Criminal Governance in Times of Post-Chávez Revolution and Questioned Legitimacy: A Look at the Different Territorial Orders and Armed Actors in Caracas

Abstract

This article compares the configuration of two armed territorial orders and forms of local governance in neo-patrimonial authoritarian contexts in Caracas that suffer from what has been called a “complex humanitarian crisis”. Based on the analysis of ethnographic data, this text dialogues with the concepts of collaborative governance and criminal governance to understand how social control functions locally in an authoritarian context where a political, economic, and humanitarian crisis has restricted the resources and scope of government. The Venezuelan case is especially revealing of processes of mutation in the relations between armed actors and a fragmented state that involve social control functions in their territories in a context of contested legitimacy.