Paper short abstract:

This research is set in a shanty town in Lima (Peru) where the violence, poverty and social exclusion determine the routine life of the people and especially of the young people in so-called “gangs”.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years social insecurity has spread through Peruvian society as it has across Latin America. After the end of the armed conflict, which lasted from 1980 to 2000 (CVR 2003), came the emergence of "pandillaje" ("gangs") in Peru. "Pandillaje" has been defined by social science and mass media as violent and hierarchical bands involved in delinquency and related to the hooligans of Peruvian football teams (Santos, Martinez and Tong). From our point of view the concept of the "gang" is a social construction which came from the Chicago School theories. The Chicago School has defined the gangs as schools of delinquency without taking into account their political, historical and social context. Following this line of thinking, the dominant discourse in the 1990s defined a sector of youth as violent and "dangerous", hiding other kinds of violence like the structural, symbolic or routine.

This research is an analysis of "pandillaje" within the power relations drawing on our two years of fieldwork with the "gangs" known as Los Chacales and Los Dioses. We will analyse this process through the different forms of governmentality through which society legitimizes the social exclusion and the violence of policies like "zero tolerance" which are widespread in Latin America. We are going to analyze the role of these young people in a different context from the "official" definition of "gang", when they created a Youth Social Association and carried out a self-organised project to provide themselves with work against their social exclusion.