Nightlife Emergency: Controlling Night Spaces and Governing Citizen Security in Highland Peru.

Abstract

This dissertation tackles questions of urban citizenship and participatory governance through an ethnographic study of the regulation of space and time in the historic city center of Ayacucho, Peru. It traces how “nightlife” emerged as a social crisis and was then transformed into a political agenda for maintaining urban order. By examining how the struggles to control nightlife became entwined with the doctrines of citizen security and democratic participation, this dissertation reveals new dimensions to the layered imbalances of citizenship.

This dissertation argues that the “night,” though under-theorized, is a significant realm of sociality and subjectivity, and a critical site of power and social distinction. This in-depth look at the public debates and policies regarding nightlife further reveals the various experiential connections between nightlife ideologies and corresponding regulatory politics of urban planning and urban zoning. The discourse of a nightlife crisis presented certain forms of music and entertainment (namely nightclubs and fiesta chicha concerts) as morally and physically dangerous, thus creating an urban politics that blended moral judgments with ideas about social transgression and criminality. Among the tools adopted in the campaign against nightlife was the discourse of “citizen security” (seguridad ciudadana) which was circulating within the wider interdiscursive field of governance and urban order, in the Andes and across Latin America. A 2004 ordinance declaring a security emergency due to nightlife firmly situated the political crisis within a nascent system of citizen security that was intimately tied to existing frameworks of participatory democracy. Government campaigns promoting citizen security as “everybody’s task,” masked the disjunctures of political participation. In practice, “responsibility” to solve problems of urban insecurity was allocated differentially, whereby peripheral and city center neighborhoods were expected to participate in markedly different fashions. As geographies of social distinction mapped onto geographies of urban insecurity, deep existing social inequalities were naturalized and depoliticized. Moreover, these municipal governance programs, which I have termed “participatory security,” have effectively institutionalized social inequalities in new and highly consequential ways. This dynamic raises important questions regarding the effectiveness of programs of participatory governance and their potential to foster inclusivity and equality in urban citizenship.