D Rodgers
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 47525 |
|---|---|
| NOME | D Rodgers |
| PRENOMES | D |
| SOBRENOME | Rodgers |
| ASSINATURA | RODGERS D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8957-4796 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 55 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 942 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 55 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Critical Gangster Life Histories
Gangs, Drug Dealing, and Criminal Governance in Marseille, France
Marseille is a city that has long been sensationalistically associated in the public imagination with crime and drug dealing. This article begins by tracing the history of drug dealing and gang violence in the city, from its 19th century origins to the rise of what has been called the "French Connection" in the 1960s and 1970s, when Marseille played a central role in the global heroin trade. The city's criminality subsequently became more local i…
The gangster imagination
Loi Des Hors-La-Loi
Cet article présente le numéro spécial en passant en revue les traditions francophones et anglo-saxonnes d’anthropologie juridique, avant de situer le droit des hors-la-loi au sein de ces traditions et de souligner sa contribution potentielle au développement d’une approche pragmatique du droit
Law of the Outlaw
This article introduces the special issue through a review of Francophone and Anglo-Saxon legal anthropology traditions, before situating the law of the outlaw within these and outlining its potential contribution towards the development of a pragmatic approach to law
Capitalist Dis/Order in Urban Pakistan - Laurent Gayer, Le Capitalisme à main armée
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Gang Rule(s)
This article explores the longitudinal dynamics of youth gang transformation in urban Nicaragua. On the basis of an overview of successive gang iterations that have emerged over the past 30 years in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, the article identifies key elements for the articulation of a political economy of both change and stability. In particular, drawing on Bourdieusian theory, it…
Comparison through Collaboration
This article explores how and to what extent collaborative ethnographic fieldwork enables comparison both inherently and in practical terms. More often than not, ethnographic comparison involves the juxtaposition of studies carried out separately by individuals and relates to comparing arguments rather than empirical incidents. This obscures important contextual specificities across research sites and dilutes the comparative endeavor. We argue th…
Beyond the City Limits
The so-called “Chicago School of Sociology” (CSS) was the dominant current of sociological thought during the first half of the 20th century, particularly associated with its then cutting-edge studies of urban life. Today, however, it is frequently held up as an example of unreflexive, Northern-centric thinking, that put forward universalist claims and theories about cities on the basis of parochial empirical experiences that focused on Chicago. …
Debunking the Myth of Nicaraguan Exceptionalism
Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political …
After the Gang
Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this 'desistance' process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals' post-gang trajectories, partl…
The intimacies of drug dealing
In this article, we explore how and to what extent it is useful to think about drug dealing through the conceptual lens of intimacy. Such an approach both complements and challenges mainstream views on drug dealing, which see the phenomenon as based on ‘formal-rational’ organisation and practices. We explore the intimacies of drug dealing along three axes: the involvement of kin and family, ‘governing intimacy’ and as embedded in culturally intim…
Carles Feixa and César Andrade (King Manaba) (2020), El Rey
There exists a long tradition of works drawing on life histories within the field of gang studies. Beginning with the pioneering volumes by Chicago sociologists Clifford Shaw (The Jack-Roller, 1930) and Edwin Sutherland (The Professional Thief, 1937), through to more recent works such Ralph Cintron's Angels' Town (1998), Marie-Hlne Bacqu and Lamence Madzou's J'tais un Chef de Gang (2008), or Robert Gay's Bruno (2015), they constitute an important…
A Nosotros, nos Tienen que Respetar! (They Have to Respect us)
Gangs are often associated with violence and chaos, but they can also be institutional vectors for the imposition of particular forms of social order, based on their members’ status as locally hegemonic “violence experts”. This “gang governance” is often exclusive and volatile, however, and its underlying logic can easily change. Instances of the latter are frequently connected to generational turnovers within gangs. An obvious question in this r…
(Il)legal Aspirations
Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research carried out over two-and-a-half decades in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores how legal and illegal economic activities are socially legitimized, and more specifically, how certain illegal economic activities can end up being seen as legitimate, and certain legal ones perceived as illegitimate. The first part of the article explores the variab…
The Sounds of Development
The experience of development, as well as understandings of and responses to it, are uniquely rendered through popular culture generally, and popular music in particular. Music has been a medium of choice through which marginalised populations all over the world convey their (frequently critical) views, while in the Global North music has also long played a prominent (if notorious) role in portraying the plight of the South’s ‘starving millions’ …
Telling Tales
The ethnographic representation of violence is a controversial issue, involving debates about (avoiding) sensationalism or (acknowledging) emotionality, for example. Less considered is how the subjective nature of ethnography and the fact that ethnographic narratives are always situated can have ramifications for both interpreting and representing violence, particularly in the context of longitudinal ethnographic research. Drawing on my investiga…
Neglected Transportation Infrastructure
Verkhnemarkovo, a small Siberian town located on an oil field in Russia’s Irkutsk region, is plagued by bad roads and limited mobility. This article explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the wellbeing of individuals and communities, with a focus on transport and mobility infrastructure. Some oil companies, such as Irkutsk Oil Company, are tied to the sustainability standards of international financial institutions.…
The drugs consensus
Ethnographies and/of violence
This paper examines ethnography as both a methodological practice and a form of writing, and specifically how ethnography as a textual product may shape and be shaped by the methodological process. We argue that a critical discussion of this relationship is especially important in relation to the ethnography/ethnographies of violence. Examining a range of recent texts, we consider whether different forms of violence necessitate, or have prompted,…
Urban Anti-politics and the Enigma of Revolt
This article focuses on processes of urban confinement, and the fact that these often do not generate significant forms of political contestation, despite their obviously negative socio-spatial consequences. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork begun in 1996 in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, it begins by describing a specific instance of urban confinement illustrating what Merrifield (2014) has aptly described as 'neo-Haussmann…
Introduction. Sandinismo 2.0
« Tous les grands evenements et personnages historiques se repetent pour ainsi dire deux fois [...] la premiere fois comme tragedie, la seconde fois comme farce. »Karl Marx, Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte (1851) 19 avril 2018 : une manifestation contre la reforme des retraites, largement composee d’etudiants des universites de Managua, la capitale du Nicaragua, est reprimee dans le sang. La vague de confrontations qui suit a travers tout le pa…
Drug booms and busts
The income generated by the drug economy can often be substantial for the different parties involved, even at the lowest rung of this illicit trade. Yet the drugs trade is also a notoriously volatile activity, meaning that drug-related prosperity is highly prone to boom-and-bust cycles. Drawing on ongoing longitudinal ethnographic research in urban Nicaragua, this article explores the consequences of the cyclical nature of the drugs trade, tracin…
"For a "Delinquent Ethnography
Les gangs font partie d'un nombre restreint de phénomènes quasi-universels, présents au fil de l'histoire dans la plupart des sociétés à travers le monde. Il existe une longue tradition de recherches ethnographiques sur les gangs qui comptent les études les plus approfondies et les plus révélatrices du phénomène. Ceci est en partie dû au fait que l'ethnographie est une approche méthodologique qui appelle au développement d'une certaine intimité a…
Introduction
Infrastructural violence
This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of 'infrastructural violence'. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of 'infrastructural violence' c…
Living in the Shadow of Death
This article explores the dynamics of the youth gang (pandilla) phenomenon in contemporary urban Nicaragua, drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research conducted with a Managua pandilla in 1996-97 and in 2002. Pandillas and their violent practices are conceived as constituting a form of local social structuration in the face of broader conditions of high crime, insecurity, and socio-political breakdown. This form of 'street-level politics' chan…
Slum Wars of the 21st Century
The political economy of violence in Central America is widely perceived as having undergone a critical shift during the past two decades, often pithily summarized as a movement from 'political' to 'social' violence. Although such an analysis is plausible, it also offers a depoliticized vision of the contemporary Central American panorama of violence. Basing itself principally on the example of Nicaragua, the country in the region that is histori…
The State as a Gang
This article explores the nature of state violence in contemporary Nicaragua. It begins by considering the premise that Latin America has undergone a 'crisis of governance' during the past decade, due to the rise of multiple forms of non-state violence, proposing a means of visualizing how forms of 'state sovereignty' and 'social sovereignty' can viably coexist. With reference to the example of Nicaraguan youth gangs, it then explores the underly…
Gangs, Urban Violence, and Security Interventions in Central America
Urban violence is a major preoccupation of policymakers, planners and development practitioners in cities around the world. Public authorities routinely seek to contain such violence through repression, as well as through its exportation to and containment at the periphery of metropolitan centres. Yet, urban violence is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon and not amenable to reified diagnosis and coercive intervention. Muscular state-led responses …
Joining the Gang and Becoming aBroder
The fact that anthropologists 'construct' the field in which they conduct their ethnographic research has long been recognised, but less considered are the ways in which the field can 'construct' both the anthropologist and fieldwork practices. In many ways, this process is a natural corollary of the fact that researchers must always adapt and sensitise themselves to the realities of their field locations, and more importantly, the inherently dia…
Disembedding” the city
This paper explores the emergence of a new pattern of spatial segregation linked to rising urban insecurity in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, during the past decade and a half. Rather than fragmenting into an archipelago of isolated “fortified enclaves”, as has been the case in other cities around the world, Managua has undergone a process whereby a whole layer of the metropolis has been “disembedded” from the general fabric of the city …
Cities and Conflict in Fragile States in the Developing World
The articles presented in this Special Issue draw on five years of research by the Cities and Fragile States programme of the Crisis States Research Centre, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This programme, funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), was an exploratory ‘blue skies’ endeavour that set out to examine the relationship between cities, states and conflict in conflict-affected parts of…
Gangs as Non-State Armed Groups
Gangs are popularly considered to be the major security threat facing the Central American region. In focusing on the origins and dynamics of gangs in the region, this article seeks to broaden conceptualizations of non-state armed groups by expanding the theoretical optic from a narrow focus on war and post-war contexts to a wider spectrum of settings, actors, and motivations. It highlights a category of actors that does not explicitly seek to ov…
The Fiction of Development
This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority and representational form, and explore these by comparing and con…
Critique of Urban Violence
Urban contexts are widely conceived as inherently violent due to their putatively disorderly nature. Such a conception of violence effectively conceives it as singular and fundamentally destructive, neither of which necessarily hold universally true. Drawing on Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' and the life history of Bismarck, a former gang member turned drug dealer turned property entrepreneur living in a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragu…
Haussmannization in the tropics
This article considers the underlying dynamics of the elite-oriented urban transformation that Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, has undergone during the past decade and a half. It begins by drawing a cross-historical comparison between Managua's metropolitan makeover and a paradigmatic case of planned urban change, that of 19th-century Parisian Haussmannization, in order to highlight the systemic and purposeful nature of the former's trans…
Bróderes in arms
Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research that has been ongoing since 1996, this article explores the way that gangs socialize individuals into violent norms and practices in Nicaragua. It shows how different types of gang violence can be related to distinct socialization processes and mechanisms, tracing how these dynamically articulate individual agency, group dynamics and contextual circumstances, albeit in ways that change over time. As s…
Ethnographies and/of violence
This paper examines ethnography as both a methodological practice and a form of writing, and specifically how ethnography as a textual product may shape and be shaped by the methodological process. We argue that a critical discussion of this relationship is especially important in relation to the ethnography/ethnographies of violence. Examining a range of recent texts, we consider whether different forms of violence necessitate, or have prompted,…
From a Politics of Conviction to a Politics of Interest? The Changing Ontologics of Youth Politics in India and Nicaragua
There exists a longstanding association between youth and revolution, partly due to the assumption that the politics of the former are inherently "prefigurative" in nature. Youth politics can often actually be quite conservative, however, as can be observed in contemporary Nicaragua, where rather than attempting to "change the world" in the way that previous militant youth generations were famously associated with, current Sandinista youth activi…
Latin American Urban Development into the Twenty-first Century
The intimacies of drug dealing
In this article, we explore how and to what extent it is useful to think about drug dealing through the conceptual lens of intimacy. Such an approach both complements and challenges mainstream views on drug dealing, which see the phenomenon as based on ‘formal-rational’ organisation and practices. We explore the intimacies of drug dealing along three axes: the involvement of kin and family, ‘governing intimacy’ and as embedded in culturally intim…
Introduction. Sandinismo 2.0
« Tous les grands evenements et personnages historiques se repetent pour ainsi dire deux fois [...] la premiere fois comme tragedie, la seconde fois comme farce. »Karl Marx, Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte (1851) 19 avril 2018 : une manifestation contre la reforme des retraites, largement composee d’etudiants des universites de Managua, la capitale du Nicaragua, est reprimee dans le sang. La vague de confrontations qui suit a travers tout le pa…
Drug booms and busts
The income generated by the drug economy can often be substantial for the different parties involved, even at the lowest rung of this illicit trade. Yet the drugs trade is also a notoriously volatile activity, meaning that drug-related prosperity is highly prone to boom-and-bust cycles. Drawing on ongoing longitudinal ethnographic research in urban Nicaragua, this article explores the consequences of the cyclical nature of the drugs trade, tracin…
Contingent Democratisation? The Rise and Fall of Participatory Budgeting in Buenos Aires
The implementation of participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires following the crisis of December 2001 was a highly unlikely event. The different parties involved had competing and contradictory agendas that did not coincide with participatory budgeting's stated aims of extending citizen participation in government, but these interacted in a way that contingently created a space for a viable process to develop. Subsequent political shifts led to the…
A Symptom Called Managua
Nicaragua’s capital as microcosm for the country’s transformation since the 1970s: shattered by earthquake and the depredations of the Somoza dictatorship, briefly lifted by Sandinista urban reconstruction, remade in the 1990s by narco-traffickers and the returning Miami emigration
After the Gang
Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this 'desistance' process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals' post-gang trajectories, partl…
The Projection of Development
Popular representations of development need to be taken seriously (though not uncritically) as sources of authoritative knowledge, not least because this is how most people in the global North (and elsewhere) ‘encounter’ development issues. To this end, and building on the broader agenda presented in a previous article exploring the usefulness of literary representations of development, we consider three different types of cinematic representatio…
Debunking the Myth of Nicaraguan Exceptionalism
Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political …
Urban Anti-politics and the Enigma of Revolt
This article focuses on processes of urban confinement, and the fact that these often do not generate significant forms of political contestation, despite their obviously negative socio-spatial consequences. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork begun in 1996 in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, it begins by describing a specific instance of urban confinement illustrating what Merrifield (2014) has aptly described as 'neo-Haussmann…
"Disembedding" the city
Disembedding” the city
This paper explores the emergence of a new pattern of spatial segregation linked to rising urban insecurity in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, during the past decade and a half. Rather than fragmenting into an archipelago of isolated “fortified enclaves”, as has been the case in other cities around the world, Managua has undergone a process whereby a whole layer of the metropolis has been “disembedded” from the general fabric of the city …
Living in the Shadow of Death
This article explores the dynamics of the youth gang (pandilla) phenomenon in contemporary urban Nicaragua, drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research conducted with a Managua pandilla in 1996-97 and in 2002. Pandillas and their violent practices are conceived as constituting a form of local social structuration in the face of broader conditions of high crime, insecurity, and socio-political breakdown. This form of 'street-level politics' chan…
The State as a Gang
This article explores the nature of state violence in contemporary Nicaragua. It begins by considering the premise that Latin America has undergone a 'crisis of governance' during the past decade, due to the rise of multiple forms of non-state violence, proposing a means of visualizing how forms of 'state sovereignty' and 'social sovereignty' can viably coexist. With reference to the example of Nicaraguan youth gangs, it then explores the underly…
‘Each to their own’
This article presents some ethnographic notes on the economic organisation of poor households in urban Nicaragua. These highlight a number of atypical features that raise several important theoretical questions. In particular, they highlight the possible emergence of non-cooperative households, and point to a problematic association in the literature between doubly ‘naturalised’ notions of kinship and households. The article concludes that not on…
Joining the Gang and Becoming aBroder
The fact that anthropologists 'construct' the field in which they conduct their ethnographic research has long been recognised, but less considered are the ways in which the field can 'construct' both the anthropologist and fieldwork practices. In many ways, this process is a natural corollary of the fact that researchers must always adapt and sensitise themselves to the realities of their field locations, and more importantly, the inherently dia…
A Symptom Called Managua
Nicaragua’s capital as microcosm for the country’s transformation since the 1970s: shattered by earthquake and the depredations of the Somoza dictatorship, briefly lifted by Sandinista urban reconstruction, remade in the 1990s by narco-traffickers and the returning Miami emigration
The Fiction of Development
This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority and representational form, and explore these by comparing and con…
Gangs as Non-State Armed Groups
Gangs are popularly considered to be the major security threat facing the Central American region. In focusing on the origins and dynamics of gangs in the region, this article seeks to broaden conceptualizations of non-state armed groups by expanding the theoretical optic from a narrow focus on war and post-war contexts to a wider spectrum of settings, actors, and motivations. It highlights a category of actors that does not explicitly seek to ov…
Gangs, Urban Violence, and Security Interventions in Central America
Urban violence is a major preoccupation of policymakers, planners and development practitioners in cities around the world. Public authorities routinely seek to contain such violence through repression, as well as through its exportation to and containment at the periphery of metropolitan centres. Yet, urban violence is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon and not amenable to reified diagnosis and coercive intervention. Muscular state-led responses …
The Chronic Poverty Report 2008–2009 – Escaping Poverty Traps
Slum Wars of the 21st Century
The political economy of violence in Central America is widely perceived as having undergone a critical shift during the past two decades, often pithily summarized as a movement from 'political' to 'social' violence. Although such an analysis is plausible, it also offers a depoliticized vision of the contemporary Central American panorama of violence. Basing itself principally on the example of Nicaragua, the country in the region that is histori…
Interview with Dennis Rodgers
Dennis Rodgers is a social anthropologist by training, with a BA and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, as well as a postgraduate degree from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a Senior Research Fellow in the Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI), at the University of Manchester, UK, where he leads their research programme on ‘Urban Poverty and Conflict’, 1 and a Visiting Senior Fellow with the Lond…
Contingent Democratisation? The Rise and Fall of Participatory Budgeting in Buenos Aires
The implementation of participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires following the crisis of December 2001 was a highly unlikely event. The different parties involved had competing and contradictory agendas that did not coincide with participatory budgeting's stated aims of extending citizen participation in government, but these interacted in a way that contingently created a space for a viable process to develop. Subsequent political shifts led to the…
Introduction
Latin American Urban Development into the Twenty-first Century
The 2010 UNCTAD Least Developed Countries Report – Towards a New Development Architecture for LDCs
Nicaragua’s Gangs a debate
Nicaragua’s Gangs
Nicaragua’s gangs are less a legacy of war and more a consequence of there having been no resolution to the many social, political, and economic issues that led to war and revolution in the first place
The Projection of Development
Popular representations of development need to be taken seriously (though not uncritically) as sources of authoritative knowledge, not least because this is how most people in the global North (and elsewhere) ‘encounter’ development issues. To this end, and building on the broader agenda presented in a previous article exploring the usefulness of literary representations of development, we consider three different types of cinematic representatio…
Haussmannization in the tropics
This article considers the underlying dynamics of the elite-oriented urban transformation that Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, has undergone during the past decade and a half. It begins by drawing a cross-historical comparison between Managua's metropolitan makeover and a paradigmatic case of planned urban change, that of 19th-century Parisian Haussmannization, in order to highlight the systemic and purposeful nature of the former's trans…
Infrastructural violence
This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of 'infrastructural violence'. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of 'infrastructural violence' c…
Cities and Conflict in Fragile States in the Developing World
The articles presented in this Special Issue draw on five years of research by the Cities and Fragile States programme of the Crisis States Research Centre, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This programme, funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), was an exploratory ‘blue skies’ endeavour that set out to examine the relationship between cities, states and conflict in conflict-affected parts of…
The Projection of Development
Popular representations of development need to be taken seriously (though not uncritically) as sources of authoritative knowledge, not least because they are how most people in the global north (and elsewhere) encounter development issues. To this end, this paper presents three clusters of films on development: those providing uniquely instructive insights, those unhelpfully eliding and simplifying complex processes, and those that, with the bene…
Re-thinking the Latin American City
Sociology (37 obras) · Political science (36 obras) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (28 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Criminology (18 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (12 obras) · Economics (11 obras)