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In
Policing the Revolution, Rebecca Hanson provides the first in-depth analysis of policing and security policies during the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, focusing on the experiences of three groups: police officers, police reformers, and residents of neighborhoods most affected by violence. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and survey research collected over ten years, she analyzes how security policies within the context of the pink tide and later turn to authoritarianism contributed to the expansion of lateral violence and the pluralization of non-state violent actors. Rethinking the relationship between revolution, violence, and state-building, this book is essential reading to understand how and why violence increased so dramatically in Venezuela in the twenty-first century.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Research Design, Methods, and Embodied Ethnography
- Chapter 3: Reform and its Discontents
- Chapter 4: Securing the Revolution Part I
- Chapter 5: Malandros Uniformados: Masculinity, Marginalization, Insecurity, and Attitudes on Police Violence
- Chapter 6: The New Socialist Mother and Her Fight against Crime
- Chapter 7: Caiga quien Cagia: Systematic Killing in Maduro's Venezuela
- Chapter 8: Securing the Revolution Part II
- Chapter 9: Conclusion
- Index
About the author
Rebecca Hanson is Assistant Professor at the University of Florida, with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American Studies and director of UF's International Ethnography Lab. Her research focuses on how policies and political changes that seek to reduce inequality and violence end up contributing to these problems and how changing modalities of violence in the 21st century affect state building and capacity, with a specific focus on policing. She is the coauthor of
Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press, 2019) and co-editor of
The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime, and Policing during Chavismo (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).
Summary
Since the mid-2000s Venezuela has been ranked one of the most violent countries in the world as homicides and police violence skyrocketed. Much has been written about the country's turn to Chavismo but scholarship has ignored what will perhaps be the revolution's most important legacy: how Chavista policies transformed coercive power and the security landscape.
In Policing the Revolution, Rebecca Hanson provides the first in-depth analysis of policing and security policies during the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, focusing on the experiences of three groups: police officers, police reformers, and residents of neighborhoods most affected by violence. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and survey research collected over ten years, she analyzes how security policies within the context of the pink tide and later turn to authoritarianism contributed to the expansion of lateral violence and the pluralization of non-state armed actors. Far from the always-already authoritarian project proposed by many scholars and pundits, Hanson shows that the Bolivarian Revolution was defined by highly contested and contrasting visions of security that resulted in a fragmented and inconsistent ordering of state and society. Moreover, by pairing the vantage point of street-level police officers with that of ordinary barrio residents, she provides a unique analysis of how insecurity during revolution was experienced "from below."
Rethinking the relationship between revolution, violence, and state-building, this book is essential reading to understand how and why violence increased so dramatically in Venezuela in the twenty-first century.
Additional text
Hanson's Policing the Revolution provides counterintuitive insights into the nature of politics and the state in Bolivarian Venezuela. The book addresses important and complex puzzles that fit Venezuela into debates about violence in Latin America, highlighting similarities but also key differences. Hanson perceptively shows that violence and crime in Venezuela emerge, in part, because of decisions made by state leaders that keep the police disorganized, thus reducing their capacity to engage in effective law enforcement and shifting the balance of police power in the country. Hanson's detailed and incisive ethnography of Venezuelan police provides critical insights into politics in that country and its police forces.
