Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá by Austin Zeiderman

Abstract

Austin Zeiderman, Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogota. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 312 pp.Colombia is at a historic juncture, or so it seems. In less than a week, peace negotiations between government and FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), country's largest guerrilla group, went celebratory signing of a peace accord in Havana on September 26, 2016, to rejection of agreement in a closely voted referendum on October 2nd. In a country that has endured a 52-year conflict, with more than 200,000 deaths and 7 million displaced persons, transit to a post-conflict era continues to be deeply troubled and perennial pre-postconflict (Theidon 2015) moment raises critical concerns. Immediate concerns include demobilization and reintegration of armed groups. These are daunting challenges, given not only number of combatants and weapons in circulation, but also availability of opportunities for rearmament in an expanding landscape of criminal fueled by drug trafficking, resource extraction, and deregulated regional economies.More broadly, one might ask what it means to say country is moving into a post-conflict era when structural conditions that have sustained armed conflict continue to be firmly entrenched in Colombian society. Among these is status of security as an enduring rationality of government and a pervasive cultural framework that reinforces modes of exclusion and inequality. Is security, as a political technology and social idiom, being reconstituted? Does post-conflict status hold promise as a move toward a post-security era? What kinds of political spaces and modes of social engagement will post-conflict security frameworks enable? Any meaningful approach to these questions must begin by disentangling dense strands of meaning and multiplicity of uses that have made security one of most pervasive yet opaque notions in Colombian society.In Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogota, Austin Zeiderman does precisely this with an ethnographically engaging and theoretically ambitious study of governance of urban risk in Colombia's capital city. In a context in which fears of insecurity saturate (6) public realm and has the status of master-signifier (29), Zeiderman's foray into politics of risk expands our field of vision in important ways. His book complicates causal and linear (30) analyses of and security, exploring instead open-ended and multi-directional processes through which insecurities are experienced by urban dwellers and acted upon by officials and experts. While resonating with recent scholarship on Latin America's violence at urban margins (Auyero, Bourgois, and Scheper-Hughes 2015), Zeiderman's focus on environmental risk offers an oblique (29) perspective that unsettles dominant understandings of violence-from criminal to structural- and sheds light on shifting politics of security both as a technology of governance and as a space of citizenship.In looking at Bogota's wide-ranging transformations during past decades-from a city besieged by criminal to an international model of progressive urbanism-Zeiderman argues that disaster risk management has emerged as a critical framework of urban governance, shifting definition of threat from disorder, criminality, and insurgency to floods, landslides, and earthquakes (16). To explore these shifts, Zeiderman tracks mapping and monitoring of risk zones as well as politics surrounding resettlement schemes. The bulk of his research was carried out between 2008 and 2010, in midst of a leftist turn in urban politics in Bogota, which saw expansion of risk management in peripheral settlements.Zeiderman's ethnography unfolds primarily in Ciudad Bolivar, a collection of self-built settlements clinging to mountainous terrain of Bogota's southwest periphery. …