Criminal Competition and Collective Political Mobilization

• In Event: Security and Citizenship in Latin America

Abstract

Millions of people across much of the Global South live and work in marginalized urban spaces with limited access to basic but fundamental public goods. Access to public goods impacts patterns of socioeconomic development (Besley and Ghatak 2006), perceptions of government legitimacy (Levi and Sacks 2009; Tsai 2007), the quality of citizenship (Houtzager and Acharya 2010; O’Donnell 1993), and the stability of political regimes (Levi 1988). But it is in the marginalized territories that populations with limited access to public goods reside and work where we also often find organized criminal groups (OCGs) coordinating illicit economies backed by the threat and use of violence. Existing theories of the politics of public goods provision, however, focus largely on ethnic heterogeneity (Alesina et al. 1999; Habyarimana et al. 2007), state capacity (Rauch and Evans 2000), electoral competition (Herrera 2017; Magaloni et al. 2007), partisan misalignment across levels of government (Calvo and Murillo 2004; Stokes et al. 2013; Szwarcberg 2015) and institutions of accountability (Abers 2000; Auerbach 2020; Díaz-Cayeros et al. 2014; Tsai 2007). Recent research acknowledges the roles that non-state actors play in the politics of public goods provision, including familial and other social networks, non-governmental organizations, and formal and informal businesses (Brass 2012; Cammett and MacLean 2014; MacLean 2010; Post et al. 2017) – but here criminal actors are also largely absent.

In this paper I tackle these gaps in our existing knowledge through an analysis of the role that criminal dynamics play in shaping the ability of communities to engage in collective political mobilization for public goods. I focus specifically on one core dimension of settings where organized crime is present: competition between criminal groups for territory and illicit market share. I argue that distinct levels of competition should have varied effects on the ability of communities to mobilize collectively for public goods. Criminal competition impacts the prospects for collective political mobilization by shaping the logic of crime that, in turn, influences social cohesion crucial for collective action. The logic of crime refers to the meanings and understandings that people assign to crime using both objective insights and subjective perceptions to make crime and insecurity in their neighborhood environments legible and predictable. Much like state actors simplify societal structures for the purposes of legibility to enable productivity (Scott 1998), individuals also order their environments to foster a sense of control in their lives – a particularly pressing objective in settings characterized by insecurity (García-Ponce et al. 2023). I focus on two dimensions of the logic of crime: 1) rationalization of lethal criminal violence and 2) geography of predatory crime. These two dimensions of the logic of crime combined shape the fear of victimization (Ferraro 1995; Hale 1996) which, in turn, impacts the level of social cohesion – a core building block for collective political mobilization. This framework brings together insights from political science on how contextual conditions shape armed actors’ coercive strategies (Kalyvas 2006; Humphreys and Weinstein 2006) and criminology and sociology on how individual understandings of environmental risks and threats impact perceived safety and individual behavior (Garofolo 1981; Killias 1990; Skogan and Maxfield 1981). I illustrate the analytic utility of this argument using a subnational comparative analysis across three neighborhoods in the eastern zone of Mexico City. The empirical analysis in this paper draws on data collected over nearly a year of field research carried out by myself and teams of research assistants consisting of Mexico City-based graduate students and neighborhood residents. We conducted semi-structured interviews, maintained field diaries, and collected and analyzed publicly available crime, political, and administrative data.

Author

• Eduardo Moncada, Barnard College, Columbia University