Explaining Variation in Territorial Control in Latin American Cities

• In Event: New Research on Territorial Control and Violence

Abstract

Across cities in the developing world, we find marginalized urban communities where State presence is low, and armed organized criminal groups (OCGs) exercise de facto territorial control. While the extant literature recognizes this variation in territorial control, and offers important insights into its effects on variables such as violence and governance, scholars lack an overarching, comparative theory to account for the heterogeneity itself. How then can we explain variation in territorial control in these contexts? This article presents a theoretical framework to explain this variation, and applies it to the context of urban Latin America, a region with a large number of marginalized urban communities in which OCGs exercise territorial control and frequently perform governance functions.

This article argues firstly that State actors will only seek to increase territorial control in areas dominated by armed nonstate actors where these groups represent security threats. Given the close linkages that political elites and other senior State actors often develop with OCGs, this outcome is by no means guaranteed. In then responding to OCG threats, two core variables, elite coordination and police capacity, interact to shape patterns of localized territorial control in marginalized urban communities. Where the interests of political elites align across different tiers of government, and they unite in coalition, State authorities not only implement ambitious policies in response to OCG threats, but also safeguard them against discontinuity. However, given the partisan incentives that politicians face, and the volatility of democratic turnover, securing cross-tier collaboration is an arduous task. In turn, police capacity directly impacts the ability of the State to exercise territorial control in the areas in which it intervenes, whilst also shaping the systems of governance which emerge in these communities. To demonstrate the plausibility of my framework, I draw on original data from hundreds of interviews undertaken in cities in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. These were carried out between 2021-2023, during extensive multisite field research.

In offering an original theoretical framework to account for variation in territorial control in urban centers, this paper contributes to the growing scholarship on security and (criminal) governance in the developing world. However, more broadly, in shining a light on the difficulties of articulating State responses to armed nonstate violence in young (and fragile) democracies, this paper also offers insight into the relationship between democracy and violence, and has broader theoretical implications for the literature on State-building in Latin America.

Author

• Daniel Barker Flores, Oxford University