Neutralizing the Rival: Situated Practice of Violence and Legitimacy

• In Event: Urban Insecurity: Dynamics and Responses

Abstract

Frameworks of legitimate violence are typically grounded in elusive concepts like “the state” and “morality,” glossing how violence becomes legitimate in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic observations of a legally unsanctioned violent organization in Medellin, Colombia and its interactions with state institutions and local residents, I show how legitimacy is an outcome of situated interactions and relations. I analyze patterns of violence through an original framework based on a reconceptualization of Tilly’s notion of the rival. I argue that when residents, the police, and the organization share perceptions of threats to public order and jointly construct appropriate targets that warrant neutralization through violence, certain forms of unsanctioned community-level violence become legitimized in Medellin. I contend that unsanctioned violence becomes legitimate when audiences do not visibly resist it and demonstrate in practice that it accomplishes localized versions of public order. In showing how the legitimacy of violence is situationally and relationally determined and offering an alternative to monolithic-actor models of the state and narratives of state institutional corruption, this article extends our understanding of how some forms of persistent violence in marginalized communities interconnect with state institutional practices vis-à-vis the question of legitimacy.

Author

• Jonathan Gordon