Kees Koonings

Featuring original fieldwork across a broad array of case studies, this cutting edge volume focuses on questions not only of crime and insecurity, but also of Latin American cities' ability to creatively and productively respond to these problems.

"The twenty-first century is set to be the stage for the massive urbanization of the world's population. Particularly, the so-called 'megacities' around the world are rapidly becoming the scene for deprivation and exclusion, especially in what has come to be called the 'global south'. In such large-scale yet concentrated social environments, a complex set of relationships links poverty and exclusion to urban politics, power relations and public policy. Violent actors look for power in strategies that seek access to urban politics and policy-making. The urban poor are confronted with the challenge of charting pathways in their 'encounters with violence'. Local politicians, administrators, grass roots leaders and NGO officials are faced with the puzzle of how to restore effective non-violent institutions, legitimate governance and citizen security. Featuring case studies from across the globe, Megacities examines recent world-wide trends in poverty and social exclusion, urban violence and politics, and links these to the challenges faced by policy-makers and practitioners."--Publisher description.

This volume explores recent evidence of how partial state failure in Latin America interacts with new forms of organized violence, undermining the democratic consolidations of the past two decades. This 'new violence' stems from a variety of social actors: drug mafias, peasant militias and urban gangs, the socalled actores armadas, and include state-related actors like the police, military intelligence agencies and paramilitary forces. The results include both 'governance voids' - domains where the legitimate state is effectively absent - and the erosion of the capacity and willingness of stat.

As cities sprawl across Latin America, absorbing more and more of its people, crime and violence have become inescapable. Based on empirical evidence, interviews with local people and historical contextualization, the authors attempt to shed light on the fault-lines which have appeared in Latin American society.