The deterritorrialization of violence

Abstract

Nunes, E. D. et al. 270 with manifestations that where terrible but secondary in a world which, in one way or the other, was reasonably organized. Well, I propose that this world that broke apart differed in two aspects from our troubled times.In the first place, the political, police, cultural and symbolic control mechanisms worked in a way that, in fact, there was a higher degree of tranquility for certain segments of the population of the world. The labor class of the industrial world enjoyed relative prosperity, the upper classes, even in the poor countries, could sleep quietly, seen that violence was confined to Africa, to the jungles of Vietnam or to the torture cellars of the Latin American dictatorships. Violence existed but it was not a problem. What makes a problem not only political or social but sociological? I enounce once more my own proposition: The mechanisms that built the sanitary cordons isolating violence collapsed, the mechanisms of social control where not efficient anymore, violence deterritorialized and consequently potential victimization increased.This is not a question of denying the changes in the nature of the phenomena marked by violence. Nor is it a question of not recognizing that in certain regions and under certain circumstances such manifestations increased in number and intensity of violence. However, I think it is necessary to mention that the extension of its range of action to beyond the before relatively efficient frontiers has a much greater weight than we usually admit. This is the most relevant factor for considering the changes in the perception of unsafety Wieviorka refers to at the beginning of his text. We are living as we were about to densify the rates of victimization by some frightening modality of violence seeming to be out of control.When referring to social control mechanisms, what I have in mind are obviously State institutions, but not only. I also refer to a series of psychological, cultural, symbolic and social mechanisms that would not fit into an explicative context exclusively built on the so -judiciously -divulged crisis of the State. I insist on this point because I intuit, among the researchers dealing with the phenomenon violence, a kind of shame to admit that what we had and what we don't have anymore are efficient instruments of social control. This resistance perhaps arises from a certain association between the emphasis given to social control and the defense of descriptivist and conserva-