Urban violence: a guide to the literature

Abstract

This review of literature on urban violence does not attempt to be comprehensive. Rather, its objective is to outline some of the key ideas regarding the manifestations of urban violence that have emerged from recent literature, and to explore these ideas in the context of examples from the South. The review draws on a typology that distinguishes between political, institutional, economic and social violence, and it highlights the degree to which these different categories overlap and converge in such phenomena as the drug trade, informal justice and youth gangs. It stresses the importance of macro-level structural forces and points to how various influences (including certain development models) intersect with local conditions to stimulate and shape violence.