Systems of Urban Violence in the Americas Medelin 1400 x 400

Systems of Urban Violence in the Americas

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship

2018 – 2021

The ‘Systems of Urban Violence in the Americas’ project is supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship grant, awarded to Dr Alexandra Abello Colak (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, LACC), and based at LACC.

Latin America and the Caribbean has exceptionally high levels of lethal violence and victimisation. This security crisis has a clear urban expression. The violence seems to respond to cyclical dynamics and is accompanied by multiple forms of non-lethal violence.

The project uses a systemic approach to explore these dynamics in three of the most affected cities in the region: Medellín, Tijuana, and Kingston. It aims to understand how it is that urban violence becomes chronic and apparently intractable.

During the first year a conceptual framework based on general systems theory was developed to explore the dynamics of violence in the three cities. The project contributes to the multidisciplinary literature on violence and security in the region and challenges the way security is currently conceived and delivered. 

Impacts achieved

This project aims at impacts at the community as well as municipal and federal state levels - linking all of these. At the local state level, the team have informed local political and security actors in each locality of the research and initial findings. They have presented findings to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and contributed to expert meetings to explore how the human security approach could be used to improve local responses.

At the community level, the process of building the Agendas for Human Security with communities has been the key impact. Each Agenda was discussed in draft form following regular workshops and informal conversations and Agendas produced with community policy recommendations in three of the four case studies, where the security conditions permitted it. In Apatzingan, an Observatory of Human Security was set up to take the Agenda forward, coordinated by the Community Researcher with links to various civil society organisations.

On the academic front, the PI and Research Coordinator are completing a journal article on the research. The PI has also linked up with the PI of a sister Newton-funded Conacyt project. This collaboration translated into a successful bid for a Newton Impact Scheme grant, for a two year follow up of both team’s research in Michoacan, linking community and civil society approaches to new security thinking.

Publications

Events

 

Photo banner: Medellín community, Armando Reques, 2017, Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.