THE POLITICS OF VIOLENT CONCATENATIONS

Abstract Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines face‐to‐face violent interactions in a high‐poverty squatter settlement in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Delving into the situational interactions and biographies of those who simultaneously exercise and suffer violence—victims and perpetrators—we illustrate in fine‐grained detail the concatenations of violence and their political dimensions. Violent concatenations are political in a twofold sense: (1) they are shaped by state (legal and illegal) interventions, and (2) they are understood by both victims and perpetrators as being caused by state actors either directly (in the form of police repression) or clandestinely (in the form of collusion with criminals).