Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá by Austin Zeiderman (review)

Colombia is at a historic juncture, or so it seems. In less than a week, peace negotiations between the government and the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), the country’s largest guerrilla group, went from the celebratory signing of a peace accord in Havana on September 26, 2016, to the rejection of the agreement in a closely voted referendum on October 2nd. In a country that has endured a 52-year conflict, with more than 200,000 deaths and 7 million displaced persons, the transit to a post-conflict era continues to be deeply troubled and the perennial “pre-postconflict” (Theidon 2015) moment raises critical concerns. Immediate concerns include the demobilization and reintegration of armed groups. These are daunting challenges, given not only the number of combatants and weapons in circulation, but also the availability of opportunities for rearmament in an expanding landscape of criminal violence fueled by drug trafficking, resource extraction, and deregulated regional economies.

More broadly, one might ask what it means to say the country is moving into a post-conflict era when the structural conditions that have sustained the armed conflict continue to be firmly entrenched in Colombian society. Among these is the status of security as an enduring rationality of government and a pervasive cultural framework that reinforces modes of exclusion and inequality. Is security, as a political technology and social idiom, being reconstituted? Does post-conflict status hold promise as a move toward a post-security era? What kinds of political spaces and modes of social engagement will post-conflict security frameworks enable? Any meaningful approach to these questions must begin by disentangling the dense strands of meaning and the multiplicity of uses that have made security one of the most pervasive yet opaque notions in Colombian society.

In Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá, Austin Zeiderman does precisely this with an ethnographically engaging and theoretically ambitious study of the governance of urban risk in Colombia’s capital city. In a context in which fears of insecurity “saturate” (6) the public realm and violence has “the status of master-signifier” (29), Zeiderman’s foray into the politics of risk expands our field of vision in important ways. His book complicates “causal and linear” (30) analyses of violence and security, exploring instead the open-ended and multi-directional processes through which insecurities are experienced by urban dwellers and acted upon by officials and experts. While resonating with recent scholarship on Latin America’s “violence at the urban margins” (Auyero, Bourgois, and Scheper-Hughes 2015), Zeiderman’s focus on environmental risk offers an “oblique” (29) perspective that unsettles dominant understandings of violence––from the criminal to the structural––and sheds light on the shifting politics of security both as a technology of governance and as a space of citizenship.

In looking at Bogotá’s wide-ranging transformations during the past decades––from a city besieged by criminal violence to an international model of progressive urbanism––Zeiderman argues that disaster risk management has emerged as a critical framework of urban governance, shifting the definition of threat “from disorder, criminality, and insurgency to floods, landslides, and earthquakes” (16). To explore these shifts, Zeiderman tracks the mapping and monitoring of risk zones as well as the politics surrounding resettlement schemes. The bulk of his research was carried out between 2008 and 2010, in the midst of a leftist turn in urban politics in Bogotá, which saw the expansion of risk management in peripheral settlements.

Zeiderman’s ethnography unfolds primarily in Ciudad Bolivar, a collection of self-built settlements clinging to the mountainous terrain of Bogotá’s southwest periphery. The most expansive and impoverished of the city’s 20 localities, Ciudad Bolívar has a population of over 700, 000 inhabitants and has been a main destination for rural migrants and internally displaced persons since the mid-20th century. Zeiderman shows how the area and its inhabitants––for years associated with criminal violence and illegality––have...