In Short:

Forced localism reinforces the jurisdictional authority of highly constrained state and local institutions in violence attenuation. The consequence is exceptionally high rates of serious violence and a harsh and exclusionary criminal justice system, with Black Americans exceptionally vulnerable to both.

Abstract

Scholarly work in American politics has yet to confront one of the nation’s starkest inequalities: lethal violence. The risk falls disproportionately on Black Americans, but much like poverty and inequality, lethal violence is a broadly American problem that African Americans are disproportionately likely to experience. The lack of attention to life-threatening violence has limited our understanding of race, criminal justice, and the nature of the American state. We draw on work in American political development and racial politics to extend a racialized state failure framework for understanding the United States as a high-violence society. Life-threatening violence declined dramatically in the nineteenth century in countries where state building involved the integrated consolidation of centralized violence monopolization and universal male suffrage. Such efforts faltered in the US, however, and violence thrived. We argue that this racialized state failure is the result of two reinforcing features of American politics: anti-transformative racial orders and institutional fragmentation. Fragmentation has long provided opportunities for anti-transformative racial orders to limit national intervention in violence control and enfranchisement, even during critical junctures when institutions are less determinate, and actions by decision makers are more likely to generate change. We illustrate the disruption of state building by racial orders, which minimized the state’s capacity to delegitimize violent self-help during two critical junctures in the US: Reconstruction and the crime wave of the mid- to late twentieth century. The resulting institutional configuration, which we refer to as forced localism, reinforces the jurisdictional authority of highly constrained state and local institutions in violence attenuation. The consequence is exceptionally high rates of serious violence and a harsh and exclusionary criminal justice system, with Black Americans exceptionally vulnerable to both.

About the author

Rebekah Jones

Incoming assistant professor, school of government and policy

Rebekah Jones is a political scientist who studies how local political institutions shape the allocation of public goods—and how those distributions, in turn, affect how groups experience and participate in democratic systems.