Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro‐Colombian Shantytown

Alves, Jaime Amparo

doi:10.1111/plar.12276

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The police, as the state’s principal executive security actor, demonstrated the ability, and made use of their legal obligation, to protect the hostages and followed the sovereign command to kill. In cities of the Global North and South, police killings of suspects have often been discussed in relation to state sovereignty (Cooper-Knock, 2018; Hutta, 2019) and disproportionately victimize black and other minority populations (Alves, 2019). Since, from a legalistic standpoint, police decisionmaking involves procedures and regulatory frameworks that reach beyond the specific moment of deploying a lethal action, literature on policing and sovereignty has emphasized the importance of interpreting police killings not as individualized instances of police brutality, but rather as repetitive expressions of a societal ‘consensus’, ‘where the right to kill is a shared practice and lived experience for police and urban citizens’ (Denyer Willis, 2014: 5).…”

Section: Decentring and Materializing Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The technopolitics of security: Agency, temporality, sovereignty

Müller

Richmond

2023

Security Dialogue

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This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. ‘Technopolitics’ refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These technopolitical practices give rise to new forms of agency, producing effects unintended by their designers that may alter logics of political contestation and allow technologies to be reappropriated for different political purposes. To illustrate the distributed forms of agency and contingent encounters that the technopolitics approach evokes, the article develops three key aspects of technopolitics in its relationship to security governance: (1) an understanding of agency as distributed between human and non-human actors, but also asymmetric in that human intentionality plays an assembling role that is frequently overrun by the unintended effects; (2) the temporal horizons of imagination and action over which technopolitical interventions unfold, identifying the importance of logics of anticipation and eventization; and (3) the relationship between technopolitics and sovereignty, arguing that it encourages a decentred and materialized understanding of how claims to sovereignty are made and contested.

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Section: Decentring and Materializing Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This entails that we reflect both on the techno-material dimensions of how claims to sovereignty are made and contested and on the way claims to sovereignty rest on the control of, or violence inflicted upon, differentially coded (racialized, gendered, etc.) bodies (Alves, 2019; Mbembe, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The technopolitics of security: Agency, temporality, sovereignty

Müller

Richmond

2023

Security Dialogue

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“…Davis, 1997, James, 2005. A small but growing literature traces this dynamic elsewhere in the Americas, including Latin America (Alves, 2018(Alves, , 2019Da Silva, 2014), the Caribbean (Paton, 2004) and Canada. In Canada, Maynard (2017: 32) shows how a set of meanings attached to blackness under slavery, including criminality, 'created a road map for [the] treatment of Black life throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'.…”

Section: Blackness Territory and Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Nowhere land: The evicted space of Black tenants’ rights in Montreal

Rutland

2021

Environ Plan D

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Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a well-organized tenants’ movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants’ rights in the city. During the same period, however, an emerging police, government and media discourse cast Black communities as criminal ‘ghettos’, and a variety of mechanisms, including new policies meant to protect tenants’ rights, were used to evict criminalized Black tenants. Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants’ rights. The racial limits of tenants’ rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city. The tenant, the article concludes, is never just a tenant, but also a racial subject – a subject formed at the edges of blackness. In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants’ rights presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place.

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“…Nor can it be read solely in terms of resistance to state rule; less even an outright refusal to be governed (cf. Alves 2019), or grounded in the existence of a homogeneous “class consciousness,” or oppositional subculture (cf. Willis 1977).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday Authoritarianism: Class and Coercion on Housing Estates in Neoliberal Britain

Davey

Koch

2021

PoLAR

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In Britain, especially in the 2010s, neoliberal reform involved an extension of legal coercion into the domestic and community lives of marginalized citizens. On two postindustrial housing estates in Britain, working-class residents experience this "everyday authoritarianism" in areas that the liberal state typically constructs as private and purports to leave alone: the home and the intimate relations that frame it. Residents engage this legal coercion by adopting responses that range from defensive avoidance to co-opting officials to acts of vigilantism. By doing so, they negotiate the presence of an authority that is often out of sync with their own expectations for protection, and in some cases actively undermines their efforts to remain safe. Their pluralism can be framed neither in terms of an acceptance of state authority nor as a straightforward refusal to be governed. Rather, it reveals the contradictory ways in which marginalized citizens define their relationship to the state under contemporary conditions of class fragmentation. By adding detail on everyday life to meta-narratives of an authoritarian turn, this article theorizes the political potential and limits of people's daily engagements with the state for contesting the latter's authority. [class, coercion, liberal governance] Despite its ambitions of universal freedom, liberal governance has historically featured limits where it interfaces with authoritarian forms of rule. This is especially the case for those people deemed to lack the capacity for self-governance (Bennett, Dodsworth, and Joyce 2007). In Britain, class marks one such limit, along with-and intersecting with-gender and race. Liberal democracy not only historically enfranchised the propertyowning classes but also monitored, policed, and controlled working-class people in ways not known to their middle-class counterparts (Joyce 2013). Our fieldwork was conducted in the 2010s, with our focus on the recent period of British governance known as neoliberalism. In Britain, neoliberalism is generally seen as commencing in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and her policies of privatization, welfare retrenchment, and accumulation by dispossession. During this time, the state came to subject many working-class people to evermore open forms of coercion (

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Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro‐Colombian Shantytown

Cited by 10 publications

References 24 publications

The technopolitics of security: Agency, temporality, sovereignty

The technopolitics of security: Agency, temporality, sovereignty

Nowhere land: The evicted space of Black tenants’ rights in Montreal

Everyday Authoritarianism: Class and Coercion on Housing Estates in Neoliberal Britain

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