Stanford conference to examine violence and policing
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Scholars, law enforcement officials, business leaders and community activists will meet next week at Stanford to examine violence and policing in Latin American and the United States.
A two-day conference beginning April 28 will highlight the work of entrepreneurs and grassroots organizations trying to reduce violence and rebuild civil society. The gathering is hosted by the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. It is hosted in partnership with the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the Center for Latin American Studies, the ‘Mexico Initiative’ at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
"Violence linked to drug trafficking, gang wars and criminality is one of the leading barriers to development that effects the lives of millions in Latin America,” said Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science who directs PovGov, a program that studies the links between public action, goverance and poverty.
“The conference brings together people who have dealt with these problems in cities in Latin America and in the U.S. Seldom is the case that we bring to campus practitioners with first-hand experience dealing with some of the most pressing problems the hemisphere is confronting,” said Magaloni, who is also a senior fellow at FSI.
The first day of the conference will feature a panel with Jose Galicot, the driving force of Tijuana Innovadora, a movement that helped Tijuana recover from devastating criminal activity and violence the last four years. Galicot will be joined by Jailson Silva, from Observatório of Favelas, one of the most reputable grass-roots organizations in the slums of Rio that undertakes research, consultancy and public actions focused on the city's favelas.
Many violence-plagued cities in the U.S. have implemented innovative initiatives to address the challenge that have included community policing tools and youth violence interventions. Similar initiatives are also taking place in Latin America with varying degrees of success. One of the goals of the conference is to get practitioners to share their experiences and best practices to reduce violence in major cities.
One of three featured keynote speakers, Sergio Fajardo, the current governor of Antioquia, Colombia, will speak on April 29 and help build the foundation for such dialogue. From 2003 to 2007, Fajardo implemented an effective strategy to reduce the level of violence in Medellin while he was mayor of the Colombian city.
By providing alternatives to illicit work, allocating resources to the most disadvantage areas, reclaiming public spaces and fostering dialogue among different sectors of society to create a sense of collective ownership, Fajardo transformed Medellin.
The two other keynotes include Mariano Beltrame, minister of security of Rio de Janeiro who is credited for the enactment and implementation of the Pacification Police Unites to reduce violence in the favelas of the city and Hector Robles, major of the municipality of Zapopan who has implemented various innovative policies to give better opportunities to the youth in Mexico, including an initiative called Jovenes con Porvenir (Youth with a Bright Future).
The conference will also bring together police chiefs from Brazil and the U.S. to share their experiences and insights on grassroots implementation of initiatives designed to reduce violence. General Commander of Operations, Coronel Paulo Henrique, from the military police of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Chief Eric Jones from Stockton, CA will be speaking on a panel titled, “’Pacification’ Strategies and Policing” on day two of the conference. Tony Farrar, chief of police for the city of Rialto, CA will be joined by Robert Chapman, deputy director of Community Policing Advancement and others to present on police accountability and gang violence in the U.S shortly thereafter.
The conference will build upon a PovGov research project that is focused on the Brazilian military police in Rio de Janeiro. Targeting an important initiative in the city's favelas, the "Pacifying Police Units", the ongoing project investigates the use of lethal force by the police and reforms aimed at controlling violence.
A number of conference sessions will be led by CDDRL faculty members and affiliates, including: FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar; Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow; FSI senior fellow and CDDRL affiliated faculty member Alberto Díaz-Cayeros; and former President of Peru and CDDRL Visiting Lecturer Alejandro Toledo. A conference report will be made available following the event.
Sessions will be held at Stanford University's Bechtel Conference room in Encina Hall on Monday, April 28 and the Alumni Center on Tuesday, April 29. All sessions are free and open to the public. Please RSVP here to attend. A complete agenda can be found here.
For conference updates via Twitter please visit #PovGov
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The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia
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Why have militarized interventions to curtail violence by drug cartels had wildly divergent results? In the past six years, state crackdowns drove a nine-fold increase in cartel-state violence in Mexico, versus a two-thirds decrease in Brazil. Prevailing analyses of drug wars as a criminal subtype of insurgency provide little traction, because they elide differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Cartels, I argue, fight states not to conquer territory or political control, but to coerce state actors and influence policy outcomes. The empirically predominant channel is violent corruption— threatening enforcers while negotiating bribes. A formal model reveals that greater state repression raises bribe prices, leading cartels to fight back whenever (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional on cartels’ use of violence. Variation in conditionality helps explain observed outcomes: switching to conditional repression pushed Brazilian cartels into nonviolent strategies, while Mexico’s war “without distinctions” inadvertently made fighting advantageous.
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A Hole at the Center of the State: Prison Gangs and the Limits to Punitive Power
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The state’s central function is to establish authority through its monopoly on violence; the very attempt, however, can be counterproductive. Punishment incapacitates and deters individuals, but can empower destructive collective forces. Prison gangs, their ranks swelled by mass incarceration, transform the core of the coercive apparatus into a headquarters for organizing and taxing streetlevel criminal activity, supplanting state authority in communities, and orchestrating mass violence and protest. Drawing on a formal model, fieldwork, and case studies from the US and Latin America, I show how gangs use control over prison life, plus the state-provided threat of incarceration, to project power. The model predicts that common state responses—crackdowns and harsher sentencing— can strengthen prison gangs’ leverage over outside actors, consistent with the observed expansion of prison gangs during mass-incarceration initiatives. These gang-strengthening effects of incarceration can have increasing returns, implying a point beyond which additional punishment erodes state authority.
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From Paris to Sacaca: A Human Rights Genealogy
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The trajectory of human rights in the contemporary world is one in which ideas and cultural practices constitute each other in ways that can bedevil theorists and empirical researchers alike. The conventional wisdom is that this dynamic interaction, or “vernacularization,” must be understood as the inevitable, if (to some) lamentable, result of the rapid expansion of international and transnational human rights after the end of the Cold War. This talk challenges the conventional wisdom by tracing the genealogy of one such idea—that of universality—from the work of a mysterious, though highly consequential, UNESCO committee in 1947 and 1948 to the practical human rights advocacy of a peasant intellectual living in a remote region of the Bolivian Andes. Doing so allows us to reframe a key moment in the history of the birth of the modern human rights movement after the Second World War; appreciate the extent to which the narrative of universal human dignity does important cultural work as a matter of practical ethics; and realize that a critical approach to both the promises and dilemmas of human rights does not stand apart from mainstream human rights advocacy, but is rather woven into the very fiber of its history.
Mark Goodale is currently Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Human Rights at the Crossroads (Oxford UP, 2013), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge UP, 2010), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell, 2009), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). Forthcoming volumes include Human Rights Encounters Legal Pluralism (with Eva Brems and Giselle Corradi, Hart/Oñati International Series in Law and Society, 2014). His writings have appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Social & Legal Studies, Current Legal Theory, and the Journal of Legal Pluralism, among others. He is at work on several new research projects, including an NSF-funded empirical study of the relationship between human rights and radical political and social change in Bolivia and a set of essays that examine the culture, contested politics, and phenomenology of human rights after the post-Cold War.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Mark Goodale
Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology
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George Mason University
Seminars
Violence and Policing in Latin American and US Cities
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The global cities of Latin America - Rio de Janeiro, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Mexico City and Medellin - have become engines of economic growth. These cities attract remarkable talent across all levels and build extensive networks that allow for innovation and the circulation of ideas. But crime, violence and the dissolution of the social fabric threaten the main attraction of these cities and significantly undermine development prospects. The challenge of providing policing that protects citizens, especially those living in the poorest neighborhoods where gangs and other criminal organizations tend to concentrate, is daunting. The conference on violence and policing in Latin America and US cities brought together academics, policy makers, NGOs, and citizens to reflect on how cities in Latin America are meeting the challenges of rising criminal violence. Particular focus was given to the “policing” processes in cities that have experienced and successfully reduced civil war-like levels of violence. The goal was to reflect on the dynamics and varieties of security strategies, police reform and efforts to rebuild the social fabric of major cities.
The conference was hosted by the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Other centers and institutions at Stanford University that co-sponsored the conference include the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the ‘Mexico Initiative’ at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Conference Resources:
April 28 (Day 1)
Bechtel Conference Room
Encina Hall
616 Serra St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
April 29 (Day 2)
Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center
326 Galvez Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6105
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