Coercion, capital, and the Latin American city: understanding territorial control and governance in marginalised urban communities

Thesis

Across the developing the world we find marginalised communities where State presence is low, and armed nonstate actors exercise de facto territorial control. While extant research on civil wars and organised criminal violence has recognised this variation in territorial control and offered important insights into its effects, scholars lack an overarching, comparative theory to account for this heterogeneity to begin with. This dissertation begins to rectify this oversight, providing a theoretical framework to explain the shifting patterns of territorial control held by a particular set of actors– State and organised criminal groups (OCGs)– in the specific context of urban Latin America. How then can we explain variation in territorial control in Latin American cities? And, relatedly, why do we observe durable expansions of State territorial control into areas dominated by OCGs in some instances, but not others? In this dissertation, I argue that in response to the emergence of particular politicised security threats (those that affect the urban upper-classes), two core variables– elite coordination and police capacity– interact to shape variation in territorial control. I test my theoretical framework across several empirically rich case studies, for which I undertook hundreds of research interviews and extensive archival research in six cities across Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Leveraging longitudinal within-case variation, I match different time periods from my case studies to distinct theoretical outcomes from my framework, showing how my independent variables change across time to shape diverging responses to OCG-related insecurity, and, in turn, varying constellations of territorial control. This dissertation contends with core questions in the social sciences, shining light onto the development of political order and processes of political violence, whilst making important theoretical contributions to the scholarship on subnational politics, urban security, criminal governance, and State-building.

Authors: Barker Flores, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-6r091mzbe
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: state building; Latin America; policing; criminal governance; organized crime; subnational politics
• Subjects: Political Science; Sociology