Bibliografía em Willis “before the body count” para describir “groups (…) (that) are increasingly

prominent regulators of security and death in historically violent parts of cities”

Enrique Arias. Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public
Security: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ of North
Carolina Press, 2009);
Romain Bertrand. ‘Behave like enraged lions”: civil militias, the army and the criminalization of
politics in Indonesia’. Global Crime, 6 (2004): pp. 325-344;
Damion Blake. ‘Shadowing the State: Violent Control and the Social Power of Jamican Garrison
Dons’, Journal of Ethnographic and Qualitative Research, 8( 2013), pp. 56-75;
Aldo Civico. ‘We are Illegal, but not Illegitimate: Modes of Policing in Medellin, Colombia’.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35( 2012), pp. 77-93;
Diane Davis. ‘Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities and Shifting Patterns of
Sovereignty and Insecurity in the Modern World’. Contemporary Security Policy, 30 (2009), pp.
221-245;
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff. (eds.) Law and Disorder in the Post-Colony (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Em Yashar Homicidal ecologies

The goal of this book is to explain varied homicide levels in contemporary democracies and to chart
out a theoretical agenda that focuses on violence at the intersection of three factors: the geography
of illicit political economies, the capacity of state security forces, and organizational competition
over territorial enclaves. These three factors interact within and across borders, explaining much of
the categorical variation in violence across the region. They help explain “homicidal ecologies”
(subnational regions most susceptible to violence) and associated mechanisms (to explain when and
why violence spikes). Taken in reverse order, I argue in particular that organizational competition to
control subnational, illicit, territorial enclaves drives the high violence patterns in the region; this
competition occurs between illicit actors and/or with the state. However, the violence-inducing,
competitive mechanisms are playing out in specific homicidal ecologies: geographically, violence-
prone subnational enclaves are emerging most clearly along prized illicit trade and transit routes,
where security forces are weak and/or corrupt (although this situation has also arisen in capital
cities). While some isolated cases of violent struggle might be politically motivated (to take state
power and/or influence policy), most are not. In this regard, the violence of the contemporary
period is distinct – less ideological, more dispersed, more fragmented, and arguably harder to
control. 4

Yet, democracy has not done so for so many. To understand why, we must look beyond formal
institutions and national boundaries to explore the interaction of the illicit, the state, and
organizational competition. 4-5

First, I contend that the development of a transnational illicit economy and illicit criminal
organizations set the stage for the high levels of violence that we now see in Latin America. In
particular, the development of high value-added illicit trade and transit has created high-stakes
incentives for illicit organizations to control lucrative territories/transit routes; these are the areas
most susceptible to high violence since there are strong economic motives to assert control and no
legal channels to institutionalize hegemonic domains and adjudicate conflicts. Second, I argue
that illicit trade and transit is likely to take hold where illicit actors find weak and/or complicit state
institutions (particularly law-and-order institutions such as the police and courts). In this context,
illicit organizations are moving into areas where they are unmonitored (and thus have a greater
likelihood of assuming control over territorial enclaves to support the trade and transit of illicit
goods) and/or where they are able to strike deals with state actors and thus create a situation of
collusion.15 Third, and finally, I find that the highest levels of violence are emerging particularly
where illicit organizations encounter organizational competition (either from other illicit
organizations or the state or both) to control previously hegemonic territorial enclaves. This means
that where organizations are hegemonic, the use of violence will be low. Where organizations
compete to assert control over common territories, violence will be high.16 No single factor
determines the outcome. The combination of factors, however, can be deadly. 18-19

These four types of arguments contend that (1) political transitions (following civil wars and/or as
part of democratization) create institutional uncertainty and insecurity gaps that can result in
higher violence, (2) sociologically fractured civil societies (including weak social capital) offer up
anomic individuals both prone to violent behavior and unregulated by their environments, (3) harsh
economic conditions (i.e., inequality and/or neoliberal reforms) generate individual grievances that
increase the risk of violent behavior, and (4) historical legacies of state formation privilege certain
actors who resort to coercion to defend their privilege. The first three approaches, as a whole, aim to
explain why individuals are compelled to violence to address a range of poor political and economic
conditions. The final approach highlights class and state actors. I contend that these four approaches
begin with the wrong point of departure, since organizations and organizational dynamics – not
particular individuals or classes – will prove key to explaining high-homicide-level cases in
contemporary Latin America.23-24

To explain violence in Latin American democracies, this book proposes an

argument featuring the role of competitive organizations operating in the
context of illicit economies and weak state capacity. Astronomically high
homicide rates are not the result of hordes of individual thieves or anomic
individuals committing crimes that somehow include death; nor is it
simply a function of individual actors taking advantage of the uncertainty
of democratic transitions; nor can it be analyzed by only taking into
account formal political, economic, and social factors. Rather, high levels
of violence in the third wave of democracy are being orchestrated by
organizations that pursue certain goals (usually profit, order, and/or
territorial hegemony), use violence toward that end, and operate in
particular geographies. 65

This book therefore develops the argument that organizational competition to control illicit
territorial enclaves is driving the very high violence patterns in the region; these enclaves are
emerging most clearly where law-and-order state institutions are weak and corrupt. A range of illicit
and state organizations deploy violence in higher measure to control (or develop) lucrative
territorial enclaves within and across national boundaries. To explain why this violence has
occurred in the contemporary period, this book first introduces changing patterns in the illicit
political economy, then the states that foster this or allow it to occur, and finally the organizational
actors that have emerged therein to stake out and defend illicit subnational enclaves in the region.
These three core factors (transnational illicit economies, weak state capacity, and organizational
competition over subnational territory) together help explain the high rates and varied geography of
homicides in the region. 65-66

el paralelismo entre weak state y violencia tiene sentido, pero hace un contraste interesante com el
de Lessing de que la governancia criminal no tiene una correlación directa com la “debilidad” del
Estado. Como sería el juego entre estas 3 variables (fortaleza estatal, gobernancia criinal y
violencia)? Podría pensarse que em espacios donde se cumplen los outros factores de Yashar, pero
hay una presencia intermedia del Estado, (y por lo tanto el “costo” político de la vida es mas alto) es
mas probable desarrollar gobernanzas criminales fuertes, que deviene una solución cuando el
mercado es insuprimible, pero por lo menos se “pacifica”
I argue that two types of illicit
political economies (transnational routes regulated by organized crime
and urban local spaces dominated by urban gangs) have created high
stakes that often coincide with the geographically concentrated high
violence patterns found in contemporary Latin America 68

buen resumo de Portes:

Portes (and his subsequent collaborators) argued that much of the economy operates
“beyond” state regulation, leading him to distinguish between the formal and informal
economy. The informal economy refers to “transactions where the state neither provides
protection nor receives a ‘cut’” (Centeno and Portes 2006: 26). This describes a significant
part of the economy in Latin America, affecting both those who cannot be absorbed by the
formal labor market and those who might maneuver to avoid it. It includes street vendors,
shoeshine boys, maids, and security guards, among others, who might constitute
a significant economic sector but work beyond state regulation. Centeno and Portes
argue that it is not just that the state does not regulate these areas but also that entrepre
neurs find ways to escape state regulation. “The relationship between the state and the
informal economy is thus cyclically causal and negatively correlated. In general, the weaker the
state, the greater the likelihood of an economy being able to escape its gaps.
The more ambitious the scope of state regulation, the more cause for escape” (Centeno and
Portes 2006: 29). Indeed, many states tolerate the informal economy, Portes argued,
because it can be functional to the maintenance of capitalist systems; this systemic eco
nomic accommodation, however, can create political distortions by providing short term
remedies for citizens that in the long term minimize their ability to formally demand and
protect their rights 68-69

As states define the boundaries of what is legal, actors often

find ways to supply and access those illegal goods at a profit. The creation
of illicit categories, therefore, creates the incentives for some subset of
actors to subvert these regulations if doing so can lead to material gain
(and/or the promise of increased political power, social status, etc.), which
in turn is partially predicated on state capacity to implement the law.
Otherwise stated, prohibition creates incentives for actors (collective and
individual) to take advantage of, and make profit from, these prohibitions 69

Latin America’s illicit economies have thrived. They have occupied both
high-profit and low-profit markets and have generated enormous reven-
ues. But of greatest import for this book are the ones that have assumed
a territorial dimension – the ones that require organizations to control
highly valued territories to sustain their livelihood and turn a profit; this is
because the dramatic rise in contemporary violence is spatially tied to the
changing geography of illicit economies10 and the presence, in particular,
of illicit groups competing to control these territories. 72

Esto es interesante. La prisión debería definirse como uno de esos territorios de mercados ilícitos
em disputa donde la violencia sería factor? Evidentemente, esto tendría que ver com el grado de
monopolio alcanzado

the national geography of the trade and transit of illicit drugs explains
which countries are most likely to have higher levels of violence.
Organized criminal actors associated with illicit economies seek to assert
monopoly control of specific territories. When they do so, homicidal levels
are often relatively low; however, when they are competing with other
organized crime groups and/or the state, they will more readily deploy
violence to assert hegemony and defend and extend local control. Thus,
illicit does not equal violence. But illicit spaces (especially where there is
competition over core subnational spaces such as ports, highways, air-
strips, and borders) have a greater propensity than licit spaces to experi-
ence high homicide levels 73

An expansion of urban gangs has occurred in tandem with the expand-

ing drug trade – with gangs also seeking to demarcate territories within
which they establish illicit forms of extraction. Gangs have been involved
in extortion rackets and selling drugs; this starts on a local scale, although
over time there is some evidence of organized crime’s efforts to incorpo-
rate them into the trade and transit of illicit drugs moving north. As with
organized crime, gangs have become particularly prevalent and powerful where the state has either
demonstrated weak capacity in regulating urban
spaces or complicity in profiting from gang activities or both.

Competition over trade and transit (rather than production per se) are
driving much of the violence in the region; this is the first empirical leg of
the tripartite argument in this book.21 The profit margin is the highest –
and, arguably, the stakes are the most dramatic – when we look at transit
routes (rather than production sites)78

The return on investment is very high – as is the risk of seizure. Thus,

they have incentives to occupy/dominate certain trade routes (and to
prevent their competitors from doing the same, while also avoiding law
enforcement) so that they can gain greater market share and be price
setters along the route.78

Reuter has described this chain of supply as an hourglass,

characterized at one end by millions of agricultural coca producers in the
Andes (poppy in Myanmar and Afghanistan) who receive a very small
percentage of total drug revenues (Reuter estimates 1 percent) and are
price takers in this process; at the other end, there are hundreds of
thousands of retailers in advanced markets who collectively make
a great deal, although very few who make a great fortune; and in the
middle, there are a small number of smugglers and drug traffickers who
receive the greatest return on their investment (Reuter 2014: 364–365).78

para explicar violencia em Venezuela:

Indeed, over time, Europe has become an increasingly important destination market. UNODC
(2010: 26) reports that Venezuela and Ecuador served as major transit points for
over half of the maritime shipments to Western Europe between 2006 and 2008; (…) Moreover, the
2016 EU Drug Market (issued by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction
and Europol) states that Venezuela, alongside Brazil, and Colombia have become important
points of departure for drugs moving to Europe (…) hese treetop observations about Latin American
illicit economies, as homicide rates (Central America and Mexico, but also Venezuela and
Brazil) and the regions/countries through which the most profitable illicit goods are moving (trade
and transit). Homicide rates were in turn very high in the Caribbean when drugs primarily flowed
through these islands. Homicide rates increased in Central America, moreover, when drugs
started to flow primarily through this region. 87-88

llicit organizations have

responded strategically to formal prohibitions and regulations by inserting
themselves into, and taking advantage of, this illicit market; this entails
taking control of particular territories. And, strikingly, these territories
(national and subnational) often seem to correspond with high homicide
rates. In this regard, these spaces often coincide with homicidal ecologies;
they do not determine violence, but they certainly seem to have an elective
affinity with it.90

Gangs have also become an important part of Latin America’s illicit

economy. While they do not compare with organized crime in terms of
their yield, profits, or transnational networks, they have come to dominate
certain urban spaces (illicit microeconomies) and in some countries have
started to develop broader territorial control. Like organized crime, gangs
have become increasingly important illicit actors that share a desire to
control territory for profit. Extortion, in particular, has become the cur-
rency of control.42 While DTOs and gangs are not the only illicit actors
operating in the region, they are strikingly similar in their territorial
dimensions and have increasingly shaped territorial spaces within which
violence is taking hold.90

Gangs thus have come to form part of urban illicit economies. Over
time, they have become increasingly powerful urban actors and organiza-
tions that compete for control not only over turf but also over micro-level
illicit economies – including widespread extortion (especially over trans-
portation routes) and occasional drug sales. (…) Territoriality’s centrality means that gangs in many
Central American, Mexican, and Brazilian countries have developed social and economic
incentives to control urban enclaves. They have assumed a parastatal role
where the rule of law is weak. In this regard, gangs have occupied urban
spaces over which they develop social identities, project authority,
demand obeisance, and secure profits. They have been able to do so by
force and/or by extracting rents in exchange for security 95

n this regard, gangs have created protection rackets (recalling Tilly’s

1985 discussion of the state as organized crime). If states use the threat of
violence to uphold their hegemony over territories, the same is true of gangs
(and organized crime, more generally). Indeed, violence has become an
important part of gang culture and practice. Gangs use violence to defend
local territories, for which they charge protection (in theory, gangs do not
commit crimes in their own backyards but rather commit them in other
territories), although with the rising importance of domestic drug sales, this
is perhaps no longer as true as it once was (Demoscopía 2007: 51–53). They
use violence strategically to assert power within their organizations and
over territory.48 Violence is most likely in contested spaces and areas where
no authority is hegemonic; that is to say, in places where neither the state
nor rival gangs have assumed dominance, as discussed in Chapter 4, it is the
competition over these spaces that often results in violence 96

Notably, these gangs (in contrast to the organized crime organizations

discussed earlier) have operated on a more microeconomic scale. They
have not been important players in the trade and transit of illicit drugs,
although that has arguably started to change recently. Nor has the sale of
drugs been a major component of what they do. UNODC (2007, World
Drug Report, passim, 17, 62–63, 180 in particular) notes that current
estimates suggest that there is a relatively small local/domestic market for
drugs; cocaine trafficking is largely maritime, while gangs are not; the
percentage of estimated drug users is lower than the number of gang
members; (...) “So while gang members surely deal
drugs, as they do everywhere in the world, there are simply too many of
them and not enough of a market for this to become a basis of support for
the majority of the membership” (UNODC 2007: 63).

esta división es interesante, pues pondría al PCC como una organización que se “graduó” de un
nivel para el outro

The success of illicit actors in this

world rests on their ability to control territorial enclaves. For the drug
organizations, it is about trade and transit – moving the drugs transnation-
ally. For the gangs, it is about asserting control over specific urban terri-
tories, in which they oversee extortion and illicit sales. In each case,
economic livelihood depends on territorial hegemony. While these organi-
zations include many other characteristics (including strong identities,
social behaviors, among other features), this chapter emphasizes their
insertion into the illicit economy, their territoriality, and their associated
economic motives to assert hegemonic control over lucrative spaces.
These illicit territorial enclaves, in turn, have a high propensity to
generate high levels of violence; thus they constitute homicidal ecologies.
That said, violence is neither inherent nor inevitable to illicit economies
per se 98-99

Why do illicit groups choose to set up illicit activity in some countries (and
subnational spaces) and not others? Under what circumstances do these
illicit groups deploy violence in these territories? Both questions speak to
strategic calculations about territoriality on the part of illicit organiza-
tions. While the first question focuses on antecedent macro-strategic
calculations about where illicit groups set up shop, the second question
addresses the subsequent strategic calculations about when violence is
likely to be used in those spaces.
State capacity critically addresses the first question. It shapes decisions
about where illicit organizations choose to establish their business (and
where they flourish). I argue that this factor fundamentally shapes geo-
graphies of illicit activity. Since state capacity is a multi-institutional and
multivalent variable, however, I focus in particular on the state institu-
tions functionally responsible for maintaining order and upholding the
rule of law – namely the police (in interaction with the military and
courts). 100

Habrá aquí un engañoso foco em lo policial? Si entedemos la relacion entre OCs y estado como una
no simplemente de represión, tal vez sea interesante mapear las outras relaciones institucionales de
los actores violentos

This chapter complements the meso-political argument about geogra-

phies of illicit political economy with a micro-argument about when illicit
actors will deploy violence. As scholars have long recognized, violence is
costly. Illicit actors strategically prefer to avoid violence when there are
other options. They will deploy violence, however, to defend their terri-
torial control – whether challenged by other illicit organizations or by the
state – or to extend their territorial reach. I therefore argue that organiza-
tional competition explains the emergence of high-stakes and high homi-
cide rate violence within these economie 101

Since organized crime is a business – one that is

concerned with its investment and return – illicit actors (if they are going
to survive and prosper) need to figure out how the state will structure the
situation to their (dis)advantage. Corrupt states with poor rule of law can
be bad for the overall economy but good for illicit businesses that are
seeking to buy off officials and spaces to move their goods. Thus, busi-
nesspersons tied to the illicit economy often develop trade routes in
geographically advantageous countries where state monitoring and
accountability are perceived to be low. Similarly, youth organizations
are most likely to set up shop and seek to expand in those urban areas
where the state’s administrative reach is weakest. 102

esta es una tesis frente a la que tengo cierta reticencia, precisamente por la paradoja venezolana
(2000-2012) del aumento del nivel de vida y de la penetración del Estado junto al de la violencia.
Habría tal vez que identificar que tipo de Estado está presente/ausente, y que espacios generan
integración y cuales no (a la Andrés), pero igual parece una descripción un poco grossa

the primary drug-producing states (Colombia, Peru, and

Bolivia) have an incentive to identify geographically proximate countries
(to their north and to their east) to move their illicit product to northern
markets. Geographically speaking, landlocked countries (Paraguay) and
countries to the south and/or west (Chile and Argentina) would not be
ideal places for trade and transit routes. Conversely, countries to the north
(e.g., Venezuela, the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico) would
appear as prime locations for movement northward to the United States
just as countries located on the Atlantic Coast would be prime targets to
move illicit goods eastward to Europe 103

Esto está interesante como explicación de los bajos niveles de violencia em el cono sur, y difiere
completamente de las cepas explicativas que apuntan a factores estructurales, como mayor
industrialización o menor desigualdad

el foco em la idea de que las DTOs están bien “escapando” del monitoreo, y de que la policia y el
sistema judicial son actores principales (104-105), me parece que compra una dicotomía que no me
convence

These rule-of-law institutions generally have a poor record and reputa-

tion in Latin America. It is commonly noted that they have limited
resources, weak training, limited accountability (i.e., high levels of impu-
nity), and high levels of corruption. Thus, the region as a whole seems to
be conducive for illicit activity. But the more interesting question is
relative: Which countries are weakest along these dimensions and there-
fore most conducive to the illicit trade and transit of drugs? As discussed
later, the drug trade is most pervasive in those Central American countries
on the isthmus (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) with particularly
weak rule-of-law institutions. In parallel fashion, in the countries where
state institutions (particularly rule-of-law institutions) are comparatively
strongest (Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica), the drug trade is the weakest. 105

The types of strategic calculations made by illicit organizations are

noted in Figure 4.2, identifying prime geographies in order to maximize
international physical location (pull), avoid international monitoring
(push), and take advantage of weak domestic rule-of-law institutions
(push and pull). Although these decisions do not always occur in this
temporal order (and while illicit actors can further weaken and corrupt
host states) 105

“The central problem is that the quality of data on state weakness is negatively affected by the very
weakness it tries to measure: the more corrupt or criminalized a state, the worse [i.e., less
reliable] its measures of corruption and criminality will be” (Wilkinson 2004: 72).10
Therefore, there is a circular process by which weak states provide promising territories for illicit
actors, which in turn can further corrupt these weak states. Because of this, the weakest states are
often the ones hat are also the most susceptible to corruption by illicit actors (often becoming
involved in the very activities they are supposed to monitor). Indeed, illicit actors operate not only
where the state is weak but also where the state is complicit (Arias 2006a and 2006b; Cruz 2010).In
practice, then, the illicit rubs up against the formal in unexpected ways – sometimes in tension,
sometimes in collaboration 107-108

State capacity is a notoriously contested concept and one for which it is

challenging to disentangle cause and consequence.12 Along with my col-
leagues Miguel Centeno and Atul Kohli, I take “state capacity” to refer to
the organizational ability to implement governing projects – separate from
the political will to deploy it.13 In this sense, it is a term of potential
utilization; it is normatively neutral, as it can be used for good and for
ill. As a multidimensional variable, it is based on territorial reach,
resources, human expertise, and organizational coherence (including
clear hierarchies, mandates, information, accountability, and ability to
juggle multiple/competing mandates). Since states, moreover, are com-
posed of multiple agencies, analysis should specify the institution respon-
sible for those outcomes and ascertain the capacity thereof; certainly,
different state institutions and associated capacities are required, for
example, to promote economic growth and social inclusion versus security and order (Centeno et al.
2017).108

To measure state capacity for law-and-order institutions in Latin

America, I analyze the organizational coherence and territorial reach
alongside other behavioral measures (how [in]efficacious they are in
holding criminals to account) – elaborated later and discussed at greater
length in the case studies.17 Where law-and-order institutions lack orga-
nizational coherence (i.e., they have poor role specification, limited inter-
nal accountability, and marginal esprit de corps), territorial reach (i.e.,
deployment of police officers throughout the territory), and efficacious-
ness (i.e., poor homicide clearance rates), it is difficult to hold other licit
and illicit actors to account (both illicit actors outside of the institutions
and public officials in associated state institutions). Weak state capacity
can facilitate (and reflect) complicity and corruption on the part of the
very institutions designed to reign in these behaviors.18 It provides fertile
ground for the growth of illicit activity (as well as possible state incompe-
tence and/or complicity). 110
Aqui está el tema, no parece faltar alcance de la policía, y ciertamente no esprit de corps, si no que
no tiene priorizado resolver los homicidios de “bandidos”.

police functions in Latin American countries are neither

clearly defined vis-à-vis the military (Withers, Santos, and Isaacson 2010)
nor with relation to the attorney general’s office (in terms of investigative
responsibilities, for example). 110

ella intenta (114-117) diferenciar entre gasto grueso y “eficacia” de la policía, poniendo como
ejemplo Nicaragua y sus reducidas pero bien conceptuadas fuerza policial y prisiones. Esto entra
dentro de la línea managerial que busca instituciones “eficientes” pero no se cuestiona si estas están
siendo “eficientes” em outros objetivos

varying police capacity (role specification, homicide

clearance rates, accountability) plays a differential deterrent role for illicit
organizations seeking territories in which to set up shop. This is important
not just for the Becker hypothesis about individual-level crime but also for
the organizational decisions made by illicit organizations such as DTOs
and youth gangs (…) for drug organizations,
they are trying to decide where to move the goods (all the more so after the
crackdown on the Caribbean coast); for urban gangs, they are trying to
figure out not only which territories they can dominate (at first blush
a function of urban residence) but also which routes are lucrative (e.g.,
bus routes) and where they can buy off or avoid police monitoring.117

Hence, what deters legal business investments can incentivize the

growth of illicit ones. This is particularly so for drug organizations that
have the transnational field of vision to decide where they are going to
move the goods. While gangs are not as transnational in scope and
operation, it is clear that they have flourished and grown precisely
where the state is incapable of controlling them and where local police
officers are themselves complicit. Weak state capacity (understood as an
inability to monitor or hold to account either complicit state officials or
illicit actors or both) provides an attractive field of investment for orga-
nized crime seeking to prosper via trade and the transit of illicit goods and
for gangs engaged in extortion and other forms of criminal delinquency 118

hay una visión simplista de los ilegalismos populares, y de la función que cumplen para el "orden
formal" (a la Misse) en esta idea de gangs urbanas

While
illicit organizations might be more likely than licit ones to engage in
violence, violence is rarely a first response. Indeed, homicidal vio-
lence is costly; it not only can lead to more deaths, but in the short
term it can also harm profits. Thus, the preferred strategy for illicit
organizations should be to establish hegemonic control over a given
territory – whether hegemony is defined in terms of monopoly over
territory, markets, government, information, or social interaction.
Many scholars have highlighted that where armed groups establish
territorial monopoly, violence is low – be it organized crime, ban-
dits, the mafia, drug trafficking organizations, or even civil war
combatants (Gambetta 1996, Tilly 2003, Kalyvas 2006, and Snyder
and Durán-Martínez 2009, among others). Where armed groups are
able to establish governing structures absent competition from either
other illicit organizations or the state, they try to impose order, not
chaos. Violence is always threatened; the order is coercive. But it can
exist without recourse to high levels of homicide 119

et drug organizations and gangs cannot always establish or maintain

hegemony. Given the lure of high profits, there is often an incentive for
other organizations to try to hone in and capture profits, to try to disci-
pline internal divisions, and to assert hegemony when under threat. 119

Violence is wielded more often in the context of organizational

competition and uncertainty to establish precedent and power – including
to stake out turf (taxes, sales, etc.), scare/increase membership, undercut
competitors, and enforce the illicit rules of the game. In short, organiza-
tional competition to control territorial space significantly motivates illicit
actors to turn to homicidal violence. In these circumstances, violence
demonstrates a kind of “credible antagonism” (i.e., that one is willing
and able to wield violence now and in the future) to defend (or acquire)
territorial spaces where illicit actors can maneuver and grow their busi-
nesses120

Kalyvas (2015) argues that indiscriminate violence is very costly and can be counter
productive (because of the increased likelihood of retaliation and loss of local support).
In what might be called an Arendtian logic, it can destroy power but cannot create it.
It might occur in cases where there is an imbalance of power (e.g., insurgents might be
weak and cannot offer protection), information is low, rivals control a given territory,
and an armed group therefore might target a given area indiscriminately in an effort to
generate a changed equilibrium. But by doing so, these actors might lose whatever
support they had and invite retaliation; thus, it is a very costly strategy. This situation
might parallel what the state has done in some cases, as in Mexico, and might set off
a high violence spiral; however, this is not a common strategy, for the reasons noted by
Kalyvas (2015). More common than indiscriminate violence are cases of discriminate
violence against noncombatants. Discriminate violence occurs against specific targets
and, according to Kalyvas, is jointly produced (with local collaboration to share informa
tion with armed groups). It is most likely in cases where the armed group has predominant
but not total control of a given area and where citizens expect protection in exchange for
information. Violence is meted out against those identified as traitors and snitches, and,
strikingly, patterns of violence against noncombatants thus vary by the territorial balance
of power. Where one group is hegemonic, discriminate violence by hegemonic groups will
be low (no one to denounce, no one to target) and indiscriminate violence by opposing
group is possible but costly. Where the balance of power favors one side but the area
remains contested, discriminate violence will be highest. 122
Ella aclara que estos mecanismos específicos pueden no ser equivalentes para el caso de
organizaciones criminales y no de insurgentes. Igual es bueno tenerlo em cuenta

em Lessing conceptualizing criminal governance

What unites these cases is that, for those governed, states’ claims of a monopoly on the legitimate
use of force ring hollow; for many quotidian issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant
authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and call the police for
problems beyond gangs’ purview—or even to inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior
(e.g., Barnes 2018). States may actively contest criminal authority, but just as often they ignore,
deny, or even collaborate with it. The results are distinctly non-Weberian: states and the criminal
groups they are purportedly trying to eliminate form a “duopoly of violence” (Skaperdas and
Syropoulos 1997, 61), one that can be competitive or collusive (Arias 2017; Barnes 2017), turbulent
or stable. This duopoly of violence distinguishes criminal governance from both state governance
and common forms of non-state governance. 1-2

No such backstop underlies governance by non-state armed groups: their authority rests on their
own coercive capacity, in at least nominal opposition to the state’s. In this, criminal governance
resembles rebel governance. Yet rebels’ opposition is starker, and rebel governance—generally
understood as part of a larger “competitive state-building” strategy (Kalyvas 2006)—typically
occurs in “liberated zones” of near-exclusive control (e.g., Arjona 2016; Weinstein 2006). Criminal
groups’ opposition is subtler; they rarely establish strong territorial control, confront state forces, or
seek to supplant state governance entirely. Consequently, criminal governance often hides in plain
sight 2

Indeed, what most distinguishes criminal governance from both state and rebel governance is its
embeddedness. It flourishes in pockets of state weakness that are nonetheless surrounded and
intermittently penetrated by strong state power, like prisons and low-income neighborhoods. To
lump criminal governance in with other forms of non-state governance elides its most intriguing
characteristics: simultaneously born of, shaped by, in opposition to—but in subtle ways
complementing—state power. “Born of” because legislating, and hence outlawing, is a primordial
state function (Koivu 2018); states may fight crime, but they create “the criminal.” “Shaped by”
because virtually all state actions, from policing to zoning, from infrastructure provision to welfare
policy, have substantial effects oncriminal groups’ incentives and capacity to provide governance.
“In opposition but complementary to” because criminal governance, while it seeks to keep some
parts of the state out, may allow others in. 2

the embeddedness of criminal governance can produce unexpected and paradoxical crime–state
dynamics (e.g., Arias and Barnes 2017). State repression itself—especially mass incarceration and
drug prohibition—can inadvertently furnish the human and financial resources criminal groups use
to govern (Cruz 2011; Dias 2009; Lessing 2017; Skarbek 2011). Conversely, criminal governance
can lead to reduced state repression, in part by being useful to states. Recent scholarship has
identified cooperative crime–state arrangements based on corruption, alliance against other armed
threats, or outright crime–state integration (Barnes 2017; Koivu 2018; Snyder and Durán-Martínez
2009). Criminal governance points to distinct, “symbiotic” relationships (Adorno and Dias 2016;
Denyer Willis 2009). Criminal organizations can bring order to spaces—especially urban
peripheries and prison systems—that states perennially find difficult to govern. As these spaces
expand, criminal governance may become increasingly important to social stability, and contribute,
however perversely, to state-building itself 2

pp3:problemas de definiciónde “organizacion criminal” y la linea contenciosa entre lo “criminal” y

lo”politico”
I propose a simple, broad definition of criminal governance: the imposition of rules or restriction on
behavior by a criminal organization. This includes governance over members, non-member criminal
actors, and non-criminal civilians 3

Another important scope condition concerns “governance.” Provision of public order and
enforcement of property rights undoubtedly constitute governance, but other common CO activities,
on their own, may not. Can a criminal group that extorts residents without providing any services or
imposing any rules be said to govern? Or a drug gang that occupies a street corner but otherwise
imposes no rules on other traffickers or residents? One reason to exclude such cases is that
stretching the concept to include them dilutes the puzzles of governance. It is not surprising that
gangs predate, control the physical space where they conduct illegal transactions, or regulate those
transactions. What is puzzling is that they also provide public goods and impose rules on additional
actors. As such, I adopt the following criterion: governance occurs when the lives, routines, and
activities of those governed are impinged on by rules or codes imposed by a CO. Pure extortion,
where the only rule is “pay,” does not count. Conversely, and less plausibly, providing public goods
while imposing no rules at all is closer to philanthropy than governance. 3

First, criminal governance is more than corporate governance. Of course, COs generally seek to
earn illicit profits, and states often invoke COs’ allegedly “economic” interests to distinguish them
from “political” or ideological armed groups. The most sophisticated COs have complex internal
structures, management praxes, recruitment strategies, and “corporate cultures” that resemble those
of licit firms. Moreover, the relationship among COs can be analogized to licit firms competing for
market share: we can usefully distinguish criminal monopoly from oligopolies both competitive
(violent) and collusive (pacted or peaceful). Yet unlike most licit firms, COs’ governance extends
beyond employees to wider criminal networks and often large civilian populations. 5 It cannot be
assumed that such governance is undertaken purely as a means of maximizing profits, at least not in
any immediate sense 4

Organizaed crime is not state making either (…) criminal governance occurs in settings where states
—often quite powerful states— already exist. Indeed, states determine what is criminal, a
precondition for the rise of COs (Koivu 2018). By definition, COs face some degree of state
repression, repression which often structures the very spaces they govern: illicit markets and prisons
are prime examples. Above all, and unlike Tilly’s proto-states, criminal groups rarely challenge
existing state authority wholesale. Rather, they govern in the interstices of state power (Yashar
2018), pockets of low state penetration typically surrounded by areas of firmer state presence, and
which state forces can enter at will, though not always without violence. Thus, the view of COs as
“mini-states” within their area of influence is oftenoverblown, concealing as much as it reveals
(Gambetta 1993). 6 Criminal governance cannot be understood apart from the state, its policies, its
coercive apparatus, and its relation to citizens. 4

criminal and rebel governance differ in key respects. First, COs generally lack rebels’ overarching
goal of “competitive state-building,” which renders insurgency “fundamentally distinct from . . .
banditry, mafias, or social movements” (Kalyvas 2006, 218). Rebels, even when they govern in
order to extract rents, “differ from criminal gangs engaged in similar activities because rebels hold
territory with the political intention of taking over the state, seceding, or reforming it” (Kasfir 2015,
23). Indeed, these “political intentions” critically influence how states categorize and treat armed
groups. Murky limit cases aside, countless COs govern civilians without hope or intention of
obtaining formal state power. Relatedly, rebel governance occurs amidst civil war, typically—and
for many scholars, necessarily—in “liberated zones” of strong territorial control (e.g., Kalyvas
2006; Kasfir 2015; Weinstein 2006). Criminal groups rarely establish exclusive control.
Their authority usually overlaps, often quietly, with the state’s; COs may even welcome state
governance in domains like health and education. Such complementarity, I will argue, permits
“symbiotic” relationships between criminal and state governance; these seem quite unlikely
for rebel governance. Finally, scholarship on rebel governance emphatically limits its scope to rule
over civilians (Arjona 2016; Kasfir 2015), while that on criminal governance has—rightly, I argue
—included governance over CO´s own members 4-5

Instead, I distinguish three levels of criminal governance based on who is governed: CO members,
non-member criminal actors, or non-criminal civilians5

For internal governance by COs over their own members, the interesting question is not “why
govern?” but “how?” COs face organizational challenges due to their illegality and have developed
a rich variety of internal-governance mechanisms in response. Moreover, when Cos come to govern
non-members and civilians, it is often by extending or adapting their internal governance
mechanisms. Even scholars primarily interested in CO governance over civilians can gain insight by
studying how COs are internally organized, and why some do not govern civilian 5

COs may also govern non-member criminal actors; these may be autonomous actors in a specific
illicit market (say, retail drug dealers), non-member inmates housed in a gang-controlled prison,
local street gangs subjected to the rules and taxation of a prison-gang, or even the criminal
underworld writ large. I refer to this as criminal-market governance, although the object of
governance need not be a market in the strict sense. Here both the why and the how of governance
are puzzling: COs must have both motives and means for governing autonomous actors and groups
that are, by definition, not law-abiding. Such governance is central to influential definitions of
organized crime 5-6

Finally, criminal–civilian governance denotes CO rule over people not directly involved in criminal
activity. I propose “gang rule” as a handy (albeit imprecise) label, useful given its prominence.
Millions of citizens live under some form of gang rule, with untold implications for state formation,
democratic consolidation, economic development, and more. Were criminal governance limited to
internal or criminal-market levels, it would still matter, but it would not be of first-order political
and ethical importance. Moreover, gang rule is fundamentally puzzling: why do supposedly profit-
driven COs with no claims on formal state power get into the business of governing civilians?
In practice, distinguishing CO members from other criminal actors and civilians can be difficult,
Gang induction, for example, often involves intermediate phases of “hanging out” and provisional
status, and informal neighborhoods almost by definition involve residents in economies and living
arrangements of ambiguous legality. Family members—particularly spouses—of CO members
often fall between levels, subject to more rules than average civilians, but less than members or
criminal affiliates (e.g., Godoi 2015). CO governance at one level can thus easily spill over into
others 6

What Is Governed?
Unlike insurgents engaged in competitive state-building, COs need not contest all aspects of state
governance.Instead, CO rule over civilians is often narrow and discontinuous, regulating (say)
property crime and contact with police but leaving other domains like interpersonal violence or
electoral politics untouched. Similarly, criminal-market governance often covers some illicit
activities but not others. In short, COs can govern a lot or a little, along a host of dimensions 6

Policing and enforcement functions. COs prohibit and, to differing degrees, punish and prevent a
series of behaviors. Prohibiting theft and robbery within and sometimes near the communities that
COs operate in is quite common, reflecting the Lockean centrality of securing property to
governance in general. Perhaps more unique to criminal governance, many gangs assume
responsibility for preventing and punishing rape and sexual abuse, especially of children (…) COs
also commonly regulate interpersonal violence, particularly homicide; ban contact with authorities
(sometimes known as the “law of silence” or omertá); and restrict movement in, out, and beyond a
community, including curfews, checkpoints, and bans on visiting rivals’ territory. COs may also
regulate firearm possession and use, especially among their own members. COs frequently impose
rules around externality-producing behaviors such as loud music, motorcycle use, trash dumping,
and other bugbears of community life 7-8
Judicial functions. Resolving disputes is a basic attribute of authority (Paluck and Green 2009), and
a common dimension of criminal governance. COs’ judicial mechanisms vary widely in
sophistication and institutionalization. At one extreme, a single local boss (or designated
subordinate) may hand down arbitrary decisions. At the other, exemplified by the PCC,
institutionalized jury trials apply standardized norms, graded punishments, and even “legal”
precedents (e.g., Telles and Hirata 2009, 54), with past infractions and punishments meticulously
recorded in detailed personnel files and duly taken into account (Lessing and Denyer Willis 2019).
COs may also offer contract enforcement and debt collection services to third parties. Because they
often begin as part of internal CO governance, judicial institutions represent a key domain for
studying all three levels of governance conjointly. How far COs extend these functions to non-
member criminal actors and civilians varies considerably, even among those with significant
capacity 8

How commonly COs—who are often deeply embed- ded in tight-knit communities—implement
restorative forms of justice is a fascinating question for future research 8

Fiscal functions. Taxation is so central to state-formation (e.g., Levi 1989; Olson 1993) that many
scholars treat it as a proxy, “the next best thing” to a “perfect barometer of state power” (Slater
2010, 35). Among COs, taxation varies more widely. Protection rackets charge for “protection”,
hence their similarity to states (Tilly 1985); but many governing COs are not protection rackets. In
general, the more COs earn from illicit market transactions (especially drug trafficking), the less
they rely on taxation.13 Taxation further varies in who must pay—more commonly local businesses
than residents—and whether COs charge flat fees or attempt to price-discriminate based on income
or profits. On the flip side of taxation, many COs provide public goods beyond basic social order
and property rights. Cos can—essentially for “free”—solve coordination problems like deciding
where to locate a trash dump or a moto-taxi stand. At higher levels of governance, they may provide
“cheap” goods that mostly require labor, like street-cleaning and tree-cutting,14 or more resource-
intensive goods, like recreational facilities, drainage, and public illumination. Many COs also
provide welfare benefits for the needy, often in the form of food staples and medication. COs may
also provide financial services at all three levels of figure 1. 8

Regulatory functions. COs governance over non-member criminal actors often involves regulating
illicit markets, especially drugs: determining who can work where,sometimes setting prices, and—
spilling over into civiliangovernance—deciding which drugs can be consumed where. COs may
also regulate criminal activities beyond those they engage in. For example, Rio’s drug syndicates
often prohibit bringing stolen vehicles into their territory for disassembly. Legal markets may also
fall under COregulation, taxation, or even direct provision, especially for “universal” goods like
food staples and utilities. (…) In Rio, police-linked milícias frequently operate forced monopolies
on cooking gas and cable TV, and tax informal transportation (Freixo 2008)

el mercado de comida dentro de la prisión encaja como esto, o mas bien como un mercado”ilegal”
dada su prohibicion formal? La inmersión em casi todas las áreas de la vida (y particularmente em
las mas “vitales”) puede ser una caracteristica específica de la gobernanza prisional
Political functions. Even among COs capable of coercing voters or candidates, involvement in
electoral politics and community governance institutions varies widely (e.g. Arias 2006, 2017;
Córdova 2019; Leeds 1996). Some simply ignore elections, or endorse a candidate; others act as
brokers, selling physical access to voters in areas they control; and some actively coerce voters and
even run their own members as candidates

Who Governs, and How? Styles and Structures of Criminal Governance

Different types of organizations are likely to be interested in or capable of different sorts of
governance, at different levels. While typologies of COs abound, researchers need
not settle thorny questions like whether street gangs are organized crime in order to think about how
governance differs systematically across COs. Rather, they should seek to link attributes of the COs
they study to the criminal governance patterns they observe (e.g., Arias 2017; Skarbek 2011) (…) I
propose two dimensions as particularly relevant for criminal governance, both flowing from a
Weberian perspective: the structure and basis of authority, and its legitimation. 9

Structure and basis of authority: Personalistic versus rational-bureaucratic.

CO internal governance varies in how authority is structured and exercised, with potentially
critical downstream effects on governance over non-member criminals and civilians. COs vary
widely in their organizational structures, but as with all organizations, these can be arrayed along a
Weberian spectrum from personalistic-charismatic to rational-bureaucratic. Brazil’s two largest
COs, Rio’s Comando Vermelho (CV) and São Paulo’s PCC, approximate these ideal types. 9

Charismatic-Personalistic:
• Confederal structure among bosses
• Clan-like substructures under bosses
• Non-alienable property rights
• Arbitrary punishments
• Rhetorical emphasis on identity, loyalty
• Leaders’ personalities are prominent

Rational-Bureaucratic:
• Unified, hierarchical structure
• Standardized, replicated, rotating job posts
• Alienable property rights
• Graded, institutionalized punishments
• Rhetorical emphasis on universal norms
• Few well-known leaders or figures 11

Legitimacy. If “legitimacy”—with its heavy normative connotations—is a perennially contested

concept with respect to states, then “legitimacy in criminal governance” may seem downright
oxymoronic. Nonetheless, how COs’ authority is viewed, and by whom, are critically important
questions. I distinguish two dimensions of legitimacy—“bottom-up” and “top-down”—along which
CO governance may vary. The former understands legitimacy as flowing from the consent of the
governed, the latter as “officially sanctioned” by other power-holders, such as states in the
international system. 11

Weber characterized bottom-up legitimacy as “voluntary submission” (1947, 324) in hopes of

making it empirically observable, but oppressed people may hide their true feelings. Trying to
assess whether civilians meaningfully consent to their armed domination by criminal organizations
may seem particularly perverse. If, as Wedeen argues, “conflation of legitimacy with acceptance,
acquiescence, consent, and/or obedience is problematic for any political regime” (2015, xiv), then it
is surely more so for a criminal authority.
Still, the pragmatic question of how willingly subjects comply with the rules and restrictions
imposed is of even greater importance to COs than states. Like states, COs reap standard benefits
from “voluntary submission”, including less need for costly punishment of transgressors (Skaperdas
and Syropoulos 1997). But unlike states, Cos face an immediate threat from states if disgruntled
subjects inform on them to police. (…) virtually all governing COs have strong incentives to keep
their subjects minimally satisfied, and that failure to do so may manifest in observable ways 11-12
All things equal, bottom-up legitimacy is likely reduced by any taxes (i.e., protection fees) charged
to residents and businesses, and by COs’ use of violence to resolve disputes and achieve their
desired outcomes (Arias 2006; Barnes 2018), though residents may tolerate or even support high
levels of both if overall CO governance meets shared expectations of behavior and performance 12

For Weber, these shared expectations—the basis on which authority is accepted as appropriate by
the dominated—vary with the structure of authority: charismatic rulers are legitimated by virtue of
their unique, personal characteristics; bureaucrats by virtue of adherence to universal rules and
norms and efficacy in carrying out assigned duties. An intriguing question is whether those subject
to criminal governance judge governing COs on differentbases depending on their structure of
authority. Recent work on the PCC suggests that people under rational-bureaucratic governance
indeed judge local leaders against universal normative standards (Biondi 2016; Feltran 2018) 12

Why Govern Other Criminals?

The conventional wisdom in organized crime scholarship is that COs govern non-member criminal
actors in order to tax them. While compelling, this explanation is not exhaustive. 12

Rent extraction/extortion. Schelling famously identified organized crime with the extraction of
tribute from other, presumably unorganized, criminal actors: “Organized crime does have a
victim . . . the man who sells illicit services to the public. And the crime of which he is the
victim is the crime of extortion” (1971, 76). Schelling focused on protection from police as the
source of Cos’ extortionary power, but the same logic applies when COs
govern, pacify, and streamline illicit markets like the retail drug trade, creating a taxable economic
surplus (e.g., Skarbek 2011). This logic predicts that variation in criminal governance tracks the
tradeoff between Cos’ costs of provision and their potential gains from taxation 12

Self-protection. Many prison gangs arise as self-protection pacts, to ward off predation by other
inmates and abuse by officials. Even if establishing social order among the prison masses yields
additional benefits for gang members, they enjoy physical security as much as the larger inmate 13

Political leverage. COs may govern criminal populations in part to win loyalty and build political
constituencies, ultimately amassing leverage against the state. This logic is pronounced among
prison gangs. 13

Normative reasons. COs often espouse ethical or even ideological reasons for governance. Prison-
gang prohibition of rape, for example, is generally presented as a moral victory over an execrable
practice. Virtually all Brazilian prison gangs have adopted a version of the CV’s motto “Peace,
Justice, and Liberty”, and regularly frame their actions as part of a “struggle” (luta) against official
injustice and depraved rivals (… Whether normative concerns truly motivate costly governance
activities or are post-hoc justifications is often unclear, in part because governance may also yield
economic, political, and strategic advantages) 13
Why Govern Civilians?
Taxation/extortion. If states provide order, security, and governance with the ultimate aim of
maximizing revenue-extraction from subjects (e.g., Levi 1989; Olson 1993; Tilly 1985), perhaps
COs do as well. Many COs indeed function as protection rackets, whose customers often
include civilians (Gambetta 1993). However, COs with other income sources—especially drug
trafficking—often abstain from taxing civilians, suggesting additional motives. 13

Reduce exposure to policing and repression. Another common explanation of gang rule is that it
minimizes police incursions and patrolling in CO territory. (…) Political leverage. Instilling loyalty
may also help Cos mobilize residents to engage in protest activities, (…) Increase profits. For COs
engaging in illicit economic activity, especially retail drug trafficking, governance is likely good for
business.(…) Crowd out or deter potential competitors. This logic may help explain situations
where COs govern but do not seem to earn large rents in return. Just as community support for
the local CO may reduce that CO’s exposure to police, it may, by the same token, make it harder for
a rival CO to invade or infiltrate

Other non-material benefits. COs may also be motivated by status concerns, especially access to
women. While generally understudied, anecdotal evidence indicates that sex plays an important role
in gang recruitment and CO activity. A key empirical question, though, is whether status accrues
only or more to COs and members when they govern. If simply being a flush drug trafficker wins
one status, then this logic cannot explain why COs govern. Some COs also express a sense of duty
to the community, especially if members are locals

Complementary to internal governance. Governing civilians may facilitate CO internal governance

by providing leaders with opportunities to train and evaluate mid-level managers. For example, a
high-ranking Medellín banda leader portrayed governance as a useful barometer of neighborhood
combo leaders’ skill, because “you can always see if the neighborhood is organized or not.”22
Governing civilians well might also signal COs’ broader capacity to non-members, whether
potential recruits or rivals. 14

Criminal governance inescapably undermines the state’s monopoly on the use of force, but is not
necessarily diametrically opposed to states’ interests. True, a key motive for criminal governance is
keeping the state at bay, sometimes through debilitating anti-state protest and violence. States, in
turn, may find criminal governance sufficiently embarrassing and problematic to combat it
through muscular interventions that, often enough, fail or backfire. Yet criminal governance can
also be inoffensive or even useful to states, whose relationship to COs may blend violence and
repression at one level with detente or even cooperation at another. 14

Among prominent conceptual frameworks of crime–state relations (e.g., Arias 2017; Barnes 2017;
Koivu 2018; Lupsha 1996; Magaloni, Franco-Vivanco and Melo 2020; Snyder and Durán-Martínez
2009), we can discern three broad types of cooperative arrangements. In the first, what Barnes
(2017) calls “Integration,” COs so penetrate the state that they can use its resources for their own
criminal ends. In the other two types, the state remains autonomous from COs, but tolerates their
illicit activity in exchange for key benefits (Koivu 2018). In the first, vividly characterized by
Snyder and Durán-Martínez (2009) as “State-Sponsored Protection,” the key benefit is illicit rents,
often from drug trafficking. 23 In the second, what Barnes (2017) calls “Alliance,” states rely on
COs’ coercive force to neutralize third-party threats
Criminal governance does not fit easily into these forms of state-crime cooperation. Governing COs
are often highly marginalized or even demonized; this lack of top-down legitimacy makes
Integration basically unthinkable. Criminal governance also seems unlikely to sustain State-
Sponsored Protection, since many governance activities, such as public-goods provision and
dispute-resolution, neither generate rents nor constitute crimes, while others such as extortion are
difficult for police to observe, and hence to target for bribe-collection. Finally, criminal governance
differs from Alliance in that COs’ coercive capacity—though it may help keep order—does not
counter an organized threat to the state. 14

A more apt concept is crime–state “Symbiosis.” First, however, the term must be clarified.(...)
Building on these ideas, I propose a narrower definition of Symbiosis. First, it implies coexistence
of separate entities, and so differs fundamentally from Integration. Second, mutual benefits
constitute a necessary but not sufficient condition for Symbiosis, since they also play a key role in
Alliance and State-Sponsored Protection. Symbiosis differs in that it need not involve strategic,
deliberate, or even conscious cooperation. Rather, it evokes distinct organisms each of whose life
functions and survival strategies produce things—possibly useless or even harmful to the producer
—that are useful or “nutritive” to the other. In blunt biological terms, one creature’s waste may be
another’s food. As such, Symbiosis does not require affinity, aligned preferences, or a division of
mutually desired resources; it does, however, imply entanglement, a growing together, and mutual
dependence that may deepen over time—traits Lupsha (1996) emphasized14-15

Symbiosis thus defined encompasses state actions and policies that inadvertently strengthen COs
and fuel criminal governance in particular. Of course, state repression directly generates some of the
incentives for criminal governance, as discussed earlier. In addition, anti-crime and mass-
incarceration measures can provide resources for CO governance, including recruitment and
networking opportunities, incentives for collective action, and even coercive power over those
governed (Skarbek 2011).(...) Even policies designed to weaken prison gangs can be
counterproductive: transferring leaders to far-flung prisons can facilitate gang propagation, while
harsh solitary-confinement regimes can become badges of honor for leaders (Salla 2006, 298) and
push COs to develop rational-bureaucratic structures like rotating leadership posts (Dias 2009, 138).
In all these cases, state policy “worked” in an immediate sense, but in so doing inadvertently
fostered criminal governance. 15-16

Conversely, criminal governance may, from COs’ perspective, inadvertently facilitate undesirable
state actions, policies, or neglect. Most vividly, CO governance over sprawling, overcrowded, and
ever-expanding prison systems helps keep mass incarceration itself viable. Such governance clearly
benefits imprisoned gang leaders and governed inmates by constraining prison violence. But in so
doing, it allows states to maintain large inmate populations while skimping on infrastructure,
guards, food and medical services, and so on. In urban peripheries, providing public order and
stable property rights may help keep police out—likely one of COs’ prime motives—but it also
reduces the costs to states of broader, ongoing neglect of marginalized areas and populations. What
are, for Cos, unintended consequences of criminal governance can be very valuable to developing
states. “Symbiosis” captures this sense of inadvertently—or even unconsciously— mutual benefits.

Si bien mas cerrada que la idea de “definición recíproca” de Graham, esta noción de simbiois
permiteapuntar de formamas directa (aunque cuidado com las formulaciones normativas, o los
funcionalismos negativos) los aspectos em los que el Estado se “nutre” de las gobernanzas
criminales

The embedded quality of criminal governance has two central implications for future research.
First, we cannot understand either the causes or consequences of criminal governance in isolation
from the state. In some cases—like prison populations and illicit drug markets—muscular state
action creates the objects of criminal governance. In other cases, like informal neighborhoods, the
state may be sufficiently weak or negligent to allow criminal groups to establish local authority over
civilians, yet present enough—just a tip-line call away—to serve as a useful check on criminal
authority. The consequences of criminal governance are also bound up with its embeddedness, not
only because COs may hobble (Córdova 2019) or distort (Arias 2006) civilians’ political
participation, but because of the deeper, politically schizophrenic experience of living under a
duopoly of violence. Slum residents and inmates alike must navigate a treacherous and shifting
landscape of overlapping yet antagonistic authorities (e.g., Arias 2017; Biondi 2016; Hirata 2018).
Knowing which quotidian problems are the gang’s to solve and which are the state’s can be a matter
life or death. This is a novel form of “low-intensity citizenship” (O’Donnell 1993) whose effects on
democracy, development, and the rule of law deserve focused study 15-16

The second implication is more controversial: we can no longer truly understand state governance
in isolation from criminal governance (Arias 2006; Koivu 2018; Leeds 1996). State policies like
drug prohibition, mass incarceration, non-incorporation of informal settlements into the formal city,
and “criminalization” of immigration and welfare policy (Hinton 2016) have vastly expanded the
criminal domain; yet effectively governing spaces within this domain is perennially challenging for
states. That the resulting social orders—however unjust—are stable at all is partially due to capacity
of criminal organizations to govern themselves, criminal markets, and marginalized civilian
populations. Precisely because criminal governance does not constitute a direct, existential threat to
state authority, states can tolerate and benefit from it.

If in the US “the prison has been a privileged location for framing a larger [official] political order”
(Simon 2007, 473), in much of Latin America, it has become a physical and ideological locus
for promulgating criminal political orders. Critically, these criminal orders can stand in ambiguous
relationships to state order, simultaneously undermining and undergirding it. The typical biological
metaphors applied to criminal groups—viruses, parasites, or cancers on the official body politic—
are not only normatively suspect, often invoked to justify a politics of quarantine and
extermination; they may be fundamentally misleading. Symbiotic relationships are possible, and
perhaps more common than we realize. 16

If true, the consequences for political science are difficult to overstate. In the modern era, states’
leeway to negotiate with and even incorporate criminal groups has shrunk dramatically, while
increasingly militarized policing and mass incarceration have failed to curb crime—especially
the drug trade. The result is “hurting stalemates” that never produce “ripeness” for negotiation
(Zartman 2001); in the worst cases, violent criminal conflicts grind on for decades, transforming
urban peripheries and drug routes into active war zones. Explaining criminal resilience to and
violence against state repression are worthy goals for research. But the Symbiosis metaphor
suggests a deeper, epistemological issue. To the extent that states rely on criminal governance,
we cannot understand why state repression has not eliminated crime any more than we can
“understand” why humans’ immune systems have not eliminated the microorganisms we need to
survive.16

En Koivu Illicit partners and the State

Conventionally, the relationship between organized criminal groups (OCGs) and

states is depicted as either antagonistic, where the state tries to combat OCGs, or
opportunistic, where they co-opt one another. The former is taken as evidence of rule of
law, while the latter is regarded as corruption. Cases are then assumed to exist on a
spectrum of more or less corrupt. However, though corruption can be widespread, it is
an individual-level phenomenon. Corruption, the use of public office for private gain
(Treisman 2000), aptly describes the interaction between criminal groups and individ-
ual members of government who take bribes, fix trials, and secure lucrative government
contracts. However, the goal of these activities is essentially the same: private enrich-
ment. Evaluating state-OCG relationships as corruption allows us to understand how
political systems may permit behavior that diminishes democratic institutions. Howev-
er, it obscures group-level interactions occurring between criminal groups and states,
particularly those diverging from traditional ideas of corruption. For example, states
that cooperate with criminal groups may do so in pursuit of a developmental goal,
which problematizes corruption as a strategy for private gain. Conversely, states that
contest criminal groups may do so by cooperating with other coercive, noncriminal
groups (as the Finnish state did with the fascist Lapua Movement), challenging the idea
that fighting criminal groups is tantamount to the rule of law. 2

Contrary to theories of organized crime that posit state absence as a driving force of
criminal group development, organized crime is best understood as a phenomenon
driven by and driving the statebuilding process. States create illicit markets by crimi-
nalizing certain activities. The types of criminal groups that emerge determine the menu
of developmental partners later available to the state. Different types of state-criminal
group interactions contribute to the development of various state capacities. While
combating criminal groups develops the state’s coercive capacity (Andreas 2013),
cooperating with them develops capacity as well, though this may be short-term. In
the discussion that follows, states cooperated with criminal groups as part of a
developmental strategy for industrialization. As the cases below demonstrate, challeng-
ing criminal groups developed coercive political institutions, while cooperating with
them developed economic institutions. In other words, as the state made criminal
groups, criminal groups made the state 3

Criminal groups develop coercive skills if the use of force is not costly and the illicit market is
characterized by the need to control territory. The need to control territory requires a physical,
coercive presence that fosters the use of violence. The costliness of force depends (in part) on
whether the state adequately polices violent reprisals among and between gang members. Criminal
groups invest in the development of coercive skills in order to defend their territory and their
business from other criminal groups, especially if the state turns a blind eye to such violence. Those
groups that become skilled in the use of violence may sell that skill to other actors in the illicit
market,enforcing transactions that are outside of the state’s purview. These groups may eventually
sell their services to the state as well.
If the illicit market does not involve the control of territory or the use of force is costly, OCGs will
invest primarily in productive activities. Markets that do not require the control of territory include
long distance trafficking, particularly when the source of the contraband item cannot easily be
monopolized (…) Long distance trafficking and/or the costliness of the use of force discourages
criminal groups from investing in coercive skills, and they will instead focus on productive
activities. While they have no coercive skills to later sell to the state, they can be a source of capital
for the state 5-6

Collaborative Relationships
States that cooperate with coercive criminal groups develop collaborative relationships. In
a collaborative relationship, the state relinquishes their monopoly of coercion to insulate
themselves from other domestic threats. Levels of violence are moderate, as the OCG is
allowed to use violence to conduct business, while also acting as a coercive wing of the
state. These cases represent Snyder and Duran-Martinez’s (2009) state-sponsored protec-
tion rackets, where public officials selectively enforce the law in return for services from
the criminal group 6

Supportive Relationships
Noncoercive groups that are incorporated into the state will be used as partners for
economic development. Just as their incorporated coercive counterparts, these nonco-
ercive groups will collaborate with the state in order to develop local markets. Profits
from these illicit exchanges are reinvested in other sectors of the economy, operating as
an unofficial subsidy. The difference between noncoercive criminal groups and coer-
cive criminal groups in a permissive state is that the former are unlikely to share
coercive authority with the state, whereas the latter are much more likely to do so.
Cases that fit this type include Persia, pre-WWII Yugoslavia, and Turkey, where states
partnered with the capital-rich but nonviolent gangs as a means of developing lagging
economic sectors, often the pharmaceutical industry.6

Competitive Relationships
If the state resists coercive OCGs, the criminal group and the state will have a
competitive relationship. Levels of violence may be high as criminal groups openly
clash with the state and each other. It is important to note that there is likely to be
corruption in these cases, at lower and even middle levels of government, though the
state’s official policy will be to challenge criminal groups. Though the relationship is
violent and competitive, even weak states may adopt this strategy. Furthermore, this
relationship may increase the state’s coercive capacity. Andreas (2013) documents how
prohibition in the USA produced more than just bootlegging gangs—it created an
efficient and well-funded Coast Guard. Cases that fit this type include the USA,
Sweden, and Finland. 7

Evasive Relationships
When there are primarily noncoercive criminal groups and the state resists them, the
criminal groups respond by avoiding the state or relocating. Unskilled in violence, they
rely on their preferred business practices that emphasize win-win negotiations and
wage premiums because this draws little to no attention from law enforcement. When
transactional disputes arise, either side will seek a nonviolent way of resolving it to
prevent attracting attention from the state. This may include writing off the loss as a
business expense and refusing to do business with the offending party in the future.
Cases that fit this type include Canada, the Netherlands, and Britain.7

State cooperates State challenges

Coercive Collaborative relationship: Competitive relationship: state
criminal state shares develops
group coercive authority with coercive capacity by clashing
criminal group in violently with
return for political support criminal group (Finland)
(Japan)
Noncoercive Supportive relationship: state Evasive relationship: state
criminal uses OCG regularly enforces
group capital to develop economic law, causing criminal groups to
sectors go
(Turkey) underground (Britain
pp7

While Japan is often presented as a typical case of mafia development, i.e., coercive organizations
emerge to protect property rights in illicit markets due to the absence of the state, the historical
record supports this only partially. While yakuza gangs developed coercive capacity initially in
unpoliced areas, they were able to sustain that capacity over time at the encouragement of the state,
first as bodyguards at opium dens, and later as strikebreakers. Far from being captured, the state
actively sought the assistance of yakuza gangs. A shared nationalist bent and distrust of labor made
them natural collaborators when striking workers threatened nascent industries 9

Turkey and Japan similarly adopted only the thinnest of narcotics regulations, while
both were eager to capitalize on opium profits and enable domestic criminal groups.
However, the relationship between criminal gangs and the state differed between
Turkey and Japan because Japanese gangs had coercive skills. The yakuza gangs’
illicit economic activities were tolerated by the state, but the crux of their relationship
was in the protective function the yakuza gangs were able to provide. They had
developed a vast capacity for coercion by this time, and the state was keen to purchase
it. In Turkey, the state initially took a laissez-faire approach, where traffickers were left
to their own devices, and it was hoped they would reinvest their earnings. In both cases,
however, states flouted international regulations and partnered with criminal groups to
develop or subsidize the industrial sector. Partnering with criminal groups did not
increase the state’s coercive capacity, but it did increase the state’s ability to manage
internal markets—Turkish gangs contributed capital, Japanese gangs suppressed labor.
Criminal groups contributed to statebuilding not by enhancing the state’s coercive
institutions but by enabling the state to develop economic sectors 12

Alcohol prohibition was instituted in Finland from 1919 to 1932 in response to

domestic pressure that emphasized the danger alcohol posed to the character of the
working class. Smuggling gangs soon emerged to control the illicit trade in alcohol, and
at times, resorted to violence amongst each other and against the state. The state did not
partner with these coercive gangs however, for two reasons: (1) prohibition was enacted
to safeguard the public order that these gangs now threatened, and (2) the state had
another coercive partner already partially integrated into the state machinery: the Civil
Guard.12

There are similarities with the Turkish and Japanese cases: All states recognized the
potential for revenue from the commodity in question. In Turkey and Japan, interna-
tional pressures to prohibit the opium trade clashed with domestic pressure to allow it.
Conversely, in Finland, it was the public that demanded prohibition (Sariola 1954).
Eventually, in Finland, public demands trumped fiscal concerns 13

Before prohibition could be implemented, however, a civil war broke out, leading to
the emergence of several coercive groups, most notably the Suojeluskunta (Civil
Guard). Characterized as both a war between social classes and for independence,
conflict broke out in 1918, with the country divided sharply into Red and White
fighting divisions. (...) The White Guard emerged victorious and, with the support of
the right-wing elements in the state, became the Suojeluskunta, a coercive organization
that existed alongside the army, whose primary purpose was to root out communism
(Alapuro 1988).

Está interesante que el paralelismo mas directo de AL contemporanea venga del caso finlandes, y
del doble criterio de presión doméstica para la prohibición, y de un cuerpo para policial que hace
innecesaria la alianza com grupos criminales. Hasta que pnto puedepensarse lapolicia de AL,
forjada em las doctrina de la seguridad nacional, como paralela a las milicias finalndesas?

While smuggling gangs threatened public order, the state believed the labor move-
ment did, too; these threats were connected as traffickers often came from the working
class. A contemporary survey of the prohibition era reveals that most convictions for
smuggling alcohol went to sailors and chauffeur 13
By comparison, the Civil Guard, due to their role in the civil war and their distrust of
communists, were a more attractive coercive partner. As we saw in the Japanese case,
partnering with criminal coercive gangs against the labor movement is part of what
gave the Japanese yakuza its long-term sustainability as a criminal enterprise. Alcohol
trafficking gangs in Finland were not used for that purpose by the state and did not long
outlive the repeal of prohibition. By fighting criminal groups, however, Finland
developed much needed coercive capacity. Political will to fight smuggling increased
throughout the 1920s, as did communication between government agencies, the size of
the police force (Häkkinen 2003), and the quality of the coast guard’s equipment (Dahl
2003)—all unintended consequences of combating smuggling. Finland may not have
set out to improve the capacity of their coercive and political institutions, but it
happened nonetheless 14

The four cases above suggest that under domestic pressure for prohibition, the
state was less likely to tolerate emerging criminal groups. Domestic prohibition
movements argued that alcohol and opium threatened public health and order; the
criminal groups that surfaced were a continuation of this threat. Conversely, under
international pressure for prohibition, states had less incentive to curtail the growth of
criminal groups, particularly if there was no popular objection to that commodity. This
corresponds with Dewey’s (2012) findings that states are more likely to cooperate with
criminal actors when the public does not morally object to the illegal market in
question. 16-17

The feedback effects of the process should be noted. States create illicit markets and
criminal groups. These criminal groups develop core capacities, in part based on how
the state reacts to their use of violence. States and criminal groups interact, in part based
on whether those criminal groups are skilled in violence. However, while states may
create violent criminal groups, they often do so unintentionally and encounter them at
later stages. Thus, the decision to cooperate with these groups is distinct, often
temporally, from the set of policy choices that created them. Furthermore, while the
state’s response to a criminal group’s use of violence may raise or lower the costliness
of the use of force, it is not the only factor. Long-distance monitoring and large-number
markets can also raise the cost of force. In other words, though the state may influence
whether criminal groups develop coercive capacity, it is not the only cause.17

This article also highlights the conditions under which crackdowns, state-sponsored
protection rackets, and the diversion of agricultural exports to illicit markets might
occur—as the state’s response to a variable mix of domestic and international pressure.
An important implication is that international narcotics regimes designed to solve the
problems of the first world may create incentives for states in the developing world to
cooperate with criminal groups. By trying to externalize national narcotics policy, the
developed world may create even bigger problems globally.18

Em Rodgers “the state as a gang”

From this perspective, gangs in mid-1990s Nicaragua can be said to have

institutionally organized local collective life in the country’s ‘brown’ zones,
providing micro-regimes of order as well as communal forms of belonging
to definite, albeit bounded, collective entities.
As such, these gangs seem to bear out the idea of an ontological equiv-
alence between state and non-state forms of order, to the extent that the
order articulated by Nicaraguan gangs in the mid-1990s can plausibly be
seen as a case of ‘old wine in new bottles’ in relation to the ‘state effect’
promulgated by the revolutionary Nicaraguan state during the 1980s 321

It can still be contended that gangs in the early 2000s were socially
structuring institutions, but they promulgated a very different form of
social order to those of the mid-1990s. The means through which they
shaped social life were very different, stemming ‘negatively’ from their
ability to carry out arbitrary acts of violence that displayed little regularity
rather than the ‘positive’ imposition of predictable behavioural and cosmo-
logical frameworks. In this the basis of the order they imposed arguably
corresponded to Schmitt’s (1985 [1933]: 5) notion of ‘sovereign power’,
which he saw as being ‘not about the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but
. . . the monopoly to decide’ in an unconstrained manner who is a ‘friend’
and who is an ‘enemy’ through the imposition of a ‘state of exception’322

I want to suggest heuristically

is that, just as the nature of gangs and the order they promulgated changed
between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, one can imagine an equivalent
process happening in relation to the Nicaraguan state, such that its contem-
porary institutional incarnation has taken on new functions and new modes
of operation. In other words, the contemporary Nicaraguan state has
perhaps not so much ‘eroded’ as ‘mutated’ compared to the state in the
1980s, and can therefore be thought about as ‘new wine in old bottles’, to
continue with the previous oenological metaphor 324

(tanto las gangs como el Estado "mutan" a formas mas predatorias)

States have followed an

evolutionary sequence whereby ‘disciplinary’ forms of governmentality that
order individual bodies in time and space have been replaced by ‘bio-
political’ forms of governmentality that rest upon the management of whole
populations rather than individuals, through the identification of categories
of ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ persons, with the former being managed and ‘made
to live’ in particular ways, while the latter are neglected and ‘left to die’. 324-325

Repaso foucaultiano, que ayuda a enteder el trabajo de Graham también

Although the ‘disembedding’ that Managua has

undergone seems superficially amenable to O’Donnell’s colour-coded
analysis, insofar as the Nicaraguan elite could be construed as living in state-
sanctioned ‘blue’ zones, and while the poor survive in state-abandoned
‘brown’ zones, this is perhaps better explained as a reflection of the division
of the country’s population into groups of ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ citizens. The
Nicaraguan state is not absent from the ‘brown’ zones, as the ever-
increasing number of unpredictable and violent police patrols in poor
urban slums and neighbourhoods testify. What these represent, however,
are not so much a resurgence of Weberian forms of ‘panopticon’ control
and regulation – which implicitly underpin O’Donnell’s framework – but
rather reflect a qualitatively different form of state governmentality, based
on the ability to repeatedly precipitate localized ‘states of exception’
through terrorizing raids that symbolically demonstrate the arbitrary power
of the state and enforce the separation of Nicaraguan society into ‘valid’
and ‘invalid’ populations. The creation of these ‘states of exception’ has in
other words become the strategic principle of power upon which modern
state governmentality is based in Nicaragua. 325

The basis
of the contemporary Nicaraguan state’s governmentality of violence differs
from that implicit in the Marxist analysis – which is largely comparable to
Weberian functionalism – and operates in a way that is heuristically com-
parable to the governmentality of Nicaraguan gang violence in the early
2000s, such that the state can plausibly be conceptualized as ontologically
equivalent to a gang. 326

In opposition to ‘vulgar’ Weberian analyses of state-based forms of rational

order and the state’s functional deployment of violence, and using the
transformation of non-state forms of ‘social sovereignty’ as represented by
Nicaraguan gangs as a heuristic trope, I have attempted to underline how
state governmentality, particularly with regards to violence, has undergone
a critical transformation in late 20th- and early 21st-century Nicaragua.
Compared to the revolutionary state of the 1980s in particular, the contem-
porary Nicaraguan state can be conceived as a form of ‘new wine in old
bottles’, in that, although it bears superficial institutional resemblance with
the past, it has a qualitatively different logic. The particulars of its trans-
formation closely mirror the changing dynamics of Nicaraguan youth
gangs, which in the mid-1990s were associated with routinized forms of
violence that solidaristically provided a sense of predictability and symbolic
reference point for everyday local life in urban Nicaragua, but became
exclusive and predatory social institutions that brutally imposed order
through the creation of regimes of arbitrary terror to protect their drug
dealing interests in the early 2000s. The Nicaraguan state has similarly
become a locus for parochial elite interests, who have captured the state
apparatus and are promoting an exclusive social order based on the violent
separation of Nicaraguan society into ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ population
groups.327

This underlines a basic paradox regarding the state, which, as Spinoza

(1951 [1883]: 311) points out, is that although it is clearly a privileged
social institution that ‘establishes the law’, there is nothing that inherently
makes it ‘bound by law’, and this makes it extremely vulnerable to crossing
over what Agamben (1998: 32) calls ‘the point of indistinction between
violence and law’. Although anthropology has proven itself to be very good
at exploring the institutional ‘blurriness’ of states, it has not really proposed
significant ways of thinking about the ‘blurriness’ of state action, particu-
larly in terms of the political project that underlies this action. Obviously,
the state is not a singular political project, but rather a potential vehicle, in
a number of different ways, for a variety of possible political projects. These,
however, are historically contingent and represent the sedimentation of
everyday routinized practices of power that need to be understood on their
own terms rather than according to putatively normative ones. The chal-
lenge for anthropology, therefore, is to shift its attention from studying
states as institutional practices, whether formal and informal, to thinking
about the political rationale underlying states and their different forms of
governmentality. Only in this way will the discipline be able to reconnect
with what Hegel (1956) saw as the fundamental question regarding the
state as a social institution: whether it is an ‘ethical project’ or not. 326-327

En Fernandez-Kelly, P. Introduction, en Fernández-Kelly, P., & Shefner, J. (2006). Out of the

shadows: political action and the informal economy in Latin America. Penn State Press.

In the final analysis, both Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations, including

de Soto’s oddly libertarian scheme, fall analytically short. Missing are cogent
explorations of the role of the state and popular activism in the maintenance
of economic informality. That limitation seems all the more surprising in
hindsight because it is the state embodied in multiple practices, agencies,
departments, and divisions that creates the conditions for the expansion
or contraction of the informal economy. Without formal laws defining the
relationship between employers and workers, the informal economy cannot
exist. Put differently, formality breeds informality. Furthermore, underground
transactions are facilitated by factors such as
1 The passage of legislation and legislative amends at various govern-
mental levels in response to constituencies in different positions of
political and economic strength;
2 The uneven enforcement capabilities of state dependencies; and
3 The actions of agencies with specific and sometimes contradictory mandates. p.3

Since the 1980s, a voluminous literature focused on advanced and less

developed countries pointing to variations and regularities in the interactions
between formal and informal sectors. Researchers documented, for example,
how people move intermittently between the two domains, responding to
need and opportunity (Fortuna and Prates 1991). They also showed how small
businesses resort to unauthorized productive arrangements during times of
financial crisis and how law-abiding firms occasionally engage the services of
home workers to supplement production during periods of increasing demand
(Benería and Roldán 1987). In other words, a mounting body of evidence made
clear that a porous membrane, not a rigid boundary, separates the formal and
informal sectors. p.4

En Beraldo Social Dynamics of violence and respect

Although the literature on Latin America cited in the following section has demonstrated that
criminal groups have indeed managed to establish governance in many areas throughout the
continent, it has also demonstrated the various forms in which the state remains present in the lives
of the urban poor, from schools to health care and from income transfer programmes to police
repression. Thus, the state and crime are not mutually exclusive but act simultaneously.6
And, in fact, the works on violence in areas of urban poverty in Latin America which I cite in the
following section have generally focused on the relations between crime and state as these
governances rely, ultimately, on their capacity to resort to violence. Although this does make sense,
this literature misses a very important facet of violence – its social plausibility. This article switches
the focus of the analysis from who employs violence to who is the victim of this violence. By
drawing on ethnographic research carried out in Morro da Luz and focusing on Du’s life
story from this perspective, this paper explores important transformations in the social fabric of the
Brazilian lower classes in recent decades and focuses on the formation of bodies that are ‘subject to
violence’, of lives that don’t matter, of deaths that can’t be mourned.

En Willis City of clones

São Paulo, Brazil, is a city defined by formal and informal practices. For every formal
service provided by the state – ranging from urban planning, public transportation, to
economic regulation, security, and so on – there are myriad ‘informal’ practices and
institutions offering the same or similar service. These informal practices and institutions
routinely emerge in spaces where the state appears absent. But this ‘absence’ is a practice
of governance. These are spaces where populations are left to die, almost unremarkably,
precisely because their subjects have been systematically devalued by the state – if not
society more generally (Mbembe, 2003; Sarat and Culbert, 2009; Wacquant, 2008). The
‘formal’ and the ‘informal’ exist in relation to each other, where both are mutually pro-
duced and bound together by shared practices of power and common assumptions about
larger patterns of political authority 1-2

I argue for a consideration of São Paulo as a city of clones, where formal institutions
and outcomes exist intertwined with informal copies of the same institutions and out-
comes. Some such copies are easier to identify vis-a-vis their originals. They are visible,
material, as with housing production in informal settlements; while others are more
obscured from view, as with everyday policing practices in informal areas. Yet there are
still other practices in São Paulo where it quite literally takes a magnifying glass to dis-
cern the difference between one and the other. This is the difference between cloned and
‘real’ cars on the street – and the bureaucracies that make them possible, as I will explore.
Even where the real and the facsimile appear distinct, or where they appear indistinct,
they are nonetheless produced by mutually constitutive practices that bind the formal and
informal realms together.2

The production of originals and facsimiles has a spatial logic as well, reflecting his-
torical patterns of state–society relations and urbanization processes. Originals operate in
spaces of relatively strong state–society relations, where centrally-distributed and gov-
ernment-monitored services are more prominent. Facsimiles proliferate in areas where
state presence is relatively weak, selective, or even absent. Their emergence can be seen
as a mode of survival or adaptation to neglect and the paucity of centrally redistributed
services. Urbanization processes further differentiate these governance zones, as state
absence and self-governance responses are more likely to exist in the ‘informally built’
periphery than in the formally-built centre (Roy, 2009; Roy and AlSayyad, 2004). Yet
despite their spatial differentiation, ‘originals’ and ‘facsimiles’ coexist in the same met-
ropolitan arena.2

Still, how these spaces (informal setlements) are actively produced by political authority in a larger
system of empirical governance is too narrowly theorized. Notably, the idea of state ‘absence’ as
governance – that populations are left to die as a matter of sovereign power (Agamben,
1998; Mbembe, 2003) – has not informed empirical urban studies, especially in the
Global South (Roy, 2009). Some scholars have recently argued that we must consider the
city as a larger whole, not merely as a collection of seemingly distinct, noteworthy, or
problematic pieces (Arias, 2006; Diken, 2005). The prominent and systemically routi-
nized existence of ‘clones’ of state institutions and practices signifies an important con-
ceptual category in this regard. These replicas are spatial practices nonetheless at the
centre of governance, unexceptional in their everyday existence within bureaucracies. In
the state’s tacit acceptance of these practices, it marks them as normal within routine
political practice (Schmitt, 1985) 3-4

The simultaneous incorporation of top-down and bottom-up practices into a larger

system of political ordering recalls Weberian notions of administration, territory and
governance as qualities of the urban (Weber, 1958). Such a system reflects empirical
spatial practices that are not necessarily oppositional or antagonistic. Rather, seemingly
distinct spatial practices – housing, urbanization, policing, justice, cloned cars, among
many other possibilities – are mutually produced, mutually productive, and complemen-
tary in their formation of a more or less stable pattern of governance. Together, facsimi-
les and their originals coexist and produce a particular format of administration, territory
and governance that incorporates rather than excludes spatial histories of exclusion and
means of survival.

Esta idea de complemetariedad y produccion y productividad mutua es central. La referencia es de

“the city” de Weber, pero me parece que su idea es bastante mas ambiciosa que cualquier
planteamiento Weberiano

s particular sites of governance and authority, cities

embody the ways that the relative ‘exclusion’ of certain populations is central to the
production of political order (Agamben, 1998; Schmitt, 1985). The existence of ‘slums’
as a particular manifestation of informal urbanization, for example, is indicative of
authorities’ abilities to produce and define what is considered normal. While it is tempt-
ing to see informality as ‘exceptional’, it is not. The indignities of infrastructure absence,
mundane police violence and subhuman everyday conditions are systemic. On a closer
look, it is analytically impossible to separate the formal and the informal, or, in other
words, to make one part of something that is profoundly normal, exceptional. Slums fall
acutely into this category – that which is unexceptional, can be removed, violated,
stripped of dignity without great resistance. To demarcate informality as exceptional is to
take a position that defies everyday practice.

Las referencias a Schmitt aqui son mas aclaradoras que las de Weber.

While it would be easy to see gangs, organized crime and lynch mobs as antagonistic
to the larger established order – the formal and informal do spar violently on occasion,
and more obviously at certain scales of analysis – both sets of actors often subscribe to
the same logic with respect to who can (or should) be the subject of violence and why
(Denyer Willis, forthcoming). The consequence of such an alignment is that the formal
and informal systems of justice come to coexist as equally salient components in a
larger system, producing – as it were – a single ‘ecology’ of policing or security. The
formal public administration of violence reduction, though not always carried out by the
bureaucracy of the state, nonetheless works similarly to the informal administration of
security. Together, these practices suggest that the actions of devalued populations are
central to a single logic of governance, even one dominated by formal state actions,
both in terms of their systemic victimization of certain populations and in the nature of
responses to victimization. Inequitable patterns of urbanisation are not an end condition.
They are formative, engendering forms of organisation that are indistinct from the system
that made them necessary 5

Cloned cars illustrate how the

social practices of devalued populations have become pervasive and indistinguisha-
ble from the practices of the formal authorities, or what we might consider the ‘origi-
nal’ purveyors of social and spatial order. As such, they must be considered part of a
larger system of governance and authority, not necessarily a deviation from it. They
constitute examples of how bottom-up and top-down forms of administration coexist
and come to constitute what is both bureaucratically mundane, but also oddly
rational.10

The difficulties in distinguishing between the original and the facsimile help sus-
tain the conclusions of scholarship that sees the city as a constitutive sum of all its
parts under a larger system of authority. Especially in a place like São Paulo, where
the realm of the informal is particularly prominent, it is foolish to only consider the
local social problems of poor residents in marginalized neighbourhoods or districts
in relative isolation, as though the margins are devoid of agency and without con-
trary flows of influence. The empirical practice of governance in São Paulo, seen
through facsimiles like cloned cars, ‘criminal justice’ (Denyer Willis, 2015) and
informal urbanization, reminds us that political authority does not float ‘above’ soci-
ety and space. Governance is consumed and produced by populations and practices
that make sense for given spaces, even those locations where an absence of the state
seems to exist. Absence, in that sense, must be understood as a form of governance
constructed through abandonment. But absence also gives rise to alternative ways of
accessing the state. This is possible because that which emerges from perceived dis-
order, and on the part of under-valued populations, is assumed to be politically
inconsequential by definition. And yet, it is precisely this assumption of depleted
value that give rises to facsimiles that are otherwise not presumed important. The
self-ordering of spaces purposefully left to ‘disorder’ contributes to the constitution
and reproduction of political order. This paradox has come to define the everyday
practice of governance in São Paulo.11

em Grajales

2 hipotesis sobre los paramilitares

A nuestro juicio, en la literatura se opone una concepción de la violencia
paramilitar como un proyecto de privatización de la violencia y un análisis que
la interpreta como una forma de colapso del Estado. Sin aspirar a desarrollar una
crítica general de la literatura sobre el paramilitarismo, se busca mostrar que es
indispensable salir de esta dicotomía para abordar la relación entre los grupos
paramilitares y el Estado colombiano en términos sociológicos.

O bien organo que expande la accion del Estado, o bien criminales

la autonomía presupuestaria como complicadora de la tesis “contrainsurgente” que los asimila a

america central o cono sur

iual, tesis de “captura” del Estado, que no abarca como este realmente se producen

La mayoría de estos análisis se basan en una definición a priori del Estado,

en el que este sería, necesariamente, una entidad que debería controlar direc-
tamente un territorio sobre el cual se haría prevalecer el estado de derecho y la
democracia. Incluso los académicos más críticos, que denuncian la complicidad
entre políticos y paramilitares, o entre estos últimos y los militares, basan su
análisis en semejante visión del Estado. Entonces, hablan de un Estado local
“capturado” por las alianzas entre paramilitares y políticos (López, 2010); por
tanto, habría, por una parte, el Estado central, racional y demócrata, actuando
de acuerdo con las reglas del derecho y, por otra, las fuerzas reaccionarias locales,
que dejarían a un lado su razón de ser y quedarían “capturadas” por su deseo de
beneficio propio (Garay Salamanca, 2008).
xviiiGobernar en medio de la violencia. Estado y paramilitarismo en Colombia
Estas investigaciones sufren, en general, de un sesgo sustancialista y norma-
tivo, que retoma la terminología de los representantes del Estado, del derecho y
de las organizaciones internacionales. Definen el Estado no como lo que es, sino
como lo que analistas y académicos consideran que debería ser. De esta manera,
confunden la capacidad de las instituciones para hacer prevalecer el Estado de
derecho y la realidad del poder político. En cuanto a los análisis en términos de
delegación de la violencia, ellas hacen del Estado una cosa en sí, y a los gober-
nantes los convierte en grandes estrategas al comando de un plan macabro. Este
análisis cae entonces en un sesgo intencionalista, presumiendo capacidades de
previsión, coordinación y planeación que rara vez existen en cualquier espacios
XVI-XVII