State formation and property - Reflections on the political technologies of space in Central America

The paper analyzes state formation as the process whereby power/knowledge complexes organize, use and produce social space. In particular the focus is placed on private land ownership as a historical form of land possession. Privatization of land as a technique of government produced a homogeneous fragmentation of space, and the argument made in the paper is that this space became the primary technique in the construction of dualized Salvadorean society based on the exclusion from the political nation of a large group of delinquent and deviant bodies that should be policed, and the inclusion in the political nation of a small group of land owning individuals that took part in politics.