Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina
The Gray Zone of State Power

This book scrutinizes the series of food riots in Argentina in December 2001.

Javier Auyero (Author)

9780521872362, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 April 2007

202 pages, 3 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.47 kg

"Auyero is a skilled ethnographer, and he makes ample use of 100 interviews with actors of all kinds to vividly reconstruct the ways participation made sense of their own roles and those of others around them. [...]it is worth noting the book's distinctive approach, which is a micro-level analysis of highly individual actors whose self-understandings are a central focus. When the book's questions remain at this micro-level[...]this is a very rewarding strategy, immediate in a way that few political analyses are."
-Kathryn Hochstetler, University of New Mexico, Perspectives on Politics

Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds were injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent - particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival research, statistical analysis, multi-sited fieldwork, and taking heed of the perspective of contentious politics, this book provides an analytic description of the origins, course, meanings, and outcomes of the December 2001 wave of lootings in Argentina.

1. The gray zone
2. Party politics and everyday life
3. Food lootings
4. Moreno and La Matanza lootings
5. Making sense of collective violence.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB]