Concrete Peace: Building Security in Colombia

Austin Zeiderman, LSE

CURA/ PPP seminar

Date and time: 16th May 2019, 4-6pm

Venue: Hugh Aston Building, Room HU2.06, DeMontfort University

Abstract

Public and scholarly debates in Colombia frequently gloss the work required to achieve peace as la construcción del posconflicto, or “the construction of the post-conflict.” These debates usually surround the question of how to build the legal and bureaucratic institutions necessary for transcending a half-century of violence and ensuring a stable and lasting transition. Less attention is being given, however, to the work of building post-conflict Colombia in a concrete, physical sense. Focusing on the nationwide process of development aimed at laying the material foundations of a new society, this article examines the political potency attributed to the built environment at this critical conjuncture. Taking inspiration from a felicitous phrase coined by the Ministry of Transport’s Twitter account, #PazEnConcreto, it highlights the real-and-imaginary work that goes into building a “concrete peace” through the construction of things like roads, airports, and bridges. How exactly can peace be built out of substances like concrete? By examining two infrastructure projects endowed with the power to bring about peace and prosperity, the first objective is to shed light on the model of security and development according to which Colombia’s future is being imagined, designed, and built. The second objective is consider what these cases suggests about the political agency of the material world. Fine-grained analysis of both the political imagination and the lived experience of peacebuilding reveals the relationship between infrastructure and peace, and the capacity of the former to generate the latter, to be thoroughly contingent. Building infrastructure may produce the conditions for peace, it may reactivate latent dynamics of conflict, or it may do nothing at all.

 

Power and Capacity in Urban Climate Governance

Pete Eckersley, Nottingham Trent University

LGRC/ CURA seminar

Date and time: 8 May 2019, 3-5pm,

Venue: Hugh Aston Building, HU3.96, DeMontfort University

Abstract

This LGRC/CURA seminar, which draws on the findings of a monograph published in 2018, introduces a new framework to help understand how different systems of government shape policymaking arrangements at the municipal level. By applying the framework to climate governance in three sectors (climate change strategy, planning and each council’s own corporate activities), it will show how low levels of resource interdependence between central and local government in England, exemplified by austerity funding cuts, mean that Newcastle Council has to rely heavily on other horizontal actors to achieve its climate objectives. In contrast, Gelsenkirchen Council receives substantial support from higher tiers of government, which gives it greater control over policymaking within the locality.

Ultimately, therefore, it highlights how ‘vertical’ intergovernmental relationships influence ‘horizontal’ interactions between municipalities and other local actors, and ultimately shape policy objectives and outcomes at the local level. It also reveals how urban policymaking arrangements in both Germany and England are evolving, as municipal governments seek to increase their capacity to address challenging policy problems whilst facing resource constraints.

Dr Peter Eckersley is a Senior Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University with interests in public policy, multi-level governance, sustainability, austerity and public accountability. Prior to working at Nottingham Trent, he held postdoctoral research posts at Newcastle University, the University of York and the University of Sheffield, and before entering academia he spent ten years as a policy and management adviser at the Chartered Institute for Public Finance and Accountancy. His monograph, Power and Capacity in Urban Climate Governance, came out in 2018 and he has also published in a range of political science, public administration, geography, management and accounting journals.

CURA Events Spring/Summer 2019

CURA is pleased the confirm a lively programme of events in May, June and July, as follows:

Date & Time
Event details
8 May
3-5pm, HU3.96
P Eckersley, Nottingham Trent University
LGRC/CURA seminar
16 May
4-6pm HU2.06
PPP/CURA seminar
29 May
2-4pm
HU3.96
M Geddes, Warwick University
CURA seminar
12-13 June
12 June
6-7.30pm
HU0.08
CURA Annual Lecture by Dr Sarah Marie Hall
19 June
24 June
4-5.30pm
HU2.41
M Atzeni Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Laborales, CONICET
Local politics and workers’ organisational practices in the waste collection and recycle chain in Argentina and Chile
POWI/LGRC/CURA seminar
26 June
2-4pm
HU3.95
J Blamire, University of Exeter
The Political Geographies of Brexit in Leicester: An Ethnographic Analysis
CURA seminar
27 June
1-4 July

 

Revolutionary and reactionary urbanisms: La Paz, El Alto and Santa Cruz, Bolivia

Mike Geddes, University of Warwick

Date and time: Wednesday 29 May 2019, 2.00-4.00pm

Venue: Hugh Aston Building, Room HU3.96, DeMontfort University

Abstract

Urban identities in Bolivia have historically reflected, but also significantly shaped, the country’s complex and conflicted history.

La Paz, a culturally primarily indigenous city situated in a great bowl-like valley high in the Andean region of Bolivia, was founded by the Spanish conquistadors and was historically a site of colonialist domination. In the late 20th and early 21st century, La Paz was the locus of struggle between conservative governments and oppositional forces. But it took a new urbanism to tip the balance towards the opposition and the eventual accession to government of the MAS government led by Evo Morales. This was El Alto, a new city on the lip of the bowl in which La Paz lies, populated by large scale peasant migration from the surrounding Andes. From El Alto, massive demonstrations poured down into La Paz, and were instrumental in forcing the defeat of the neoliberal regime in a revolutionary moment installing the first indigenous/socialist president and government of Bolivia.

The stability of the Morales government remained threatened however by the presence in the lowland east of the country of opposition forces based in large scale agriculture and centred on the city of Santa Cruz. The largest city in the country, culturally Spanish and the focus of economic and industrial dynamism in contrast to the poverty of the Andean region, Santa Cruz epitomised the continuing strength of the forces of reaction in Bolivia.

The paper will explore the contribution of these contrasting urbanisms to ongoing processes of change.

 

Professor Mike Geddes

 

Background

My academic background is in history and geography (BA Southampton) and urban and regional studies (PhD Sussex).  From 1989 to 2008 I was Senior Research Fellow, Reader and Professorial Fellow in the Local Government Centre, Warwick Business School.  My research spanned a range of issues in local politics and public policy, with particular interests in theories of the state and cross-national comparative analysis of patterns of local governance under neoliberalism.

 

Current research

My interest in cross-national comparative analysis led to my current research focus on aspects of contemporary politics and policy in Latin America, especially those countries with more progressive political regimes.  Specific research topics include radical initiatives in local politics and governance; political and policy programmes which claim to challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism; and projects to ‘refound’ the neo-colonialist and neoliberal state.  I am particularly interested in contemporary politics and policy in Bolivia.

 

Selected publications

Geddes M N (2019  Forthcoming)  Co-editor.  Latin American Marxisms  Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Geddes M N (2019 forthcoming)  Megaprojects:  Capital, states and civil society in Latin America. In Latin American Marxisms  Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Geddes M N (2016) What happens when community organising moves into government?  Recent experience in Latin America, in Shaw M and Mayo M (Eds) Class, Inequality and Community Development, Bristol: Policy Press.

Geddes M N (2014) The old is dying but the new is struggling to be born:  Hegemonic contestation in Bolivia.  Critical Policy Studies.8, 2, 165-182.

Geddes M N (2014) Neoliberalism and local governance: radical developments in Latin America.  Urban Studies.  Online 7 January, DOI: 10.1177/0042098013516811.

Geddes M N and Sullivan H (2011) Localities, leadership and neoliberalisation: Conflicting discourses , competing practices.  Critical Policy Studies, Vol 5 No 4, 391-493.

Geddes M N (2011) Neoliberalism and local governance: Global contrasts and research priorities.  Policy and Politics, 39, 3, 439 – 447.

Guarneros-Meza V and Geddes M (Eds) (2010) Symposium on local governance and participation under neoliberalism.  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34, 1, 115-173.

Geddes M N (2010) Building and contesting neoliberalism at the local level: Reflections on the symposium and on recent experience on Bolivia.  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34, 1, 163-173.

Geddes M N (2008) Marxist theories of urban politics, in Davies J and Imbroscio D (Eds) Theories of urban politics. London: Sage.

Fuller C and Geddes M N  (2008) Local governance under neoliberalism: Local state restructuring and scalar transformation Antipode 40, 2, 252-282.