Alke Jen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 180861 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alke Jen |
| PRENOMES | Alke |
| SOBRENOME | Jen |
| ASSINATURA | JEN A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | RnOlD-BErGsTrAeSsEr-INsTiTuT |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5751-7946 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 100 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2016 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The authoritarian politics of energy infrastructures
The Lithium Road. Political practices in favor of extractive infrastructures in the Bolivian Altiplano
Given the new extractive geographies of the energy transition, the Bolivian salt flat Salar de Uyuni has gained enormous attention since it represents the world's largest lithium deposit in the world. We understand lithium mines in the South American Andean region as part of a global infrastructural arrangement brought about by political and financial forces to foster and nurture the energy transition. In Bolivia, lithium extraction encapsulates …
Beyond state space
Energy infrastructures are the talk of the hour. Enormous investments are mobilized globally to overhaul national energy systems, link different grids, and make electricity provision ‘future proof’. Analyses, however, have frequently limited themselves to binary perspectives between national energy spaces and private or foreign provision, energy independence and dependence. Contributing to literature on energy spatialities, infrastructure violenc…
Permitted crimes
This article contributes to efforts to complexifying discussions of state-crime relations and security governance in Latin America. A political economy approach to the state, combined with an understanding of illegal economy as an integral, if obscured part of global economy, allows conceptualizing such relations beyond state capture and even regimes of permission. Based on qualitative interviews, executive and judicial documents and leaked data …
Political practices between internal colonialism and global inequality
Shaping the peaceful city
This contribution examines the impact of transnational actors, policies, and discourses on the dynamics of urban renewal and governance in Colombia’s conflict-ridden cities. Emphasizing local and global encounters in policymaking, we understand initiatives of spatial economic restructuring as central components of a larger project oriented towards cities’ adjustment to the requirements of global markets. Frequently, the rationality of such polici…
Cities as nodes of conflict
Much conflict studies scholarship on cities has focused on post-war urban reconstruction. However, high rates of violence and perceptions of urban insecurity, particularly in Latin America, have diluted the clear distinction between armed conflict and peace. From a different perspective, logistics studies have pointed out the conflictive impacts of goods movement on urban communities where efficient supply chains are the ultimate priority. This c…
Fantasies of Flows and Containment
This contribution combines literature on logistics with literature on the articulation between racism and the securitisation of migration. Studying security infrastructures in Mexico in conjunction with the Mesoamerican Project, a massive transnational infrastructure plan, I show how security and trade infrastructures become intertwined in what governments have called a “secure trade corridor” between Colombia and the United States. In this secur…
Elsewheres of the Unbuilt
Pipelines and refineries, hydropower dams, and solar and wind power projects feeding into emerging transnational energy networks make up the thrust of a new push for infrastructural expansion in the global South. This article argues that understanding the effects of this expansion requires attending to the multiple elsewheres of transnational energy projects in various states of realization. By this we mean accounting for the ways in which these …
State-led Gentrification Against the Backdrop of Urban Authoritarian Practices
This collection of interventions unites academics hailing from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, reintroducing discussions on authoritarian state tactics and coercion into urban renewal dialogues within urban studies. During our discussions, it became apparent that urban authoritarian tactics are crucial in contemporary state-led gentrification efforts. In this introduction to the series, we aim to merge research on au…
The Coloniality of Capitalism
Prefiguring politics
Transregional energy infrastructure projects connect regions anew and envisage borderless energy flows. Building on prior work on technopolitics and the practice-turn in research on authoritarian power, we develop a political economy approach to the effects of transnational energy infrastructure expansion. This contribution asks what role transregional authoritarian practices in energy infrastructure expansion play for the limitation of opportuni…
Authoritarian power and contestation beyond the state
Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach.This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as nonstate actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state.We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregio…
Everyday scalar politics
This contribution asks how urban inhabitants (trans)form their everyday practices in the face of insecurity in Neoliberal Urbanism. Based on the analysis of interviews conducted in the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, which has seen enormous rises in property prices, short-term rentals, and numbers of tourists, I argue that urban dwellers adapt to asymmetrical manifestations of insecurity through care networks and adapted mobilities, and such eve…
Control, Utility and Formalization at the "Frontier"
This article explores the deep transformation of the Altillanura region in Colombia, where the expansion of the agricultural frontier has brought to light the dynamics of the ‘economies of dispossession and land appropriation’ (Jenss, 2017, this issue) that underpin the extractive model dominating Colombian development. Alke offers an overview of the principal mechanisms through which these dynamics are expressed, particularly the expansion of ne…
Scalar Struggles
So-called development projects in rural Mexico are heavily contested. Changes in institutional design have had little effect in mediating the exclusivity of the political decision-making processes defining such projects. Why, and how, has the Mexican state been able to maintain a developmentalist agenda, despite growing pressures to incorporate participatory development institutions and consult Indigenous peoples about development projects? This …
Transformed Security Practices
The article builds an analytical framework to study the relation between security and informality and the extent to which it contributes to producing hegemony in local politics. By emphasizing a processual understanding of hegemony, the article develops a twofold argument: (1) structurally powerful actors with well-established links to state institutions carry out informal practices just as well as those often perceived to be at the 'margins' of …
Disrupting the Rhythms of Violence
This contribution draws on rhythmanalysis and the political economy of assemblage to provide a framework for understanding the productive spatio‐temporal effects of physical violence on urban rhythms. The paper explores how Buenaventura, Colombia's biggest port city, is transformed both by the growth in container turnover, and through recurring, spatial and temporal practices of violence. What role does violence play in the relation between trade…
Gobernanza de la expansión
Las transformaciones hacia infraestructuras “ecológicas” están íntimamente ligadas a conflictos sociales. Para enriquecer el debate sobre estas expansiones infraestructurales en disputa, relaciono análisis de economía política y ecología política con la literatura sobre “políticas de operación” y logística. Para ello se analiza la infraestructura de energía renovable del Proyecto Mesoamericano, el cual fomenta nuevos “territorios transnacionales”…
Rethinking Authoritarian Power
How to rethink authoritarian power in ways that better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state boundaries? By reconceptualizing the context in which to analyze authoritarian power, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between the secondary port cities Aqaba/Jordan and Buenaventura/Colombia. We demonstrate that processes of privatization and a continuum of pre-emptive, technocratizing, and repressive authorit…
Interventions on Democratizing Infrastructure
Global flows and everyday violence in urban space
Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban …
A Criminal Commodity Consensus
Mexican human rights organizations accuse the Mexican military and federal police of having taken part in tens of thousands of forced disappearances in the last decade. Curiously, the regions in which people disappear are also sites of displacement and changing patterns of land tenure and production. Yet, property relations are seldom a topic of studies on illegal state activities. Through a state theory lens, including Aníbal Quijano's notion of…
Criminal heterarchy and its critics
The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and biggest guerrilla organisation, has long been constructed as the country’s public enemy number one, an enemy that is increasingly portrayed as an outright criminal actor who abandoned all political ambitions. This image of the FARC as a criminal threat to the Colombian state and society is central to a broader turn towards criminalisation in Colombian politics. Through the lens of a critical governance perspective …
Authoritarian neoliberal rescaling in Latin America
There is an increasing consensus that, across the globe, austerity policies have often relegated fiscal pressures from the state to the urban scale. These are sometimes discussed under the label ‘austerity urbanism’. This article explores urban authoritarian neoliberalism through an examination of spatial and scalar manifestations of neoliberal restructuring. It asks how austerity urbanism’s rescaling takes effect in spatially variegated ways in …
Rethinking Authoritarian Power
How to rethink authoritarian power in ways that better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state boundaries? By reconceptualizing the context in which to analyze authoritarian power, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between the secondary port cities Aqaba/Jordan and Buenaventura/Colombia. We demonstrate that processes of privatization and a continuum of pre-emptive, technocratizing, and repressive authorit…
Authoritarian neoliberal rescaling in Latin America
There is an increasing consensus that, across the globe, austerity policies have often relegated fiscal pressures from the state to the urban scale. These are sometimes discussed under the label ‘austerity urbanism’. This article explores urban authoritarian neoliberalism through an examination of spatial and scalar manifestations of neoliberal restructuring. It asks how austerity urbanism’s rescaling takes effect in spatially variegated ways in …
Authoritarian power and contestation beyond the state
Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach.This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as nonstate actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state.We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregio…
Global flows and everyday violence in urban space
Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban …
Prefiguring politics
Transregional energy infrastructure projects connect regions anew and envisage borderless energy flows. Building on prior work on technopolitics and the practice-turn in research on authoritarian power, we develop a political economy approach to the effects of transnational energy infrastructure expansion. This contribution asks what role transregional authoritarian practices in energy infrastructure expansion play for the limitation of opportuni…
Interventions on Democratizing Infrastructure
Fantasies of Flows and Containment
This contribution combines literature on logistics with literature on the articulation between racism and the securitisation of migration. Studying security infrastructures in Mexico in conjunction with the Mesoamerican Project, a massive transnational infrastructure plan, I show how security and trade infrastructures become intertwined in what governments have called a “secure trade corridor” between Colombia and the United States. In this secur…
A Criminal Commodity Consensus
Mexican human rights organizations accuse the Mexican military and federal police of having taken part in tens of thousands of forced disappearances in the last decade. Curiously, the regions in which people disappear are also sites of displacement and changing patterns of land tenure and production. Yet, property relations are seldom a topic of studies on illegal state activities. Through a state theory lens, including Aníbal Quijano's notion of…
Shaping the peaceful city
This contribution examines the impact of transnational actors, policies, and discourses on the dynamics of urban renewal and governance in Colombia’s conflict-ridden cities. Emphasizing local and global encounters in policymaking, we understand initiatives of spatial economic restructuring as central components of a larger project oriented towards cities’ adjustment to the requirements of global markets. Frequently, the rationality of such polici…
Criminal heterarchy and its critics
The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and biggest guerrilla organisation, has long been constructed as the country’s public enemy number one, an enemy that is increasingly portrayed as an outright criminal actor who abandoned all political ambitions. This image of the FARC as a criminal threat to the Colombian state and society is central to a broader turn towards criminalisation in Colombian politics. Through the lens of a critical governance perspective …
Elsewheres of the Unbuilt
Pipelines and refineries, hydropower dams, and solar and wind power projects feeding into emerging transnational energy networks make up the thrust of a new push for infrastructural expansion in the global South. This article argues that understanding the effects of this expansion requires attending to the multiple elsewheres of transnational energy projects in various states of realization. By this we mean accounting for the ways in which these …
State-led Gentrification Against the Backdrop of Urban Authoritarian Practices
This collection of interventions unites academics hailing from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, reintroducing discussions on authoritarian state tactics and coercion into urban renewal dialogues within urban studies. During our discussions, it became apparent that urban authoritarian tactics are crucial in contemporary state-led gentrification efforts. In this introduction to the series, we aim to merge research on au…
Everyday scalar politics
This contribution asks how urban inhabitants (trans)form their everyday practices in the face of insecurity in Neoliberal Urbanism. Based on the analysis of interviews conducted in the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, which has seen enormous rises in property prices, short-term rentals, and numbers of tourists, I argue that urban dwellers adapt to asymmetrical manifestations of insecurity through care networks and adapted mobilities, and such eve…
Transformed Security Practices
The article builds an analytical framework to study the relation between security and informality and the extent to which it contributes to producing hegemony in local politics. By emphasizing a processual understanding of hegemony, the article develops a twofold argument: (1) structurally powerful actors with well-established links to state institutions carry out informal practices just as well as those often perceived to be at the 'margins' of …
Grauzonen staatlicher Gewalt
Paramilitärs, Kriminalität, Verschwundene - der »Krieg gegen die Drogen« hat in wirtschaftlichen Boomzonen Kolumbiens und Mexikos Gewaltverhältnisse auf Dauer gestellt: Illegale und legale Ökonomie sind kaum mehr zu trennen. Alke Jenss bietet einen differenzierten Blick auf die Rolle des Staates: Bekämpft er die, die er zu bekämpfen vorgibt? Stellt der Staat tatsächlich Ordnung her oder produziert er vielmehr selbst Unsicherheit für Teile der Ges…
A Criminal Commodity Consensus
Mexican human rights organizations accuse the Mexican military and federal police of having taken part in tens of thousands of forced disappearances in the last decade. Curiously, the regions in which people disappear are also sites of displacement and changing patterns of land tenure and production. Yet, property relations are seldom a topic of studies on illegal state activities. Through a state theory lens, including Aníbal Quijano's notion of…
Criminal heterarchy and its critics
The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and biggest guerrilla organisation, has long been constructed as the country’s public enemy number one, an enemy that is increasingly portrayed as an outright criminal actor who abandoned all political ambitions. This image of the FARC as a criminal threat to the Colombian state and society is central to a broader turn towards criminalisation in Colombian politics. Through the lens of a critical governance perspective …
Authoritarian neoliberal rescaling in Latin America
There is an increasing consensus that, across the globe, austerity policies have often relegated fiscal pressures from the state to the urban scale. These are sometimes discussed under the label ‘austerity urbanism’. This article explores urban authoritarian neoliberalism through an examination of spatial and scalar manifestations of neoliberal restructuring. It asks how austerity urbanism’s rescaling takes effect in spatially variegated ways in …
Global flows and everyday violence in urban space
Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban …
Disrupting the Rhythms of Violence
This contribution draws on rhythmanalysis and the political economy of assemblage to provide a framework for understanding the productive spatio‐temporal effects of physical violence on urban rhythms. The paper explores how Buenaventura, Colombia's biggest port city, is transformed both by the growth in container turnover, and through recurring, spatial and temporal practices of violence. What role does violence play in the relation between trade…
Gobernanza de la expansión
Las transformaciones hacia infraestructuras “ecológicas” están íntimamente ligadas a conflictos sociales. Para enriquecer el debate sobre estas expansiones infraestructurales en disputa, relaciono análisis de economía política y ecología política con la literatura sobre “políticas de operación” y logística. Para ello se analiza la infraestructura de energía renovable del Proyecto Mesoamericano, el cual fomenta nuevos “territorios transnacionales”…
Rethinking Authoritarian Power
How to rethink authoritarian power in ways that better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state boundaries? By reconceptualizing the context in which to analyze authoritarian power, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between the secondary port cities Aqaba/Jordan and Buenaventura/Colombia. We demonstrate that processes of privatization and a continuum of pre-emptive, technocratizing, and repressive authorit…
Interventions on Democratizing Infrastructure
Control, Utility and Formalization at the "Frontier"
This article explores the deep transformation of the Altillanura region in Colombia, where the expansion of the agricultural frontier has brought to light the dynamics of the ‘economies of dispossession and land appropriation’ (Jenss, 2017, this issue) that underpin the extractive model dominating Colombian development. Alke offers an overview of the principal mechanisms through which these dynamics are expressed, particularly the expansion of ne…
Scalar Struggles
So-called development projects in rural Mexico are heavily contested. Changes in institutional design have had little effect in mediating the exclusivity of the political decision-making processes defining such projects. Why, and how, has the Mexican state been able to maintain a developmentalist agenda, despite growing pressures to incorporate participatory development institutions and consult Indigenous peoples about development projects? This …
Transformed Security Practices
The article builds an analytical framework to study the relation between security and informality and the extent to which it contributes to producing hegemony in local politics. By emphasizing a processual understanding of hegemony, the article develops a twofold argument: (1) structurally powerful actors with well-established links to state institutions carry out informal practices just as well as those often perceived to be at the 'margins' of …
Prefiguring politics
Transregional energy infrastructure projects connect regions anew and envisage borderless energy flows. Building on prior work on technopolitics and the practice-turn in research on authoritarian power, we develop a political economy approach to the effects of transnational energy infrastructure expansion. This contribution asks what role transregional authoritarian practices in energy infrastructure expansion play for the limitation of opportuni…
Authoritarian power and contestation beyond the state
Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach.This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as nonstate actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state.We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregio…
Everyday scalar politics
This contribution asks how urban inhabitants (trans)form their everyday practices in the face of insecurity in Neoliberal Urbanism. Based on the analysis of interviews conducted in the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, which has seen enormous rises in property prices, short-term rentals, and numbers of tourists, I argue that urban dwellers adapt to asymmetrical manifestations of insecurity through care networks and adapted mobilities, and such eve…
Cities as nodes of conflict
Much conflict studies scholarship on cities has focused on post-war urban reconstruction. However, high rates of violence and perceptions of urban insecurity, particularly in Latin America, have diluted the clear distinction between armed conflict and peace. From a different perspective, logistics studies have pointed out the conflictive impacts of goods movement on urban communities where efficient supply chains are the ultimate priority. This c…
Fantasies of Flows and Containment
This contribution combines literature on logistics with literature on the articulation between racism and the securitisation of migration. Studying security infrastructures in Mexico in conjunction with the Mesoamerican Project, a massive transnational infrastructure plan, I show how security and trade infrastructures become intertwined in what governments have called a “secure trade corridor” between Colombia and the United States. In this secur…
Elsewheres of the Unbuilt
Pipelines and refineries, hydropower dams, and solar and wind power projects feeding into emerging transnational energy networks make up the thrust of a new push for infrastructural expansion in the global South. This article argues that understanding the effects of this expansion requires attending to the multiple elsewheres of transnational energy projects in various states of realization. By this we mean accounting for the ways in which these …
State-led Gentrification Against the Backdrop of Urban Authoritarian Practices
This collection of interventions unites academics hailing from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, reintroducing discussions on authoritarian state tactics and coercion into urban renewal dialogues within urban studies. During our discussions, it became apparent that urban authoritarian tactics are crucial in contemporary state-led gentrification efforts. In this introduction to the series, we aim to merge research on au…
The Coloniality of Capitalism
Beyond state space
Energy infrastructures are the talk of the hour. Enormous investments are mobilized globally to overhaul national energy systems, link different grids, and make electricity provision ‘future proof’. Analyses, however, have frequently limited themselves to binary perspectives between national energy spaces and private or foreign provision, energy independence and dependence. Contributing to literature on energy spatialities, infrastructure violenc…
Permitted crimes
This article contributes to efforts to complexifying discussions of state-crime relations and security governance in Latin America. A political economy approach to the state, combined with an understanding of illegal economy as an integral, if obscured part of global economy, allows conceptualizing such relations beyond state capture and even regimes of permission. Based on qualitative interviews, executive and judicial documents and leaked data …
Political practices between internal colonialism and global inequality
Shaping the peaceful city
This contribution examines the impact of transnational actors, policies, and discourses on the dynamics of urban renewal and governance in Colombia’s conflict-ridden cities. Emphasizing local and global encounters in policymaking, we understand initiatives of spatial economic restructuring as central components of a larger project oriented towards cities’ adjustment to the requirements of global markets. Frequently, the rationality of such polici…
The authoritarian politics of energy infrastructures
Political science (22 obras) · Economics (17 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (14 obras) · Geography (12 obras) · Political economy (11 obras) · Law (8 obras) · State (computer science (7 obras)