Governance of development and citizenship regimes
This focus on state instruments (public and participatory policies, representation) has shown that recent transformations in citizenship regimes are complex, non-linear and interdependent. The book Legacies of the Left (Balán and Montambeault, 2020) argues that the record of the lefts in Latin America is uneven, having notably failed to include all citizens, particularly women, LGBTQ+ populations and indigenous peoples. Other works extend this argument, including a panel on COVID governance (Nagels and Hilgers, 2022), an article on the ‘new middle class’ (Hilgers, Calderón and Honigmann, 2022); and a colloquium (2023) and book (2024) on democratic innovations in authoritarian contexts organized by Levy and Furukawa-Marques. In addition, the impact and resilience of formal participatory arrangements were discussed in the article by Montambeault and Dias-Félix (2021) and at conferences by Abers (2020), Goldfrank and Wampler (2022) and de Almeida (2023). The question of agentivity and inclusion of indigenous peoples (Papillon SSRC, Montambeault and Nagels, 2018-23) was explored further at a co-organized LASA panel (2019), in a co-authored chapter (2024) and an article in preparation, at the international seminar The Politics of Indigenous Participatory Rights (2022) and at conferences by Fontana (2020), Jaskoski (2021) and Torres (2022).
Informality, public space and governance
This axis serves to analyze the coexistence of formal and informal channels of governance and intermediation in state-society relations, a question addressed in the collective work Les espaces publics en Amérique (Durazo-Herrmann, PUL, 2019). In addition, the article by Hilgers and Mayer (2022), reveals that neoliberal reforms perpetuate clientelist practices in Latin American democracies. The role of the media as private actors and intermediaries between the state and citizens was also discussed by ÉRIGAL postdoctoral researcher Nodari in her conference (2023). Dabène's seminar (2020) on street art, Islas Weinstein's seminar (2020) on feminist graffiti and protest, and El-Ouardi and Montambeault's article (2023) on collective gardens were fruitful for thinking about informality as a form of civic engagement. These discussions were the subject of two panels, at LASA in 2021 (Montambeault, Islas Weinstein and Furukawa-Marques), and at the UNESCO Symposium in 2022 (Levy, Furukawa-Marques and Montambeault), as well as the CISSC Informal Cities working group (2022-2024, Hilgers and Mayer).
Conflict governance: resilience(s) and resistance(s)
This axis is used to reflect on political and social responses to social conflict, and to political violence by the state. Violence in the context of urban development has been at the heart of the axis' work (Hilgers, 2020; Davis and Hilgers, 2022). Then, Dias-Félix and Hilgers' (2020) article, published in a collection of the journal Policing and Society which they co-edited, as well as Maika's (2021) and Gonzales' (2021) conferences and Campbell's (2019) Canada-CARICOM residency, critically addressed police reforms and unequal access to urban citizenship rights. Interrogating the effects of chronic violence, state responses and social conflict as a mode of intermediation of state-society relations, the international conference Resisting Chronic Violence (Mayer and Hilgers, 2019), bringing together over thirty international researchers and practitioners, shed light on multiple collective and individual resistance strategies from below and their impacts on citizenship. Mayer's article (2021) and the special issue of BLAR he edited analyze these from the perspective of informal workers.