Guerilla fighters for the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and their families experienced multiple forms of violence during wartime and the transition to peace. Prof. Bourgois will discuss his 20-year study that follows the shift from political violence to interpersonal and criminal violence and highlights the need to examine the overlapping relationships between intimate and structural violence. As many former fighters and their families immigrate to the United States, the patriarchal family arrangements central to the processes of violence in both war and peace are complicated by new forms of U.S. criminal and gang violence.

Philippe Bourgois is Professor of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at UC San Francisco. He has published in popular and academic venues on political violence, ethnic conflict, immigration, labor conflicts and street children. He is currently conducting fieldwork among homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers in San Francisco.

Teresa Caldeira
“Hip-hop, Violence and Segregation in São Paulo”

One response to increasing urban violence and new forms of segregation in São Paulo has been the development of new cultural and artistic movements in the poor peripheries. Hip-hop is the most visible and influential of these movements. São Paulo’s rappers produce a powerful critique of Brazilian society as they use music, dance and graffitti to articulate what they call “attitude,” a new code of behavior that might allow young black men to survive in the midst of widespread violence.

Teresa Caldeira is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine. Her research interests include the interconnections between urban violence, spatial segregation and democratization and the re-creation of gender and generational roles among São Paulo youth in the context of neoliberalism and democratization.

Maria Elida dos Santos
“The Difficult Reality of Organ Trafficking: Mozambique and Brazil”

Sister Elida dos Santos’s long history of human rights work includes protesting the 2003 execution of 14 street children in Nampula, Mozambique, a crime linked to an alleged organs trafficking mafia. She is now part of a parliamentary investigation into organs trafficking in São Paulo and was awarded the Franz de Castro Holwarth Award in Human Rights from the Order of Brazilian Lawyers.

Camilo González Posso
“Nonviolence in Colombia: More Solidarity Than Authority?”

In the past five years, Colombia has seen a decrease in urban armed violence due to the dismantling of large drug trafficking cartels, initiatives for peaceful coexistence and citizenship education. Sustaining this reduction in violence depends on the consolidation of a culture of nonviolence by giving primacy to the peaceful instruments of dialogue, democracy, solidarity and the promotion of cultural transformation. Policies that focus on the “war on terrorism” do not create a nonviolent society. Peace as the result of war or the imposition of the law through fear is nothing more than an armed truce.

Camilo González Posso is President of the Institute for Peace and Development, ex-Minister of State and a promoter of peace and nonviolence initiatives in Colombia. He has participated in dialogues and peace negotiations since 1984 and was one of the coordinators of the Mandate for Peace which received 10 million votes in 1997 and mobilized millions of Colombians.

James Holston
“Gang-Talk, Rights-Talk and Rule of Law: Using Democratic Citizenship to Justify Criminal Violence in Brazil”

The past 30 years have seen both increasing political democracy and increasing violence in Brazil. The new democracy destabilizes old formulas of established rule and social hierarchy and in the process, erodes the patterns of domination and deference that previously provided a sense of everyday order and security. In a striking twist to the democratization process, during this period of destabilization powerful criminal groups from the poor urban peripheries have adopted a discourse of democratic rights, citizenship and rule of law to represent their organizations in their public pronouncements.

James Holston is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego and often teaches at the University of São Paulo. His focus is on citizenship and democratic change in the Americas, especially Brazil and the United States, and related transformations in the social and spatial organization of cities. His publications include The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília and Cities and Citizenship.

Antanas Mockus
“Law Enforcement and Citizenship-Building”

In Bogotá, as in other big cities, people pursue their objectives using the best means to attain their goals. Nevertheless, their options for action are usually framed by regulation mechanisms that can be formal rules (legal norms) or informal rules (moral and social norms). Those rules can be obeyed for positive or negative reasons, such as fear of legal sanctions, guilt or social rejection. The policy of citizenship culture developed during my tenure as mayor of Bogotá, was an approach to the enforcement of law that succeeded in transforming the relationship between citizens, public administrators and public space.

Antanas Mockus was mayor of the city of Bogotá, Colombia from 1995–97 and 2001–03. He also served as Rector of the National University of Colombia and is the author of numerous books and articles on politics, culture and education. Mr. Mockus has announced his candidacy for the Colombian presidential elections in 2006.

María Clemencia Ramírez
“Construction and Contestation of Criminal Identities: The Case of the Cocaleros in the Colombian Western Amazon”

Historically, the central government has perceived the Western Amazon region of Colombia as a land without inhabitants, denying the existence of the indigenous population and designating it as a receptor for displaced people. Peasants who settled in this region as a result of different waves of migration, and who today grow coca, have been stigmatized as criminals with no regional identity. The central state does not accord them a place within the national society except as guerrilla auxiliaries or drug traffickers and thus justifies the use of violence against them.

María Clemencia Ramírez is a Senior Researcher at the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia and Professor of Anthropology at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is currently a visiting scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Her work explores the intersections of violence and identity in the Putumayo department of Colombia.

Peter Rawitscher
“Kidnapping and Trust in Colombia”

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
“Death Squads and Democratization in Northeast Brazil”

During the 1990s, death squad attacks on street children, minority youth and other “sub-citizens” caused democratic Brazil to sustain youth mortality statistics in some urban centers comparable to a nation at war. In Timbauba, Pernambuco the state of political anarchy peaked in the late 1990s when a local death squad took control. A small group of local political activists joined forces with a newly appointed judge and a tough-minded district attorney to wrest the municipio from the vigilantes. Their success, in spite of limited material support and a complicit police force, is a tale worth telling.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her lifework explores the violence of everyday life from a radical existentialist and politically engaged perspective. She is best known for her award winning books on madness among bachelor farmers in County Kerry, Ireland and on the madness of hunger, mother love and infant death in Brazil.

Angelina Snodgrass-Godoy
“Violence, Law and Violent Law: Lynchings in Latin America”

Mob “justice” is an increasingly common trend across Latin America. To date, the scant scholarly analysis of the trend has supported increased state control of lawless territories and populations. In fact, I argue that these incidents are not knee-jerk reactions to criminality but rather commentaries on deeply unjust distributions of power in societies becoming ever more unequal. By enacting these highly ritualized, public displays of “justice,” marginalized communities seek not only to punish criminal activity, but perhaps more importantly, to reassert themselves as agents rather than victims.

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is Assistant Professor of Law, Societies and Justice and of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research interests include the spread of mano dura policies in post-authoritarian Latin America, the use of vigilante “justice,” the growth of intellectual property law and its impact on health and human rights in poor countries.

Luiz Eduardo Soares
“Social Invisibility, Public Security Policies and Police Reform in Brazil: The Trajectory of Sisyphus”

Brazilian society faces a major drama: almost 50,000 people are killed every year, most of them poor, black, young and male. Both right and left — for opposed yet complementary reasons — have shown less concern than the magnitude of the tragedy requires. The police are mostly brutal and ineffective and are frequently involved in corruption scandals. Prof. Soares will analyze the logic behind the widespread lack of political will and examine the most promising policies currently being put forward.

Luiz Eduardo Soares served as the Brazilian Secretary of Public Security in 2003 and was previously the Undersecretary of Security for the state of Rio de Janeiro. He is Professor of Anthropology and Political Science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and was elected 1999 “Man of Ideas” by the Jornal do Brasil for his innovative approaches to human rights and public security.

Loïc Wacquant
“State of Violence in the Brazilian Metropolis”

Mass poverty and destitution, vertiginous inequality and the routine malfunctioning of the police, courts and prisons are three roots of violence in the Brazilian metropolis. By failing to develop a formally bureaucratic apparatus, institute the rule of law after the return to democracy and stem the growth of the informal criminal sector, the state is the primary source of escalating urban violence which creates a climate of rampant fear and intolerance in the city.

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and Researcher at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne in Paris. His work deals with comparative urban marginality, violence and the body, the penal state and the politics of reason. He is a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography.