This project focuses on the practices of gangs in slums, which will soon incorporate a billion people worldwide. Although gangs' primary motivation is a monopoly of violence and the sale of drugs in these areas, many have engaged in various forms of governance over the local populace. This dissertation project will seek to delineate the causes of this variation and trace how and why gangs have engaged in such practices over time. In many slums, the state has been historically absent. In place of the state, gang organizations constitute the major political actors. Some gangs implement responsive systems of law and justice, while others do not. Eradicating or controlling gangs in these contexts requires taking into account the roles they play.
This research will involve quantitative analysis of the structural factors that that may explain variations in gang governance, including policing tactics, incursions by rival gangs, strength of civil society, and the electoral value of the slum. The research will also include in-depth qualitative case studies, semi-structured interviews and resident surveys in order to better understand gang governance practices and trace them over time. This project will be able to argue for more explicit links and commonalities between various armed actors as well as clarify the impact of various contextual factors. Furthermore, this project will demonstrate how gangs have responded to changing circumstances over time that will provide a more dynamic account of gang governance.
This project has important ramifications for urban public policy in much of the developing world in addition to engaging with important theoretical debates concerning armed groups and their relationships to civilians. Nearly half of the world lives in urban contexts and, soon, more than a billion people worldwide will live in slums and shantytowns. Gangs are present in many of these, and the types of relationships that gangs develop with residents remains the biggest determinant of basic economic welfare, provision of public goods, development of democratic practices and levels of vulnerability to violence and intimidation. Multiple states are actively confronting urban gangs and trafficking organizations and struggling to contain them. The assumption in public policy circles that gang presence and violence will automatically decrease with greater policing and provision of resources is problematic. This proposal suggests gangs are strategic and calculating players that can produce a variety of outcomes and will require a multifaceted and long-term approach in order to fully eradicate or control. The results from this project will be shared with both policymakers and academic audiences.
More than a thousand favelas dot the sprawling urban landscape of Rio de Janeiro. In most of these communities, few social services, public transportation, schools or even basic utilities are provided to the inhabitants and Rio's military police have a limited albeit brutal and corrupt presence. For their part, gang organizations maintain local monopolies of violence and can be considered the dominant political authority. Yet the relationships these organizations develop with local communities vary considerably across Rio. In some communities, gangs implement responsive systems of law and justice, maintain a relatively high degree of social order and provide some forms of welfare. In other favelas, gangs implement more violent and unresponsive governing institutions while offering the community little in terms of public goods. This dissertation project and the field work conducted over the course of 30 months in Rio de Janeiro will delineate why such governance structures can differ so drastically and how and why gangs and local residents respond to changes in these local political contexts. This project is an attempt to understand the behavior of urban armed actors. It will bridge literatures in political science, sociology, anthropology and economics while implementing novel methodological approaches (quantitative, qualitative and geographical analysis) to the study of urban political violence. First, this project will make more explicit links between different types of violent actors. The political science literature has almost entirely avoided discussion of urban gangs and the governance practices of these groups are little understood. This research will remedy this considerable gap while integrating other theoretical frameworks from other disciplines. Second, sociological studies of gangs and other research on organized crime have generally not analyzed the specifically political impacts of these organizations and have seldom made efforts to systematically analyze across armed groups within one municipal setting. The project proposed here will use many of the insights of this literature while implementing a comparative analysis in an attempt to generalize some of these theories and hypotheses. At a more general level this research will contribute to an understanding of violent non-state actors in what are usually considered stable and peaceful democratic states. This is especially relevant to the contemporary Latin American context in which multiple states are actively confronting urban gangs and trafficking organizations and struggling to contain them. Beyond Latin America, nearly half of the world lives in urban contexts and, soon, a billion people will be living in slums or shantytowns. In terms of urban governance, economic development and the consolidation of democratic institutions, such actors will play a large role in whether or not these countries are able to accomplish these goals. The field research period for this project began in October, 2012 and will conclude in February, 2015. The NSF provided funding during 12 months of this period during which I engaged in ethnographic and participant observation research activities as well as semi-structured interviews with former gang members, NGO workers, local politicians and other favela residents. During this time, I also completed the archival research for several historical favela case-studies. These qualitative methods will be supplemented by original survey data and a longitudinal dataset on violence and crime compiled through several research insitutes and non-governmental organizations for the completion of the project.
