Urban Violence in a Global Context: Concepts, Challenges, and Responses.

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable aims to initiate a flexible and free-flowing discussion on “urban violence”, a complex and complicated global phenomenon. The selected discussants (participants) have been invited, based on their research expertise and scholarship, to provide contemporary and critical insights on the evolving nature and emerging trends of violence, crime, and insecurity in cities around the world. Specifically, our discussants are encouraged to think about three key areas: concepts, challenges, and responses. First, how can we better conceptualise the idea of “urban violence” in ways that distinguish it from complementary concepts, such as risk, vulnerability, and insecurity, and allow us to think about certain forms of violence in comparative ways, as a global phenomenon, rather than a distinctly “southern” or “postcolonial” problem? Second, how are new and emerging challenges (such as climate change, displacement, migration, public health), complicating pre-existing understandings of urban violence beyond its armed and physical traits, encouraging us to think about structural violence in urban spaces and neighbourhoods? And third, how and to what extent are public and private responses to urban violence evolving, and how can we critically (re)assess the roles of state and non-state actors, victims and observers, and community-based reactions and resistances to the insecurity that generates or is generated by urban violence? In addressing these broad questions, our discussants are encouraged to draw upon their research on a range of issues including urban security, development, and infrastructure, the role of the youth, grassroot organisations, social movements and community activism, street gangs, vigilantes, mafia groups and organised crime, and public and private security providers. In so doing, this roundtable will prompt and produce a thought-provoking, wide-ranging, but in-depth conversation on violence in cities around the world, with perspectives from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Subtopic

• Topic 3: Crime Correlates / Neighborhoods and Crime

Chairs

• Kieran Mitton, King's College London, UK

• Andrea Varsori, University of Huddersfield, UK

• Zoha Waseem, University of Warwick

Discussants

• Sobia Ahmad Kaker, University of Essex, UK

• Emilia Ziosi, University of Milan, Italy

• Anna Sergi, University of Essex

• Tessa Diphoorn, Utrecht University

• Catalina Mellado, University College London, UK

• Luciano Pollichieni, University of Nottingham, UK

• Alistair Fraser, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow