CANCELED: The Clandestine Hands of the State: The Relational Dynamics of Police Collusion in Drug Markets

Most research on the inner workings of the modern state focuses on its legal and public interventions. Far less analytic attention has been paid to the clandestine actions and interactions of state actors. Drawing on an original legal archive of court cases in Argentina, including hundreds of pages of wiretapped communications, and on ethnographic fieldwork this talk dissects the relational dynamics of collusion between police and drug dealers and its impact on the daily life of marginalized urban spaces. After detailing common practices used to shield participants from law enforcement and secure the competitive advantage of certain groups, Javier Auyero argues that collusion is an error-filled, improvised, and interactive process that regulates illicit drug markets and shapes daily interpersonal violence.

Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin where he directs the Urban Ethnography Lab. His main areas of research, writing and teaching are urban poverty, political ethnography, and collective violence. He is the author of various books among them Poor People’s Politics, Patients of the State, Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (with Débora Swistun), In Harm’s Way. The Dynamics of Urban Violence (María Fernanda Berti), and the recently published The Ambivalent State (with Katherine Sobering). He is also de co-editor (with Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper Hughes) of Violence at the Urban Margins and the editor of Invisible in Austin. Life and Labor in an American City.

Lunch will be served.