Colombia’s urban gangs present new security threat

Significance Security forces have inflicted serious damage on Colombia’s main criminal organisations in recent years. However, the enduring cocaine economy is providing new opportunities for smaller gangs to emerge. With links to national groups such as Los Urabenos, street gangs operating in small-scale drug trafficking (microtrafico) are thriving and, according to top prosecutor Luis Gonzalez, now pose the greatest threat to citizen security. Impacts High-profile gang killings risk tarnishing Colombia's recently improved image, weighing on tourism prospects. Urban population growth and rising gang violence will increase pressure for investment and infrastructure in cities. A major coca eradication drive would push up the street value of cocaine, making urban gang activity more lucrative.

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

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).

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

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.

Socialization and violence

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.

“Blue” Morality and the Legitimacy of the State—Ed Rubin's Soul, Self, and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State

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.