This edited volume asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular ‘urban’ social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the impact of memory. The analytical categories of space and time must be thought as inextricably linked with each other. Expanding this fundamental conceptual idea offers fresh perspectives on urban violence. The book unites case studies on different world regions and historical periods , and thus challenges assumed binaries of cities the global North and South, the past and present. -- .

Paramilitaries, crime, and thousands of disappeared in official numbers - the so-called 'war on drugs' has perpetuated violence in parts of Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. This book offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence: To what extent and for whom do states produce order and disorder, by devising security policies within the 'fight against drugs'? Which social forces support and drive such policies? This first comparative study of Colombian and Mexican security policies employs state theory and critical political economy to understand recent dynamics of violence in both contexts. It highlights how the 'war on drugs' has exacerbated contradictions driven by a particular economic model, and simultaneously resorts to discourses which criminalize precisely those that this model has radically disadvantaged.

Im Kontext neoliberaler Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik erfuhren die Lander Lateinamerikas tiefgreifende Veranderungen ihrer Sozialstrukturen. Jedoch kontrastiert die hohe Relevanz dieser Wandlungsprozesse mit ihrer bislang geringen wissenschaftlichen Erforschung. Der Sammelband vereint daher die wenigen und hervorragenden internationalen vor allem aus Lateinamerika stammenden Beitrage zu den wichtigsten Dimensionen der gegenwartigen Sozialstrukturen. Damit wird eine erste theoretische und empirische Grundlage fur weiterfuhrende Analysen der lateinamerikanischen Realitat geschaffen.