Tracing Practices of Coercion and Consent: Multi-Scalar Perspectives on the Authoritarian City

The analysis of “new authoritarianisms” is rarely based on their entanglements across sites, scales and administrative boundaries. Far too often, authoritarian developments are analysed as endogenous problems, based on internal social dynamics or ‘problematic’ governments. Literature on authoritarian developments in the urban often stresses repressive or unreliable forms of policing. However, beyond coercion, authoritarianism encompasses practices that facilitate the consent of specific social groups and may be related to changes in spatially specific accumulation strategies and investment shifts. Building on scholarship on 'authoritarian neoliberalism' and linking it to urban studies, this contribution shifts its focus to both the multi-scalar dynamics and the specific productions of space implicated in urban authoritarianism. I argue that consent is inherent to spatially specific disciplinary practices. Methodologically, this implies tracing the repercussions of local contexts elsewhere as opposed to 'cases' as bounded entities. I base my observations on interviews and document analysis around authoritarian practices in the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca that are unevenly distributed across urban space, and trace them across the urban-rural continuum. The contribution’s point of departure for theory-making on authoritarian processes are 'local' histories, but insists that their context stretches well beyond the local institutional level and cities’ administrative boundaries.