Coercion, Capital, and The Latin American City: Understanding Territorial Control and Governance in Marginalised Urban Communities

Since democratisation, many Latin American states have responded to the presence of violent non-state actors in their territories through highly repressive, militarised strategies. However, numerous pacification programmes have recently been attempted in cities across the region, which combine community policing with development initiatives and attempt to reintegrate ungoverned, violent and marginalised urban spaces into the orbit of state governance. These multiyear programmes are ambitious departures from prevailing regional trends, utilising a more holistic approach to security and governance than is generally employed. Nonetheless, there appears to be noteworthy variation among the durability of these different programmes, with some proving to be sustainable means of extending state governance and others dwindling or collapsing. What explains these varied outcomes?

Significant subnational variation indicates that we should be cautious in inferring too much from national trends, and so this project takes the city as the unit of analysis. This approach recognises the fundamental importance and specificities of highly-localised metropolitan politics, avoiding the pitfalls associated with over-generalising about macro-level changes. Foregrounding subnational politics over central state policy is key to understanding how de facto power relations affect governance and security management, and how the networked-relations of state and non-state actors influence the direction of politics in ways which are highly consequential for the residents of Latin America's cities. This research will draw on case studies of cities from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

In developing a theoretical framework for explaining the causes of sustainability or decline, I will consider these pacification programmes as micro-level acts of state-building, which provide unique insights into contentious state-building processes in environments with competing nodes of power and imbricated governance structures. This will add to a burgeoning body of literature which problematises prevailing notions of state-building and governance and seeks to demonstrate the complex role which non-state actors (violent and non-violent) continue to play in the very process of state-building in Latin America. Focussing on local political elites, private-sector actors, and violent non-state actors, this research will be a novel contribution to the existing scholarship, providing lessons for both academics and policy-makers.