Notes Towards a Political Sociology of Urban Marginality: Where the Ambivalent State Meets Subsistence Strategies with Javier Auyero, Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor, University of Texas

Seminar cities

Sciences Po, exclusively on Zoom, Compulsory Registration

Over the last few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have turned from analyzing the state's neglect and abandonment into documenting its harsh interventions and punishing presence. Yet, we know very little about the covert world of state action that is hidden from public view. In The Ambivalent State, Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering offer an unprecedented look into the clandestine relationships between police agents and drug dealers in Argentina.

In this presentation, Javier Auyero examines the illicit relationships that link police forces and participants in the market of criminalized drugs, and describe the conditions of possibility of the “clandestine hands” of the state. After a summary of the research that gave origin to the book The Ambivalent State, Auyero will present original archival and ethnographic research on collusive relationships and on how/why these intersect and interact with poor people’s subsistence strategies.

Speaker

Javier Auyero is the author of Poor People’s Politics, Patients of the State, and Contentious Lives.Duke University Press, 2012. Together with Deborah Swistun, he published Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. Oxford University Press USA, 2009 and, with Fernanda Berti, In Harm’s Way: The Dynamics of Urban Violence. Princeton University Press, 2016.
He is the series editor of the Global/Comparative Ethnographies Series at Oxford University Press.

Discussion 

Côme Salvaire, Associate Researcher, Sciences Po, Centre for International Studies (CERI)

Compulsory Registration

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