Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and judicial wiretap analysis in Argentina, this paper shows that collusion between state actors and violent non-state actors operates through fluid and competitive relational networks rather than stable hierarchies or fixed institutional arrangements. In Mexico, private security entrepreneurs broker ties between public officials, clients, and violent specialists, particularly during periods of electoral competition. In Argentina, criminal organizations and state agents develop shifting alliances that shape drug market regulation and patterns of violence. Across both cases, collusion depends on the continuous negotiation of trust, access, and information across overlapping networks embedded within state institutions. We argue that these patterns cannot be fully explained by frameworks that treat collusion as a legacy of authoritarianism or as a product of institutional weakness. Instead, collusion emerges as an adaptive relational process shaped by competition among actors and the instability of contemporary security governance. These dynamics produce fluid and contested "gray zones" in which legality and illegality are continuously reconfigured, with direct implications for how violence and authority are organized in Latin America.

What kind of knowledge does ethnography afford? Why do we need such knowledge? This paper draws upon the authors’ individual work to reflect on the ongoing necessity of good enough ethnographic fieldwork in sociology. Alongside presenting moving stories, unearthing rules of behavior, interpreting meanings through thick description, obtaining fine-grained insight into the working of organizations, revealing the complex interplay of informal and formal rules, and reconstructing and explaining local points of view, we argue that sociological inquiry needs ethnography for a) describing, at a granular level, the meso-level mechanisms that connect large structural transformations with face-to-face dynamics occurring in specific socio-symbolic universes; b) explicating social processes in detail and as they unfold over time (because how things happen explains why they happen); c) transcending agents’ words and official discourse so as to unearth the (both internal and exogenous) motors of social action; d) capturing negotiations over meanings as they happen in real time, as local viewpoints emerge, vanish, and/or crystalize; e) examining the rootedness of extra-ordinary events or bureaucratic processes in daily life; f) grasping the affective dimensions of social phenomena; and g) doing all this in a narrative form so that readers care.

This essay reviews four recent books (Garcia-Lamarca 2022; Han, McKenna and Oyakawa 2021; Levenson 2022; Sobering 2022) that examine cases of more or less successful collective action in very different contexts: Argentina, Spain, South Africa and the United States, and speculates on the existence of similar processes at the root of the dynamics of contention.

Mass street protests and other highly contentious actions often capture headlines and public attention, but what remains after the news cycle moves on? Many times, grassroots initiatives crystallise during or after these intense moments of participation, leaving in their wake effective organisations that continue to make daily life more liveable in contexts of extreme vulnerability. Despite the persistence and impact of these 'things that work' - as we call them - they are often less visible and understudied. How do these initiatives emerge and sustain themselves in the communities in which they work? Using ethnographic methods, we investigate the case of a community centre formed in the wake of a land occupation in the urban periphery of Buenos Aires to answer these questions. We argue that grassroots initiatives build local power through everyday care-work: forming relationships, changing identities and providing valuable services and information.

In Squatter Life, sociologist Javier Auyero and anthropologist Sofía Servián detail the diverse and often precarious strategies that Argentina’s urban poor rely on to survive. Blending three years of ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with personal narratives of Servián’s experience growing up and living in a squatter settlement, the authors examine how Argentina’s squatter communities contend with violence and secure necessities like food, land, and housing despite inadequate state support and protection. Auyero and Servián recount the bricolage of tactics these individuals employ to make ends meet, such as relying on highly exploitative jobs, patronage, and networks of reciprocal exchange that can involve illicit activities. Analyzing how these survival strategies intersect with class, gender, and political domination, the authors present a nuanced account of marginality in Argentinian squatter settlements while maintaining a deeply human portrait of survival and persistence.

Este ensayo reseña cuatro libros recientes (García-Lamarca 2022; Han, McKenna y Oyakawa 2021; Levenson 2022; Sobering 2022) que examinan casos de acción colectiva más o menos exitosa en contextos muy diferentes: Argentina, España, Sudáfrica y los Estados Unidos, y especula sobre la existencia de procesos similares en la raíz de las dinámicas de protesta.

Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines face-to-face violent interactions in a high-poverty squatter settlement in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Delving into the situational interactions and biographies of those who simultaneously exercise and suffer violence-victims and perpetrators-we illustrate in fine-grained detail the concatenations of violence and their political dimensions. Violent concatenations are political in a twofold sense: (1) they are shaped by state (legal and illegal) interventions, and (2) they are understood by both victims and perpetrators as being caused by state actors either directly (in the form of police repression) or clandestinely (in the form of collusion with criminals).