Book contents
Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
When officials and politicians talk about governability … what do you think they are talking about? Do you think they refer to their ability to pass a law in Congress? To have one or two more party members in the House? No. No way. Listen carefully. They are talking about the capacity to generate a big mess [un gran quilombo] in the Conurbano. That's what they mean when they say governability.
Interview with Luis D'Elia, July 2005The December 2001 lootings in Argentina can (and should) serve to open a broader inquiry into the relational underpinnings of collective violence. The massive damage visited on people and property during that December constitutes an extreme event that, as Marcel Mauss (1979 [1916]) asserted a long time ago, is marked by “an excessiveness which allows us better to perceive the facts than in those places where, although no less essential, they still remain small-scale and involuted.” It is precisely this excessiveness that acts as an invitation to scrutinize the gray zone where everyday life, routine politics, and collective violence surreptitiously intersect and interact. This book has done so by paying special attention to the role of “third parties” (political brokers and police agents) who, as the American Sociological Association's report on the social causes of violence asserts (Levine and Rosich n/d:70), “are often involved or present during violent encounters; yet, our knowledge of their role is very limited.”
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- Information
- Routine Politics and Violence in ArgentinaThe Gray Zone of State Power, pp. 151 - 158Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007