ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an alternative conception of ‘gangland’ that highlights its variegated nature and that of gang authority more generally – and in doing so, identifies potential peacebuilding avenues within what at first glance would seem to be a space whose dynamics are destructively (rather than constitutively) violent. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragua, Rodgers describes how gangs promote a specific form of local sociospatial ordering which involves locations – in this case the thriving Huembes market – that are frequented by members of rival gangs in what the author argues is a form of terra nullius: a space of exception within the broader gangland context where different violent actors can coexist and engage with each other in ways that do not have to entail antagonism.
