Violence as social control, the case of Venezuela

This paper evaluates the criminologically ‘deviant’ case of Venezuela; in the first decade of the 21st century social indicators on poverty and inequality improved substantially along with dramatically increasing homicide rates. Based on its homicide rate, Venezuela is the second most violent country in the world today. This paper draws on a year’s fieldwork in Venezuela and argues homicide rates there have little more to do with aggregate structural conditions such as poverty or inequality, but everything with the structure of social relationships that supports these conditions. Building on the relational work of Black and Gould and a year’s fieldwork in Venezuela it argues violence is an informal social control mechanism in the Venezuelan barrio, where social life is vibrant, but legitimate formal social control absent. This violence takes a particularly deadly shape there because it was able to institutionalise and diffuse in and through the gang networks of ‘el malandreo’. The paper argues criminology should take more account of the dynamics of social interaction.status: publishe