How Crime Governance Defines the Urban Experience
The Maze of Security
Fernando León Tamayo Arboleda author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:12th Jun '26
Should be back in stock very soon
The book explores the complex links between war and order, presenting a well-founded and fresh view on how crime is governed in modern societies. It challenges existing analyses of the relationship between space and social control, offering an original theoretical perspective and a new analytical tool that paves the way for several lines of research examining how dynamic spaces of social control are designed across different spatiotemporal contexts.
The author shows how the uneven distribution of violence and security worldwide is key to understanding how our ideas of order are formed and how we perceive and inhabit cities. This uneven spread of violence and security grants a particular privilege in modern societies: the right to live in less violent areas. Such a privilege affects how crime is regulated and how security issues are addressed.
Fernando uses the case of Bogotá to illustrate how war influences crime governance, even in societies and periods that seem peaceful, and how crime governance affects people's interactions within the city. Consequently, the author offers a compelling explanation of the structure, functioning, and fluidity of social control in modern societies, challenging common explanations of crime governance's social effects, opening multiple avenues for research, and proposing new theoretical foundations for understanding and connecting the experiences of the Global North and South.
Both theoretically rich and accessibly written, this book will appeal to academics and general readers alike, especially those interested in understanding contemporary urban life.
How Crime Governance Defines the Urban Experience offers a powerful and original lens on how the logics of war permeate everyday governance. This book unpacks the uneasy continuities between militarism, crime control, and urban life, revealing how security and privilege are co-produced through practices of exclusion that shape both our cities and our sense of order.
Maartje van der Woude, Author of The Mobility Control Apparatus
In this critical engagement with the ever-present yet unevenly distributed nature of war, Fernando León Tamayo Arboleda unravels the manifest ways in which war saturates the social body, facilitates the extension of police power through everyday life, and allows war to become governance itself. The outcome is a compelling argument about order as both violence and privilege.
Mark Neocleous, Author ofPacification: Social War and the Power of Police
Fernando Tamayo's How Crime Governance Defines the Urban Experience is a bold intervention in contemporary debates about crime and urban governance. The book introduces a scheme that cannot be analysed using the classic models of the colonial and post-colonial world. It is a world where the complex mix of security technologies, highly variable but globally distributed, is mediated by the exposure of specific places to war. A world where carceral logics remain present but increasingly immersed in forms of security, control and exposure to death that bypass the sovereign structures of law and punishment. I expect scholars and security actors will be referencing this framework for many years to come.
Jonathan Simon, Author ofMass Incarceration on Trial
ISBN: 9781041145189
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 420g
116 pages