Bringing the State to the Slum

Bringing the State to the Slum: Confronting Organized Crime and Urban Violence in Latin America by Vanda Felbab-Brown, The Brookings Institution.

Public safety is increasingly determined by crime and security in urban spaces. How the public safety problem in urban spaces is dealt with in the 21st century as urbanization intensifies will determine citizens’ perceptions of the accountability and effectiveness of the state in upholding the social contract between the citizens and the state. Major cities of the world, and the provision of security and order within them, will increasingly play a major role in the 21st century distribution of global power. In many of the world’s major cities, law enforcement and social development have not caught up with the pace of urbanization, and there is a deep and growing bifurcation between developed and reasonably safe sectors of economic growth and social advancement and slums stuck in a trap of poverty, marginalization, and violence. Addressing the violence and lifting the slums from this trap will be among the major challenges for many governments.

There are many forms of urban violence. This article presents some of the key law enforcement and socioeconomic policy lessons from one type of response to urban slums controlled by non-state actors: namely, when the government resorts to physically retaking urban spaces that had been ruled by criminal or insurgent groups and where the state’s presence had been inadequate or sometimes altogether nonexistent. Its focus is on Latin America—specifically Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Jamaica; but its findings apply more broadly and are informed by similar dynamics between non-state actors and state policies in places like Karachi, Pakistan, and Johannesburg, South Africa...