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Sociology Colloquium Series to host talk by Javier Auyero on collusion and violence in Argentina

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Sociology Colloquium Series to host talk by Javier Auyero on collusion and violence in Argentina

Uptown Campus
Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
B11

Featuring Dr. Javier Auyero

Join the Sociology Department at Tulane University in welcoming Dr. Javier Auyero, for a talk titled The Ambivalent State: Collusion and Violence in Latin America on Thursday, January 24, at 3:30 PM.

Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a poor high-crime neighborhood of Argentina and documentary evidence from court cases involving drug traffickers and police officers, this talk examines the clandestine connections between participants in the illicit drug trade and members of the state security forces – and their impact on skyrocketing urban violence. The presentation unpacks the much-referred to (but seldom scrutinized) content of police-criminal collusion reconstructing the resources, relational practices, and processes at its core. The talk makes its three-fold argument by way of empirical demonstration: a) illicit relationships between police agents and traffickers serve the latter to achieve a quasi-monopoly in the use of force over a territory that is central to the prosecution of their illegal trade, b) clandestine relationships between police officers and traffickers feed the systemic violence that characterizes the market of illegal drugs and contributes to localized violence, and c) police-trafficker collusion fosters widespread skepticism about law-enforcement among residents of low-income violent neighborhoods.

Dr. Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of Poor People's PoliticsContentious LivesRoutine Politics and Violence in Argentina, and Patients of the State. Together with Débora Swistun, he co-authored Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. His new book, In Harm's Way: The dynamics of urban violence, co-authored with María Fernanda Berti, was recently published by Princeton University Press. He is also the editor of Invisible City: Life and Labor in Austin, Texas (published this year by University of Texas Press), and co-editor with Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes of Violence at the Urban Margins (published this year by Oxford University Press).

Sociology Department