Anthropology

Please join us for the second Crimescapes series lecture organized by the Crime, Law, and Governance in the Americas program at the Center for Latin American Studies. Anthropologist Dr. Kees Koonings (Utrecht University and University of Amsterdam), one of the 2016 Bacardi visiting scholars, will deliver a talk on “Criminal governance in Latin America: ‘New violence’, power, and territoriality.” The event will take place next Wednesday, February 10, 5-6pm at Ustler Hall. Reception to follow. More information below and in the flyer attached.

Criminal governance in Latin America. ‘New violence’, power, and territoriality

Kees Koonings

CEDLA, University of Amsterdam & Department of Anthropology, Utrecht University 

Over the past decades, many Latin American countries have been presenting the paradoxical combination of consolidated democracy and increasing levels of criminal violence and public insecurity. This so-called ‘new violence’ is constitutive for present-day ‘crimescapes’ in Latin America. The constitution of these crimescapes have important and highly ambiguous implications for politics, governance, and even the fundamental question of territorial sovereignty. I will approach this problem from the perspective of ‘criminal governance’. I understand criminal governance to be the exercise of power or the ability to rule (partly) outside the legal-bureaucratic-democratic frame of the modern state for – at least in part – illicit objectives.  

Kees Koonings is Professor of Brazilian Studies at the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor in Development Studies and Latin American Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Utrecht University.