Written in a comprehensive yet accessible style, Urban Violence, Resilience and Security investigates the diverse nature of urban violence within Latin America, Asia and Africa. It further analyzes how regular and irregular governing mechanisms can provide human security, despite the presence of chronic violence.

Written in a comprehensive yet accessible style, Urban Violence, Resilience and Security investigates the diverse nature of urban violence within Latin America, Asia and Africa. It further analyzes how regular and irregular governing mechanisms can provide human security, despite the presence of chronic violence. The empirically rich and conceptually grounded contributions of established and emerging scholars evaluate the current state and future trajectory of urban development. They also question common explanations of the drivers of violence in urban areas and also provide measured recommendations for improved policy and future governance. Chapters thoroughly examine the opportunities and hazards of focusing on resilience as the only method to improve security and identify governance and policy practices that can move beyond the rhetoric of resilience to evaluate diverse approaches to attaining human security in urban areas of the Global South. This invigorating book will be an excellent resource for academic researchers interested in urban dynamics in the Global South as well as scholars embarking on geography, human security, political science and policy studies. Based on a set of original case studies, policymakers will also benefit from the questions and challenges to the conventional approaches to urban planning and governance that it raises.

Why are Latin American cities amongst the most violent in the world? Over the past decades Latin America has not only become the most urbanised of the regions of the so-called global South, it has also been the scene of the urbanisation of poverty and exclusion. Overall regional homicides rates are the highest in the world, a fact closely related to the spread and use of firearms by male youths, who are frequently involved in local and translocal forms of organised crime. In response, governments and law enforcements agencies have been facing mounting pressure to address violence through repressive strategies, which in turn has led to a number of consequences: law enforcement is often based on excessive violence and the victimisation of entire marginal populations. Thus, the dynamics of violence have generated a widespread perception of insecurity and fear. Featuring much original fieldwork across a broad array of case studies, this cutting edge volume focuses on questions not only of crime, insecurity and violence but also of Latin American cities’ ability to respond to these problems in creative and productive ways.

"This book brings together political economy and vital materialism to set out an original conceptualization and genealogy of urban violence"--

This book explores the resilience in urban neighborhoods affected by chronic conflict and violence, developing a new model for improving resilience policies. The neighborhood resilience approach is an inclusive form of building positive resilience, which recognizes that local communities possess valuable skills and experience of dealing with crises, and prioritizes the agency of local communities in the production of knowledge and developing practices. The book identifies and describes the repertoire of neighborhood resilience practices organized in four clusters: (1) addressing the structure of conflict; (2) increasing the effectiveness of external resources; (3) enhancing the community capacities; and (4) reflecting the dynamics of identity and power in neighborhoods. One of the key findings of the book is the nonlinear connections between structure and dynamics of conflict and neighborhood resilience practices represented in the Four Loops Model. The concentration on community-based practices addresses macro-level critiques of neo-liberalism in critical resilience studies and encourages rethinking the ways community-based indicators might operate in combination with existing macro indicators of resilience. The bottom-up indicators provide more specific details and essential localized experiences for improving resilience policies at the national level. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, resilience, urban studies, and US politics.

As cities sprawl across Latin America, absorbing more and more of its people, crime and violence have become inescapable. From the paramilitary invasion of Medell¡n in Colombia, the booming wealth of crack dealers in Managua, Nicaragua and police corruption in Mexico City, to the glimmers of hope in Lima, this book provides a dynamic analysis of urban insecurity. Based on new empirical evidence, interviews with local people and historical contextualization, the authors attempts to shed light on the fault-lines which have appeared in Latin American society. Neoliberal economic policy, it is argued, has intensified the gulf between elites, insulated in gated estates monitored by private security firms, and the poor, who are increasingly mistrustful of state-sponsored attempts to impose order on their slums. Rather than the current trend towards government withdrawal, the situation can only be improved by co-operation between communities and police to build new networks of trust. In the end, violence and insecurity are inseparable from social justice and democracy.