONS OF IMRAN KHAN During the post-2013 Karachi operations, Pakistan’s military and its subordinate agencies, such as the Sindh Rangers, took to heart the criticism of their 1990s operations—unless politics in Karachi are cleaned up and defanged of their violent proxies, violence will return. Instead of diligently prosecuting political connections to murders, Pakistan’s military and the Rangers set out to destroy the MQM. Through 2017, the military and Rangers initially sought to split the MQM and create a new political power in Karachi’s former MQM mayor, Mustafa Kamal. The Rangers and police were also alleged to have pressured MQM members, operatives, and councilors to defect to Mustafa Kamal, with scores of MQM members joining Kamal’s new political party after being released from the Rangers’ detention (“Missing MQM” 2016). When Kamal failed to undermine MQM’s political base and outmaneuver its machinery, the military chose Imran Khan as its dark horse—in Karachi and nationally. A former world-renowned cricket player and an Oxford playboy, Imran Khan entered Pakistani politics in the 1990s, refashioning himself as a born-again Muslim, religious conservative, and opponent of U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States in counterterrorism operations. However, for two decades, his political party, Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), won barely a seat in regional or national elections, despite the military’s efforts. However, by 2013, Imran Khan’s Pakistan’s PTI gained sufficient support to become Karachi’s second largest party. During the July 2018 national elections in Pakistan, the military did everything possible to support the PTI and Imran Khan and sabotage the chances of its political rivals (“Military Machinations” 2018). Working also through the Rangers, it put pressure on various politicians and party operatives to defect to the PTI. The military warned journalists and media outlets to cover the PTI, not the MQM. A 2017 gerrymandering census, in which soldiers went door-to-door with census workers, undercounted the city’s population by between five and seven million. Ultimately, the PTI won 116 of the 272 votes in the National Assembly and, as the largest party, formed the government,

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with Imran Khan becoming prime minister. In Karachi, the PTI, assisted by the Rangers’ muscle, won 14 out of the city’s 21 National Assembly seats—a bruising defeat for the MQM.

ANTI-CRIME SOCIO-ECONOMIC MEASURES Unlike in Ciudad Juárez, no socio-economic policies were specifically designated as anti-crime measures in Karachi. The entire anti-crime effort was one of enforcing the law by repression. After his election, Imran Khan did promise a series of socio-economic measures to develop Karachi, his critical electoral base. In March 2019, he designated $1.15 billion for the city’s development, specifically ten public transportation projects and seven water delivery projects (Ur-Rehman 2019). Immediately, however, questions arose as to how equitably the projects would be distributed, and whether their implementation would follow Karachi’s typical pattern of rewarding one’s constituents at the expense of ethnic and political rivals. Meanwhile, Karachi’s MQM mayor, Waseen Akhtar, set out to change Karachi’s Economist ranking as the fourth least livable city in the world (“The Global Livability” 2018) by bulldozing Karachi’s informal Empress Market—with the justification that its informal stores and hawkers encroached on public and private property. Across Karachi, some 20 informal markets with over 11,000 shops and stalls were destroyed, affecting the livelihoods of tens of thousands in just two months, between November 2018 and January 2019 (Ahmad 2019). As long as Karachi remains “the drain of Pakistan, where all the poor and displaced wash up,” as a Pakistani security analyst put it,12 anti-crime socio-economic measures will be drowned by the larger forces of Karachi’s inequality.

CONCLUSION During the 2008–15 period, both Mexico’s Cuidad Juárez and Pakistan’s Karachi experienced a major flare-up of homicides and criminal violence. In both cases, organized crime and street violence played a significant role in the conflicts, but in Karachi the problem was further compounded by extensive use of violence by political parties, ethnic contestation, and widespread and complex terrorism and militancy. Both cities adopted similar approaches in response, which relied upon military and paramilitary forces to perpetrate violence and human rights violations. In Karachi, the military, paramilitary, and police forces also blatantly interfered with and reorganized the political organization of the city—dismantling the existing dominant party and engineering the rise of another political party. Both cities also featured significant civil society and business community

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mobilization, unsurprising as both are critical economic hubs of their countries. The civil society response expressed itself differently in each city, but deeper renegotiations of the social contract failed to materialize in either city. Ultimately, enforced repression of crime failed in Cuidad Juárez but worked in Karachi. The repression succeeded in Karachi only in the narrow sense of suppressing violence and terrorist attacks. Neither city managed to fully dismantle criminal networks or illicit economies. State capacity did not strengthen in either city. Fundamentally, neither city resolved the underlying causes of violence and instability or has been able (or willing) to mount effective police reform. In Cuidad Juárez, where violence declined through the victory of the Sinaloa Cartel over its rivals, the resulting “narcopeace” was vulnerable to changes in balances of power in the criminal market; it collapsed when the dominant criminal group (Sinaloa) experienced internal fragmenting and massive external challenges from other large criminal groups. Since 2016, violence in the city has escalated, and the city and national authorities are again struggling to reduce it. For Karachi, the fundamental question remains whether the stability and decline in violence will hold or whether, in a few years, it will return. While the business community in Karachi continues to applaud the paramilitary Sindh Rangers’ efforts, the question remains whether the “success” was worth the scope of egregious human rights violations. Neither city has addressed key urban deficiencies in access to water, infrastructure, and other services. The lack of such services not only alienates local populations from the state, but it also provides fertile ground for criminal groups and for a complex entanglement of criminal groups with politicians, political parties, and the cities’ bureaucracies. The extensive and long-term presence of the Rangers in Karachi also resulted in their involvement in the city’s illegal economies. Improving law enforcement strategies is key to securing cities and bonding citizens with states, but merely fixing these strategies is not enough. Law enforcement strategies also need to be set within a much broader and deeper framework of citizens’ security that strengthens the bonds between residents and the state in multiple dimensions. This includes emphasizing human rights, accountability of law enforcement, and effective, expansive, and equitable rule of law—and addressing the socio-economic needs of citizens so that they are not bound to illicit economies. The economic devastation of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which has decimated the economies of both Mexico and Pakistan, intensifies this important but crucial policy element.

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NOTES 1. Author’s interviews in Cuidad Juárez, Spring 2011. 2. Citizens’ Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), statistics on killings in Karachi, provided to author by the CPLC during her May 2016 fieldwork in Karachi and interviews with CPLC staff. 3. Author’s interviews with political party representatives and police officials, Karachi, May 2016. 4. Author’s interviews with former and current Pakistani police officials and security experts, Karachi and Islamabad, May 2016. 5. Author’s interviews with Pakistani civilian justice representatives, human rights activists, and active and retired military officials, Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore, May 2016. 6. Author’s interviews with human rights activists, Karachi, May 2016. 7. Ibid. 8. Author’s interviews with members of CPLC staff and advisory board and Karachi police officials, Karachi, May 2016. 9. Author’s interviews with security analysts and political party representatives, Karachi, May 2016. 10. Author’s interviews with business community representatives and current and former Karachi police officials, Karachi and Islamabad, May 2016. 11. Author’s interviews with members of Karachi’s business community, security analysts, and human rights activists, Karachi and Islamabad, May 2016. 12. Author’s interviews with a Pakistani security analyst, Washington, D.C., May 2018.

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“Joint Statement on U.S.–Mexico Mérida Initiative” (2011). U.S. Department of State. Available at: https://​2009​-2017​.state​.gov/​r/​pa/​prs/​ps/​2011/​04/​162245​ htm. “Karachi Operation Report: 2018 Records Higher Number of Rangers’ Operations” (2019). The Express Tribune. Available at: https://​tribune​.com​.pk/​story/​1878567/​ 1​- karachi​- operation​- report​- 2018​- records​- highest​- number​- rangers​- operations [accessed April 16, 2021]. “Karachi’s Ranking Improves Drastically on World Crime Index” (2019). Geo Television News. Available at: https://​www​.geo​.tv/​latest/​234985​-karachis​-ranking​ -improves​-drastically​-on​-world​-crime​-index [accessed April 16, 2021]. Khan, I. (2018). “Karachi’s Crime Changing Face,” Dawn, November 27. Khan, N. (2010). Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan: Violence and Transformation in the Karachi Conflict. New York: Routledge. Malik, M. and Siddiqui, N. (2019). “Exposure to Violence and Voting in Karachi, Pakistan,” United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Special Report No. 450. Available at: https://​www​.usip​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​2019​-07/​sr​-450​-exposure​_to​ _violence​_and​_voting​_in​_karachi​_pakistan​.pdf [accessed April 16, 2021]. Mallet, V. and Bokhari, F. (2014). “Karachi: Under Siege,” Financial Times, June 26. “Military Machinations” (2018). Economist. Available at: https://​www​.economist​.com/​ asia/​2018/​07/​19/​violence​-and​-claims​-of​-election​-rigging​-overshadow​-pakistans​ -election [accessed April 16, 2021]. “Missing MQM workers are being found at PSP offices” (2016). The News. Available at: https://​www​.thenews​.com​.pk/​print/​140142​-Missing​-MQM​-workers​-are​-being​ -found​-at​-PSP​-offices [accessed April 16, 2021]. Molzahn, C., Ferreira, O.R., and Shirk, D. (2013). Drug Violence in Mexico: Data and Analysis Through 2012, Justice in Mexico Project. Available at: http://​ justiceinmexico​ files​.wordpress​.com/​2013/​02/​130206​-dvm​-2013​-final​.pdf. Seelke, C.R. and Finklea, K. (2013). “U.S.–Mexican Security Cooperation: The Mérida Initiative and Beyond,” Congressional Research Service. Available at: https://​sgp​ fas​.org/​crs/​row/​R41349​.pdf. Tanoli, I. (2016). “Rangers Detain Ex-Chief of Fishermen Cooperative for 90 Days,” Dawn, March 17. Temple-Raston, N. (2013). “The Tony Soprano of Karachi: Gangster or Politician?” NPR. Available at: https://​www​ npr​.org/​2013/​01/​02/​168197733/​the​-tony​-soprano​ -of​-karachi​-gangster​-or​-politician. “The Global Livability Index 2018: A Free Overview” (2018). Economist: Intelligence Unit. Available at https://​pages​.eiu​.com/​rs/​753​-RIQ​-438/​images/​The​_Global​ _Liveability​_Index​_2018​.pdf. “The Merida Initiative: Expanding the U.S./Mexico Partnership” (2011). U.S. Department of State. Available at: https://​2009​-2017​.state​.gov/​p/​wha/​rls/​fs/​2012/​ 187119​htm [accessed April 16, 2021]. Ur-Rehman, Z. (2018). “Sindh Rangers Work to Clean Up Violent Karachi,” Pakistan Forward. Available at: https://​pakistan​.asia​-news​.com/​en​_GB/​articles/​cnmi​_pf/​ features/​2018/​09/​06/​feature​-02. Ur-Rehman, Z. (2019). “Karachi Shifts Focus to Development as Security Improves,” Pakistan Forward. Available at: https://​pakistan​.asia​-news​.com/​en​_GB/​articles/​ cnmi​_pf/​features/​2019/​04/​19/​feature​-01. Valencia, N. and Chacon, A. (2013). “Juárez Shedding Violent Image, Statistics Show,” CNN.com. Available at: http://​www​.cnn​.com/​2013/​01/​05/​world/​americas/​ mexico​-juarez​-killings​-drop/​index​ html.

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Verkaaik, O. (1994). A People of Migrants: Ethnicity, State and Religion in Karachi. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Verkaaik, O. (2004). Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. WikiLeaks (2009). SCENESETTER FOR SEPARATE MERIDA-RELATED VISITS. Available at: https://​wikileaks​.org/​plusd/​cables/​09MEXICO3093​_a​ html [accessed April 15, 2021].

10. Strain between two worlds: a sociological approach to the rise and fall of crime and violence in Guatemala City Daniel Núñez STRAIN THEORY, CRIME, AND VIOLENCE In 1938, sociologist Robert K. Merton shook the world of criminology by providing a theoretical framework to understand what he called “nonconformist conduct.” Rather than focusing on the individual characteristics that pushed certain people to transgress legal and moral codes, Merton set out to analyze the structural factors that contributed to some people’s rebelliousness and disregard for social norms. “Our primary aim,” he said, “lies in discovering how some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct” (Merton 1938, p. 672, original emphasis). Merton based his theoretical framework on two simple components: the cultural goals that a society defines for its members, which he referred to as “frame of aspirational reference,” and the legitimate ways that a society constructs to achieve those goals (Merton 1938, pp. 672–3). Accordingly, individuals could be classified depending on their acceptance or rejection of the cultural goals and means to achieve them. Given his emphasis on nonconformism, Merton was particularly interested in those individuals who accepted the culturally defined goals but rejected or lacked access to the legitimate means to achieve them, a cultural pattern he defined as “innovation” (Merton 1938, p. 676). Using as examples organized crime in the north side of Chicago and “[t]he extreme emphasis upon the accumulation of wealth as a symbol of success” in the American society of those days (Merton 1938, p. 675), Merton set out to explain the analytical usefulness of his theoretical framework. According to him, the fact that some observers had noted that certain “specialized areas of vice” were considered “normal” in this part of town was not due to some inherent deviant characteristic of its residents (Merton 1938, p. 678). Rather, 160

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the normalization of crime was a symptom of the unequal or lack of access to legitimate means to achieve the culturally defined goal of wealth accumulation. In his words, “On the one hand, [the residents of this area] are asked to orient their conduct toward the prospect of accumulating wealth and on the other, they are largely denied effective opportunities to do so institutionally” (Merton 1938, p. 679). Merton’s theory can be used to understand why crime and violence have risen and fallen in Guatemala City since the turn of the twenty-first century. During the first decade of the 2000s, Guatemala City (or la capital, as it is referred to by locals) became one of the most violent places on the planet. According to a report from those years (CCPSPJS 2011, p. 3), in 2010, the city was ranked seventh in a list of the 50 most violent cities in the world, just above notoriously violent places, like Mazatlán and Culiacán in Mexico, and Medellín and Cali in Colombia. The reasons for this upsurge of violence were many, but some of the main factors involved were the availability of firearms as a legacy of the Civil War (1960–96), an increase in street-gang violence, and a weak and ineffective justice system. Ten years later, in 2020, Guatemala City registered its lowest levels of violence in the last 20 years. While the low numbers that year can be partly attributed to the lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were the continuation of a downward trend that began at the end of 2009 that has not stopped. The reasons for this downward trend are also many, but the official narrative is that it responds to legal reforms and the strengthening of the systems of justice and criminal prosecution. Based on Merton’s theoretical insights, this chapter seeks to bring attention to the structural causes of the rise and fall of crime and violence in Guatemala City during the last 20 years. Without denying the importance of the legal and institutional reforms that have paved the way for the decline, the chapter suggests that two of the main structural factors associated with crime and violence in la capital, namely, poverty and absence of legitimate channels to reach culturally defined goals of success, have not been adequately addressed, and that the decline can be at least partially explained by security forces targeting the young population that is affected by these factors. The importance of highlighting these issues lies in realizing that, without addressing the structural causes of the problem, the recent peace in Guatemala City and the country may be a passing trend that can soon change its course. The following section gives a brief account of the growth of the city from the 1950s onwards and the parallel emergence of an “invisible city” of informal settlements. The chapter then describes the rise of crime and violence because of this growth, and the development of gated communities as a response to insecurity and an embodiment of ideals of wealth and success. A third and final section describes the pacification of the city partially because of legal reforms

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and the strengthening of law enforcement, which have led unintendedly to the overcrowding of prisons and the criminalization of the young urban poor.

URBAN GROWTH AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE INVISIBLE CITY Guatemala City’s population has grown considerably due to two distinguishable but continuous and overlapping waves during the past 70 years. Both waves were linked to different factors and had different consequences for city life. The first wave, which began around the 1950s, resulted from population growth, increased pressure on land in rural areas, and significant changes in the country’s economic structure. In 1960, Guatemala signed the General Treaty for Central American Integration with El Salvador and Nicaragua, which allowed the free flow of goods and services among the three countries. The treaty paved the way for industry to proliferate in Guatemala City, which in turn fostered a great deal of immigration from the countryside (AVANCSO 2003, pp. 103–5; Roberts 2010, pp. 590–93). In 1968, for example, one study noted that 90 percent of the manufacturing industry of the country was located in la capital and the neighboring municipalities of Mixco and Villa Nueva. By 1975, the same study observed that 83 percent of the industrial workers of the country lived in the city and its adjacent municipalities (Alvarado n.d., p. 61, cited in AVANCSO 2003, p. 104). Migration from the countryside to Guatemala City and bordering areas continued to grow at a steady pace during the following years, partly sustained by the damage caused by the 1976 earthquake and the exacerbation of violence during the country’s Civil War (AVANCSO 2003, p. 117; Roberts, 2010, p. 599). By 1981, the population of Guatemala, Mixco, and Villa Nueva had grown considerably. The most staggering case was Mixco, which in 1950 had a population of 11,784 people, but by 1981 had reached 197,741, an increase of 1,578 percent. In Guatemala City, the numbers went from 294,344 in 1950, to 754,243 in 1981, an increment of 156 percent (Martínez 2013, p. 103). A second wave of growth—one linked to neoliberal policies that promoted privatization of public services and deregulation to attract foreign investments—occurred around the mid-1990s (Roberts 2010, pp. 596–9). In this case, other municipalities, in addition to Guatemala, Mixco, and Villa Nueva, began to grow at a high rate. For example, from 1994 to 2002, the population of San Juan Sacatepéquez rose from 88,766 to 152,583 people, an increase of 72 percent. Likewise, the population of Villa Canales rose from 69,334 to 103,814, representing an increment of 50 percent (Table 10.1). Today, the “urban stain” of the city has extended over different portions of the 17 municipalities of the department of Guatemala, covers around 103 square

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miles, and is home to approximately 2.7 million people (Núñez and Lebau 2015, p. 21; National Population Census 2018). The wave of growth that began around the 1950s was relatively well-absorbed by the city. The industrial sector was able to employ many of the rural migrants, and those who did not make it had no issue with relying on self-employment (Roberts 2010, pp. 593–6). The opportunities offered by the city seemed to match well with the expectations of the working classes, and social mobility was seen as a possibility that depended significantly on personal effort. There was no sense of “relative deprivation,” even though la capital was already showing the signs of income inequality that would characterize it in the decades to come. Roberts noted the following about his fieldwork there during those years: [I]nequality, while clearly apparent in housing and lifestyles, was not perceived by my poor informants as a structure excluding them or their children from the possibility of obtaining education, employment and shelter. For rural migrants, the city offered opportunities for work, improved housing and education for their children. Among the first generation of migrants, poverty did not provoke violence or radical politics. (2010, p. 593)

After the urban population continued to grow during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and as the second distinguishable growth wave emerged in the mid-1990s, the situation began to change. Unlike in the previous wave, this time neoliberal policies led to a whole range of issues, from income inequality, informal employment, and residential segregation to the spread of gated communities and the rise of crime and violence (Roberts 2010, p. 597). According to one estimate, by 2002, only 34 percent of the people living in la capital were employed in upper and upper-middle occupational positions, while the rest (66 percent) were employed in lower-middle and lower ones (Martínez 2013, p. 239). Occupational stratification was noticeable within the city as well. While all neighborhoods had most people employed in lower-middle and lower occupations, some zones showed signs of increasing affluence and income inequality (Figure 10.1). Neighborhoods located around the main commercial and financial district (Zone 10) in the center had more people working in upper-middle and upper occupations than in other districts (Zones 14 and 15). These zones became the main residential neighborhoods of the wealthy. Some of the poorest areas were Zones 18, 19, and 21, located to the east and west of the city (Martínez 2013, p. 239). They were characterized by many people working in maquilas (textile plants) and living in shantytowns or informal settlements, which had emerged gradually during previous decades (AVANCSO 2003; Núñez and Lebeau 2015, p. 46).

3,373 20,655

28,380 2,146

San Juan Sacatepéquez

San Miguel Petapa

17,477

Source

3,021

6,013

8,612

8,717

5,882

9,533

9,500

3,329

6,985

9,225

10,714

7,682

18,932

13,297

10,481

12,934

26,412

32,763

8,078

43,116

31,774

42,082

129,878

700,504

1973

3,121

6,744

11,168

12,741

10,324

22,649

15,132

11,878

17,387

32,885

41,682

13,271

49,848

39,309

71,069

197,741

754,243

1981

Population statistics for Guatemala taken from Martínez (2013, p. 103) and INE (2018).

2,314

San José del Golfo

5,906

San Pedro Sacatepéquez 6,921

4,801

4,851

12,935

Palencia

Fraijanes

San Raymundo

15,418

7,451 7,844

San Pedro Ayampuc

San José Pinula

Chuarrancho

10,829

5,187

Santa Catarina Pinula

19,727

4,948 11,616

Chinautla

Amatitlán

35,594

26,896

7,428 20,057

Villa Nueva

Villa Canales

36,940

11,784

572,671

294,344

1964

Guatemala

1950

4,213

7,091

15,082

21,009

17,166

34,239

24,471

20,260

38,628

54,930

63,463

41,506

88,766

69,334

192,069

305,297

823,301

1994

Population growth in the department of Guatemala, by municipality, 1950–2018

Mixco

Table 10.1

5,156

10,101

22,615

31,503

30,701

47,705

47,278

44,996

63,767

82,870

95,312

101,242

152,583

103,814

355,901

403,689

942,348

2002

7,229

12,638

31,605

51,292

58,922

70,973

79,844

58,609

80,582

116,711

114,752

135,447

218,156

155,422

433,734

465,773

932,392

2018

164 Urban violence, resilience and security

Strain between two worlds

Note Source

165

Data for Zones 24 and 25 not available. Map by author, based on data by Martínez (2013, p. 239).

Figure 10.1

Percentage of people working in upper-level occupations in Guatemala City by municipal zones, 2002

While some settlements were formed as early as the 1940s (AVANCSO 2003, p. 108), and others emerged slowly during the following decades, recent surveys show that between 30 and 50 percent of the settlements in the municipalities of Guatemala, Mixco, and Villa Nueva were formed between 1991 and 2000 (Techo-Guatemala 2015, p. 49). The rest emerged during the migrations precipitated by the Civil War in the 1980s and, to a significantly lesser extent, during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (Techo-Guatemala 2015, p. 49). Numbers vary, but the most recent data show that, in the Metropolitan Area, there are somewhere between 300 and a little over 400 informal settlements, which house approximately 800,000 people (Núñez and Lebeau 2015, pp. 36–7; Méndez Villaseñor 2016; Techo-Guatemala 2015). In contrast, in 1968, there were approximately 68,000 people living in informal settlements in Guatemala City (Morán 1997, p. 16, cited in AVANCSO 2003, p. 108). Unlike favelas in Brazil, which oversee cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and are usually visible from the ground, most of the informal settlements in Guatemala City are located away from the public eye in the ravines that characterize the coun-

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try’s broken geography. Because of this, a recent study aptly refers to them as an “invisible city” (Núñez and Lebeau 2015, p. 65). Life in informal settlements is characterized by precarious conditions and everyday violence. A study from 2003 noted that many people living in these settlements struggled every day to get to their jobs and to have access to water and public transportation (AVANCSO 2003).1 In regard to violence, the study notes the following: Fights between violent youth street-gangs is a cause of permanent insecurity for the residents of popular urban neighborhoods. Walls present numerous testimonies of the force that this phenomenon is gaining. Attitudes and gestures of “mareros” [street-gang members] are extending to other sectors, like street children and the rural youth. (AVANCSO 2003, p. 91, author’s translation)2

Indeed, as the next section shows, violent youth street-gangs would become a major problem in Guatemala City in the following years.

CRIME, VIOLENCE, AND THE RISE OF GATED COMMUNITIES Precarious conditions in Guatemala City paved the way for crime and violence to reach unprecedented levels during the first decade of the new millennium. The lack of access to basic services, housing, and decent employment pushed many people, especially the young, to look for alternative routes to make a living. Petty theft and burglary began to occur more frequently and created a sense of generalized insecurity. In addition, many of the rural migrants who arrived in la capital during the 1990s and 2000s ended up working as security guards in a growing private security sector. The end of the Civil War in the mid-1990s left numerous former soldiers with no professional prospects outside security. A great number of them got involved in the unregulated and poorly supervised private security firms created by former military officials during those years (Argueta 2010). At the beginning of the 2000s, there were somewhere between 70 and 80 private security companies in the country, but by 2004, the number had increased to 170. Of these, only 82 were legally authorized (Táger 2002, p. 103, cited in Argueta 2010, p. 6; see also González-Izás 2017, pp. 38–9). To put numbers into perspective, in 2011, Small Arms Survey reported that Guatemala had approximately 120,000 private security guards, a number that far exceeded the 19,974 police officers registered in the country that year (Small Arms Survey 2011, p. 105). A major factor related to violence in Guatemala City was the emergence of street gangs. These groups were originally formed in the United States by the

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children of migrants who fled Central America during the 1970s and 1980s because of armed conflicts (USAID 2006, p. 6). Many of these immigrants were eventually deported during the mid-1990s because of tough approaches on crime and immigration (Arana 2005, pp. 100–101; USAID 2006, p. 6). According to one estimate, “In 1996, around 38,000 immigrants were deported [to Asia and Latin America] after committing a crime; by 2003, the number had jumped to almost 80,000” (Papachristos 2005, p. 53). Once back, these youngsters reproduced street-gang culture in their receiving countries, and eventually morphed into the Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang or Barrio 18. By the mid-2000s, street gangs in El Salvador had approximately 30,000 members; the number in Honduras approximated 40,000 (Arana 2005, p. 101). In Guatemala, a report from USAID based on data from the police claimed that the number of street-gang members ranged widely between 14,000 and 165,000 (USAID 2006, p. 6). With these factors in place, homicides and other types of crimes began to soar. In Guatemala City, according to police statistics,3 the average number of monthly homicides rose from 57 at the end of 2001, to 106 at the end of 2009. In Mixco, the upsurge was from 14 to 31, and in Villa Nueva, from 7 to 28. Overall, from January 2001 to December 2009, 14,029 people were killed in these three municipalities. In the city alone, 9,528 homicides were registered during that period. Within Guatemala City, there were some neighborhoods that recorded more homicides than others (Figure 10.2). According to official numbers, almost half of the killings that occurred in la capital during those years happened in Zones 18, 12, 7, and 6, which together accounted for 4,702 of the total number. To be sure, these numbers are dependent on local populations. In Zone 18, for example, there were 1,683 violent deaths during that period, the highest number of all, but that Zone also has the largest population in the entire city. The rest of the homicides were distributed in other zones, particularly in working-class neighborhoods with large numbers of informal settlements. In terms of rates, the patterns change. The highest rates were registered in Zones 4 and 9, which are mostly commercial areas that serve as passage routes to residential neighborhoods. Zone 4 is also home to La Terminal, the biggest public street-market in Guatemala, where approximately USD 4 million are exchanged every day between 40,000 merchants and thousands of customers (Gamarro 2017). Newspaper reports about La Terminal have noted the presence of a vigilante group that calls itself Los ángeles justicieros (The Avenger Angels), and whose members are allegedly paid by merchants to secure the market and have repeatedly been accused of killing alleged wrongdoers (Patzán 2015). The surge of homicides during the first decade of the 2000s was partially related to street-gang extortion rings that targeted private homes, small

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Source

Map by author. Data adapted from Policía Nacional Civil (2001–20).

Figure 10.2

Homicides in Guatemala City, by municipal zone, 2001–09

businesses, and the public transportation system. From December 2004 to December 2009, the number of extortion reports increased from a monthly average of around 10, to an average of 242. The increase, however, did not occur gradually: the numbers skyrocketed around May 2009, and in a period of seven months, reached unprecedented levels (Diálogos 2020). Commentators have attributed the great increase of extortion reports in 2009 to legal and institutional reforms within the police and criminal prosecution systems, which may have created incentives for people to file complaints against them and have led to the targeting of the public transportation system (CIEN 2014, p. 7; Espinoza 2018). In 2013, Guatemala City had around 3,000 buses; the majority (the so-called “red buses”) were owned by approximately 1,325 individuals organized in 28 cooperatives (Escalón 2013; Ramírez et al. 2014, p. 6). Red buses were particularly vulnerable to extortion rings and street-gang violence due to the way the cooperative system was set up; two or three individuals were often responsible for one to three buses that covered specific and predictable routes, a model that turned both buses and owners into easy targets (Escalón 2013; Ramírez et al. 2014, p. 6). From 2007 to April 2014, one estimate, based mostly on newspaper reports, claimed that almost

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1,500 people—bus drivers, helpers, and passengers—were violently killed by street-gang members (Ramírez et al. 2014, p. 9). The rising spiral of violence during the first decade of the new millennium led to the emergence of “gated communities,” that is, “residential areas with restricted access in which normally public spaces are privatized. They are security developments with designated perimeters, usually walls or fences, and controlled entrances that are intended to prevent penetration by nonresidents” (Blakely and Gail Snyder 1997, p. 2). Usually located in wealthy zones, these communities are separated from the rest of the city by security gates, which frequently house heavily armed guards, and by perimeter walls, which in some cases have razor wire and surveillance cameras. A study from 2007 showed that, out of 30 housing projects listed in a single housing advertisement chosen randomly from a newspaper in Guatemala City, 20 advertised security gates and nine promoted perimeter walls (Bravo Soto 2007, p. 211). Gated communities tend to have a detrimental effect on a city’s public life (Blakely and Gail Snyder 1997). Their hermetic nature fragments the city’s public space, which leads people to stop feeling part of a broader community in which they have rights and responsibilities. In Guatemala City, this sense of alienation is strengthened by the fact that there are almost no pedestrian public spaces or public parks, and that middle- and upper-class individuals rarely use the public transportation system. The city also has a significant number of enclosed shopping malls, some of which house expensive restaurants and movie theaters, which turns them into peculiar sites of what could be called gated entertainment. The distribution leads to important sectors of the urban population feeling out of touch with the city in which they live; it also causes the reproduction of inequalities, as there are virtually two societies that live on the same space but barely or only superficially interact with each other on a daily basis. As González-Izás puts it, “The problem is that ‘islands’ are now being formed and they affect integration, increase isolation, and contribute to the reproduction of crime as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” (2017, p. 57). Not only do gated communities separate the middle and upper classes from the rest of the population, but they also represent the ideals of wealth and success of Guatemalan urban society. The most “exclusive” communities are set in terrains with scenic greenery and are sometimes identified with names completely detached from local history that evoke faraway idyllic lands surrounded by nature (“Sausalito,” “Westfalia,” “La Cañada,” “Siena San Isidro”). The epitome of this sense of class alienation is the city within the city called “Cayalá.” Built in the mid-2000s, but planned for almost 30 years,4 Cayalá is a 34-acre urban project located within Guatemala City that includes all essential amenities: apartment buildings, offices, supermarkets, sports and medical facilities, restaurants, movie theaters, and a church. The

170

Urban violence, resilience and security

city is planned for its residents to wander beyond its walls as little as possible, to prevent them from seeing the victims of rampant crime and the violence that surrounds them. With out-of-tune, ostentatious architecture that brings to mind an idealized Europe with a majestic Greco-Roman history, Cayalá is virtually an embodiment of a desire to not live in Guatemala City; this image is reinforced by exorbitant rent and housing prices that keep almost everyone, from the middle and working classes, to the poor and marginalized, from moving in. Overall, the project is planned to spread across 870 acres, 25 times the size that it is today.

PACIFICATION AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE YOUNG URBAN POOR As the first decade of the new millennium came to an end, Guatemala City’s crime and violence levels began to give signs of a slow but steady decline. After reaching 109 homicides in 2010, the monthly average descended to 66 in 2012, 51 in 2015, and 48 in 2018. In 2020, because of the lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the average was 32, a significant reduction of more than 70 percent in comparison with 2010. The decline was registered not only in the city but in the country as well. In fact, in 2020, the country recorded the lowest levels of violence of the last 35 years (Mendoza 2021). While the country has experienced significant reductions in its violence levels, some neighborhoods in Guatemala City still face significant challenges. Zone 18 registered 3,127 homicides from 2010 to 2020, which represent almost 20 percent of the total number documented in the city during that period. Zones 1, 6, 7, and 12 account for almost 40 percent of the violent deaths in those years. The remaining cases are distributed in significantly lower percentages in the rest of the areas. The patterns of violence in Guatemala City roughly coincide with the presence of street gangs in different neighborhoods (Figure 10.3). According to a recent investigative report (Insightcrime 2018), the city has some areas where one of the two main gangs is predominantly present. Cliques of the MS-13 are present in many zones of the eastern part of the city (Zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 19) and in Zones 24 and 25 in the west. Cliques of the Barrio 18, on the other hand, are present in Zones 14 and 16. Both gangs appear in other neighborhoods, like Zones 5, 6, 12, 13, 18, and 21. Competition and rivalry around extortion and drug sales may explain some of the high levels of violence that still define these neighborhoods. Some commentators partially attribute the decrease in homicide rates in Guatemala City to the implementation of a new public transportation system in 2010 called the Transurbano (Ramírez et al. 2014; Cabría and Villagrán 2018). In sharp contrast to the red buses that often fall victim to the extortions

Strain between two worlds

Source

171

Map by author, based on data from Insightcrime (2018).

Figure 10.3

Neighborhoods with presence of both gangs (MS-13/Barrio 18) in Guatemala City, 2018

and violence of street gangs, the Transurbano comprises several relatively well-equipped buses that have cameras, use prepaid boarding cards, and have clearly defined boarding stations across the city. The system was designed to shield buses from the attacks of street gangs, as no cash is exchanged between drivers and passengers, and boarding stations are supposed to be constantly monitored through surveillance cameras. Another view, often put forward by public officials and analysts, is that violence in Guatemala decreased because of legal reforms and the strengthening of the security and criminal prosecution systems (Baires 2014; International Crisis Group 2018). Accordingly, these measures, facilitated in part by the Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), fostered an integrative approach to crime, as it opened up legal possibilities for investigators and prosecutors to more effectively carry out their jobs, strengthened technical capacities, facilitated coordination among institutions, and paved the way for qualified individuals to lead major processes. One component of these reforms, for example, was the Law against Organized Crime, passed by Congress in 2006. Among other things, this law explicitly defined extortion

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of buses as a crime; to investigate criminal organizations, security forces employed “undercover operations” and “surveilled deliveries” and “telephone and other media interceptions.” Another component frequently mentioned by analysts is the use of sophisticated techniques to examine evidence, such as forensic analysis of videos, ballistics, and DNA studies. Measures such as these, combined with other institutional changes and strengthened capacities, enabled investigators from different institutions to tackle crime patterns and the criminal networks behind them from a technical point of view, as opposed to investigators with little or bad training treating each homicide as a single occurrence. The presence of the CICIG also seems to have played a role, as it may have generated a sense of support among investigators and prosecutors. A report by International Crisis Group argues the following: Overall, the safer streets since 2007 can be attributed—at least in part—to better methods of investigation, increased interinstitutional collaboration, and the belief, which the CICIG’s presence has fostered, that criminals can be found and convicted. One prosecutor interviewed by Crisis Group said, “Now we feel we can really do our job.” (2018, p. 13)

Putting aside the difficulties involved in investigating the effects that these measures had on overall crime and violence trends and patterns, and without denying their possible contributions, an aspect that is often overlooked is that these measures may have also had unintended consequences for the country. For one, the state’s record of human rights violations is a constant reminder of the possibility that governments can use their repressive measures against their own populations. In 2015, for example, government officials admitted in public that they had used cameras, drones, and face-recognition software to identify individuals during protests against the now former president and vice-president. In a country that experienced a 36-year-long Civil War that pitted civil society and security forces against each other, the risk of criminal investigators equipped with new technologies going awry is always present. Another example of an unintended consequence is the overcrowding of prisons and the subsequent reduction of rehabilitation prospects for inmates (Figure 10.4). The emphasis on the effective investigation and prosecution of crime has not been sufficiently accompanied by other efforts in these areas. According to the latest data, Guatemala has one of the highest levels of prison overcrowding in the world, with a capacity to hold approximately 6,800 individuals, but a current prison population of a little over 25,000 (World Prison Brief 2021). This means that the official capacity is surpassed by more than 370 percent. In fact, Guatemala ranks fourth out of the 20 countries with the highest levels of prison overcrowding on the planet, located just beneath the Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, and Haiti. Although this overcrowding

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173

was already noticeable at the beginning of the new millennium, a marked population increase started between 2008 and 2010, around the time when the legal and institutional reforms mentioned before began to take place. From that point on, the number of inmates has continued to grow at a high rate. A more pressing issue relates to the question of who has been imprisoned during the past ten years. According to the 2018 national census, which included a count of the prison population, most of the adult people who were serving time that year were young, urban Ladino (“not indigenous”) men between the ages of 18 and 35 who had completed just a few years of education. When compared to the national population, the great disproportions suggest that there is a systematic bias toward individuals who fit this profile, a pattern that may have something to do with the way they are perceived by law enforcement officials in terms of class and race/ethnicity (Núñez 2021). In addition, more than 40 percent of the inmates were born in the department of Guatemala, a characteristic that may reflect the concentration of law enforcement agents in the Metropolitan Area and the high levels of crime and violence of some of its municipalities.

Source

Chart by author, based on data from INE (2018). See also Núñez (2021).

Figure 10.4

National population vs. prison population in Guatemala, 2018

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Urban violence, resilience and security

In the absence of more integral approaches to crime and violence that consider the structural underpinnings of the problem, the growing incarceration trend, with its possible biases, will continue to grow and become unsustainable in the future. Prisons are already a major source of crime and violence in Guatemala. In just one prison, for example, half of all extortions that occur in the country are allegedly coordinated by inmates (Studdert-Kennedy 2019). As the opening paragraphs of this chapter suggest, in a highly unequal society that emphasizes material gain as the definition of success, but at the same time does not provide for legitimate means to reach that ideal, crime and violence become daily expressions of “innovative” ways to surpass relative deprivations. Policies that emphasize incarceration without taking other aspects into consideration are not really dealing with the problem; instead, by avoiding it, they are laying the foundation for a worse scenario in the future.

NOTES 1. See picture descriptions with no page numbers between pages 91 and 95. 2. The quote comes from a picture three pages after page 91, which has no page number. 3. All data on homicides come from National Civil Police datasets. They can be found in the website of Asociación Civil Diálogos, available at: https://​dialogos​ .org​.gt/​. 4. See Cayala’s history in its website, available at: https://​cayala​.com​.gt/​nosotros/​ historia/​.

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Roberts, Bryan R. (2010). “Moving On and Moving Back: Rethinking Inequality and Migration in the Latin American City.” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 42, No. 3: 587–614. Small Arms Survey (2011). The Small Arms Survey 2011: States of Security (Geneva: Small Arms Survey). Studdert-Kennedy, Phoebe (2019). “Half of Extortion Calls in Guatemala Are Made from One Prison.” Insightcrime, December 30. Available at: https://​insightcrime​ .org/​news/​brief/​extortion​-calls​-guatemala​-prison/​. Techo-Guatemala (2015). Censo de asentamientos informales (Guatemala: Techo). USAID (2006). Central America and Mexico Gang Assessment: Annex 2: Guatemala Profile (Guatemala: USAID). World Prison Brief (2021). Online database. Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London. Available at: https://​ www​.prisonstudies​.org/​contact.

11. Criminal victimization and social resilience in Latin America Eduardo Moncada INTRODUCTION Whereas research on violent conflict in the Global South has historically focused on rural settings, cities are now focal points in the surge of criminal violence washing across developing world regions. Criminal violence poses important challenges for political stability, economic development, and social cohesion (Moncada 2013). Levels of urban violence can vary dramatically not only across cities but within them as well. For example, despite Colombia’s depiction as a historically violent country, its major cities exhibit remarkable diversity in levels of criminal violence when cast over time both individually and in a comparative lens against each other (Moncada 2016). Furthermore, the prevalence of criminal violence can vary dramatically across individual neighborhoods located within the same city (Arias 2017) as well as across non-jurisdictional “micro-zones,” such as adjacent city streets (Groff, Weisburd, and Yang 2010). Existing research provides vital insights into the causes and consequences of urban criminal violence. Yet, threaded throughout this research is an assumption that the relationship between criminals and citizens is a one-time event where criminals victimize citizens who are defenseless and largely resigned to their fates. This assumption has profound implications for our empirical understanding of criminal victimization and social resilience and, in turn, our theorization of related dynamics and political consequences. First, the assumption of passivity complicates our ability to see victimization as a relationship between victims and criminals. Within these relations, victims and criminals contest material rents as well as social and political forms of power. Second, recognizing that victimization can be a political process invites us to broaden our conceptualization of victims’ behaviors— and, in particular, to consider whether and how victims exercise agency in the context of their victimization. Finally, a focus on the agency of victims of crime generates new opportunities to build analytical bridges and dialogue 177

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with the broader literature on social resilience in contexts of adversity and systemic shocks. To address these issues, this chapter proceeds in several steps. In the next section, I synthesize insights from existing research on crime relevant for theorizing resilience in the face of criminal victimization. The second section starts to make a case for building on existing research to develop a broader conceptualization of civilian responses to criminal victimization. This section draws a contrast between one-time and recurring crimes. The third section builds on Albert Hirschman’s (1970) influential typology of responses to organizational decline—exit, voice, and loyalty—as an organizing frame upon which to construct a typology of the menu of choices that victims face vis-à-vis their criminal victimizers. The fourth section then conceptualizes ideal-type forms of social resilience along two dimensions: whether victims use violence and citizens’ use of violence. I subsequently illustrate the contrasting forms of social resilience using empirical evidence from across Latin America. I conclude this chapter with a summary of the argument and outline key questions for future research on the ways that order and governance are built in settings of crime, violence, and insecurity.

EXISTING VIEWS OF CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The worrisome growth in levels of criminal violence in the developing world is spurring important research on its patterns and consequences. Analyses on the dynamics of criminal violence identify a range of potential explanatory factors, including socioeconomic inequality (Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza 1998), state capacity (Bergman 2018; Yashar 2018), fragmented power across levels of government (Durán-Martínez 2017), political competition (Snyder and Durán-Martínez 2009; Trejo and Ley 2020), and criminals fighting for control over territory and illicit markets (Magaloni et al. 2020). These lines of research shed light on patterns of criminal violence conceptualized in terms of level, modality, and distribution across space and time. The focus on explaining patterns of criminal violence, however, often relegates civilian victims to the background as static actors. Certainly, experiencing criminal violence can have a paralyzing effect on victims in settings where organized criminal groups hold territorial control and have captured the core state institutions that we would normally expect citizens to turn to in search of order and justice. Auyero and Sobering (2019, p. 81) vividly capture this reality in their ethnographic analysis of drug-related violence in an impoverished neighborhood

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in Buenos Aires, Argentina, when they interview a woman whose son was murdered amid local gang violence: We all know who killed him, but the state prosecutor wants witnesses. And who is going to be a witness? The kids [who know] are afraid because they know that the cops are complicit with the dealers. Nobody wants to talk, nobody wants to report. Everybody knows who killed my son, but nobody talks.

But assuming that victims lack agency prematurely undercuts our ability to conceptualize forms of social resilience that victims pursue in the face of criminal victimization. This then hampers theorizing the conditions that result in these distinct forms of social resilience as well as their consequences for order and governance. The traditional emphasis on state–criminal relations, in other words, needs to be expanded to include victims as actors that contribute to the shaping of local security dynamics. Here, research on people taking the law into their own hands provides a useful starting point. Scholars point to limited state capacity or poor governance (Brown 1975; Abrahams 1998; Buur and Jensen 2004; Jung and Cohen 2020), marginalization (Goldstein 2003, pp. 22–43; Godoy 2004, p. 623), and inequality (Phillips 2017) as factors that can lead people to engage in vigilantism. However, the empirical focus in this line of research largely eschews settings where armed criminal actors hold territorial control—a dynamic evident in many parts of Latin America.1 Drawing this distinction is vital because territorial control rests on a foundation of careful and constant monitoring of the local population as well as of potential incursions by state actors and rival criminal groups—all for the existential task of sustaining territorial control that provides the basis for the operation of a range of illicit markets. Such territorial control is a major barrier to social resilience as it increases the risk of punishment at the hands of criminal actors, which suggests that the mechanisms and processes of social resilience likely vary across empirical contexts that differ in levels and forms of criminal territorial control. Likewise, the emphasis on the absence or weakness of the state in explaining civilian mobilization in response to victimization struggles to explain why some victims’ practices of social resilience include close coordination with police and political authorities. There is a growing dialogue between research on criminal and political violence (Kalyvas 2015). Scholars analyze how exposure to different types of violence affects political behavior, including voting and civic engagement (Bellows and Miguel 2009; Blattman 2009; Bateson 2012; Trelles and Carreras 2012; Bauer et al. 2016; Ley 2017). These analyses, however, offer limited traction for conceptualizing and theorizing how victims of crime interact with their criminal victimizers. This reflects a tendency in extant studies to conceptualize victimization as a one-time act where the extent of the

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interaction between victims and criminals starts and ends with the crime. But recognizing that the process of victimization can vary across distinct types of crimes highlights an opportunity to extend our understanding of the political consequences of criminal victimization. These interactions are inherently political because they entail contestation between two actors—victims and criminals—over material and non-material sources of power, which are the currency of politics. I expand on this point in the next section.

DISAGGREGATING CRIME: ONE-TIME VERSUS RECURRING VICTIMIZATION In this section, I propose that we can disaggregate crime into two overarching types: one-time acts and recurring processes. This move alerts us to the fact that the political consequences of crime can vary across different types of crime. More specifically, this conceptual move provides the groundwork for developing a broader understanding of the full range of choices that victims face vis-à-vis their victimizers. Different types of crime may entail very different experiences between victims and their victimizers. Existing studies tend to focus on either lethal criminal violence or generate indices that bundle a range of criminal acts, from vehicle thefts to robberies to home break-ins. These types of crime lend themselves to enumeration that offers vital knowledge for our scholarly and policy-relevant understandings of crime. But this conventional focus on “one-time” criminal acts, where the interaction between the victim and the perpetrator is primarily limited to the act itself, overlooks forms of victimization that are recurring. I understand recurring criminal victimization to entail repeated criminal offenses committed by the same criminal actor against the same victim. Recurring victimization can take place over variable periods of time, from weeks to months to years. Drawing this distinction reveals why it is problematic to generalize the political consequences of crime based solely on the study of “one-time” variants of crime. For example, intimate partner violence (IPV) is among the most prevalent forms of crime in the world. In Latin America between one-fifth and two-fifths of “ever partnered women” have been victims of violence at the hands of an intimate partner (Yagoub 2017). As Gelles (1997, p. 75) states bluntly: “Wife-beating is a pattern, not a single event, in most violent households.” One study in the United States found that among female victims of physical violence carried out by their partners, the average period of victimization for rape victims was nearly four years, while two-thirds of male victims of physical assault indicated victimization by the same partner lasting an average of 3.6 years (Rand and Saltzman 2003, p. 137).

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Other forms of crime commonly deployed by armed criminal groups in Latin America can also recur over time. Criminal extortion—where an actor threatens or uses violence to extract rents from a population in return for the promise of protection from external threats and itself—is a widespread but largely understudied dimension of the criminal landscape in Latin America (Magaloni et al. 2020, p. 1165). While forms of extortion can vary in modality, substantial portions of the targets of extortion in Latin America experience it as a systemic and ongoing interaction between themselves and criminal actors. This means that like IPV, the recurrent extraction of money under threat of violence is actually embedded in a broader set of ongoing contacts between victims and criminals. Contrasting one-time and recurring forms of criminal victimization invites further analysis into the process of criminal victimization, specifically the ways in which interactions between victims and criminals offer spaces for the former to pursue distinct types of social resilience.

A TYPOLOGY OF VICTIMS’ RESPONSES TO CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION Albert Hirschman’s (1970) influential framework of responses to organizational decline provides a useful heuristic tool to typologize the ways that victims respond to recurring criminal victimization. Figure 11.1 presents the resulting typology in schematic form.

Figure 11.1

Typology of response to criminal victimization

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Exit can be defined as a victim’s effort to end their victimization by fleeing beyond the grasp of their criminal perpetrator. For an individual residing in a territory controlled by a street gang, moving to a different neighborhood within the same city or another city altogether may offer an escape from undergoing repeated victimization and the broader influence that the gang may exert over everyday aspects of local life, such as the types of clothes people are allowed to wear, the ability of residents to leave and enter the neighborhood at will, or the individuals with whom residents are allowed to interact. Migratory flows out of Central America are instructive examples. Hiskey et al. (2018) show that being the victim of a crime in Central America increases the probability an individual will plan to migrate in the near future. Ríos (2014, p. 208) finds that every additional case of extortion per 100,000 inhabitants in Mexico increases migration out of the country by approximately thirteen people. Hirschman defined loyalty as “the reluctance to exit in spite of disagreement with the organization of which one is a member” (1970, p. 98). Victims may tolerate their continued victimization out of fear of reprisal for attempts to exit or exercise voice, but also as a way to maintain the benefits associated with the relationship with the criminal group. For example, studies of child sexual abuse (Jülich 2005) find that victims refrain from denouncing their victimization out of fear of reprisal and concern about the potential loss of benefits from other aspects of the relationship, including emotional and material benefits. Similar scenarios occur at larger scales of analysis. In Jamaica, powerful criminal actors, or “dons,” engage in criminal violence within impoverished communities to whom they also provide valuable goods and services (see Arias, Chapter 6 in this book). Surveys find that residents of these communities positively perceive dons, despite their violent behaviors, precisely because victims can extract material benefits from the criminal actors in conditions of resource scarcity (Harbers et al. 2016). This alerts us to how dependency on a victimizer in a setting where the state’s capacity to provide public goods is limited can produce complex relations among victims, criminals, and states. Tolerance of victimization may also reflect cost–benefit analyses given broader structural conditions. For example, in Eastern Europe, business firms tolerate extortion by armed non-state actors because the state is unable to provide the same level of security and enforcement of contracts necessary for firms to compete and survive (Varese 2001). But can victims exercise voice vis-à-vis their criminal perpetrators? Part of the existing literature on the political consequences of crime shows that criminal victimization can shape victims’ political activities—though studies have not established whether or the degree to which victims use these political activities as a way to specifically seek redress for their personal victimization or, alternatively, broader conditions of insecurity associated with crime. Yet, by focusing on the agency that victims can exercise amidst their own victim-

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ization, we can broaden our lens of what counts as “political” in settings of criminal violence to include the interactions between victims and their criminal victimizers. By locating the political consequences of crime only in the relationship between citizens and the state, the emphasis on one-time criminal acts assumes that perpetrators drop out of the analysis after the crime takes place. However, criminal perpetrators can also be regular actors in the process of victimization if we consider recurring types of victimization. In the latter, the criminal offenses both result from and shape a broader set of interactions between victim and offender. To analyze the ways in which victims exercise voice in the context of their own victimization, I turn to the concept of social resilience.

SOCIAL RESILIENCE AND CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION Social resilience refers to “the capacity of groups of people bound together in an organization, class, racial group, community or nation to sustain and advance their well-being in the face of challenges to it” (Hall and Lamont 2013, p. 2). The basis of social resilience is the strength of social ties between members of a social group and the resources these ties make available to members of said group—otherwise known as social capital.2 Analyses of social resilience focus on how social ties enable populations to engage in collective action that allows them to weather systemic shocks. Hence, researchers have explored how social resilience enables social groups to navigate economic scarcity (Hall and Lamont 2013) as well as rebuild in the aftermath of natural disasters (Aldrich 2012). Yet, less research has been carried out on social resilience in the context of criminal victimization.3 In this section I argue that we can conceptualize these forms of social resilience along two dimensions: whether or not victims use violence and the role that the state plays in victims’ social resilience. Violence as Part of Social Resilience? The notion that social resilience can entail the use of violence may seem antithetical to conventional views of social resilience as a normative lay positive force. Researchers have certainly acknowledged the potential “dark side” of social capital. In a powerful early critique of the assumption that social capital, robust civil society, and strong democratic governance went hand in hand, Berman (1997) showed that a high level of social capital embodied in a strong civil society can, under certain conditions, lead to the downfall of democratic rule. I build on this point to argue that resilience in response to criminal victimization can also entail the use of violence in ways that are decidedly undemocratic and erode the rule of law, but nonetheless conceptually still fall

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under the construct of a form of social resilience. Therefore, overlooking the use of violence as a potential component of social resilience prematurely limits our understanding of the full conceptual and empirical range of potential ways in which social groups mobilize to confront criminal violence. State Participation in Social Resilience Analyses of social resilience emphasize the role that social ties between members of a population play in their ability to weather a challenge or shock. These ties bind the community together and underwrite the coordination and execution of collective action as it mobilizes. However, even when social groups count on strong social ties, the particular form that the collective action they pursue takes can vary across groups depending on broader structural conditions. One such condition is the nature of the population’s ties to the state. As O’Donnell (1993) has argued, a defining characteristic of the democracies that emerged from the third wave of democratization in the late 20th century is uneven access to the state across territory and social groups. Access to the state can differ substantively along lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other identities. Hence, combining a focus on the internal ties that bind a social group and the nature of the group’s external connections to the state can provide insights into the specific form social resilience will take. The intersection between victims’ use of violence and whether they work with the state yields four ideal-type strategies of social resilience as shown in Table 11.1. Private vigilantism refers to cases where the state does not participate in victims’ response, but victims do use violence as part of their effort to stop criminal victimization.4 However, the state can be an ally in victims’ violent manifestations of social resilience amid criminal victimization. Public– private vigilantism refers to cases where victims’ response to criminal victimization features extra-legal violence that is jointly produced between themselves and the state. In these instances, victims and states cooperate to advance targeted extra-legal violence against criminal actors. Yet not all forms of social resilience are violent. Expressions of social resilience can also be non-violent while varying in their level of state participation. Formal resistance can be thought of as a strategy of social resilience where victims refrain from violence and instead coordinate with the state through legal channels, specifically via the criminal justice system, in an effort to stop criminal victimizers. Table 11.1 also identifies an intriguing final form of social resilience in response to criminal victimization where the state does not coordinate with victims and the latter refrain from violence. Building on James Scott’s (1985) notion of “everyday resistance,” here victims use subtle tactics and strategies to directly negotiate the dimensions of their victimiza-

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Table 11.1

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Manifestations of social resilience in response to criminal victimization Victims use violence as part of social resilience

Victims work with the state as part of social resilience

Yes

No

Yes

Public–private vigilantism

Formal resistance

No

Private vigilantism

Everyday resistance

tion with the criminal perpetrators but without necessarily being able to end victimization. In the remainder of this section, I expand on each of these ideal-type strategies of social resilience against criminal victimization by drawing on illustrative cases from across Latin America. Private Vigilantism: Self-Defense Groups in Mexico Amid the drug-related violence in Mexico since the early 2000s, competing drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) supplemented their revenue streams from the narcotics trade with a variety of other illicit markets, including extortion. In the Mexican state of Michoacán, the Knights Templar (Caballeros Templarios) DTO engaged in widespread extortion, particularly in the region’s lucrative agricultural sectors. The DTO invoked varied forms of violence, including threatening family members, to extract rents from their victims. Starting in 2013, however, victims in parts of Michoacán mobilized to end extortion and related violence through private vigilantism (Fuentes Díaz and Paleta Pérez 2015; Osorio, Weintraub, and Schubiger 2016). To carry out private vigilantism, victims in municipalities across Michoacán established armed self-defense groups (grupos de autodefensa) that mobilized collectively to end extortion. These groups then targeted members of the DTO for varied forms of violence, including lethal violence, assault, “arrest,” and disappearances. In some cases, victims also targeted key state institutions, namely municipal police forces, as part of their extra-legal efforts to end extortion. Victims did so because they viewed municipal police as controlled by criminal actors. For example, municipal police were sometimes tasked by the Knights Templar to help carry out key parts of criminal extortion, including “arresting” victims who failed to pay the criminal tax and turning them over to the DTO for punishment. In such instances, victims perceived that not only could they not enlist a core state institution to help stop their victimization, but that they actually had to neutralize this element of the state as part of their efforts to confront the DTOs (Moncada 2022).

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Public–Private Vigilantism: Victims and Police in El Salvador Despite democratization in the second-half of the 20th century, extra-judicial violence by state security institutions under democracy remains a critical concern in Latin America. Osse and Cano (2017) find a positive correlation between national homicide rates and the proportion of killings attributed to a country’s police force, suggesting that as disorder deepens, the police are more inclined to turn to measures beyond the rule of law. Brinks (2007) claims that an informal institution—a social norm that sanctions the killing of young and poor men by the state—underwrites extra-judicial violence by police in Brazil. Also focusing on Brazil, Ahnen (2007) argues that extra-legal police violence results from “pro-order” political coalitions that weaken institutional oversight over the police while adopting security policies that prioritize the use of coercive force. We can complement the emphasis on factors that shape the state’s supply of coercive force by also considering civilians’ demand for state violence. As Huggins (2000, p. 117) suggests, in parts of Latin America the provision of order by the police is not a public good but instead has become “increasingly commodified into a ‘free market’ of social control services” available to those actors who demand the service and count on conditions to secure it. Attention to the demand side of the state violence equation enables us to consider how public–private vigilantism can emerge as a form of social resilience by victims of crime—a dynamic that is particularly evident in El Salvador. Among the main criminal organizations in El Salvador are gangs called maras; the two main ones are the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Barrio 18. Both evolved during the 1990s into powerful national criminal syndicates (Cruz 2010). A primary source of income for the gangs is financial rents collected through extortion. Estimates suggest that a majority of the country’s businesses pay extortion taxes to the gangs. In some cases, victims have sought to end extortion through extra-legal violence in coordination with individual elements of the police, yielding public–private vigilantism. This public–private vigilantism has taken the form of small groups of victims working jointly with handfuls of police to target gang members for lethal violence in different parts of the country. In one locality in eastern El Salvador where I conducted research, for example, small-scale farmers that were being extorted by local gang members enlisted small numbers of police agents to carry out sporadic acts of lethal violence against gang members. Police agents not only provided victims with police uniforms that they could use to carry out the acts of vigilantism, but they also kept victims informed about patrols by other police to prevent the victims from being caught. In return, police received information from victims to help identify gang members—a rare occurrence in contexts where gangs violently punished those suspected of collaborating with

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the police. Additionally, police received support in killing gang members in a context where state–criminal conflict had made police vulnerable to targeted violence by gangs. This case shows how social resilience can entail a high degree of violence while concurrently relying on participation from important elements of the state (Moncada 2022). Formal Resistance: Victims and the State Coordinating in Medellín State participation in manifestations of social resilience against criminal victimization need not always result in extra-legal violence. Instead, social resilience can take the form of cooperation between victims and the state by using formal legal channels that adhere to the rule of law. Arias and Ungar (2009), for example, show that state efforts to advance community policing in conflictive neighborhoods can yield positive outcomes in terms of decreasing levels of criminal victimization. We can see evidence of formal resistance in the case of business owners who responded to criminal extortion on a pedestrian walkway in Medellín, Colombia known as the Pasaje Peatonal Calle Junín. During the 1990s, a criminal gang extorted businesses on this busy pedestrian walkway that was home to small retail shops, restaurants, and bakeries. Every week business owners were expected to pay a “tax” to the gang in exchange for protection from everyday crime and from the criminal gang itself. However, firms worked collectively through the Federation of Commercial Business Owners, a powerful local business association, to draw the state into their formal resistance. Through the association, business owners demanded that local government authorities provide increased security on the pedestrian walkway and, in return, promised to provide authorities with information on local criminal activities being committed by the gang. Upon receiving a commitment from the local government to increase its police presence, partly financed with financial donations from the walkway’s firms, business owners began to refuse to pay the security tax to the gang—denying the organization an important source of revenue (Moncada 2017). Everyday Resistance: Seeking Dignity as a Form of Social Resilience in Medellín Expressions of social resilience to confront criminal victimization are not always as easily observable to outsiders as the forms of vigilantism or practice of formal resistance described above. Building on seminal work by James Scott (1985), I argue that victims can also contest victimization using subtle non-violent practices unaccompanied by the state. The repertoire of practices relies on carefully calibrated discourses, rhetoric, and other types of non-physical engagement by victims with criminals to contest the material

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dimensions of their victimization and, more broadly, to also reclaim a sense of dignity and self-worth. As noted earlier, the process of victimization can be a grueling experience that transpires over extended periods of time during which criminals exert informal authority. During this process, however, criminals can invoke a range of tools to impose and sustain their informal authority over their victims that entails tactics such as humiliation and belittling. Thus, mapping everyday resistance requires attention to these non-physical but nonetheless conflictive points of interaction between victims and criminals. In Medellín, the informal street vendors I studied as part of a larger research project pursued exactly these types of practices (Moncada 2022). The vendors were extorted by a criminal gang known as the Convivir. The Convivir actually began in the mid-1990s as state-sponsored groups of civilians formed, trained, and equipped by the Colombian national government to provide supplemental security in a context of ongoing violence driven by the country’s drug trade and decades-long civil war. Over time, the Convivir transformed into paramilitary groups in the countryside and criminal extorters aligned with larger criminal syndicates in the country’s urban centers. Few businesses in Medellín’s commercial center escape having to pay the Convivir informal taxes, including the many informal businesses that operate in this area, such as the several hundred vendors I studied and who worked every day in a large street market not far from the municipal government’s administrative buildings. The members of the Convivir relied on several strategies to impose and sustain extortion in the street market. Following the cases discussed above, to extract financial rents from the vendors—a process that happened every week—the criminal actor relied on threats and use of violence. In addition to physical force, the members of the Convivir also invoked tactics to make the vendors feel as if they had no choice but to adhere to the informal rule imposed by the Convivir, regardless of how predatory it was. The criminals also regularly belittled the vendors as a way to undercut the willingness of victims to contest the extraction of rents. These “symbolic taxes” included insulting the vendors on the basis of how they dressed and smelled, and by the dirty conditions in which they worked as part of eliciting “deference, demeanor, posture, verbal formulas and acts of humility” (Scott 1990, p. 188). Members of the Convivir also enacted practices intended to shape the political subjectivity of the vendors, including flaunting the criminal group’s capture of the local police assigned to the market. For example, when physically assaulting vendors who failed to make regular payments of the criminal tax, members of the Convivir would simultaneously taunt them by saying, “Call the police! Call the police!” as a reminder that this fundamental state institution was unavailable to the vendors under the political rule that the criminals had imposed in the informal market (Moncada 2020).

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CONCLUSION Criminal violence challenges development. Existing studies that seek to understand the political consequences of victimization in contexts of intense criminal violence focus primarily on whether victims withdraw or engage in conventional political life following their victimization. In this chapter, I have argued that while yielding important insights into the political implications of criminal victimization, expanding the analytical lens to bring victims more squarely into our analyses can yield new knowledge that can inform future theory-building. By drawing a conceptual distinction between one-time and recurring forms of crime I have shown how we can evaluate the choices that victims of crime face and, in particular, whether and how they pursue social resilience to exercise voice. The typology of four ideal-type forms about how social resistance can manifest in contexts of criminal victimization can provide a starting point for further research on the politics of criminal victimization and social resilience. Among the core tasks for future research is to identify the factors that lead to distinct forms of social resilience amidst criminal victimization. The main aim of this chapter was to build and illustrate a typology of strategies of social resilience. Theorizing the conditions under which distinct strategies arise will require comparing and contrasting victims of similar types of crime who nonetheless pursue contrasting strategies of social resilience. A second challenge in the research agenda on the political consequences of crime requires building on the distinction drawn here between one-time and recurring types of crime to more precisely identify how these different forms of victimization may vary in their effects on the political behavior of victims, including political beliefs and preferences, voting behavior, and civic engagement. Finally, analyses along both these lines will likely require expanding the methods that we use to study the politics of criminal victimization to complement the conventional use of survey data with ethnographic approaches to better comprehend how victims experience and understand the process, meanings, and consequences of criminal victimization and related strategies of social resilience.

NOTES 1. Two exceptions are Misse (2007) and Zaluar and Conceição (2007), who analyze the emergence and operation of militias in Brazil. Phillips (2017) does focus on territories controlled by drug cartels in Mexico, but does not theorize how this territorial control influences the possibility and form of civilian responses. 2. On social capital, see Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti (1994).

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3. And Koonings and Kruijt (2015) offer a useful typology of urban resilience, but I depart from their approach by incorporating violent responses—which they explicitly omit from their typology. 4. Vigilantism is defined as the use or threat of extra-legal violence in response to an alleged criminal act (Moncada 2017, p. 408).

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Index Bekker, Simon 123 Benjamin, Walter 12 Berman, Sheri 183 Bhan, Gautam 46, 49 bhatta economy 146 big data 77–9, 84 Bobea, Lillian 35 Borie, Maud 40 boundary closures 75 boundary objects 42–3 Brand, Fridolin S. 42 Brazil collective action 59 extra-legal violence 186 rich–poor chasm 22 smart cities 78 see also Rio de Janiero Briceño-León, Roberto 16, 54 Brinks, Daniel M. 186 Burgess, Ernest 103 business community, extortion 140, 142, 152, 187 business strategies, coercion/violence 28–35

9/11 attacks 73, 74–5 accommodations 92 see also settlements adaptation climate change 53 victimization and 58 adaptive resilience 77, 84 Africa forced migration 120 homicide rates 54 see also South Africa Akhtar, Waseen 154 Akindes, Francis 33 Amato, Peter 104 Anderson, Ben 54 anomie 33, 105 anti-crime policies 138–59 Arias, Enrique Desmond 10, 11, 15, 33, 65, 187 armed groups civil conflict 90–91 collaborative governance 92, 93 extortion 181–2 feral cities 114 hybrid governance relations 94–5, 98 illicit markets 97 police force relations 109, 110 rivalry 10–11 self-defense 185 arrabal (slum) 117 authoritarianism 116 Auyero, Javier 178 Babinou, Kathryn 10 Baghdad, Iraq 8, 12 Banerjee-Guha, Swapna 3 barrios (informal settlements) 101 Bateson, Regina 58 Beall, Jo 56

Caldeira, Teresa 75 City of Walls 75 Caldera, Rafael 106–7 Calderón, Filipe 88, 143 Camacho, Oscar 103 Camorra-related killings 27 Cano, Ignacio 186 Cape Town, South Africa 9, 33–4 Caracas 101–19 Caribbean fragility/resilience in 88–99 homicide rate 26 violence concentrated in 25 Carothers, Thomas 98 cartels 59–60, 139–41, 144, 146–7 center-periphery relations 44–5 193

194

Urban violence, resilience and security

Chatsworth, Durban 122 displacement camp 125–7 Chávez, Hugo 106, 108–10 child members, gangs 33, 34 children, xenophobia and 134 civil conflicts 90–91 civil society mobilization 142, 148, 151–3 civil society organizations 108 civilians mobilization 179 state repression 139 victimization of 178–9 Coaffee, Jon 13, 15, 56 coercion 28–35, 186 Coke, Christopher “Dudus” 88, 97 colectivos, Caracas 108 collaborative governance 91–2, 93 collective action 57–63, 184 collective life 41, 46–8 collective violence 33 colonial ideology 7, 44–5 Comaroff, Jean 46 Comaroff, John L. 46 command and control governance 74, 76 community leaders 10, 140 community resilience 74, 76 conflict resolution 10 conflict zones 53–71 conflicts gangs 97 hybrid governance 90–91, 94 organized crime 95 sectarian 148 Connell, Raewyn 44, 45 consolidated areas 104–5 contentious politics 53–71 corruption 11–12, 140–141 Côte d’Ivoire 28, 33 coup d’état, Caracas 106–7 COVID-19 pandemic Dharavi slum 47–8, 50 economic devastation 155 gangs’ “benevolence” 34 governance 11–12 organized crime growth 35 police violence 110 resilience for 39–40, 43 security during 85 top-down interventions 43, 46

violence reduction 161, 170 vulnerability 14 Cox, Savannah 15 Creechan, James 27 crime disaggregating 180–181 normalization of 160–161 crime/fear of crime, security measures 83 criminal disorder 91 criminal impunity, expansion of 105 criminal market 94, 140–141, 144, 155 criminal organizations see organized crime criminal paternalism 10 criminal victimization consequences 178–80 existing views of 178–80 responses to 181–3, 185 social resilience 177–92 criminalization, young urban poor 170–174 crowdsourced social media 80–81, 82 Cuidad Juárez, Mexico 59–63, 88, 91, 138–59 cultural goals framework 160–161 Dannemiller, Keith 60 Davis, Mike 22–3 de Boer, John 4 democratic governance 58, 111 democratization 41, 45, 184 deregulation 23, 162 Derickson, Kate 56 Dharavi slum 47–8, 50 Dick, Howard 7 digital technology, security 75, 84 dignity as social resilience 187–8 disabilities 128–9, 133 disaster management 73, 78–9 disorder 89, 91, 93, 96 displaced migrants 120–139 displacement camps, Durban 124–7, 132–3 dispossession processes 3 divided governance 91, 93 dragnet repression 139, 150, 152 drug trafficking 10, 21–38, 88, 95–6, 140, 147 drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) 25, 30–32, 96, 185

Index

Duran-Martinez, Angelica 31 Durban, South Africa 120–139 Durkheim, Émile 33, 54, 105 ecological perspectives 42 economic development 57, 145 El Salvador 29–30, 92, 162, 167, 186–7 electricity services, Caracas 115–16 Elfversson, Emma 13 Elias, Norbert 102 the elite, use of term 104 employment sectors, female migrants 128–9, 131–2 encounter killings 152–3 Engels, Friedrich 4 entrepreneurial initiatives 57 ethnic identities, xenophobia and 131 ethnic population, Karachi 145 ethnic violence 146 evaluation of cities 72 resilience 41, 50 urban problems 7 of violence 15, 17 exceptionalism 84 “extended urbanization” 1 extortion 28–9, 60 armed groups 94, 181–2 business effects 140, 142, 152, 187 by DTOs 185 homicide rates and 96 informal markets 188 law reforms 171–2 mara gangs 186 migration due to 182 police participation 93, 185 policy responses 150 by prison populations 174 street gangs 167–9 extra-legal violence 184–6 “failed” cities 54 Farah, Douglas 10 favelas 10, 34, 78, 81, 103–4 disorder 96 divided governance 91 gang vigilantes 114 “pacification” program 78 security in 85

195

visibility of 165 fear of crime 83, 112 Felbab-Brown, Vanda 9, 16, 26 female migrants 120–139 feral cities 3, 54, 89, 101–19 Fiori Arantes, Pedro 59 Fix, Mariana 59 forced migration/displacement 120, 123 formal resistance 184, 187 formal urbanization 101, 104 fortress developments 75–6, 112 fragility 40, 49–50, 88–99 free market 186 Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 84 functional violence 25, 33, 57 Furedi, Frank 56 Gaffney, Christopher 79 Galtung, Johan 121 gangs 21–38, 108–9, 112, 114 coercive force 186 conflict resolution 10 extortion rackets 96 mafia coordination 94 political parties’ relationship 92 prison factions’ affiliation 93 settlements with 97 social media reports 81 vigilantism and 186–8 violence between 9, 95 see also street gangs gated communities 166–70 Cayalá 169–70, 174 gated entertainment 169 Gelles, Richard J. 180 gender-based violence 120, 127 George, Stacia 25 Glaeser, Edward 2 Gleeson, Brendan 56 global cities 2–3, 5, 45, 55 global city regions 45 Global South, dimensions of vulnerability/resilience 101–92 globalization 2, 5–6, 7 Golding, Bruce 88 González-Izás, Matilde 169 Gounder, Kim 16 governance alternative modes 8–12

196

Urban violence, resilience and security

command and control 74, 76 criminal organizations’ role 90–91 democratic 58, 111 dimensions of 11 hybrid forms 90–95 neoliberal 5–6, 42 tiered governance 92, 93 government support, displacement camps 132–3 Guatemala 10, 25 Guatemala City 16, 22, 160–176 Guzman, Chapo 30–31 Harvey, David 3, 13, 54 Haysom, Simone 34 healthy cities 101, 114 Hirschman, Albert 178, 181–2 Hiskey, Jonathan T. 182 Höglund, Kristine 13 “homicide capitals” 25 homicide rate Caracas 101, 106 Cuidad Juárez 59–60, 138, 140–141 Guatemala City 167–8, 170 Hong Kong 27 Jamaica 96 Karachi 138, 144 Latin America 4, 24–6, 29–32, 101 population growth link 54 Hong Kong 27 honor, homicides over 27 housing production, Caracas 104–5, 109 Huggins, Martha K. 186 human rights 142, 150, 152–3, 172 hybrid governance 90–95, 97–8 hyperinflation 115 IDPs see internally displaced persons illicit economies 93–4, 97, 140, 143, 147–8 immigration 60, 162, 167 imperial projects 44 industrial development 4 inequality 3, 4, 163 informal employment 128, 131 informal markets 154, 188 informal settlements 121, 145, 165–6 informal urbanization 101–5, 112 consolidated areas of 104–5

non-consolidated areas of 105, 112 infrastructure 2, 5, 13, 21–2, 42, 79, 143, 155 institutional framework, Caracas 106–9, 113 internally displaced persons (IDPs) 121, 123 intimate partner violence (IPV) 180, 181 invisible cities 161–6 IPV see intimate partner violence Iraq, ISIS in 8, 12 Isipingo, Durban 120–139 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 8, 12 Jacobs, Jane 6 Jamaica 10, 88, 92, 95–7 Jax, K. 42 jihadist groups 144, 145, 147–9 Juárez Cartel, Cuidad Juárez 140 judicial processes 149 justice 10, 56, 83, 139, 149–50, 161, 184 Kalyvas, Stathis 90 Kamal, Mustafa 153 Karachi, Pakistan 138–59 katchi abadis (squatter settlements) 145 Keynesian perspectives 5 Khan, Imran 153–4 kidnapping 140, 150–152 land occupation 22, 94 land rights 147 Latin America concentration of violence in 25 criminal victimization 177–92 extortion demands 28–9 feral cities 101–19 fragility/resilience in 88–99 gang-on-gang violence 9 governance crisis 12 homicide rate 4, 24–6, 29–32, 101 inequality levels 4 organized crime 10 rich–poor chasm 22 security methods 75, 82, 85 social resilience 177–92 see also Venezuela; Mexico; Guatemala

Index

law-destroying violence 12 law enforcement see police forces/ policing law-preserving violence 12 law reforms, extortion 171–2 layered governance 92 Lee, Kin-Wa 27 Lefebvre, Henri 6, 103 Leitner, Helga 43, 55–6 Liotta, Peter H. 2, 21 loyalty, definition 182 McKenzie, Desmond 96 mafias 28, 94, 145, 147 Maharaj, Brij 16 Mampilly, Zachariah 90 maras gangs 24, 28–30, 33, 186 market criminal market 94, 140–141, 144, 165 free market 186 Marvin, Simon 77 Medellín, Colombia 82, 91–2, 95, 187–8 “megacities” 45 Merton, Robert K. 160–161 Metelits, Claire 90, 97 Mexico anti-crime policies 138–59 collective action 58, 59–63 drug trade role 95–6 homicide rate 30–32 self-defense groups 185 see also Cuidad Juárez microbes 33 migration 4–5, 120–139, 162–3, 166–7, 182 militancy 138, 148 militarized strategies 72 military forces/groups 110, 139, 141–2, 149, 153 Miskel, James 2, 21 Moncada, Eduardo 16 Mosul, Iraq 8 Muggah, Robert 3 Mumbai, India 47–8, 50 Murakami Wood, David 56 mutual learning 46, 50 narcopeace 139, 144

197

negotiation 5, 58, 92, 97 neoliberal governance 5–6, 42 neoliberalism 5, 12, 23, 55, 162–3 networks, female migrants 129 Nieto, Enrique Peña 143 non-consolidated areas 105, 112 nonconformism 160 normalization of crime 160–161 of violence 101–19 norms anomie effects 105 diffusion of 55 Norton, Richard 3, 101, 114, 116 Núñez, Daniel 16, 22 occupational stratification 163, 165 one-time victimization 180–181, 183 organizational decline 178 organized crime 10, 21–38 alternative governance 9–10 business bankruptcy and 140 community support 58 conflict dynamics 95 governance processes 90–91 illicit economies 147 political parties’ connections 144, 146 socio-economic programs 143 suppression of violence 139 victimization 178 vigilantism 186 wealth accumulation 160–161 orillas, Latin American 102 Osse, Anneke 186 “pacification” program 78, 170–174 Pakistan, anti-crime policies 138–59 parallel cities 102–3 paramilitary forces 139, 140, 149 Partlow, Joshua 32 Pashtuns, Karachi 139, 146, 152–3 Pavoni, A. 21, 24 Pérez, Carlos Andrés 106 peripheral developments 45–6 periphery-center relations 44–5 Perlman, Janice 34 pernicious resilience 33, 58, 88–99 Pieterse, Edgar 56, 62

198

Urban violence, resilience and security

planning 5–6, 56, 145 police forces/policing cartel connections 60 colectivos and 108 corruption of 140–141 criminalization of young urban poor 173 Cuidad Juárez 139 exceptionalism 84 in extortion rackets 93, 185 extra-legal violence 186–7 favela stigmatization 81 gang vigilantes 114 Karachi 139, 149–52 military assistance 141–2 morality and 105, 109–11 predictive policing 80 protection capacity 115–16 security systems 80 weaknesses of 145, 148–9 police pacification program 78 police reform 150 policy processes 84 political consequences, victimization 179–80, 182–3 political context, Caracas 106–7 political dissonance 4 political manipulation 153–4 political participation resistance as 62 victimization and 58 political parties 92, 144, 146–7, 153 political stability 106–7 political systems, popular inclusion 93–4 population growth 21–2, 54, 145, 162–4 population movement see migration post-displacement trauma 133–4 post-traumatic stress disorder 134 poverty 22, 132 “power to hurt” 28 precarious settlements 22 prejudice 7, 129 prison overcrowding 172–3 prison population extortion 174 gang affiliations 93 privatization 115–16, 145, 147 private police, Karachi 152 private production areas 104 private security 112, 114–16, 166

private vigilantism 184–5 protection capacity, police forces 115–16 protection fees 140, 187 protests 6, 114, 116, 124–5, 132–4, 172 public production areas 104 public–private vigilantism 184, 186–7 race 111, 173, 184 racial prejudice 7 Rangers, Karachi 147, 149–52, 153 Rao, Anwar 153 reconciliation 107, 135 recurring victimization 180–181, 183 regulation 5, 32, 58, 72, 76, 105, 109, 115–16 resilience as boundary object 42–3 definitions 42 development of/on 40–41 establishment of concept 53 framework for 89–93 genealogy/critical review 55–7 not “resilience” 53–71 security as 73–82 see also urban resilience resilience “turn” 82–5 resistance 62, 184–5, 187–8 Riis, Jacob 4 Rimmer, Peter 7 Rio de Janeiro favelas 10, 34, 78, 81, 85, 91, 96, 165 fragility/resilience in 88, 90–93 security programs 85 smart cities 78–9 see also favelas Ríos, Viridiana 182 riots 72 risk, inequality and 4 risk management 74 Rist, Gilbert 57 Roberts, Bryan R. 163 Robinson, J. 45 Rodgers, Dennis 12 Rogers, Peter 56 Roy, Ananya 41, 45–6 rule of law index 117 rural–urban migration 162–3, 166

Index

sanitation 21, 121, 127, 135 Sassen, Saskia 2, 3, 23 Schafran, Alex 64 Schelling, Thomas 28 Schindler, Seth 7 Schwanen, Tim 56 Scott, James C. 13, 184, 187 SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals sectarian conflict 148 security human security 13–14, 63 privatization of 112, 114–16 as resilience 73–82 soldiers working in 166 see also privatization security-driven urban resilience 72–87 self-defense groups 185 Selle, Werner 1 services, privatization of 115–16, 145, 147 settlements gang leaders 97 hybrid governance 92 “shock cities” 4 Sigsworth, Romi 127 Sinaloa Cartel, Cuidad Juárez 31, 139, 140–141, 144, 146–7 slums 10, 47–8, 50, 104–5, 117 smart cities 2, 3, 77–9 see also Rio de Janeiro smart resilience 77–81 Sobering, Katherine 178 social capital 183 social cohesion 12, 83, 129, 177 social media 80–81, 82 social networks 129 social pact 111–14 social resilience 177–92 socio-economic anti-crime policy 141, 143–4, 154 sociological approaches 160–176 soldiers Caracas 106 Guatemala City 166 Mexico 60 South Africa 33–4, 120–139 “southern” turn, urban resilience 41, 44–8 squatter settlements 145

199

Standing, André 10 Staniland, Paul 90–91 status homicides over 27 violence giving 33 strain theory 160–176 strategic resilience 81–2 street gangs 24, 28–9, 33, 166–71 structural factors, rise/fall of crime 160–161 surveillance 75, 79–80, 84 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 53–4, 83 targeted killings 144, 150–151 Taylor, Zac 64 territorial closures 75 territorial control 179 terrorism 8–9, 138, 144, 149, 151–2 trafficking 10, 21–38, 88, 95–6, 140, 147, 185 transportation sector 28–9, 168–72 trauma, female migrants 133–4 Triad violence 27 Tulumello, Simone 21, 24 Ungar, Mark 187 urban development formal processes 4–7 informal processes 4–7 invisible cities 162–6 urban ecology 42 urban governance, conflict zones 53–71 urban planning 5–6, 56, 145 urban resilience boundaries of 42–4 in context of violence 54 critique of 43–4 definitions 39–40, 74 everyday experience 74–6 knowledge production 40–43 narratives 40 security-driven 72–87 twenty-first-century 39–52 urban safety, resilience for 82–5 urban security 12–13, 39, 42, 56 urbanism 1–2 urbanization globalization 2, 7

200

Urban violence, resilience and security

processes/patterns 1–7 twenty-first-century 1–7 violence as function of 21 Velazquez, Ramon J. 106 Venezuela 101–19 victimization 58, 60, 101, 112, 177–92 victims, agency of 16 vigilantism 114, 167, 179, 184–7, 190 violence between gangs 9, 95 as business strategy 28–35 categorization of 135 drivers of 140–141, 145–8 genealogy/critical review 55–7 local processes 54–5 normative dimension 101–19 within social resilience 183–4 for status 33 sexual 127 structural 135 urban background/process 21

urban, form of 8 urban–violence connection 21 violent non-state actors 9 water services 115–16, 151 wealth gated communities 169 segregation and 22 wealth accumulation 160–161 Wiig, Alan 3 Williams, Phil 1, 15 women migration 120–139 socio-economic programs 144 Wyly, Elvin 3 xenophobic violence 120–139 young urban poor 167, 170–174 Yujnovsky, Oscar 103 Zizumbo-Colunga, Daniel 58