Refusing to Be Governed: Urban Policing, Gang Violence, and the Politics of Evilness in an Afro‐Colombian Shantytown

Abstract

AbstractWhat is the role of policing within urban contexts marked by economic dispossession, crime, and gang violence? This article grapples with this question by examining both policing practices and the strategies of resistance embraced by residents of El Guayacán, a predominantly black neighborhood in the outskirts of Cali, Colombia. I argue that policing is not only about repression but also about enforcing spatial‐racial boundaries and administering social death. On the one hand, targeting black bodies and black places as the problem of urban security provides police a spatial fix (to borrow from critical geographers) for broad anxieties around crime. On the other hand, the discursive and material production of unruly bodies and ungovernable spaces justifies state disinvestment, social abandonment, and police aggression against racialized others.