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Conceptualizing Criminal Governance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2020

Benjamin Lessing Open the ORCID record for Benjamin Lessing [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. For them, states’ claims of a monopoly on the use of force ring hollow; for many issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and even inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior. Criminal governance flourishes in pockets of low state presence, but ones that states can generally enter at will, if not always without violence. It thus differs from state, corporate, and rebel governance because it is embedded within larger domains of state power. I develop a conceptual framework centered around the who, what, and how of criminal governance, organizing extant research and proposing a novel dimension: charismatic versus rational-bureaucratic forms of criminal authority. I then delineate the logics that may drive criminal organizations to provide governance for non-members, establishing building blocks for future theory-building and -testing. Finally, I explore how criminal governance intersects with the state, refining the concept of crime–state “symbiosis” and distinguishing it from neighboring concepts in organized-crime and drug-violence scholarship.

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Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 854 - 873
Copyright
© American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

He graciously acknowledges support from: the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Center for International Social Science Research, and the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict at the University of Chicago, and award W911-NF-1710044 from the US Department of Defense and US Army Army/Army Research Laboratory under the Minerva Research Initiative. The views expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to any of these agencies or foundations.

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