Death and dying – both as temporal moments and social context – can have profound implications for how violent groups imagine and govern themselves in the urban margins. Beyond that, however, it can also impact gang relationships with the city, as well as the way gang members encounter or think about state power. Violent urban gangs, for instance, by creating proximate deathworlds which render death inordinately visible within cities, offer a unique challenge to one of the key elements of state power over subjects; that is the ability to hide the gaze of violence (Crossley 1993).
But what does gang death bring to how we read violence and order in the urban space? There are three ways one might answer this question. Firstly, gang dying sits at the intersection of a familiar urban dilemma: how to make sense of the contradictions inherent in a state that is hyper-visible in the city (through a rather dense patchwork of extractive infrastructure, such as taxation and policing) but also quite absent (particularly in the provision of social good in the poor urban margins). Gang deaths embody this contradiction because although they tend to elicit harsh and highly visible disciplinary responses from the state, for example, via arbitrary arrests, the sheer impunity of gang violence in itself is one of the most visible signs of the impotence, absence and limits of state authority. Secondly, studying gang death opens up the possibility to recognize how violence is spatialized in cities. Urban mortality densities, for instance, can often be directly associated with inter-gang contestations over the control of space (Valasik/Tita 2018). This is a consequence of the material and affective value with which city spaces are inscribed within gangscapes. Finally, death is profoundly helpful for understanding the inequalities produced by neoliberal urban life and the ways the construction of a “good city” seems fundamentally dependent on the devaluation of life and bodies on its margins. This is what McIntyre and Nast (2011) described as a spatial unity that exists in contemporary neoliberal capitalism, and which allows for a “profit and surplus population, accumulation and dispossession, life and death” to be “dialectically produced” (Alves 2018: 41).
Death is also a useful site for studying the governance of social life more broadly, because power, politics and sovereignty are embodied within its governing archaeologies. Anyone who has lost someone understands that the incidence of human death does not simply trigger affective relations, but that it also sets in motion various formal regulatory requirements that are ultimately mediated by state power, including registration, autopsies, coroner’s inquests, wills and/or police investigations. As Stepputat explains, “the state is articulated at the transition from life to death” (2014: 4), and in ways that highlight the biopolitical nature of the end of human life. Regarding violent categories, such as urban gangs, the idioms through which meaning is constructed and articulated also tend to derive from activities for which dying is an ever-present reality, an exciting prospect, or, in fact, a reasonably expected end-product. The inherent violence of gang activities, such as drug dealing, supremacy battles and masculine performances, often carry with them the very real prospect of death. These activities are, therefore, why one needs to recognize, on the one hand, that gang violence is the main conduit of mortality, but also, on the other hand, how that violence is produced by the urban context itself. Recognizing the urban-violence intersection, Glebbeek and Koonings (2016: 4) suggest four useful ways by which violence can explicitly be referred to as “urban”. Firstly, violence is usually a strategy to control the urban space. Secondly, the visibility of violence in urban contexts can be a result of demographic and spatial density. Thirdly, violence is endemic in certain urban contexts. Finally, urban violence leads to a fragmentation of urban spaces, which then generates hybrid forms of legitimate coercion.
Anthropology has long struggled with how best to deal with the symbolisms and materialities that underpin death. There was an early focus on understanding how societies are able to carve out continuity in the very finality of death, and in ways that appear to conceptualize death primarily in its symbolic value (Palgi/Abramovitch 1984). Since then, shifts in scholarly thinking around death have led to a new emphasis on the material aspects of dying, including issues such as the spatial organization of/in urban cemeteries (Alimi 2022), the treatment of corpses (Stepputat 2014; Ololajulo 2017), and the economy of death rituals, transactions and affect (de Witte 2003).
While death has apparent biological and social implications, it is also profoundly political. In recognition of the important ways in which sovereign power is exercised through the “control” of mortality, scholars such as Achille Mbembe (2003) and João Biehl (2005) situate death within a liminal space in which living, dying and power are co-located. Here, precarious lives evince the imagery of living-death, or what Biehl called the “dead alive and dead outside” (2005: 8). This approach allows a combination of the symbolic and material aspects of death and dying with a consideration of how precarious social lives (de)value the body, and the interesting ways in which the body – both of the living and the dead – represents sites of sovereign subjectification. But death, for all its embodiment of biological, political and social vulnerability, can also be an agentic site in which sovereign power is resisted, reconfigured and appropriated by the subject. This suggests that sovereign subjects are able to appropriate the vulnerable act of dying in ways that transform the moment into a tool through which power is signalled, questioned and reconstituted.
My arguments about urban gang death in this essay are premised on the recognition of two interrelated phenomena. The first is of gang dying as one-off moments which occur as isolated events but are, nonetheless, powerful constitutive social sites of meaning. What marks these moments out as something powerful is not just their tragic biological finality, but the spectacle that accompanies it when the mutilated corpse is exposed as a veritable spectre for/of the violent. The second is of gang death as an enduring moment. Here, although death usually occurs as a one-off event, it does so with such frequency within gangscapes that these one-off events endure across temporal and material spaces, thereby producing connected morbid realities.
The implications of this distinction for studying urban gang death are profound. Firstly, it recognizes that, for gangsters, the frequency of death and the underlying sense of a social (rather than merely biological) inevitability regarding dying that underpins gang mortality elevates dying to something more than an occasional rupture in the permanence of everyday life, but rather to the very context of/for life. It makes death proximate in ways with which ordinary people would be fundamentally unfamiliar, except, of course, if they live in conditions of exception, such as during pandemics or protracted conflict.
Secondly, proximity to death in urban gangscapes is simultaneously spatial, social and temporal. Death, for the gangster, is socially proximate in that dying is essentially an act of performative masculinity – an act of belonging. Spatially, the cramped urban margins mean that not even the governing archaeologies of death created by the state/society to render death invisible can effectively hide away the gore of gang dying. The whole point of the state’s techniques of sovereign governance of death is to codify a system that guarantees the containment of the corpse. Some of the justifications for control have come from public health perspectives related to the dangers of putrefying corpses, and they are implicated in the production of spatial practices, such as cemeteries, as well as biosocial practices, such as embalmment (Stepputat 2014). What these practices do is contain (or if you like, render invisible) the corpse, and remove spectacle from the tragic reality of dying. One of the markers of a good city and the goals of state planning in this regard is, therefore, that death is rendered invisible. For death to be invisible, corpses need to be effectively and promptly contained, murder or “illegitimate dying” needs to be illegal and minimal, and responsibility for all aspects of dying needs to be marked and regulated. This goal is governed by an elaborate system of laws, norms and socio-spatial practices.
It is this control of dying that gangs fundamentally threaten when they construct counter-hegemonic moral universes in which they appropriate the state’s right to take life and engage in morbid spectacles that force the reality of dying back into the urban open. Death regulations for the ordinary city corpse often mean that the dead body is removed as soon as possible, and contact with it, including the public display of photographs of the corpse, are limited. Gang violence, however, undercuts this desire for invisibility, as, by its very nature, it seeks public and visceral displays of power which inevitably invite high levels of state scrutiny. The gangster’s death is rendered visible by the inescapable news reports. However, through the obscene spectacle of the display of the gangster’s body and intense police scrutiny, the deceased individual remains abject – an irrelevant footnote to urban violence.
Finally, in temporal terms, gang members die too frequently for time to carve out the boundaries of memory that allows healing. The reality of death, thus, becomes a chronic condition; something to live with, expect and which never ends, something proximate.
“Visual records of the human casualties of violence are therefore never entirely devoid of political signification.”
(Linke 2018: 384)
The Daily Post (Daily Post Staff 2024) reported in May 2024 that a senior member of the notorious Aiye cult group had been murdered in Ijoko, Ogun State, in South West Nigeria. His hands were cut off and taken away by the assailants. It was reported that the murder was committed by members of the Eiye Confraternity, a rival group. A few days later, a member of the Eiye Confraternity who worked at a petrol station was attacked in retaliation. He was first shot and then hacked to death with axes. He was then decapitated and his head hung on the Ijoko bridge in a macabre spectacle. This violent spectacle is not unusual within gangscapes in urban Nigeria. But why does death need to be such a macabre spectacle?
Analysing the overlap between the coercive histories of sovereign discipline and that of grandiose spectacle, Tony Bennett (1994: 124) argued for the existence of an “exhibitionary complex” which, to him, was involved
“the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed (but to a restricted public) into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the representations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power (but of a different type) throughout society”.
In many ways, the morbid spectacles favoured by urban gangsters represent a profound intersection of these two histories – discipline and exhibition – and is ultimately about establishing power through the ability to shock.
Brutal spectacles, such as the one described above, are staged as part of a macabre system of gang entertainment in which rival groups seek to outdo each other in the courage to be outlandish. This pattern is apparent in all aspects of urban gang cultures, from slang articulations to clothing/fashion, as well as the exaggerated systems of respect, outrage and offence which generate the violence in the first place. While morbid spectacles, such as a severed head on a bridge, are shocking examples of the gang extreme, it is useful to note that gang cultures more broadly seek to mark them as something outside of society, something un-human. This is partly why gangs appear to “abdicate their humanity” (Mikkelsen 2020: 2) when they render death so visible within the urban space, and doing so with so little regard for established norms for how the corpse should be treated, respected and feared. Yet, the very extremeness of gang(ness) means that society understands why they act in that way – an understanding that effectively reinstates their humanity. By becoming monsters of spectacle, gangsters embody what Mikkelsen described as the “extreme same” (2020: 16) – an embodiment of what we could all become. Violent gang spectacles are, thus, really not so other for postcolonial urban centres such as Lagos, in which outbursts of seemingly uncontrolled and irrational violence, such as we see in mobs, are relatively common.
The exhibitionary complex not only creates a need to inscribe violence in the public sphere, but also provides the tools by which this violence can be marked out and memorialized on the public conscience. It is this inscription of brutal one-off moments of dying on the public imagination that is useful to how we think about the idea of proximate death. The brutality of the killing at Ijoko is inscribed into the public imagination not by the fact of the killing, but by the macabre display of the head hanging off of the bridge. My point is that the act of murder is not enough in itself to render death proximate, this is achieved by the deliberate construction of that morbid moment as spectacle. Spectacle facilitates the entry into street mythologies, conversations and imaginations of the otherwise “unremarkable” event of an all-too-common gang murder. This creates enduring lores of violence, victimhood and heroism that anchor death firmly to the gang imagination.
But what if these one-off moments of gang dying occur so frequently that they become the context of social life? Henrik Vigh encourages us to recognize the analytical implications of crisis when it is chronic or “a constant prospect waiting on the other side of the horizon” and “a possibility ingrained in the conflict prone social environment” (2008: 6). At the core of the idea of chronicity is the understanding that crisis is not simply episodic for many who live in precarious contexts, but that by occupying a long temporal horizon, crisis ultimately becomes all that people know, and social life eventually adapts itself to that reality.
Chronic violence is not just the outcome of gang practices, it is also facilitated and produced by the nature of city life and spatial politics itself, particularly in the ways the city heightens inequalities, isolates subjects and fractures social solidarities. Hoffman makes a similar point when he argues that the postcolonial city lends itself to endemic violence because its specific forms of spatial organization and economic practices produce “spaces for the organization and deployment of violent labor” (2007: 422). His argument is that the city spaces where young bodies congregate tend to create social conditions that produce violent labour reserves, and that the city is constituted by “networked barracks spaces and nodal points for the assembly and deployment of bodies” (Hoffman 2007: 422).
In part because the city produces violence, the state’s need to impose order means it is inevitably overly present through bureaucratic, tax and policing regimes. As a consequence of this hypervisibility, the actions of gangsters attract high levels of state scrutiny and discipline. Yet, by being outside of society or, perhaps more accurately, on its margins, that scrutiny is often an ambivalent one, something present but largely disinterested – a sort of chronic state presence which can be simultaneously reckoned with and ignored. It is this ambivalent relationship with state discipline which allows the violence of gang life to produce death on proximate terms. This is because it allows violence to fester and to do so in ways that hardly enforces accountability. The urban space is also conducive to the memorialization of gang violence. The spatial density of a city such as Lagos often means that violent spectacles are not just widely reported, but in the age of social media, they are also archived so publicly that it guarantees their entry into urban street mythologies.
As death becomes a chronic reality, gang relationships with the city shifts in meaningful ways. The boundaries of who can be harmed and where violence can be performed, for instance, blur significantly when previously out-of-bounds categories suddenly become legitimate targets. This is particularly the case in protracted conflict and can often be aimed at symbols of state authority, such as police and the elite. This blurring of boundaries also inevitably produces a more hostile city, both socially and spatially. In the Ikorodu area of Lagos, for instance, multiple brutal deaths inflicted by members of the Badoo gang generated such anxiety and hysteria that mobs began to maraud, killing anyone who looked out of place or even remotely suspicious. These mob killings have a lasting legacy of privatized security and spatial ordering that has transformed parts of the area into zones of exclusion – dangerous to the outsider and tense for the insider.
Studying gang death and the violence that facilitates it has important implications for how we think about the urban space. Spectacles of surplus death encourage the spatial, class and, in some cases, identity-driven reorganization of the city. It is common in cities such as Lagos to see the emergence of zones of exclusion which are marked out by gated estates, the private militarization of the streets and the expansion of the disciplinary gaze through techniques of control, such as CCTV cameras. These are attempts by the city to remake itself in response to an uncomfortable proximity to crime and gang death, leading to what Glebbeek and Koonings described as the “fragmentation of the city” (2016: 4) into spaces of (il)legitimate coercion. As a metaphor for abjection, death, as captured by those who study the biopolitical (see Mbembe 2003; Biehl 2005), also allows urban scholars to recognize the corporeal and affective impacts of structural inequality, and the important ways in which city spaces magnify, intensify, categorize and reproduce these inequalities.
Gang violence threatens the very foundations of urban life, but it does not do this only by disrupting social cohesion. How it challenges the idea that the gaze of violence should be invisible – à la Bentham’s panopticon – is more problematic. The importance of invisibility for power has been well outlined by Michel Foucault (1991). In his discussion of the panopticon, Foucault makes clear that the real power of the state’s gaze is not merely in its ability to see the subject, but in its capacity to render that gaze invisible. In many ways, the evolution of “civilization” and “social order” centres around the removal of death, and the underlying violence it embodies, from public proximity. Gangsters undermine this when they create an atmosphere of protracted violence and death, and when they do so with brutal spectacle and flair.
However, the intangible shifts in norms that proximate death generates and what these mean concerning how moral universes are created and governed within cities are perhaps more important. The questions of who is abject, what acts of violence are acceptable and where accountability resides in the event of violence become more morally complicated in places where death and dying have become proximate. The governing logics of the moral universe that seek to hide death away are effectively upended by morbid chronicity, inevitably unleashing (and legitimizing) policing and disciplinary systems that are repressive and ultimately compound the problem.
As discussed above, proximate death speaks to a relationship with human mortality that takes into account the extreme levels of attrition that occur within violent contexts, how it might induce shifts in the way in which groups are governed, and how this should not be understood in the same way as we understand death in the ordinary course of life. By combining spectres of extreme brutality with the frequency of dying, gang deaths exist in a state of exception – similar to high mortality pandemics or protracted conflict – and open up new opportunities for understanding the impact of violence on the urban youth psyche. In this regard, the type and frequency of violence is perhaps more important than the fact of violence itself, and core features of the gang life – from performance to masculinity – evolve in recognition of this risk to the body.
The gang body carries with it visible archives of street violence that are marked out in grisly scars, symbolic tattoos and absent limbs. In essence, the gang life writes itself on bodies – both living and dead. In the same way, the city carries with it archives of protracted gang violence, with zones of danger (and exclusion) inscribed into the consciousness of its inhabitants, and physical infrastructure bearing the marks of violence, decay and collapse. Overall, death looms large and meaningfully over urban gang cultures.