Criminal Violence and Governance of Cities and Nations

Workshop organized by Arturo Alvarado, 2020-2021 Paris IAS Fellow, with the support of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

This event in English is open to the public.
Registration needed (see registration form at the botton of this page)

Presentation

The workshop will focus on the challenges posed by organized criminal organizations for democracy and the governance of cities and countries.

A group of experts on organized crime and urban studies will explore the current trends of governing cities and nations from a comparative, international perspective. In particular they will analyse how a wide variety of criminal organizations affect the economy, society and governments in many different ways.

In certain regions of the world, criminal groups control territories and cities, influencing political processes. Criminal organizations and their  structures  range from local gangs, mafias or paramilitaries to large-scale transnational criminal associations and similar groups.

Some of these actors use forms of extreme violence and engage in war-like confrontations to control territories. Others tend to enter into ostensibly non-violent arrangements with authorities and political elites, such as conditional agreements or some kind of associations (co- optation, capture).

These criminal actors also interact and affect the composition of civil society both at macro- and micro- territorial levels. This raises the question about the role that other urban and national associations, like churches or NGOs, could play in improving civil society and restoring the rule of law.

The workshop will address the following questions:

• To what extent have organized criminal organizations eroded the democratic governability of cities and states?

• How do criminal actors transform the government of states and societies?

• What are the responses of different actors (governments, police, illicit agents, citizens) to criminal interventions?
  
  

Program

Session 1
Mafias and Governance (From Italy and beyond)

Federico Varese – University of Oxford, UK

Session 2
Criminal Governance and States in Latin America in the XXIth century

Angélica Durán-Martínez – University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA

Session 3
Gang Governance in the city

Dennis Rodgers - Graduate Institute of Geneva, Switzerland

Session 4
Criminal Governance of the prison and from prison to urban territories in Brazil

Camila Nunes Dias - Federal University of ABC, Brazil.

Session 5
Tainted interdependencies: comparing politics-crime interaction in Indonesia and India

Ward Berenschot - KITLV Leiden & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Session 6
The emergence and roots of the Rise of Criminal Governance in Africa

Guillaume Soto-Mayor - CNAM, Paris, France.

Discussants: Sergio Adorno - University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Arturo Alvarado.

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