Violence and the State at the Urban Margins

Abstract

Based on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork in a violence-ridden, low-income district located in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, this article examines the state’s presence at the urban margins and its relationships to widespread depacification of poor people’s daily life. Contrary to descriptions of destitute urban areas in the Americas as either governance voids deserted by the state or militarized spaces firmly controlled by the state’s iron fist, this article argues that law enforcement in Buenos Aires’s high-poverty zones is intermittent, selective, and contradictory. By putting the state’s fractured presence at the urban margins under the ethnographic microscope, the article reveals its key role in the perpetuation of the violence it is presumed to prevent.