Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article focuses around the concept of the enemy, taking as a reference the work of Carl Schmitt, with the contributions of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The objective of this article is to contrast the Schmitt proposal with the contributions of Freud and Lacan, with the intention of solving theoretical and practical problems. Then, it is debated whether Achille Mbembe’s proposal suggests a transformation in the idea of enmity, or if it is a sharpening of preconditions; analyzing in depth if the enemy in the necropolitics corresponds to the approach of the absolute enemy in Schmitt. Finally, we examine what are the contemporary political conditions that have led to an increase in necropower scenarios.

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This article analyses the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) of Rio de Janeiro which, since 2008, have taken control of some of the favelas that were previously dominated by highly armed criminal groups. Through both Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” and Neocleous’ one of “pacification”, it will be demonstrated that in these spaces po- lice control is strongly marked by its colonial past. In particular, during the last forty years it has become clear that, for those who have governed the city, the life of the inhabitants of the favelas has no value by itself and that the decision of letting them live or die is subordinated to economic interests. Before the pacification process, local authorities, supportedby public opinion, encouraged police lethality within the favelas, while the UPPs’ presence was characterized by an attempt to hide police’s necropower in these territories and by the willingness to transform the image of the residents with the intention of supporting processes of attraction of international capital that the city had implemented in the last decade. To conclude, the article will look into the reasons that brought UPPs’ agents to consider that their main mission is that of “civilizing” the favela population. The analysis proposed in this article is the result of an ethnographic study mainly developed with members of three different Pacifying Police Units between 2013 and 2015.

Achille Mbembe´s issues that the politic of death is the continuity of yesterday´s racial war. Starting from this idea, we hold the relevance of reviewing the mbembian proposal for the analysis of exclusion contexts. Is in these scenarios that the question about who makes the decision of giving life or death arises; the answer seems to cross micro-power groups: gangs or maras, which emerge through the neoliberal effect. This article pretends to deploy some ofthe elements that allow a better comprehension of the mbembian thinking. Through Mbembe´s lecture, we propose a deepening of his theorical articulation of Necropolitics that understands politics as a work of death, and invites to see how politics of life in modern states and the Illustration project are in fact politics of death.

In the context of a series of transformations that have been occurring in the Western Region of Costa Rica (Occidente) and the increase of violence causedby gangs linked to drug trafficking, this article analyses the expansion of drug dealing from the Greater Metropolitan Area towards Naranjo canton, which has generated a territoriality through necropower. Achille Mbembe’s analyticalproposal on necropolitics allows a reading of the subjective impact and theplace of this drug trade when it comes to thinking about the conformation of the community.

The narration of a murder is the reason of the current article and raises a series of questions about dying in territories governed by drug dealing. Using the deconstruction of ethnographies and narratives, we address three ways of making experience about death in a specific territory, the Community of Metropolis 3. Thus, we think the banalization, the fascination and the governmentalization as dynamics resulting from the homicide that serves as a scene, understanding them as a result of a neoliberal contemporaneity. Because of the latter, there is a need to think of an exit in reconstruction of a social bond worn out by the violence that crosses the community.

Book review of "Climate change and the future of democracy", written by Richard Deese, Doctor of History and professor at Boston University. Review prepared by the professor of the School of Political Science and Doctor of Social Sciences from the University of Potsdam, Germany, Mr. Alonso Villalobos Jiménez.

Book review of "How democracies die", written by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Review prepared by the political assesor of Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones (costarican electoral institution) and Doctor in Information´s Society from the University Complutense of Madrid, Mr. Gustavo Román Jacobo.