The politics of criminal violence in Brazil: State violence, gang and the plebs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benoit Décary-Secours
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
Criminal Violence

The Drug Trade and State Violence in Internal Conflicts: Evidence from Peru

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 96-123
Author(s):  
Angélica Durán-Martínez ◽  
Hillel David Soifer
Keyword(s):  
Main Channel ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Drug Trade ◽  
State Behavior ◽  
Criminal Violence ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Conflict Settings ◽  
Major Producer ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACTMost literature on drugs and conflict focuses on how the drug trade affects insurgent behavior, paying little attention to its effect on state behavior in conflict settings. This article begins to address this gap by analyzing the impact of drugs on state violence during the internal conflict in Peru (1980–2000), which, in the 1980s, was the world’s major producer of coca for the international drug trade. Drawing on literature on criminal violence and on drug policy, this study theorizes militarization as the main channel by which drug production affects how state forces treat the civilian population during internal conflicts, though it also explores a second channel associated with corruption. The analysis finds that, all else equal, drug-producing localities saw increased state violence in ways consistent with the militarization channel.

Violence, Poverty, Values, and the Will to Punish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Western
Keyword(s):  
Economic Inequality ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Criminal Violence ◽  
Violent Criminal ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues that Fassin’s analysis should be expanded in three ways. First, Fassin should take greater account of how the unlawful state violence he rightly deplores is nonetheless frequently produced in response to violent criminal acts. Losing sight of the underlying problem of criminal violence in poor and marginal communities can make it harder to see how reform might be possible, by reducing the problem to one of arbitrary labeling (and subsequent punishment) of certain kinds of conduct. Second, while Fassin notes the connections between vulnerability to state violence and poverty, it would be worth paying more attention to the way economic inequality dehumanizes certain subjects and makes them more vulnerable objects of state abuse. Social analysis should be humanizing, in response. Third, Fassin should express positive value commitments to those latent in his critique as a guide to reform.

State, Violence, and Security in Mexico

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Solar
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Public Security ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Criminal Violence ◽  
State Responses

Paul Kenny, Mónica Serrano with Arturo Sotomayor, eds., Mexico's Security Failure, Collapse into Criminal Violence (New York: Routledge, 2012). Wil G. Pansters, ed., Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). George Philip and Susana Berruecos, eds., Mexico's Struggle for Public Security: Organized Crime and State Responses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda, Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy (London and New York: Zed, 2012).

Risk, Desire and Adaptation: The Paradox of Queer Solidarity and the Political Possibility of Death Under Neoliberalism and Homonationalism

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Strategy I

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.

Challenging the Terms of Order: Representations of the Detroit Rebellions, 1967–1968

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan T. Camp
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Civil Structures ◽  
Us History ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
John Clarke

While many analysts have commented on the representation of 1968 campus events and antiwar demonstrations, less attention has been paid to the global significance of the dramatic struggles in industrial Detroit during the period. The meanings of events in the city were intensely fought over. As Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts observed, the events of 1968 were “an act of collective will, the breaks and ruptures stemming from the rapid expansion in the ideology, culture and civil structures of the new capitalism . . . in the form of a ‘crisis of authority.’” In Detroit the crisis of authority was expressed in the form of popular political struggles against racism, state violence, and the contradictions of life in the industrial capitalist city. This article asks and answers the following research questions about the struggle over the meaning of this decisive turning point in US history: What was the relationship between racial ordering, uneven capitalist development, and mass antiracist and class struggles? How did Black working-class organic intellectuals resist and alter hegemonic definitions of the situation? How are the dialectics of insurgency and counterinsurgency to be best theorized during this precise historical conjuncture? 

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

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