Collective violence is a recurring feature of politics around the world. It often seems to flare spontaneously in response to natural and political disasters, only to subside into routine politics as the forces of state order move in. Javier Auyero focuses on one such incident of explosive collective violence: a week of looting in Argentina in December of 2001. In his explanation of that week, no part of the intuitive description passes muster: The looting is not spontaneous, but organized; there is no firm line between routine politics and violence; and the grounding distinctions among actors as violent perpetrators, ordinary political actors, or forces of order do not hold up.

Instead, Auyero argues that clandestine connections among these actors—the “gray zone” of the subtitle—link routine and violent outcomes. Therefore, understanding the events of that particular week requires understanding the routine politics of the poor, which in Argentina means understanding how the Peronist Party constructed urban clientelist networks. The author finds analytic symmetry in the ways local party brokers solve the problems of Argentina's hungry poor both in routine politics, when they distribute cash subsidies in exchange for political support, and in their activities in that extraordinary week, when they almost certainly passed on rumors about the areas that residents could safely sack (pp. 121–22). Assessing safety required gauging the likely response of security forces, who might forcibly repress the looting, stand aside, or even join in. In Auyero's analysis, these patterns of interactions created an opportunity for looting in December, 2001, probably partially orchestrated by some Peronist brokers to show their disruptive capacity (p. 124). (Contradictory accounts by different informants often leave him sifting the evidence to find the best-supported conclusions.) As looters themselves explained their actions, “the opportunity made the looter” (p. 141). Looters also made sense of their actions by stressing their own need for the things they took, especially food, and by underplaying the property damage done. Both looters and the shell shocked looted shopkeepers agreed that the failures of state and party politics were the root cause of the disturbances (pp. 137, 147).

Auyero is a skilled ethnographer, and he makes ample use of 100 interviews with actors of all kinds to vividly reconstruct the ways participants made sense of their own roles and those of others around them. For example, we learn that the “clients” in routine patronage relationships often experience those relationships as habitual and friendly, feeling grateful for the assistance of a trusted neighbor (pp. 65–67), notwithstanding the critiques of many observers. The author also uses a database constructed from 14 newspapers during the week of protests, which provided him with an initial narrative of the week's events. He does not rely heavily on this database, noting that “journalistic accounts of the events were far from accurate and reliable” (p. 21). A reader who is less interested in how participants account for their behavior and more interested in “what really happened” would probably levy the same critique at Auyero's interview respondents. He sometimes responds to irreconcilable contradictions between his respondents by sifting the supporting evidence and deciding which seems most likely, but sometimes—on the same topic of Peronist involvement in the uprisings, for example (pp. 112–18)—he simply presents long excerpts from the contenders. This analytic approach has the virtue of preserving complexity, but it sacrifices clarity.

The concept of the gray zone is the part of this analysis that Auyero sees as most generalizable to other studies of collective violence. He argues that political scientists need to pay more attention to the possible existence of such a sphere that blurs routine and violent politics, rather than simply seeing the visible, respectable relationships (p. 38). He also acknowledges that the importance of the gray zone varies over time and space, with Argentina having had less of such a zone than many of its neighbors, but having a larger gray zone now than in its own recent past (pp. 50–51). In the conclusions, he lays out research strategies for identifying the presence of significant gray zone actors. Their actions will not be easily visible, that is, through newspaper reports, but will have to be similarly reconstructed through a close look at long-term relationships, event sequences, and actor understandings. These are plausible hypotheses and strategies that may well be helpful in other studies of collective violence. In other parts of the conclusions, however, he appears to exaggerate the influence of the gray zone in ways not well supported by his own evidence. Having rejected a “steamkettle” model of when violence erupts, he appears to replace it with a “faucet” model: “[T]hose who can set in motion the synapses of the gray zone will be capable of creating civil disturbance and of keeping it at bay” (p. 157). Yet throughout the book, there are aspects of contemporary Argentine politics that he places beyond the control of his gray zone relationships, including the piquetero movement (pp. 88–89) and other contemporaneous strategies, such as road blockages and large rallies in plazas (p. 79). If there is spigot-like control, it is not of the water main.

Auyero's own theoretical discussions stick tightly to the question of explaining collective violence. Yet his arguments are also more broadly applicable to the study of routine contentious politics. Here, the dominant political process model often used by political scientists tends to assume the same kind of sharp actor distinctions that Auyero rejects, this time between the state—provider of mobilizing “opportunities,” elite allies, and so on—and societal organizations and their mobilizations. The frequently intimate relations among them are correspondingly often missed. An approach similar to his investigation of the gray zone would be more likely to find the ways in which individuals in fact move back and forth across the boundary, activists sometimes mobilize inside the state to bolster some part of it, and long interactions can build the close relationships more commonly noted by policy scholars than by students of contentious politics.

Finally, it is worth noting the book's distinctive approach, which is a micro-level analysis of highly individual actors whose self-understandings are a central focus. When the book's questions remain at this micro level—as in the chapter on the neighborhood-level workings of clientelism—this is a very rewarding strategy, immediate in a way that few political analyses are. This kind of approach is currently more common in sociology and anthropology than in political science, and many political scientists will miss clear analytic aggregation rules to larger political scales and final explanations. For example, Auyero asserts near the end of the book that new social policies and the end of Fernando De la Rua's presidency are some of the larger “reverberations” of these lootings (p. 156). This is almost certainly true, but the connecting steps will need to be traced more methodically in some future work.