France: criminal organisations, urban gangs and politics

Ed Rubin's provocative new book, Soul, Self, and Society: The New Morality & the Modern State (2015), attempts to capture the relationship between morality and the state. It maintains that that there are three comprehensive moral systems: the morality of honor that characterized feudal relationships and survives today in failed states and urban gangs, the morality of higher purposes that linked individual self-worth and state legitimacy to a shared belief system, and the morality of self-fulfillment that entrusts development of a moral code to each individual and sees the role of the state as creating the conditions for individual flourishing. This review essay argues that Rubin's work is critically important in explaining that the idea of self-fulfillment combines public tolerance with private discipline, and rests on obligation as well as freedom. It suggests, however, that if the new morality were to truly take hold, it would weaken the links between citizen and state that make the system possible.

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Socialization and violence

Journal of Peace Research ◽

10.1177/0022343317721813 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 54 (5) ◽

pp. 592-605 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Jeffrey T Checkel

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Group Dynamics ◽

Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽

Special Issue ◽

Socialization Theory ◽

Post Conflict ◽

Rebel Groups ◽

The Social ◽

The Us ◽

Urban Gangs

This article sets the stage for a special issue exploring group-level dynamics and their role in producing violence. My analytic focus is socialization, or the process through which actors adopt the norms and rules of a given community. I argue that it is key to understanding violence in many settings, including civil war, national militaries, post-conflict societies and urban gangs. While socialization theory has a long history in the social sciences, I do not simply pull it off the shelf, but instead rethink core features of it. Operating in a theory-building mode and drawing upon insights from other disciplines, I highlight its layered and multiple nature, the role of instrumental calculation in it and several relevant mechanisms – from persuasion, to organized rituals, to sexual violence, to violent display. Equally important, I theorize instances where socialization is resisted, as well as the (varying) staying power of norms and practices in an individual who leaves the group. Empirically, the special issue explores the link between socialization and violence in paramilitary patrols in Guatemala; vigilantes in the Bosnian civil war; gangs in post-conflict Nicaragua; rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Sierra Leone and Uganda; post-conflict peacekeepers; and the US and Israeli military. By documenting this link, we contribute to an emerging research program on group dynamics and conflict.

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Vigil Awarded Textor Prize for His Study of Urban Gangs

Anthropology News ◽

10.1525/an.2007.48.7.28.2 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 48 (7) ◽

pp. 28-29

Author(s):

Katherine S Newman

Keyword(s):

Urban Gangs

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Why Are Violent Non-State Actors Able to Persist in the Context of the Modern State?

The Journal of Intelligence Conflict and Warfare ◽

10.21810/jicw.v1i1.524 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Victoria Dittmar Penski

Keyword(s):

Los Angeles ◽

El Salvador ◽

The United States ◽

Homicide Rate ◽

Central American ◽

Modern State ◽

San Pedro ◽

The World ◽

Urban Gangs ◽

San Pedro Sula

El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras constitute the most violent region on the globe outside a declared warzone: The Northern Triangle. Cities in these countries have dominated the list of most dangerous cities in the world for years. For instance, Honduras’ San Pedro Sula had been at the top of the list for four consecutive years - only overtaken by Caracas, Venezuela in the latest report (Seguridad Justicia y Paz, 2016). El Salvador has, at the time of writing, an average of twenty-four homicides per day (Marroquin, 2016), and Guatemala is the fifth country with the highest homicide rate in Latin America (Gagne, 2016). Most of the violence in these countries is generally attributed to the Maras, urban gangs that formed in marginalized neighborhoods in Los Angeles, California by Central American migrants and refugees, and then strengthened in the Northern Triangle following mass deportations from the United States, including the expatriation of criminals (Cruz, 2010).

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Top Boy : Cultural Verisimilitude and the Allure of Black Criminality for UK Public Service Broadcasting Drama

Journal of British Cinema and Television ◽

10.3366/jbctv.2017.0387 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 14 (4) ◽

pp. 423-444 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Sarita Malik ◽

Clive James Nwonka

Keyword(s):

Media Studies ◽

Public Service ◽

Urban Crime ◽

Black Communities ◽

Media Relations ◽

Public Service Broadcasting ◽

Crime Narratives ◽

Urban Gangs ◽

The Uk ◽

Gang Life

In the early 2000s, a new form of multicultural television drama began to emerge in the UK, exploring contemporary gang life within Britain's black communities. A notable example of this ‘black urban crime’ genre is Top Boy, screened by the UK's leading multicultural public service broadcaster, Channel 4, in 2011 and 2013. This article produces an analysis, drawing on sociological and media studies perspectives, and through historicisation and contextualisation, that seeks to understand the fascination of the black urban crime genre for programme-makers, broadcasters and audiences in the contemporary British mediascape. It locates Top Boy at the intersection of complex media relations and modes of production that are themselves intertwined with political, legislative and cultural agendas tied to post-multiculturalist and neoliberal tendencies within public service broadcasting frameworks. The article suggests that black urban crime narratives do not advance understandings of the organisational structure of urban gangs or drug-related crime that are so central to these texts, nor do they offer a progressive contribution to contemporary debates or the representation of black criminality.

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My body imprisoned, my soul relieved: Youth, gangs and prison in Cape Verde

European Journal of Cultural Studies ◽

10.1177/1367549415603380 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 148-164 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Peter Anton Zoettl

Keyword(s):

Economically Disadvantaged ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Cape Verde ◽

Street Gangs ◽

Cape Verdean ◽

Youth Gangs ◽

Internal Dynamics ◽

Urban Street ◽

Urban Gangs ◽

Gang Life

Urban street gangs flourish in the urban centres of the Cape Verdean archipelago. Most of their members belong to the male, young and economically disadvantaged strata of society. While in public discourse youth gangs are often peremptorily blamed for most of the violence and criminality that take place in the country, the internal dynamics of gang life often go unnoticed. Based on fieldwork in the cities of Praia and Mindelo, the article discusses the mechanisms that make Cape Verdean adolescents and youths join urban gangs and stick to them, despite the state’s politics of securitization and repression. Within this context, the experience of imprisonment is related to gang members’ pre-prison biographies and the conceptualization of prison itself, reinforced during individual ‘careers’ of marginality.

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