Alke Jenss – författare

This edited volume asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular ‘urban’ social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the impact of memory. The analytical categories of space and time must be thought as inextricably linked with each other. Expanding this fundamental conceptual idea offers fresh perspectives on urban violence. The book unites case studies on different world regions and historical periods , and thus challenges assumed binaries of cities the global North and South, the past and present.

This edited volume asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular ‘urban’ social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the impact of memory. The analytical categories of space and time must be thought as inextricably linked with each other. Expanding this fundamental conceptual idea offers fresh perspectives on urban violence. The book unites case studies on different world regions and historical periods , and thus challenges assumed binaries of cities the global North and South, the past and present.

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. Selective Security in the War on Drugs analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico. It interprets the “security projects” of the 2000s—when the security provided by the state became ever more selective—as embedded in processes of land appropriation, transformed property relations, and global capital accumulation. By zooming in on security practices in Colombia and Mexico in that decade and juxtaposing the two contexts, this book offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence. To what extent and for whom do states produce order and disorder? Which social forces support and drive such state practices?Expanding the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism and the coloniality of state power—thus linking political economy to postcolonial approaches—the book builds a theoretical lens to study state security practices. Different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influenced the state discourse on crime to very different extents. Security practices—which oscillated between dispersed organization by a multiplicity of actors and institutionalization with the military—materialized as horrific insecurity for social groups thought of as disposable. In tendency, putting security centerstage disabled dissent. The “security projects” exacerbated contradictions driven by a particular economic model and simultaneously criminalized precisely those that this model had already radically disadvantaged.

Im Kontext neoliberaler Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik erfuhren die Länder Lateinamerikas tiefgreifende Veränderungen ihrer Sozialstrukturen. Jedoch kontrastiert die hohe Relevanz dieser Wandlungsprozesse mit ihrer bislang geringen wissenschaftlichen Erforschung. Der Sammelband vereint daher die wenigen und hervorragenden internationalen – vor allem aus Lateinamerika stammenden – Beiträge zu den wichtigsten Dimensionen der gegenwärtigen Sozialstrukturen. Damit wird eine erste theoretische und empirische Grundlage für weiterführende Analysen der lateinamerikanischen Realität geschaffen.

Die Beiträge des Bandes untersuchen die unterschiedlichen Dimensionen der lateinamerikanischen Sozialstruktur seit der Jahrtausendwende. Klassische Fragestellungen der Sozialstrukturanalyse finden ebenso Beachtung wie jüngere Forschungsfelder. Der vorliegende Sammelband vereint innovative Beiträge lateinamerikanischer und weiterer Forscher*innen zu den bedeutendsten Dimensionen der gegenwärtigen Sozialstrukturen. Damit liegt erstmalig in deutscher Sprache eine umfassende Zusammenschau der wichtigsten sozialstrukturellen Entwicklungen in Lateinamerika der letzten 20 Jahre vor. Die Sozialstruktur in Lateinamerika ist in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten in Bewegung geraten. Ausschlaggebend waren zum einen die Folgen der neoliberalen Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik der 1980er und 90er Jahre, zum anderen die Wahl von Mitte-Links-Regierungen seit Beginn der 2000er Jahre. Diese Regierungen stellten das neoliberale Dogma in Frage und nahmen auch dank gestiegener Rohstoffpreise Umverteilungspolitiken in Angriff. Diese sozialen, politischen und kulturellen Umbrüche machten sich auch in den Sozialstrukturen der Region bemerkbar. Der Band analysiert wichtige Entwicklungen, rezente Phänomene und neue Debatten.