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This article discusses transformations in social conditions, rights and urban violence in Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Poverty, social inequalities and violence are constitut...

aViolence refers to detrimental behaviors that cause damage, including murder. In Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence-And a Bold New Plan for Peace in The Streets, Thomas A...

The densely populated, multi-ethnic area of Lyari in Karachi is one of the city’s original settlements. The area has become infamous as the site of an ongoing conflict between criminal gangs, polit...

The introduction of app-based ride-share services in Johannesburg, South Africa has provoked deadly clashes between meter-taxi and e-hailing drivers. While the extreme violence in the taxi industry...

Peacekeepers in cities face particular challenges because cities are densely populated and heterogeneous, encompass multiple terrains and fluid features, and host key assets of political, economic and strategic importance. Attacks targeting peacekeepers in cities constitute a recurrent problem, but how do they affect a peace operation’s activities? We theorise the effects of such violence on three outcomes: patrolling and outreach, use of force, and the establishment of new bases. We explore these dynamics by analysing intra-city dynamics of violence and operational activity following attacks on African Union (AU) peacekeepers in Mogadishu, Somalia, from initial deployment in 2007 through 2009. We use the geo-referenced UCDP Peacemakers at Risk (PAR) dataset and extend it by coding specific city sub-locations for incidences of violence, allowing us to analyse the spatiality of violence involving peacekeepers in Mogadishu. The evidence suggests that during its first three years, attacks on AMISOM significantly hampered its ability to spread out in the city and operate effectively, but did not evidently alter wider patterns of violence in the city. Despite these challenges, AMISOM managed to fulfil the core element of its mandate: preventing the overthrow of the Somali Transitional Federal Government.

The concept of power provides a useful analytical framework through which to analyse the political relationships between non-state armed groups, marginalised territories and populations in cities. ...

This article considers the adaptation of international peace mediation to the post-war context of urban gang-related violence. The 2012 OAS-brokered San Salvador gang truce represented a sh...

Warfare often spills over into contentious mobilisation in cities. However, violent urban social disorder is not simply a reflection of broader conflict dynamics. In this article, I argue t...

Eric Hobsbawm's milestone work Bandits is attentive to the rural poor and situates social banditry within the world of peasant resistance, but his concepts are surprisingly adaptable to contemporary urban settings. Drawing on Hobsbawm's conceptualisation of social banditry and avengers, this article examines the perspective of gangs who perceive themselves as victims of inequality, poverty and capitalism; who serve as social actors and security providers for their communities; and who at the same time engage in cruelty and high levels of violence and terror. This qualitative study is based on fieldwork undertaken in Trinidad and Tobago. Findings show that Hobsbawm's figure of the avenger contributes to a better understanding of the contemporary modalities of urban violence and helps unpacking and characterise the ambiguity of the relationship between gangs and local communities.

For decades Hip Hop cultural practices have been disparaged for allegedly inciting and being responsible for the eruption of urban violence. This assumption, likely built upon pre-existing biases r...

The Black Saturday massacre that took place on 6 December 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon, marked the first large-scale targeting of Lebanese civilians during the Lebanese civil war. The magnitude ...

While the world is focused on the exploitation and burning of the Amazon, Brazil presents other issues of importance to the country itself, and to the larger world. The Dutch anthropologist Martijn...

In 2016, 43 of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world were located in Latin America. In reducing levels of urban violence and preventing future outbreaks, approaches developed in Western Europe ...

Editors Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt have assembled a group of interdisciplinary scholars to tackle the troubling paradox of Latin America’s continuing high rates of urban violence despite the end...

It has become commonplace to claim that cities are becoming conflict zones, or ‘war zones’. This article traces some of the discursive and conceptual shifts that made it possible to define the city as a new frontier for international humanitarian action in states of the Global South. In order to represent cities as humanitarian spaces, concepts of ‘failure’ and ‘fragility’ have been problematised and subjected to reinterpretations that legitimised new strategies applied to the urban realm. I argue that this re-scaling of humanitarian practices enables a de-coupling and inclusion of so called new ‘urban conflicts’ in strategies of global liberal governance. Moving from failed states to fragile cites is a key development to understand changes in the practices that redefine humanitarian spaces today. The definition of urban violence as a new type of conflict informs a new cycle of expansion of the humanitarian order focused on the city. The article analyses the problematisation of concepts of failure...

During a workshop at Aarhus University, participants were asked to carry out an anthropological experiment modelled upon an artistic one. The artistic experiment involved one filmmaker presenting a series of obstructions to another, in effect setting unfamiliar and even abhorrent artistic tasks. My obstruction involved drawing upon Marquis de Sade's writings to consider urban gang violence among the African Americans I have studied. This paper represents my uneasy response. It is fashioned as series of dialogues, rather in the manner of a theatre piece. I offer an ethnographic case where a child is murdered and his older brother, Ralph (a gang member), exhorts his fellow ‘homies’ to stop the killings. Dialogues extracted from Sade's fictional debates between the virtuous and the libertines are juxtaposed against a fictional dialogue between Ralph and gang members who speak to the pleasures of violence and gang life.

This article explores the potential contribution to a better understanding and practice of urban security from participatory research methodologies with communities most affected by insecurity and violence. It focusses on the case of Medellin, Colombia, and analyses the key features and impacts of what is known as the ‘Medellin Model’, an approach to urban security widely regarded as innovative and successful. It locates this approach in a history of efforts to reframe security in Latin America, where urban violence has escalated greatly. The shift from ‘security as repression’ to ‘security as management’ has ushered in new models for governing ‘ungoverned’ neighbourhoods. The scrutiny of the effectiveness of these models is limited, however, by the accumulated mistrust and fear in such spaces. This article analyses a methodology for researching security practice on the ground. The paper assesses what difference it makes when academic, civic and social organisations come together to co-produce knowledge w...

Despite problems of violence domestically, Brazil has played a key leadership role as part of MINUSTAH peacekeeping operations in Haiti since 2004. This article addresses how Brazil's international military engagement is shaping domestic approaches to urban security, and what may be the implications of the use of military strategies, operations, and norms to address issues of public security in Brazilian cities. It is argued that current approaches toward urban security employing military-trained peacekeepers actually represent a continuation of old paradigms, yet these recent militarised approaches are likely evolving into newer and potentially more accountable forms by constraining indiscriminate use of force and establishing a positive state presence in marginal urban areas. As such, the article connects long-established issues of dealing with urban violence in Latin America with ongoing debates in the United States and beyond about post-counterinsurgency approaches to increasingly urban conflict setti...

The paper analyzes the determinants of apartments’ prices in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, with the use of hierarchical models, spatial models and a hierarchical-spatial approach. Besides the apartments’ characteristics, such as area, age and building standard, prices were determined by local urban amenities. The hierarchical models indicated that local variables, such as urban violence, infrastructure and services, explained over 75% of prices’ remaining variability. The spatial models analyzed if, after controlling for price variability with the explanatory variables in the second level of the hierarchical models, spatial correlations still existed in price determination. The positive and significant spatial coefficient in spatial autoregressive models (SAR) indicated spatial dependency. The hierarchical-spatial approach showed that over 70% of apartment prices’ remaining variability could be explained by local variables and that the lagged urban services variable explained another 12% of this variability.

This article presents conditions of insecurity and violence in Karachi in relation to an emerging geography whereby the city is fragmented into various enclaves of business, leisure and residence. Such enclaves have proliferated as a response to impotent public security in the face of rising urban violence and insecurity. Focusing on residential enclaves, which are primarily privately securitized spaces that attempt to restrict unwanted circulation, I emphasize the paradox of Karachi’s enclavization. Although the city is fast morphing into an archipelago of enclaves, Karachi continues to be drawn into a vortex of violence, and residents remain insecure. In this article, I investigate this paradox through a relational study of enclavization, insecurity and violence. I argue although enclaves in Karachi emerge as a tactic to deal with everyday insecurity and violence, the socio-political conditions generated by processes of enclavization create circumstances that produce a continuum of violence. This argume...

Violent acts are not random, but are infused with meaning: those intended by the perpetrators and those ascribed by others. This article explores how dominant gangs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro attempt to manipulate the meanings of violence to maintain their control of territory, presenting themselves as protectors of the community. Gangs impose violent punishment on residents who have breached their rules and behavioural norms. The messages they send out regarding the (un)acceptability of violence against women is highly ambiguous, however, which reduces women's options and increases levels of insecurity. Despite the ambiguity and unpredictability of gang rule, residents refrain from challenging gang control, preferring to moderate their own daily routines as a means to feel secure in the face of high levels of insecurity.

Parental incarceration, poverty, urban violence, and drug use can be underlying factors of academic achievement gaps between Black urban males and their counterparts. These risk factors have the potential to position low-income urban students as struggling readers. Two qualitative case studies obtained from a larger mixed methods study illustrate exemplary after-school literacy engagements with Black urban adolescent males, each with an incarcerated parent. Two researchers, a counseling psychologist and a teacher educator, collaborated to create a strengths-based after-school program with culturally relevant literacy instruction as their primary objective. The 2 case study findings reveal the complexities of choosing culturally relevant texts, the need for motivation and engagement in order to build skills, and the fact that relationships are essential in the delivery of culturally responsive literacy instruction. The article concludes with recommendations for teachers working with at-risk Black adolescen...

This paper analyses some determinants of urban violence in seven major Colombian cities. The empirical research is intended to explore variations in violence across these Colombian cities and the influence of these variations on Colombia's economic development. In this study, several econometric data panel models and various estimate types are applied to control heterogeneity across the cities and to address endogeneity problems among the explanatory variables. The results show that education, poverty, inequality and the labour market are strong predictors of homicide rates in the seven Colombian cities. The results also demonstrate that city-level homicide rates depend on the city's level of development and the tendency of urban violence to persist over time. The findings thus demonstrate that factors such as inequality, poverty, education and the labour market influence urban violence, thereby generating negative effects on Colombia's economic and social development.

The article focuses on the nineteenth century fear of the ‘dangerous classes’. From the dangerous classes – all social scientists agreed – emanated a fundamental threat to society. However, corresponding to this seemingly social threat, on a much deeper level an epistemological threat was caused by the dangerous classes as well. The epistemological fear of the dangerous classes – this is the thesis – results from the confrontation of the researcher with an object of analysis that keeps withdrawing itself from any analytical fixation and adjustment as such. In the article particularly three aspects of this epistemological fear – the fear of heterogeneity, of a levelling of borders and of hybridization – are presented and contextualized within a wider epistemological horizon, namely the nineteenth century ideal of objectivity. The last chapter of the article outlines what seems to be a reactualization of the notion of the dangerous classes within current social theories on urban violence and exclusion. In r...

In the last decade there has been a noticeable growth of suburban developments in Brazil, mostly gated communities, to the point that it has become a trend in the country's architecture and urbanism. These communities can be perceived as a loud response to urban violence, but are also increasingly anchored in a certain nostalgia that has gained space in the imagination of the Brazilian upper classes. In such an exclusionary climate, this study questions the future of Brazilian cities—should gated communities continue to be presented as the main solution to urban problems? The paper discusses these issues based upon the growth of gated communities in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and their questionable affiliation with New Urbanism, using the Alphaville Lagoa dos Ingleses project as a case study.

This article is a walking interview in an urban area of Sheffield, in which there has been considerable violence between Somali and Afro-Caribbean males in 2009. Photographs were taken at the significant stopping-points. The article elucidates how a short walk can reveal local issues and concerns. There is also a parallel discussion of the usefulness of visual methods and walking interviews which is contained within endnotes, along with further information.

In an attempt to move beyond the parochial character of the otherwise rich historiography of urban South Africa, this article compares the level of violent crime, gang conflict and vigilantism in the segregated townships and mining compounds surrounding South African cities, particularly Johannesburg, in the period to 1960, with that of African neighbourhoods in colonial cities elsewhere on the continent. The evidence suggests that concepts of South African exceptionalism need to take account of the extraordinary degree of urban violence that distinguished South Africa from its colonial contemporaries. A brutalising mining environment, combined with racial ordinances that criminalised Africans and coloureds and exposed vast numbers of men to prison and prison gangs, produced a culture of urban violence unique in colonial Africa.

Until recently the abundant literature on South African urban history has seen violence in towns and cities in terms either of anti-colonial protest or of labour consciousness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined the urban violence with which it was concerned as exclusively political. More recently, however, questions of spatiality, township culture, generation, and gender have offered alternative or supplementary explanations.This article moves from the South African historiography to the less well known history of Southern Rhodesian towns and townships. In particular it focuses on Rhodesia's main industrial centre, Bulawayo. Between 1929 and 1960 there were four dramatic events in Bulawayo which involved varying degrees of violence. These were the ‘faction fights' of December 1929; the railway strike of 1946; the general strike of April 1948; and the so-called zhii riots of 1960. There have recently been authoritative analyses of the 1946 and 1948 strikes. This article therefore concentrates...

Frederick Bailey Deeming who was named as Jack the Ripper was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 23 May 1892, who murdered his wife Emily Mather, four children and many other people. Although the five original Ripper murders had happened in the East End of London in 1888, in the autumn of 1892, from 5 March until the end of May, Melbourne was at the epicentre of a very brief but powerful flurry of astonishing newspaper reports describing the crimes, arrest, trial and execution of a man widely touted, at the time, to be Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper had become a predetermined, flexible, caricature of masculine urban violence against women.

Violence at the Urban Margins is a state of the art anthropological treatment of the problem of urban violence in North and Latin America, the latter being the most dangerous region in the world. T...

Memory plays an immense trick on most of us who write about the history of New York. We often depend on memoirs that shroud its past in a glorious aura that contrasts dramatically with our view of today's city. In the writings of politicians, authors, and even historians, the city of the last generation seems marvelously exciting, exhilarating, organized, and wholesome. In contrast, today's city seems overwhelmingly burdened with signs and symptoms of decay and dissolution. In the early 1970s, Otto Bettman, who collected and catalogued thousands of photographs of nineteenth-century New York, characterized this process as the creation of a "benevolent haze" that leaves "us with the image of an ebullient, carefree America."1 Certainly, there are aspects of periods past that should be recalled and even celebrated. But, as the history of disease in the city all too clearly illustrates, it is dangerous to lament the passing of supposedly golden eras and to characterize the present as a period of decline and disintegration. When we somberly reflect on the past, historians and lay people alike know that "The world [of the late nineteenthcentury city] was in no way spared the problems we consider horrendously our own" whether they be homelessness, poverty, crime, or, most poignantly, disease.2 Similarly, when we put aside our current and very specific fears of urban violence, homelessness, poverty, tuberculosis, or AIDS, we can see sides of the modern city that reflect its continuing vibrancy and even hope.

(1999). From the Ninevites to the hard livings gang: township gangsters and urban violence in twentieth‐century South Africa. African Studies: Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 55-85.

Urban ‘violence’ is interpreted in its sociological sense and as an interplay between stereotyped representations and the reality that ‘dangerous classes’ experience in their environment. Why is the city referred to as a dangerous place? Assumptions are made about: the selective coverage of the media which increases feelings of insecurity and movements of privatisation and retreat; the impact of hasty and cheap urban design devaluing people's identity; the consequences of territorial isolation and of social exclusion. External dynamics and larger processes impacting upon vulnerable populations’ trajectories and on specific urban areas’ development are then analysed. Finally, violence in French inner‐cities and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 illustrate problematic (and sometimes innovative) forms of urban violence.

Because urban areas have a deserved reputation for violence, it makes sense to consider the impact of violence on the urban campus. Suprisingly, urban colleges and universities may no be unusually violent, for a combination or reasons. Urban students do risk more types of violent threats, however, than their peers at rural and suburban schools. Two groups of students-victims of violence and city phobics-have strong negative reactions to the city and urban violence. For most students, though, urban violence has more subtle effects. While students lead relatively normal college existnences, they do learn to be on their guard.

Brazil presents the paradoxical situation of being an industrialised and a Third World country at the same time. Highly skewed income concentration led to the polarisation of society into haves and have‐nots, dramatically increasing social deterioration and urban violence. Within this context, the study examines three different populations ‐ students, business managers and the general public ‐in search of the image they hold of the poor. While the results indicate that the image of the poor as enemy is not yet the dominant one, nearly one‐third of the general public think people from the slums are dangerous. Moreover, those who believe so tend to agree with the use of violence against the poor.

Violent crime has been increasing at an alarming pace in large U.S. metropolitan areas. This article, condensed from a chapter published by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, explores possibilities that design and form of the urban environment may control, prevent, or invite violence. It is now a hard fact of American life that violence has become a cause of change in the urban environment. Unquestionably, our major cities are now being fortified, and historical precedents lead to the conclusion that contemporary defensive cities may become a reality in America, however foreboding and economically and socially destructive their consequences would be. Although defensive use of the urban environment can control the types and locations of crime, it will not attack the causes of crime, and may add to them. It is unclear whether improvements in the urban physical environment can influence positive behavior and reduce the overall volume of crime.

Data from a recently completed national longitudinal survey suggest, contrary to popular expectations, that individual perceptions of local violence have at best only a very moderate influence on significant changes in residential location, that concern with crime problems does not seem to result in a major exodus to the suburbs, and that what little effect urban crime has on mobility is stronger for the poor and black than for high and middle income whites. The findings are interpreted to indicate that those groups who are most affected by crime and violence, the poor and the black, are precisely those groups least able to escape the problem through residential relocation.