Authoritarian neoliberal rescaling in Latin America: urban in/security and austerity in Oaxaca

ABSTRACT

There is an increasing consensus that, across the globe, austerity policies have often relegated fiscal pressures from the state to the urban scale. These are sometimes discussed under the label ‘austerity urbanism’. This article explores urban authoritarian neoliberalism through an examination of spatial and scalar manifestations of neoliberal restructuring. It asks how austerity urbanism’s rescaling takes effect in spatially variegated ways in the intermediate city of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. I argue that Oaxaca’s austerity programmes and its rescaling of security provision are two intertwined, rather than parallel, processes. The paper builds on and aims to advance the authoritarian neoliberalism literature by linking it to literatures on the postcolonial Latin American state and urban studies. The article makes two contributions: first, it identifies and carves out multi-scalar aspects of authoritarian neoliberalism (by speaking to the urban realm); second, it contributes to the authoritarian neoliberalism literature on the ‘South’. Hence, the aim is to reveal the multi-scalar aspects of authoritarian neoliberalism and to illustrate its explanatory power in the global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Rescaling
• Mexico
• austerity urbanism
• intermediate cities
• security
• Oaxaca

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel for facilitating my participation in this special issue, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I am also very grateful for comments Ian Bruff and Robert Gather provided on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Alke Jenss http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5751-7946

Notes

1. For an overview of the debate on austerity (definitions, effects and underlying power relations) mainly in Europe, see Sturm, Griebel, and Winkelmann (2017).

2. Made up of the Spanish words ‘aristocratic’ and (central Oaxaca) ‘valley’.

3. As Porfirio Díaz’s hometown, Oaxaca, more intimately than other Mexican cities, embodies the link between urban and state scales.

4. Oaxaca receives additional federal funds via the Mexican World Heritage Cities Programme (Ayuntamiento Oaxaca, 2017a, p. 95).

5. This tendency, however, appears less clear-cut now. The prison population has dropped to a rate below that of 2004, due to limits to pre-trial detention. Pre-trial detention dropped from a record 81 in 2010 to 64/100,000 inhabitants in 2017, and down to 38% of the prison population (World Prison Brief, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alke Jenss

Notes on contributor

Alke Jenss is a Senior Researcher at Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and co-coordinates the institute’s research cluster Contested Governance. Her current research focuses on the production of security and insecurity, the Latin American ‘war on drugs’ and its relation to transnational infrastructure masterplans, and multi-scalar governance from a state theory perspective.