[Read the Spotlight On in pdf]

Violent urban policing has become one of the defining features of contemporary city life. From routine surveillance to militarized incursions, from community-based safety initiatives to algorithmic risk assessments, policing practices shape how residents circulate, assemble, dissent, and imagine their futures. In an era marked by deepening inequality and the rise of far‑right politics, questions about how urban space is governed demand renewed scholarly attention. In particular, scholars must interrogate what differentiates legitimate coercion from extreme violence, who deploys it, and through which forms of force. These dynamics are unevenly distributed: marginalized and underprivileged populations disproportionately bear the brunt of illegal coercion, displacement, and ultimately death.

At one level, there is little that is entirely new about the relationship between cities and violence. The transformation of Paris under Haussmann illustrates how large-scale urban projects have long relied on expropriation, demolition, and the expulsion of poorer residents to peripheral areas. These interventions were not merely aesthetic or sanitary; they also enabled new forms of governance, policing and surveillance, particularly by limiting the capacity for insurgent tactics such as barricade building. Urban space has thus historically been shaped through coercive means, often justified in the name of modernization, sanitation, order, or other forms of the public good.

Yet the present moment introduces important shifts in both form and visibility. While violence remains embedded in processes such as demolition, eviction, and even killing—often framed through discourses of urban renewal, climate adaptation, or security—its contemporary enactment is increasingly overt, mediatized, and politically instrumentalized. Recent incidents in Minneapolis, including controversial shootings by federal agents in which video evidence contradicted official accounts, underscore how lethal police violence continues to unfold in ways that are both contested and highly visible. As Gabriel Feltran observes in his article on the most recent police massacre in Rio de Janeiro, this time “there were no masks, no ambiguity.”

This dynamic is closely tied to the resurgence of far-right, nationalist, and anti-immigrant agendas, which are increasingly inscribed directly onto urban space. Elected leaders such as Narendra Modi and Donald Trump have mobilized the stigmatization of minority groups to justify coercive interventions ranging from forced removals to the suppression of protest. As Liza Weinstein shows in her analysis of recent forced evictions of entire Muslim informal settlements in India, these practices reflect an “urbanization of border enforcement: the extension of border techniques, logics, and affects into ordinary city spaces.” She adds that “new and increasingly assertive demonstrations of national state power are being staged in cities with the use of bulldozers, riot police, and border patrols.”

Other forces likewise legitimize the use of violence. Climate change, for example, is often invoked to justify the displacement of poor residents, even as the cleared land is subsequently redeveloped into luxury communities, as Daniel Abigboa documents in his analysis of Lagos. He argues that the wholesale clearance of coastal neighborhoods “is not simply a breakdown of governance.” Rather, such actions “are techniques of rule that convert land into speculative value by rendering certain populations removable, deniable, and exhaustible. They also function as policing practices, enforcing spatial order through removal rather than containment.”

At the same time, these conditions generate complex and often underappreciated forms of social life. These range from strategies of survival in Lagos, where residents squat and rebuild urban life elsewhere after displacement, to everyday practices of solidarity, such as protecting neighbors from ICE raids in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, or Chicago under the recent display of massive state violence against immigrants lead by the second administration of Donald Trump. In fact, the story of mobilization Kenton Card brings to this Spotlight about resisting the ICE occupation is really inspiring in telling us what communities can do together even in moments of great threat. Such dynamics remind us that cities are not only sites where violence is imposed, but also arenas in which it can be negotiated, contested, and, at times, subverted.

Taken together, these developments pose urgent challenges for urban research. How does violent policing operate across different institutional and spatial scales? What are its consequences—not only in terms of displacement and dispossession, but also in the production of political legitimacy and economic value? What, precisely, distinguishes the current conjuncture from earlier forms of urban coercion? And how are residents, activists, and local actors forging new forms of resistance and solidarity under increasingly adverse conditions?

Addressing these questions requires moving beyond narrow conceptions of policing as a discrete institutional domain toward a broader understanding of how violence is embedded in the governance of urban life itself. As Bruno Marot invites us to think in his contribution to this Spotlight, “taken together, these dynamics invite us to move beyond a strict separation between policing and war, and instead to consider a continuum of practices, actors and spatial strategies. This continuum resonates with broader analyses of the blurring boundaries between internal and external security, as well as with work on the ‘new military urbanism’”

Yet, if extreme urban violence is to function as a meaningful analytical category, it cannot be allowed to become a vague “sponge concept.” This requires sustained empirical analysis and the conceptual refinement that such grounding makes possible.Specifically, international and intercity comparisons are crucial to determine whether these forms of violence belong to a shared category or whether they differ in their forms, logics, and consequences. As far as this Spotlight On goes, similarities outweigh differences but in IJURR we are open to empirical and conceptual articles that challenge our views on this important research, social and humanitarian problem.

We thank the Urban School at Sciences Po for hosting, together with IJURR, a seminar that originated this Spotlight, with a panel coordinated and curated by Gabriel Feltran in November 2025. Several of the presentations from that day are now included here, and we have added additional contributors to make the conversation even richer. I am deeply grateful to all the contributors. In times of high productivity demands for some and high citizen demands for others—particularly in contexts of increasing violence—it is not always easy to find time to write a short piece for a broad audience, as we aim to do in our Spotlights. At IJURR, we believe in the importance of keeping these conversations alive with international colleagues, in order to better understand—and eventually counteract—the troubling trends of our time.

About María José Álvarez

Majo Álvarez is a Full Professor of Sociology at the Universidad de los Andes. Her main concern and interest is social inequality, which she approaches through a perspective that combines statistics with qualitative work, with particular emphasis on networks and their segregation. She is also interested in public policies and interventions in general that can help reduce inequality and improve well-being.