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Trajectories of Governance: Tracing the Entanglements of Order and Violence in Peripheral Cities of Latin America

Online ISBN:
9781529236323
Print ISBN:
9781529236286
Publisher:
Policy Press
Book

Trajectories of Governance: Tracing the Entanglements of Order and Violence in Peripheral Cities of Latin America

Viviana García Pinzón
Viviana García Pinzón

Senior Researcher

University of Freiburg
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
28 June 2024
Online ISBN:
9781529236323
Print ISBN:
9781529236286
Publisher:
Policy Press

Abstract

Urban violence in Latin America has reached unprecedented levels. While most existing scholarship on this is based on the experiences of large and megacities, small and mid-size cities have also been and are places of violence. There is, however, substantial variation between them. Based on an interdisciplinary perspective, this book engages in the study of the complex and variable interrelations between order and violence in peripheral cities of Colombia and El Salvador from a comparative, historical and multiscalar approach. The book develops an analytical framework – with the concept of trajectories of governance at their core – and introduces a typology to capture the diversity of local orders observed across the cases. The project advances the argument that the type of order is contingent on the entanglements between multiscalar processes and place-specific conditions. The interplay between these different aspects has a variety of impacts on those trajectories of governance: affecting, first, the dynamics of local citizenship and the capacity of local ecologies of governance to address citizens’ demands and manage conflict and, second, arrangements regarding the production and regulation of violence. Empirically, the book traces the trajectories of governance in four cities, building on more than a hundred interviews, focus groups and process-generated data. Taken together, the analytical framework and empirical analysis shed new light on the spatiotemporal connections and enabling conditions of different forms of violence in the region and on the dynamics of power and order-making in its contemporary cities.

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