This chapter sets up the puzzle of how governments in weak institutionalized democracies regulate criminal markets and achieve relative order. While Latin America is the most violent region in the world, its criminal violence varies according to informal state responses to illicit markets. I collapse these responses into four types of informal regulatory arrangements: particularistic confrontations, particularistic negotiations, coordinated protection rackets and coordinated coexistence. A further intrigue is how elected politicians are able to contain drug-related violence with inefficient police departments prone to corruption and human rights abuses. I unpack the relationships between politicians and police, showing that different regulatory arrangements emerge from various combinations of political competition and police autonomy. This chapter then specifies the study’s research design and scope conditions (i.e., weakly institutionalized democracies) and lays out the plan for the book.

This chapter deploys the book’s theoretical framework, which connects political competition, police autonomy and informal regulation of illicit markets. While the electoral costs of police corruption and violence can motivate politicians to reduce police autonomy, political fragmentation and turnover condition whether and how they can achieve this objective. Fragmentation may obstruct policy implementation but also inhibit politicians from centralizing police rent extraction, while turnover impedes sustaining policies that reduce police autonomy over time. Police autonomy will shape how the police regulate drug markets. With greater autonomy police broker particularistic negotiations with, or engage in unbridled violence, or particularistic confrontation, against dealers and traffickers. When politicians reduce police autonomy through politicization, they capture rents from criminal activities and produce coordinated protection rackets, defined by high corruption but also lower violence on both sides. Finally, professionalized police forces regulate drug trafficking through coordinated coexistence regimes, brokering informal agreements that limit violence by both police and criminals.

Chapter 5 explores the dynamics of Tawhid’s engagement in low-level violence in Tripoli in 1982–3 and especially of the implementation of an “Islamic Emirate,” which amounted to the imposition of its Islamist ideological agenda onto the city. Tawhid’s ideological behaviour, instead of being homogeneous, came to vary sometimes significantly across space and to feature instances of inconsistencies with its declaratory ideology. This, the chapter claims, originated from its readiness to recruit less or not ideologically committed members who were often Tripolitan subalterns intent on utilizing the movement as a vehicle for their older social and political revolt. At first these urban poor provided the manpower Tawhid needed to implement its “Islamic Emirate” onto Tripoli. Yet, ultimately, this constituency dragged the movement into the city’s preexisting social antagonisms which were unrelated to ideology, pushing it to target the upper class and notables and to overthrow the local order.

Chapter 6 examines what accounts for Tawhid’s involvement in high-level, seemingly ideological violence in 1983 against Tripoli’s leftist movements and Christians. It acknowledges the causal role of ideology in this exercise of violence, mainly through the activism of a handful of highly ideologized Tawhid cadres who lobbied the leaders to engage in militant Islamist behaviour and exacerbated a climate of ideological polarization. But it also notes that, in spite of their increasing success in steering the movement’s behaviour in ideologically driven ways, these figures were a minority. Instead, the chapter finds that many of the rest of Tawhid’s members and leaders were not primarily guided by ideology in their exercise of violence, but rather by considerations of a primarily political, strategic, geopolitical and social nature. The heterogeneity of motivations which had led Tawhid to engage in violence became evident as the dynamics of conflict exposed too much variation across space and time to be solely guided by ideology. And, in a show of how the movement’s internal diversity could affect its behaviour, Tawhid would eventually be penetrated by criminals who steered its behaviour and exercise of violence in a direction at odds with its Islamist ideology.

This chapter develops a new theoretical framework that explains the role played by state agents in the constitution of organized criminal groups (OCGs) and why electoral politics can become a decisive factor for peace and violence in the criminal underworld. The gray zone of criminality is introduced as the ecological space where the state and crime intersect and corrupt members of state security forces and criminals give rise to OCGs.The gray zone often emerges in authoritarian regimes, where autocrats allow state specialists in violence to regulate, protect, and profit from the criminal underworld in exchange for their loyalty. When countries transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, and postauthoritarian elites fail to reform the military and the police and to dismantle state–criminal networks, democratic mechanisms become intertwined with criminal violence. Electoral competition, party alternation, and the decentralization and fragmentation of political power introduce uncertainty in the gray zone, stimulating criminal rivalry, wars, and large-scale violence. We use these definitions and propositions to explain the outbreak and escalation of inter-cartel wars in Mexico.

This chapter explains why the federal government’s decision to deploy the military in a War on Drugs against the cartels led to a five-fold increase in violence. We argue that acute political polarization and partisan conflict between Right and Left, and the bitterly contested 2006 presidential election, motivated the War on Drugs.The federal government developed interventions in states where the president’s conservative co-partisans ruled, but deliberately neglected leftist governors – the president’s main political rivals – and then blamed the violence on them. We use time-series cross-sectional models to show that between 2007 and 2012 drug violence was more intense in leftist-governed municipalities, not because of incompetence but due to conflict between a Right-wing federal government and leftist governors. We present a natural experiment comparing the intensity of criminal violence in nearly identical municipalities located across the state borders of Michoacán (ruled by the Left) and Jalisco (ruled by the Right). This partisan conflict explains why municipalities on the Michoacán side of the border experienced significantly higher levels of violence than those in Jalisco.

In 1970, a senior civil servant in the British Home Office published The Conquest of Violence, which chronicled what he considered to be a social triumph within the United Kingdom. The book was an expression of the way that many felt in the European liberal democracies a generation after the Second World War. It built on perceptions apparent during the nineteenth century that violence, especially criminal violence and harsh responses by those in authority were alien to what were essentially progressive and humanitarian developments within European culture and society. The aims of this chapter are to probe such beliefs particularly with reference to criminal violence and responses to it. It assesses the ways in which the media have provided vicarious thrills since the early nineteenth century, the construction of a criminal class as a separate social group, and the ways in which eyes were closed to violence by agents of the state who were perceived as disciplining the uncivilized.

An exploration of organized violence through the frameworks offered by a case study on Pablo Escobar and the drug trade in Colombia. By understanding Escobar’s life, motivations, and the operation of the drug cartel as organized violence, we see how understanding human behavior and the logic of violence through an economic lens offers more insight to a solution than a rote labeling Escobar as a criminal.