ROUTINE POLITICS AND VIOLENCE IN ARGENTINA: THE GRAY ZONE OF STATE POWER

"Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during weeklong 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, and multisited fieldwork and drawing on the perspective of contentious politics, this book provides the first available analytic description of the origins, course, meanings, and outcomes of the December 2001 wave of lootings in Argentina. It scrutinizes the gray zone where the actions and networks of both party activists and law enforcement officials meet and mesh. The book also makes a case for the study of the gray zone in less spectacular, but equally relevant, forms of political activity. Clandestine connections between established political actors, this book argues, count in the making of collective violence and in routine political life."--BOOK JACKET.