MéxicoIs a Burial Machine Turati interview

Peace Review, 2022

The struggle for transitional justice to “take place” in the aftermath of armed conflict is by nature a spatial activity. This common insight holds particular value in Colombia, where academics and policy-makers alike coincide on the position that building peace must consider the geographies of violence. What follows takes the reader on a journey through spatial conceptions of the Colombian-Venezuelan border region Catatumbo, and argues that spatial imaginaries are complicit in the suspension of justice. Departing from the narrative of my participation in the "peace tribunal,” organized by civil society in the small town of El Tarra, I reflect on how the imagination of the borderland as a “wild zone” of unleashed warfare feeds into state abandonment. Here, the “necropolitics” of the sovereign right to kill took the place of biopolitical care, deferring the provision of justice—transitional, social, or otherwise defined—indefinitely. Nevertheless, in the end the “peace tribunal,” as a performance of “justice in the borderland,” escapes its hegemonic spatial imaginary, contesting and—at least temporarily—re-appropriating space to make way for social leadership.

Violence: An International Journal, 2020

This article shows the relationships laden with violence within the dynamics of cross-border mobility from the history of nine Hondurans and their grieving families. The case occurs in the broader context of the crude contemporary production of the Central America–Mexico migratory corridor, as well as the different forms of conflict that emerge around it. This context is marked by a logic of terror and death that becomes a structuring condition of the contemporary dispute for space, especially in the border areas, among diverse actors that include the state, organized crime, and migratory movements. In this transnational field, the dispute for space, rather than for the control of a perimeter territory, takes place around the control of certain specific circulation dynamics that are vertebral in the regional configuration of the capitalist global model: the movement of people and goods. These complex and dynamic territorialization processes are taking place along with the dynamic co...

Antipode, 2013

Reflexiones Marginales. Revista de Filosofía, 2018

This article explores contemporary violence in Mexico from the theoretical proposal of forensic philosophy. The approach is from a spatial event: the clandestine common grave. It refers to twelve years of an intrahistory of violence in the face of a conflict that has grown in lethal intensity, which requires the theoretical, as well as vital, construction of a critical space on suffering experiences. A minimal analysis of comparative cultural theory of life is carried out as a spatial structure of human production. Violence, within the framework of knowledge with a philosophical approach emphasizes the basis of a space qualitatively constructed on social sufferings and the disarticulation of links between the living, and of these with their dead.

Central European Journal of International and Security Studies, 2015

Using the critical methods of postcolonial studies and various feminist theories, this study investigates the Juárez femi(ni)cides and argues that they are not only heinous crimes but the result of a socio-economic system of structural inequalities around cultural and social constructions of class, race, gender and citizenship in the us-Mexico border. The Juárez events are an example of large-scale, brutal violence against women; at the same time, they point to the globalising processes that amplify the androcentric instrumentalisation of women's bodies under capitalism and (post)colonialism. My analysis of these intersecting categories is framed by Gloria Anzaldúa's conceptualisation of the us-Mexico border.

This paper is an exercise in counter-mapping gender-based violence, both its lived experience and the need for safe passage. Building on the concept of body-territory introduced by feminist geographers in Latin America, gender-based violence is plotted by its would be objects: female/feminized bodies. Each counter-map is drawn by those immediately moved by violence, by those forced to navigate its deadly consequences. William James offers insight into the spatio-temporal implications of this experience, revealing how the extensive lines of a countermap are born of intensities felt in sensation and later reflected on in thought. Counter-maps are drawn by thinking-feeling bodies to break with any fixed domain: plotted are individual memories and shared pieces of advice that are accumulated across time to give the map a unique history, and that encompass diverse events to give the map a unique spatiality. Mapped is the experience of gender-based violence in Puebla, Mexico, so as to challenge official cartographic practices and rework their deadly effects.

Ecozon@ 13.2 (The Postcolonial Nonhuman), 2022

Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully apply interspecies concepts of mobility to understanding the roles played by geopolitical borders, as well as the various, ongoing forms of colonialism that have produced and continue to perpetuate these borders. This essay applies bioregional, material, decolonial, and borderlands ecocriticisms to historicize prevention through deterrence enforcement measures in the Mexico-US border region, and discusses several significant entanglements of interspecies actors in migratory contexts, exploring a range of ways that nonhuman nature has been and continues to be deployed materially against migrants. In historicizing US enforcement tactics, the essay tracks the distribution of human agency from settler colonial, ethnonationalist, and neoliberal US policy makers, to armed paramilitary human bodies, then into structures of the built environment, and, finally, to the ways that agency is further diffused across complex webs of multiple kinds of human and nonhuman actors-plants, animals, landforms, watercourses, climate and weather conditions, and so on. While in some instances, nonhuman animals are deployed against migrant and other indigenous and mestizo people, in other multispecies entanglements, animals participate in the revelation and denunciation of state sponsored violence, leading to larger questions of the status of other nonhuman animals in the borderlands. The essay's primary focus is on illustrating the practical untenability of, and the severe harm done in, continuing to regard the borderlands from settler colonialist or human exceptionalist positionalities.

2013

I called this essay 'reflections' on Blyth's book because most of what follows is a wide-ranging commentary on the book, though I do begin with a brief summary. A second caveat is that I am reviewing this book as sociologist and anthropologist interested in long term social change-meaning millenniawith special emphasis on frontiers. I hope this approach will be useful to readers of Cliodynamics. For more typical reviews by historians see Babcock (2012), Conrad (2013), or Lee (2013).

The Informe Final of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2003, highlights a distinct geographical dimension to the violence, and established the idea that internal geographical distances in Peru amount to vast cultural divides, with the result many Peruvians remained ignorant for many years, perhaps wilfully so, of the violence perpetrated against their compatriots. Thus, in the Truth Commission’s interpretation of the conflict, Peru’s uneven socioeconomic geography is not only something which conditions vulnerability to violence, but also a factor which demonstrates the fragility of the Peruvian nation. Yet whilst the CVR’s report represents a pivotal moment in Peru’s truth and reconciliation process, and has been an invaluable source for a wealth of studies on the internal conflict, this geographical dimension to the violence, and the forms of constructed or imagined geography which the CVR highlights, remain understudied. In part, my PhD project seeks to rectify this by applying a spatial analysis to this violent period of Peru’s history.

Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative, 2018

National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence. In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers. Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music. Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—­national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/coloniality-of-the-us-mexico-border

International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 2019

This article focuses on the spatial autocorrelation of homicidal violence and the presence of groups that have the capacity to exercise sovereignty. These actors possess necro-power and operate sometimes within, sometimes outside the framework of the law. They are sometimes in opposition to one another, while at other times they operate in a coordinated fashion. Their presence gives form to what we shall call necro-spaces: places where different actors (hitmen, dealers, the police or the military) spread death and destruction, in indefinite confrontations with no foreseeable victor. The methodology of our analysis of the spatial autocorrelation of homicidal violence at the municipal level in the years 2005, 2010 and 2015 enabled us to connect the spatial relationships among the homicides with descriptions of the groups that build regimes of violence in those spaces.

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies