Governance, coercive brokerage and illicit economies through the urban frontiers

Globalisation of illicit drug markets in Latin America since the 1980s, and the expansion of drug trafficking organisations and criminal networks, have put pressure on political elites and governments in Latin American cities to act, protect citizens, and manage new forms of insecurity and violence. However, in marginal urban spaces the central state has tended to demonstrate an inability (and unwillingness) to act and govern. Because of this, militias have emerged, often with the backing and/or plausible deniability from central states and political elites. These unchecked, unaccountable governance arrangements often create violent conditions for marginalised populations.

This research dialogues with one of the most pressing issues facing urban populations of developing contexts and their governments in recent times: how to ensure more peaceable urban governance arrangements for marginalised urban populations living with militias. There is a lively debate in the academic literature about the role of urban militias in 'criminal' forms of governance. But the established policy consensus on militias tends to aggravate governance arrangements and lead to increased levels of violence.

This consensus is based on the assumption that militias emerge through a vacuum created by 'fragile' and 'weak' states. This is compounded by scholarly and media narratives portraying urban margins as infested with criminality, 'wild and unruly', and lagging behind. These regions are often portrayed as hotbeds of 'corruption' and as posing existential threats to the developmental ambitions of the central state and market. Policy responses for dealing with militias, therefore, tend to suggest 'more state' and 'more market' to fill-in the gaps and patch up the weaknesses of previous governments.

This project takes a step back from that consensus. It builds from findings of my doctoral research that suggest urban militias and their coercive systems of rule in marginal spaces sustain, fit into, and underpin the established urban political economy dynamics and processes. In ways that have not been done before, this project interrogates how and why militias have emerged and been sustained, globally and historically, to broker structural change and transformation in the urban margins, and are territorial expressions of contemporary state formation. It does so by situating militias in local, urban, state-wide and national political settlements, as components of global processes and as ways of advancing and entrenching powerful interests.

Evidence collected during my doctorate demonstrates how militias can absorb powerful economic responsibilities, meaning they can enrich themselves, obtain political power, and act in violent and unaccountable ways. At the end of my doctoral project I acquired 33,000 pages of classified documents from a parliamentary commission inquiry on Rio de Janeiro's militias, which no other researcher has access to. Although there was not the time nor resources to analyse this data systematically, preliminary analysis reveals how illicit flows are extracted violently from the urban margins and recycled into real estate in the centre. This project will analyse this data systematically and draw comparative reflections with coercive brokerage dynamics in São Paulo on the Primeiro Comando Capital.

This project aims to make visible the circular interactions of urban development, capital flows, and coercive power within which these coercive brokers are implicated. These dynamics can mean that development and state-building in the urban margins can reinforce (rather than soften) structural marginality and violence. By examining the spatial dynamics of coercive brokerage and their frontier governmentalities, this project explores how these coercive actors are capable of redefining political, economic, and social life in the city, and beyond.