Security and Development? A Story about Petty Crime, the Petty State and its Petty Law

In this article we engage with the promises and limits of the ‘Security and

Development’ discourse. Using Cali as our case study, we show how initiatives

associated with this discourse, instead of helping states move beyond insecurity,

exclusion and low levels of development by strengthening social relations,

official institutions and legal frameworks, end up producing, instead, a particular

set of precarious institutional and human arrangements. We characterise this

precarity as moving in the realm of ‘pettiness’: a characterisation that for us

suggests both the marginal kinds of solutions that ultimately form the core of

Security and Development, and the flimsiness that has come to mark those

institutional and human arrangements resulting from it. The result is a resilient

liminality across the board and the continuation of insecurity.