Political Geography: South America / Journal: Cultures & Conflits

Author:: Kimberly Theidon
Publication Date:: 09-2016
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Cultures & Conflits
Institution:: Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:: War and its aftermath serve as powerful motivators for the elaboration and transmission of individual, communal, and national histories. These histories both reflect and constitute human experience by contouring social memory and producing truth effects. These histories use the past in a creative manner, combining and recombining elements of that past that serve to interests in the present. In this sense, the conscious appropriation of history involves both remembering and forgetting—both being dynamic processes permeated with intentionality. This essay explores the political use of the narratives being elaborated in rural villages in the department of Ayacucho regarding the internal war that convulsed Peru for some fifteen years. Each narrative has a political intent and assumes both an internal and external audience. Indeed, the deployment of war narratives has much to do with forging new relations of power, ethnicity, and gender that are integral to the contemporary politics of the region. These new relations impact the construction of democratic practices and the model of citizenship being elaborated in the current context.
Topic:: Gender Issues, War, Citizenship, and Memory
Political Geography:: South America and Peru

Author:: Pamela Colombo
Publication Date:: 09-2016
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Cultures & Conflits
Institution:: Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:: The military program for building “strategic villages”, which emerged at the beginning of the Cold War, sought to develop ex nihilo urban spaces to displace rural populations living in zones influenced by guerrilla groups. This article analyses the Rural Relocation Plan implemented in the Argentinian province of Tucumán between 1976 and 1978 that led to the construction of four strategic villages. In doing so, it seeks to establish whether or not space has the power to transform a community’s political and social life in the long term. This article equally addresses the following three questions: What is everyday life like in spaces where military and civil worlds cohabit and hybridize? What are the characteristics of urban spaces designed to dissuade populations from rising up in support of the guerrillas? The analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with the inhabitants of strategic villages in Tucumán allows for an examination of the social and political effects of forced urbanization as a counter-insurgency technique.
Topic:: Counterinsurgency, Displacement, Space, and Violence
Political Geography:: Argentina and South America

Author:: Carolina Moulin Aguiar and Jana Tabak
Publication Date:: 03-2015
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Cultures & Conflits
Institution:: Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:: The paper aims at investigating the dilemmas involved in the recent turn of international humanitarian organizations to urban areas of the Global South. The incorporation of impoverished urban communities—such as Rio de Janeiro’s favelas—in the landscape of humanitarian action results from a particular reading that connects urbanization processes with a redefinition of the scope of humanitarian action. The paper argues that the transposition of humanitarian protection and assistance to other situations of violence, such as Rio’s favelas, is premised on the construction of slums as marginal sites of insecurity and as the epitome of all problems related to urban processes in developing and underdeveloped societies. Based on a review of Médecins sans frontières’ project in Complexo do Alemão - Rio de Janeiro, from 2007 to 2009, the paper concludes with a critical reading of the consequences of recognizing favelas (and the global slum) as a problem of security and protection, without acknowledging the complex democratic dimensions of local political struggles.
Topic:: Development, Humanitarian Aid, Urbanization, and Slums
Political Geography:: Brazil and South America

Author:: Claudio Zanotelli
Publication Date:: 09-2005
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Cultures & Conflits
Institution:: Cultures & Conflits
Abstract:: This article aims at understanding how homicides are distributed within the social space and the urban territory. The main questioning is to know whether homicides are linked to urban fragmentation and to the socioeconomic differentiations between the districts composing the town of Vitoria in the Brazilian State of Espirito Santo. We analyse homicides as revealing the marginalised populations'regulation. The article also deals with the question of homicide related data gathering and police behaviour.
Topic:: Civil Society and Crime
Political Geography:: Europe, France, Brazil, and South America

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