Genocide in the Neighborhood

State Violence, Popular Justice, and the 'Escrache'

Colectivo Situaciones author Brian Whitener editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Common Notions

Published:25th Jan '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Genocide in the Neighborhood cover

Key publicity targets

  • Review in Los Angeles Review of Books

  • Interview in Lux Magazine

  • Interview in Novara Media

  • Review in Dissent Magazine

  • Review in The Guardian

Social media marketing campaign

  • Pre-order discount and bundle sales 

  • Endorsement and pre-publication reviews

  • Publisher giveaways to drive engagement and sales

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    Another justice is possible. Genocide in the Neighborhood documents the theories, debates, successes, and failures of a rebellious tactic to build popular power and transformative justice.

    Genocide in the Neighborhood explores the autonomist practice of the “escrache,” a series of public shamings that emerged in the late 1990s to honor the lives of those tens of thousands disappeared and exterminated under the Argentinean military dictatorship (1976 to 1983) and to protest the amnesty granted to perpetrators of state violence. 

    Through a series of hypotheses and two sets of interviews, Colectivo Situaciones highlights the theories, debates, successes, and failures of the escraches—those direct and decentralized ways to agitate for justice that Brian Whitener defines as “something between a march, an action or happening, and a public shaming." 

    Genocide in the Neighborhood also follows the popular Argentine uprising in 2001, a period of intense social unrest and political creativity that led to the collapse of government after government. The power that ordinary people developed for themselves in public space soon gave birth to a movement of neighborhoods organizing themselves into hundreds of popular assemblies across the country, while the unemployed took over streets and workers occupied factories. 

    These events marked a sea change, a before and an after for Argentina that has since resonated around the world. In its wake Genocide in the Neighborhood investigates the nature of rebellion, discusses the value of historical and cultural memory to resistance, and tactfully deploys a much-needed model of political resistance that has recently been given new life by feminist groups across Latin America organizing against patriarchal violence.

“This is a book born in the barricades, neighborhood assemblies, and factory occupations of Argentina’s 2001 uprising against neoliberalism. Written by movement participants, it’s an inspiring account of the rebellion and a grassroots model of how to research and theorize a movement that forged a new way of doing politics from below. The English translation of such a classic book that’s been passed around revolutionary circles for decades is a cause for celebration and hitting the streets!”—Benjamin Dangl, author of The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia

“If the insurrection in Argentina that began in December 2001 was our Paris Commune, then Colectivo Situaciones fits well in the position of Karl Marx. As Friedrich Engels was fond of saying, one of Marx’s many talents was to analyze the historical importance of political events as they took place. This book by Colectivo Situaciones, written in the heat of action, certainly demonstrates that same talent in full, delving into the complexity of concrete events while simultaneously stepping back to recognize how our political reality has changed.”—Michael Hardtcoauthor of Empire, Multitude, and Assembly 

“This book composes the fragments of a global discourse, finding in the experience of the Argentinean struggle a style of inquiry that emerges directly from the organization of the struggle.”—Antonio Negri, coauthor of Empire, Multitude, and Assembly

“Assemblies may become thinking machines. And experiments of resistance may give rise to alternative experiences of sociability. Colectivo Situaciones develops out of these findings, that emerged within the 2001 resurrection in Argentina, a powerful reflexive research: a truly magnificent effort to explore the potentialities of a future beyond capitalism.”—Stavros Stavrides, author of Towards the City of Thresholds

“Twenty years ago, Argentina erupted in blockades and assemblies, occupations, demonstrations, and communal kitchens. In both its circumstances and forms, the 2001 uprising presaged the protests of 2011 and the struggles of our time. Colectivo Situaciones’ 19 & 20 provided both the sharpest analysis of that moment and a model of theoretical practice: nimble, dialogical, embedded in the movements with whom it thought, made in common. To rediscover it today is to do more than reconnect with the recent past; it is inevitably also to ask how it illuminates what we have lived since, and how we can continue to extend its lessons into the future.”—Rodrigo Nunes, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization

“A long decade before Occupy Wall Street, Argentineans poured into the streets to reject austerity and short the circuits of neoliberal capitalism, proving that state violence was no match for popular refusal. But this is not a book about Argentina or even Latin America as a whole, a brutal laboratory where neoliberalism was imposed in blood and fire. It's about a way of thinking that is also a doing, about what the concrete experience of rebellion teaches us about how the world moves, and how to turn that movement into thought. Find yourself in this book.”—Geo Maher, author of Building the Commune and A World Without Police 

The 2001 uprising in Argentina is a major flashpoint in a wave of popular struggles that repudiated the neoliberal capitalist order and authored new forms of non-capitalist social construction. Colectivo Situaciones gives us important analyses of the uprising and its legacies, the roots of Argentina’s financial and political crisis, and changes in contemporary forms of anticapitalist mobilization and resistance. Their close attention to grassroots practices of resistance, political organizing, and world-making is emblematic of their method of militant research, which itself has been an inspiration to so many. Those interested in contemporary social movements, political theory, and the history of Argentina and the region will find much to appreciate in this wonderful new edition.—Jennifer S. Ponce de León, author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War

ISBN: 9781942173861

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages