Indigenous Autonomy,Delinquent States,and the Limits of Resistance

This paper focuses on struggles by Mexican indigenous communities to defend their patrimony and guarantee their own security in an environment dominated by the parallel power of organized crime, paramilitary violence, impunity, and a neo-extractivist economy. After reviewing the relationships between the radicalization of indigenous autonomy demands and transformations of the Mexican state, analysis focuses on recent developments involving a Nahua community on the Pacific coast of Michoacán state that has a long history of successful defence of its communal lands, alongside a Purépecha community in the central highlands that has been its longstanding ally. The violence of external actors reflects the penetration of all levels of government by organized crime, but violence is not a new historical experience in this region. What has changed is that the capacity of these communities to resist has been affected by their internal disarticulation by the same forces.     

Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo do Alemão

Activists and journalists in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro are using social media to intervene in the violence that shapes their communities. In this article I draw on critical urban and digital media theory to understand how militarized policing, the spatialization of race, and discourses of criminalization influence favela populations. I examine how these discursive and material violences are motivating residents to autoconstruct new digital communities. Through digital autoconstruction, journalists and activists are using social media technologies to safely direct mobility, to witness police violence, and to unsettle socio‐spatial imaginaries of endemic crime. As such, they are deploying digital practices to disrupt material, epistemological, and discursive mechanisms of social control. These actions show that digital technologies are always‐already embodied and take shape through material histories, such as those of racialized state violence. Journalists and activists in Complexo do Alemão ultimately demonstrate that targets of violence are not simply victims of digital and violent surveillance, but are active in creating new digital relationships of care across diverse scales, transforming these technologies in the process.     

Beyond ‘Culture’ as an explanation for intimate violence: the politics and possibilities of plural resistance

This article interrogates simplified culturalist explanations of gendered violence, which evoke timeless ‘tradition’ and religiosity to locate violence in racialized places and upon ‘othered’ bodies. I examine structural processes that shape women’s experiences of and vulnerability to intimate violence. My analysis complicates culturalist narratives, but engages critically with culture as one context within which violence is embedded. Drawing on field research within Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India, I discuss the complexities of interwoven experiences of structural, state, and intimate gender violence. I draw attention to how anti-violence organizations working in marginalized communities theorize these complexities, and practices of what I am calling ‘plural resistance,’ which these organizations enact through equally complex responses to such violences. Plural resistance describes community-based strategies that simultaneously reject both gender violence and other forms of systemic violence, such as poverty born of uneven development. Embodied resistance to gender violence provides a critical lens for understanding articulations between regional patriarchies, exclusionary state practices, uneven development, and Islamophobia.     

‘Live where the terrorists live’: Urban safety,diverse neighbourhoods and bomb blasts in Manchester and Mumbai

This article is a brief commentary on new geographies of urban fear emerging in ‘post-blast’ cities. Most anthropologists studying the city through its blasts and bombs and exploring the aftermath of violence in areas afflicted by religious, racial and communal tensions, show how these events subsequently lead to ghettoization and segregated living, as majority communities both edge out and cordon off areas from minority inhabitants and mixed ethnic life. Using Manchester and Mumbai as ethnographic landscapes, the author shows how certain residential areas in both cities turn towards accommodating large numbers of Muslim residents – not to overtly sustain interreligious and interracial trust and communication, but as a form of safety and security in everyday urban life.     

Not a zero-sum game: inequalities and resilience in Sumner,Missouri, the Gooseless Goose Capital of the World

Recent works on socio-ecological resilience stress the need to integrate inequalities and power into considerations of how communities are reorganized in response to socio-ecological transformations such as climate change. These works have often approached inequalities and power as zero-sum games, with scholars framing individuals and groups within communities as either empowered or marginalized. Drawing from 20 months of fieldwork in a rural community in the central United States that was being rearranged in response to shifts in trans-national goose migration patterns, the author shows inequalities and power do not work in such dichotomous manners because different dimensions of inequality intersect and transform each other in reciprocal manners. Gender, class, and sexuality intersected to inform how individuals sustained their community, and particular men and women were simultaneously (dis)advantaged because of how their relationships with each other were rearranged in response to shifting goose migration patterns. These findings suggest scholars and policy makers working on issues related to socio-ecological resilience can better account for inequalities and power by utilizing the theoretical framework of intersectionality.     

Community Volunteering as Neoliberal Strategy? Green Space Production in Berlin

Abstract: The task for critical urban research is to analyze processes of neoliberalization “on the ground”. This paper examines—based on original empirical research—in how far the outsourcing of former local state responsibilities for public services and urban infrastructure is expressed in the promotion of community gardening in Berlin (Germany). It shows the contradictory outcomes: on the one hand, a failing strategy of outsourcing towards residents and the opening up of opportunity structures for other interests. On the other hand it shows how far the emergence of open green spaces maintained by volunteers can only be understood against the background of “roll‐back” neoliberal urban politics and that their rationality cannot be separated from “roll‐out neoliberalism”.     

Building Local Governance: Participation and Elite Capture in Slum‐upgrading in Kenya

Community and democratic participation are still an essential component of current mainstream development interventions. However, elite capture seriously undermines the outcomes of development projects. This article analyses the effects on (in)equality of the implementation of policies that are technically participatory, in the context of an internationally‐funded urban development programme in Nairobi, which was implemented in the aftermath of the post‐election violence of 2007–2008. Ethnographic data reveal how the institutionalization of pre‐existing power imbalances between landlords and tenants is accomplished through the creation of structures of community governance and ‘participatory enumeration’. The article concludes that without the resources to challenge powerful interests within the settlement, the programme is likely to worsen the condition of a large section of the residents. In the context of strong pre‐existing inequalities and conflict, participation needs careful management and firm external agency to achieve genuine social transformation.     

Political hierarchies and landscapes of conflict across Africa

Almost all African states experience substantial and widespread political insecurity in a variety of forms. This analysis explains how relationships between groups and governments create incentives and disincentives for distinct forms of political violence to emerge. It argues that ethno-regional communities across Africa are situated within a power hierarchy that determines their relative importance to, and inclusion in, regimes. A dynamic power landscape emerges from relative group positions. Various positions within a hierarchy are associated with particular dominant forms of organized political violence as groups challenge political elites, but are bounded by their goals and characteristics. A failure to consider the political hierarchies and landscapes operating within African states has led to an under specification of the causal mechanisms driving different forms of violence, and an overstatement of benefits from declining civil war rates and inclusive governing coalitions.     

Articulating corruption of infrastructural upgrading projects in Rio de Janeiro

Residents of Brazilian low-income communities have long called actions of the state “corrupt,” rhetoric that has arguably intensified in the wake of large-scale infrastructural upgrading decisions. Inspired by a new wave of critical corruption studies, in this paper I ask: how is infrastructural upgrading a key site of politics and political understandings of the state for residents in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro? How do discourses about corrupt decision-making mechanisms and money appropriation produce common sense notions of how the political system operates? And what work do these narratives do for demonstrating agency of the people living in Complexo? In answering these questions I contribute to an emerging conjunctural research agenda in global urban and corruption studies. I draw on the dual notion of articulation as central to the conjuncture: how the conjoining of political forces alongside discursive enunciations are crucial to crafting hegemonies of corruption and understandings of political and civil society. I add to this Gramscian understanding of the conjuncture a focus on how residents constitute themselves as agential subjects through discourses of corruption. By focusing on the brewing frustrations of Complexo residents, the paper argues that articulations of corruption materialized an articulated political bloc against which community members could express frustration but also, importantly, constituted a civil society demonstrating a constrained agency.     

Ulinzi Shirikishi: Popular Experiences of Hybrid Security Governance in Tanzania

In the context of increasing academic and policy‐related attention to hybrid forms of security provision which combine state and non‐state institutions, in Africa and elsewhere, this article explores the implementation of community‐based or participatory policing (ulinzi shirikishi) in Tanzania. Through ulinzi shirikishi citizens are encouraged to form local security committees, organize neighbourhood patrols and investigate reported crime. In contrast to earlier forms of state‐sponsored sungusungu vigilantism in Tanzania, community police are expected to cooperate with the Tanzania Police Force and to adhere to state law. Based on 11 months’ fieldwork in three sub‐wards of the city of Mwanza, this article argues that community policing has been fairly effective in improving residents’ perceptions of local safety. However, two important concerns emerge that may compromise the sustainability and legitimacy of community policing in the future. Firstly, organizing local policing entails considerable costs for communities, which disproportionately disadvantage the relatively poor. Secondly, controlling local service provision can enable individuals to pursue private gains, at the expense of the production of public goods. It is thus important to consider the development of hybridity over time towards models that may look less like community‐based policing and more like commercial security provision.     

The Capital of Diversity: Neoliberal Development and the Discourse of Difference in Washington,DC

Complicating top‐down analyses of neoliberal development, this article charts how demographically diverse residents in Columbia Heights—a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC—reinforce and resist dominant narratives of diversity that praise multicultural, mixed urban spaces. These narratives often not only fail to discuss power and equity, they are typically used to market state‐sponsored, upscale development that actively threatens the very diversity appropriated to sell a neighborhood. I argue that many residents initially reproduce this rhetoric of diversity, but discuss power and difference more candidly in their discussion of the neighborhood's history and amenities. Most residents who recently moved to the neighborhood juxtapose praise of diversity with comments that associate crime, litter, and “grime” with that diversity. Residents who grew up in Columbia Heights moved from praising the influx of development and new (largely upper‐middle class) residents to expressing concerns about exclusion, disrespect, and possible displacement.     

Climate change, conflict and development in Sudan: global neo-Malthusian narratives and local power struggles

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict–environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top-down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab-African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines. Today, Darfur has been labelled ‘the world's first climate change conflict’, masking the long-term political-economic dynamics and Sudanese agency underpinning the crisis. Simultaneously, the global food crisis is instrumentalized to launch a dam programme and agricultural revival that claim to be African answers to resource scarcity. The winners, however, are Sudan's globalized Islamist elites and foreign investors, whilst the livelihoods of local communities are undermined. Important links exist between climatic developments and security, but global Malthusian narratives about state failure and conflict are dangerously susceptible to manipulations by national elites; the practical outcomes decrease rather than increase human security. In the climate change era, the breakdown of institutions and associated violence is often not an unfortunate failure of the old system due to environmental shock, but a strategy of elites in wider processes of power and wealth accumulation and contestation.     

Living with patriarchy and poverty: women's agency and the spatialities of gender relations in Afghanistan

This article examines the spatialities of gender relations and women's oppression in urban Afghanistan under conditions of poverty and strict patriarchy. Using empirical data from biographical interviews with Afghan women from urban households in Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, the article questions how gender as social relation and gender as difference is lived and experienced among the urban poor in Afghanistan. Looking at urban livelihoods through the lens of feminist geography helps to better understand the gendered spaces of home and the outside world, of households as sites of security and violence, and of urban contexts and ethnic affiliations. The approach allows for reflection on women's subjectivities and their own understandings of gender inequality and injustice. Examining the gendered geographies in urban Afghanistan shows how social difference is lived under conditions of patriarchy and poverty and how women's agency contributes to the livelihoods of their households.     

Violence and vigilance in Nahua communities of seventeenth-century central Mexico

While historians have long studied the institutional dimensions of crime and punishment, this article examines the informal, extra-legal efforts of Nahuas and other residents of central Mexican communities to contend with violence and resolve conflicts. Residents of Nahua communities could not rely entirely on the authorities for protection and justice; rather, by being vigilant and taking matters into their own hands, they played a vital but underappreciated role in policing their communities, dealing with disorder, and preserving the peace. As such, they shouldered some of the law enforcement functions of the state apparatus. At times, their contributions could prove indispensable to the administration of justice. Their efforts not only helped to maintain public order and protect one another but they also tell us much about perceptions of acceptable behavior as well as notions of civic responsibility and, by extension, community membership and social solidarity.     

Rights to protection and the state: the Australian Government's National Plan to reduce violence against women and children and victim's justice

Due to increased awareness and impact of domestic violence, women's safety in the domestic sphere has become a prominent problem in Australian politics. In an analysis of criminal injuries compensation (CIC) processes in WA, this paper highlights a specific aspect of national policy failure in relation to safety for women who have experienced domestic and family violence. It establishes policy impetus to acknowledge a right to protection by the state within the domestic sphere, then discusses the history and relevance of state responsibility/obligations for victims of crime compensation and demonstrates how the failure to comply with the nationally endorsed plan to address domestic violence places some women at risk of further harm. The example of WA's victims of crime compensation processes highlights the high level of female domestic violence victims using the scheme and important intersectional issues pertinent for Indigenous women. The paper points to how a specific failure of policy implementation may be addressed.     

Slum Wars of the 21st Century: Gangs,Mano Dura and the New Urban Geography of Conflict in Central America

The political economy of violence in Central America is widely perceived as having undergone a critical shift during the past two decades, often pithily summarized as a movement from ‘political’ to ‘social’ violence. Although such an analysis is plausible, it also offers a depoliticized vision of the contemporary Central American panorama of violence. Basing itself principally on the example of Nicaragua, the country in the region that is historically perhaps most paradigmatically associated with violence, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the changes that the regional landscape of violence has undergone. It suggests that these are better understood as a movement from ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ ( Wolf, 1969 ) to ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ ( Beall, 2006 ), thereby highlighting how present‐day urban violence can in many ways be seen as representing a structural continuation of past political conflicts, albeit in new spatial contexts. At the same time, however, there are certain key differences between past and present violence, as a result of which contemporary conflict has intensified. This is most visible in relation to the changing forms of urban spatial organization in Central American cities, the heavy‐handed mano dura response to gangs by governments, and the dystopian evolutionary trajectory of gangs. Taken together, these processes point to a critical shift in the balance of power between rich and poor in the region, as the new ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ are increasingly giving way to more circumscribed ‘slum wars’ that effectively signal the defeat of the poor.     

Politics and social violence in developing democracies: Theory and evidence from Brazil

How do the political institutional features of developing democracies influence how violence occurs? Building on research showing that ‘hybrid democracies’ are more prone to social violence, this article argues that elite competition for power in the context of limited institutional oversight plays an important role in explaining violence. The framework here presents possible mechanisms linking subnational political dynamics and rates of social violence in poorly institutionalised contexts. It highlights how political competition, concentrated political power, and constraints on cooperation can create opportunity structures where violence is incentivised and the rule of law is undermined. This is examined empirically using sub-national homicide data from over 5000 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2010. Findings suggest violence is greater in contexts that are highly competitive – where political actors face credible challenges and have a more tenuous grip on power – and those where power is highly concentrated – where political actors have held power for longer periods or face limited credible challenges. Findings also suggest violence varies depending on whether interactions between state and municipal government are likely to be constrained or cooperative; and are consistent with literatures emphasising the importance of structural explanations of social violence. In light of on-going democratic transitions across the globe, the article highlights the value of understanding links between institutional context, contentious politics and social violence.     

The governmentalities of infrastructure and services amid urban conflict: East Jerusalem in the post Oslo era

Urban conflict in Jerusalem has mainly been studied through the lens of spatial and functional segregation and discriminative fragmentation between Israeli and Palestinian localities. This article adopts a governmentality approach to the study of the politics of urban infrastructure and services in urban conflict, and argues that a governmentalization process of East Jerusalem by Israel has evolved in the last two decades that has been enacted mainly through the control and management of Palestinian urban infrastructure and services. Since, as manifestations of resistance to Israeli occupation, many of the Palestinian urban functionalities historically operated separately from Israeli state apparatuses, this new development and its consequences indicate an increasing dependency and forced adaptation of Palestinians in Jerusalem to Israeli rule. Based on analysis of Palestinian public transport and education systems, the article demonstrates how the “soft” power of governmentality – mediated through the control and management of urban infrastructure and services – diffuses among the Palestinian population and in space, restructuring them as objects and subjects of Israeli administration and governmental order. In this light, urban infrastructure and services appear in the course of urban conflict as an arena of governmentality and counter-governmentality. On the one hand they serve as a site where identities are practiced and defended; on the other, they may mediate and facilitate the restructuring of political subjectivities and normalization of political structures and hierarchies.     

Producing multiple imaginations of the Silk Road in Xi’an,China’s urban development

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at how the Chinese government’s recent national project, ‘the Belt and Road Initiatives’ (the BRI), is played out at the local level in the context of cultural cities. Scholarship on the BRI focuses less on how the official narratives of the BRI have impacted the ongoing process of urbanization in China. This paper contextualizes the BRI by examining how both official and alternative imaginations of the Silk Road contribute to municipal-level urban plans that visualize the Silk Road in the urban built environment. Specifically, this paper suggests understanding the Silk Road in the local context, which entails a constellation of convergent and divergent interpretations by different actors involved in the official urban theming plans. These actors, both experts involved in the implementation process and members of marginalized ethnic communities, specify the vaguely defined ‘Silk Road’ in contexts that are within and beyond the original settings.     

信息通讯技术(ICT)与城市地理研究综述

信息通讯技术（ICT）已成为现代城市发展的重要推动力,对城市居民空间行为产生了深刻影响。本文在对国内外相关文献梳理的基础上,从城镇化、城镇体系、城市活动空间、虚拟空间与实体空间、智慧城市等方面对ICT与城市地理领域的关联性研究进行了综述。研究发现,ICT通过促进产业结构高级化协同城镇化发展,通过改变流动性、邻近性改变城镇体系与城市空间结构。同时基于虚拟空间—实体空间,构建信息通讯技术背景下城市空间与居民空间行为作用机制。在新型城镇化背景下,基于微观尺度聚焦居民个人空间行为的研究亟待开展,空间正义、社会公平、区域发展均衡等议题亟待关注,融合信息通讯技术的城市空间理论亟待发展。