Urban Violence: Patterns and Trends: Findings from an international workshop

As the developing world becomes progressively “urban”, policy makers, practitioners and scholars are confronting new challenges associated with rapid urbanization and violence. Since most population growth will be occurring in cities and their peripheries of the South there are also growing concerns that informal settlements, slums and shanty-towns will present new forms of risk and vulnerability domestically and internationally. And while military strategists have been seized by this urban turn over the past decades, the humanitarian and development sectors have been much slower to come to the table. Where humanitarian agencies debate the issue of urban violence at all, the question is still one of “whether” rather than “how” to engage. This is especially the case in so-called non-war settings or “other situations of violence” where relief and development actors have comparatively less practical experience. With few exceptions, the sheer complexities generated by urban violence are at odds with the more narrow conceptual frameworks, legal tools and standard operating procedures available amongst humanitarian agencies. Very recently, however, a small number of organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Medecins Sans Frontiere (MSF) have started to incrementally engage with urban violence, in some cases to positive effect.

The workshop “Urban Violence: Patterns and Trends” (December 8th and 9th 2011) was intended to assess these wide questions of urban violence and explore the ways in which various forms of chronic organized violence “tipped” into outright warfare. The expectation was to critically interrogate core assumptions associated with armed conflict, while also introducing a conceptual framework to better assess the “organization” and “intensity” of violence in settings ostensibly not at war. The workshop was organized by the Institute of International Relations (IRI) of PUC-Rio and assembled several geographic and thematic experts from across Latin America and the Caribbean. Workshop participants critically reviewed the experiences of urban violence in a number of cities not typically associated with conventional “armed conflict”.1 Indeed, Rio de Janeiro, Medellin and Port-au-Prince and Ciudad Juarez have all been described colloquially as affected by “wars” – on drugs or gangs, for example – though do not conform to existing frameworks and metrics. A key question, then, is whether they in fact cross the threshold of war and thus hyperbole? What are the core characteristics that determine whether a situationis seized by armed conflict? And what are the implications for domestic and international actors when such a threshold has been breached? These and other issues are a mounting concern not just of humanitarian actors as well as the Humanitarian Action in Situations Other Than War (HASOW) project funded by the International Development Research Center (IDRC).