Social Urbanism and the Politics of Violence

The Medellín Miracle

K. Maclean

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349484928
  9781137397355
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137397362
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Medellín, Colombia, used to be the most violent city on earth, but in recent years, allegedly thanks to its 'social urbanism' approach to regeneration, it has experienced a sharp decline in violence. The author explores the politics behind this decline and the complex transformations in terms of urban development policies in Medellín.

1

The Politics of Violence and Urbanism

Abstract: This chapter provides the theoretical framing for the discussion of violence and social urbanism in Medellín, drawing on work from geography, urban studies, political science, and regionally specific explorations of violence in Latin American cities. Theories of violence have tended to situate the problem either with the individual, in terms of criminal pathology, or with structural inequality. This chapter proposes a more dynamic analysis of violence as process, with a focus on how violence becomes a means to attain and retain power, and how violence enters into the ‘common sense’ of political and social life. This framework can offer an analysis of how places become violent, how violence relates to urban politics and geography, and, as may be the case in Medellín, how transformations in political processes may address the root causes of violence.

Keywords: theories of violence; subjectivity; urban violence; gender-based violence

Maclean, Kate. Social Urbanism and the Politics of Violence: The Medellín Miracle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137397362.0006.

This chapter explores the ways in which violence has been conceptualised and analysed, with particular reference to violence in an urban context. Violence is a vast subject that has been studied from a variety of perspectives. The purpose of this overview is to argue for an approach that analyses violence in terms of power, and to contextualise such an understanding within broader policy and academic debates on the subject. Violence tends to be seen, in popular representations and psychological analyses, as a trait of individuals, but a sociopolitical approach can explain how places can be deemed ‘violent’. This is pertinent to the development of social urbanism in Medellín, as, despite the fact that violence is associated with particularly villainous characters there, the claim is that a city-wide approach to urban regeneration has led to a reduction in violence.

Violence is ubiquitous, complex, and messy. Myriad incidents in which harm has been intended or effected, whether in the name of discipline, defence, revenge, or national security, as well as owing to negligence, can be categorised as ‘violent’. Efforts to neatly define violence and classify its varied manifestations, whilst helpful for analysis and policy, necessarily simplify the astonishing range of cultural, historical, psychological, economic, and political factors that are involved in any act of violence (Nordstrom and Robben, 1995). The focus here is urban violence. ‘Urban violence’, like many of the other classifications of violence, describes a cluster of incidents that are similar and different in myriad ways. Criminal violence, political oppression, gang violence, and gender violence can all be considered typical of the violence to be found in the city. Nevertheless, urban violence is a phenomenon that has generated interest from a range of scholars and development practitioners, as well as the military, who have sought reasons to explain why violent crime is so high in cities around the world and policy solutions to address what many are calling urban violence of epidemic proportion.

The Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA), a branch of the World Health Organization, defines violence as

the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation. (WHO, 2014)

The VPA further categorises violence in terms of whether it is self-directed, interpersonal, or collective, and these categories are in turn divided into social, political, and economic in the case of collective violence, and physical, sexual, and psychological in the case of interpersonal violence. This typology demonstrates the complexity of violence and the range of violent acts, whilst keeping sight of the intuitive definition of violence as the use of force to inflict harm. It has been used as the basis of work on violence in economic and epidemiological studies from the WHO, and in other analyses that situate violence as a sociopolitical concern (Moncada, 2013; Moser and McIlwaine, 2004). This definition is broadly used, but its focus on intent is controversial and represents the tendency to limit discussions of the causes of violence to the motives of the perpetrator, in terms of either psychological traits or deprivation.

Psychological approaches to violence tend to explore the relationships between aggression, arousal, cognition, learning, and the propensity to commit violent acts (e.g. DeWall et al., 2011; Mazur, 2013). Whilst there is a recognition in this body of work of the need to situate psychological explanations of violence in the context of interdisciplinary research on the subject, there is nevertheless a focus on quantitative, generalisable studies that are often carried out under laboratory conditions. Although academic work in this field is characterised by specific, limited knowledge claims, at a political level the focus on individual causes of violence in positivist science can undermine the pursuit of more contextualised understandings (Feldman, 1991). The image of the perpetrator of violence as ‘psychotic’, or as a testosterone-fuelled gang member whose cognitive processes dictate his harmful acts and lack of empathy, is powerful not only in popular culture, but also at policy level. Although the 2010 World Bank Report on Violence in the City espouses an interdisciplinary approach, it suggests that social factors such as the experience of abuse can increase the propensity of the victim to become a perpetrator of violence on the ground that ‘there is strong evidence that this experience alters brain physiology’ (World Bank, 2010: 25). Such a reductionist approach may weaken resolve to act on social issues associated with violence in favour of pathologising the individuals involved. It also coincides with political agendas that focus on incarceration and punishment rather than prevention.

Despite the prominence of an individualistic approach to violence, consistent associations have been found between poverty, inequality, city size, and city growth that would suggest that structural social and economic conditions contribute to a propensity among people in certain places to resort to violence (Elgar and Aitken, 2011; Pridemore, 2011). It seems that inequality is a greater predictor of an area being violent than poverty, although of course high levels of poverty and high levels of inequality are often related. Although larger cities tend to be more violent, the crucial factor is the rate of city growth, which, if high, is consistently associated with elevated levels of urban violence (Muggah and Savage, 2012). Whilst the evidence for these correlations is compelling, the causal mechanisms involved are debatable, and highly politicised. Although it is established that certain socioeconomic factors are involved in violence and should be a focus of prevention strategies, in the search to find generalisable consistencies, assumptions about causal mechanisms involved in these correlations may not reflect the specific political context of a given city and may reinforce fears perpetuated in the media about the potential for violence among excluded populations, further stigmatising those groups.

Coming from a focus on peace rather than violence, Galtung (1969) proposed the term ‘structural violence’ to capture the harm done by living in conditions of poverty and inequality. Contrary to the WHO definition, Galtung’s starting point is that peace is the absence of violence, and therefore, for peace to be desirable, the definition of violence must capture ‘when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations’ (Galtung, 1969: 168). Such a broad, and perhaps counter-intuitive, definition of violence entails that, to follow his examples, the death of someone from tuberculosis in a context in which remedies are available, or the uneven access to transport that permits the ‘mobility of [only] a selected few’ (Galtung, 1969: 169), be regarded as violence. The idea of ‘structural violence’ goes beyond the observation of patterns of violence or correlations to suggest that deprivation itself is an act of violence. ‘Structural violence’ also refers to social patterns in violence. As Galtung puts it, ‘when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence’ (Galtung, 1969: 171).

Structural factors associated with violence, such as inequality, exclusion, and deprivation, do not by themselves explain violence or negate the importance of social context in understanding violent acts. Collective violence, as explored by Tilly (2003), involves damage, at least two perpetrators, and coordination between those perpetrators. This coordination does not necessarily mean prior agreement or a chain of command; it may be a (possibly tacit) consensus that violence is the right course of action. Such a consensus relies on shared understandings about which situations require violent reactions and ideas of identity that indicate who is deserving of violence and whose side one should be on (Jabri, 1996; Tizro, 2013). These ideas are constantly recreated and renegotiated as people interact and are specific to local histories, economies, societies, and cultures. Examples used to illustrate this point range from ideas of masculinity, honour, and solidarity that can start a bar fight (Tilly, 2003) to the systematic, genocidal violence of colonialism and holocaust, which may be underpinned by ideas of which beings ‘count’ as human, which bodies represent evil and which civility, how to maintain control, and, most disturbingly, how to pass the time (Taussig, 1984).

Understanding the discursive context is hence a necessary component of analyses of violence, and entails an exploration of violence in private spaces, notably the home – the site where discursive constructions underpinning and justifying violence are recreated. Different types of violence need to be seen as an ‘interrelated continuum’ (Moser, 2004: 6) rather than being, as tends to be the case, dissociated from political conflicts, seen as epiphenomena of a broader conflict, or even assumed to be private, individual matters (Pearce, 2006). Such an interpretive approach that emphasises the recreation of discourses that justify violence is in danger of being confounded with ideas of a ‘culture of violence’. Allegations that cultures are somehow inherently violent are not only, according to Pécaut (1999), a ‘lazy’ analysis but can also recreate harmful colonial tropes and, in effect, offer merely a tautologous explanation that a place is violent because it is like that there. Nevertheless, it is important to ground analyses of violence in cultural context (Galtung, 1990; Munck, 2008). Cultural discourses, which can themselves be understood only in historical context, underpin the identity categories that frame analyses of social exclusion, and the discourses via which ‘normal’ behaviour is defined, transgression is recognised, and the justifications of violence are established (Nordstrom and Robben, 1995).

Studying the violent subject – not the agent in isolation, but rather the person who is interpreting, negotiating, and even trying to change her circumstances – affords a framework for understanding how violence is underpinned by structural context, as well as how that structural context positions people in terms of their propensity to violence – not only with regard to motive but also in terms of the discursive and material resources and power to commit violent acts (Jabri, 1996). As Jabri argues, unless you are a pacifist, there will be some moment at which you think violence is justified. The most obvious example is self-defence, but justifiable violence can include examples as divergent as ‘just wars’, the death penalty, and disciplining children. That moment at which violence is considered to be justified is mediated by discourse, culture, and status, as well as being a response to material and structural ‘realities’. Crucially, understanding the violent subject means foregrounding the interpretation and internalisation of ideas of identity, trust, and worth that are culturally situated in local historical, social, political, and economic contexts.

This position is a challenge to understandings of violence as the absence of order and authority. If it is accepted that the life of man (sic) is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ – a view espoused not only by Thomas Hobbes and contract theorists but also by evolutionary psychologists – and that the raison d’etre of authority is to appease and contain this brutishness, then violence is the disruption of social order. If, on the other hand, it is accepted that violence itself is mediated by social rules, norms, and discourses and situated in an economic, political context, then violence is part of a social order (Jabri, 1996). Furthermore, violence may be a critical element in the maintenance of hierarchies, identities, and norms which themselves underpin violence. For violence to continue, it has to be in certain interests that it continue (Tilly, 2003), and hence violence itself has a role in perpetuating political processes, rather than being an absence of such processes or of ‘order’ (Jabri, 1996). It therefore follows that violence cannot be fully understood without an analysis of power.

Violence and power

Discussions of violence and power have ranged from the global scale of inter-State nuclear war to so-called intimate partner violence. Violence and power have been understood to relate in various ways. Whilst Mao Zedong famously claimed that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’, Hannah Arendt argued that violence is the opposite of power, ‘where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent’ (Arendt, 1970: 56). Arendt’s conceptual division involves a definition of power as consensus, which violence is incapable of creating. What violence can achieve in the immediate is ‘effective command’, and although violence appears when ‘power is in jeopardy ... left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance’ (Arendt, 1970: 56), as it erodes the consensual bases of legitimate power.

Arendt’s configuration is a challenge to the conception of State power that has obtained for centuries in the liberal tradition, in which the State gains legitimacy by using force, in Hobbesian terms, to secure the security of its citizens, and hence can gain the consent – albeit tacit – of its citizens to obey its laws: the social contract. The need for a State that, as Weber argues, has a ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (cited in Campbell and Dillon, 1993: 141) and is capable of suppressing the natural nasty brutishness of its citizens associates power and violence constitutively. The powerful heuristic device of the social contract has dominated vernacular understandings of violence as a breakdown in social order and justifies the repression of violence and disorder by forceful means.

The understanding of violence as a breakdown in the social contract provides an analytical framework capable of explaining the relationship between inequality, deprivation, and violence as a failure of power to secure citizens’ security, broadly defined. If for whatever reason the State fails to be the sole wielder of legitimate force to maintain security, then a cycle of violence can develop in which violent acts become justified whether as a reaction to the structural violence of deprivation or as self-defence. These acts of violence, lacking legitimate process, can justify further violent reactions. This syllogistic argument justifies the State’s monopoly on violence to maintain order and its paternalistic role as guardian of citizens’ security. However, and this is particularly relevant in a post-colonial context, the initial legitimacy of the State is here assumed.

The opposing philosophies of power and violence represented by Arendtian and social contract thinking demonstrate the importance of the way violence is analysed to the way that authority, statecraft, and dissent are understood. However, as conceptual theories, their sharp divisions between ideas of power, violence, security, and authority abstract understandings of power away from the messy complex realities in which power and violence co-exist in diverse and fluctuating ways. The ideas of the State formulated in the sixteenth century, or even the mid-twentieth century, may require a radical re-reading (e.g. Fraser, 2004) if they are to be relevant to twenty-first-century political realities in which nation-States are in many cases weaker than multinational corporations and the spaces and means of legitimate political conflict have consequently been reconfigured.

Legitimacy may well be what is at stake in ‘fourth generation wars’ – the form of warfare first defined in the late 1980s to characterise the development of modern conflicts in which the distinctions between State and non-State actors, and between military and civilian spaces, have been blurred (Lind, 2004). Therefore, an assumed distinction between State and non-State in conflict situations may erroneously assume the legitimacy of the former and call into question the legitimacy of the latter (Jones and Rodgers, 2009). In many conflicts, State legitimacy is exactly what is in dispute, and there may be collusion between State and non-State actors, as in cases where paramilitary groups have been shown to be working on behalf of the State.

The State does not immediately have a monopoly on the use of violence – this has to be earned and established – but processes of democratisation have, historically, frequently been extremely violent (Carroll, 2011; Tilly, 2003). The questionable legitimacy of States that have their roots in colonial violence and may represent factional elite rather than public interests (Carroll, 2011) is a source of conflict throughout the world, although these conflicts do not necessarily spill over into violence. The solutions to the crisis of legitimacy implied by social contract theory – to ensure citizens’ security, broadly defined, and to have the apparatus in place to have a monopoly on the use of force – can appear simplistic in a globalised world in which nation-States lack the resources to ensure either of these key facets of statehood.

There are political advantages for some to continuing conflicts (Tilly, 2003), and there is also an economic profit for some from continued violence. Understanding the contribution that violence can make to an area’s political and economic development is crucial in terms of explaining how long-term epidemic violence perpetuates itself and has a role in the acquisition and maintenance of power (Jones and Rodgers, 2009). This is, for example, true of the arms trade, and in more recent years international funding available to combat violence and ‘the war on terror’ means that military funding can be seen as being dependent on continued strife (Graham, 2011). If violence has economic beneficiaries, then the resources to keep conflict going will be available – a criticism that has been levied, for example, against the US ‘War on Drugs’ (Wacquant, 2009).

Political theories of violence have centred on the issues of State and revolutionary violence. Violence in the community, in the family, and on the street is, however, no less political and no less intricately entwined with questions of power. As argued above, violent acts occur when there is a sense that they are justified, and this sense is mediated by discourse, categories, and identities that are culturally situated (Jabri, 1996). Violence comes into play when someone whose structural position gives them power perceives that the use of violence is warranted. Those in power can also define what counts as transgression, and when the use of force is warranted, and can also then exercise this force.

Many conflicts are rooted in identity (Sen, 2007). From Northern Ireland to the Middle East, what may have started as conflicts over resources or rights articulate with political tensions that configure along identity lines. It is also the case that conflict forms identity. Those in a hegemonic position shape identity landscapes from their gaze, and the ‘others’ that are created in the process – indigenous people, blacks, women, religious minorities – are forced to see themselves through the eyes of others, as they are interpellated into the dominant discourse. This power to name and define, which is performed and established as hegemonic groups recreate their identity through everyday cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Medelln Miracle
• 1  The Politics of Violence and Urbanism
• 2  Medelln: The Most Violent City in the World
• 3  The Miracle? Social Urbanism
• 4  Behind the Miracle
• 5  New Political Spaces
• Conclusion
• References
• Index