Drug Violence, Fear of Crime, and the Transformation of Everyday Life in the Mexican Metropolis

Ana Villarreal, Sociology, University of California-Berkeley

Dissertation Fellowship, 2014

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My dissertation, “Drug Violence, Fear of Crime and the Transformation of Everyday Life in the Mexican Metropolis,” is an ethnography of how and why increased criminal violence and fear have prompted a new form of urban seclusion and governance in contemporary Latin America. Most of the research we have on violence and urban inequality focuses on the living conditions of the urban poor in favelas, barrios marginados, and the inner-city. In stark contrast, this book examines the impact of a tidal wave of gruesome violence on one of Latin America’s wealthiest cities: San Pedro in Monterrey, Mexico. As a San Pedro native, I had unique access to observe the responses of the wealthy to horrific criminal turf wars over cocaine and human trafficking routes in recent years. In brief, the upper class leveraged private and state resources to make of San Pedro a city-within-a-city.

The upper class is not only relying on private security, but on the public security apparatus to create an "armored city" in detriment of the rest of the metropolis.

A similar phenomenon took place in Caracas in the aftermath of the violent riots of the Caracazo in 1989 when the upper class created the municipality of Chacao. Although researchers have shown that the upper class is more and more likely to enclose living, leisure and work spaces in Latin America and beyond, these cases are different. Here, the upper class is not only relying on private security, but on the public security apparatus to create an “armored city” in detriment of the rest of the metropolis. This book will make a unique contribution to the fields of urban and political sociology by revealing this new pattern of exacerbated urban inequality raising new challenges for urban inclusion and democracy in Latin America.

Bibliography

1. Villarreal, Ana. 2015. "Fear and the Spectacular Drug Violence in Monterrey" in Violence at the Urban Margins, edited by Javier Auyero, Phillipe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Oxford University Press.

Organization and Community: The Determinants of Insurgent Military Effectiveness

Alec Worsnop, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park

Dissertation Fellowship, 2014

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The United States and other members of the international community have lost thousands of lives and expended significant resources confronting insurgent organizations across the world. Strikingly, however, there has been little systematic analysis of how some insurgents have developed the military capacity to challenge superior forces. This puzzle has played out in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s success has continually confounded analysts; in Syria and Mali, where insurgents pose significant challenges to stability; and most recently in Iraq, where the Islamic State operated with military prowess. In response, this research project studies the development and military capacity of insurgent groups.

First, the project constructs a novel conception of military effectiveness fitting for the types of combat common in civil war, including the (in)ability to keep ceasefires, to control who is targeted by violence, or to employ increasingly complex guerrilla or conventional tactics. Next, it develops a theory arguing that it is not the structural conditions in which organizations operate—such as access to material resources or strong social networks—that determine effectiveness, but how well insurgents’ organizational composition allows them to leverage those conditions.  It is what insurgents do with what they have that matters. Like in all militaries, insurgent organizations must deliberately generate esprit de corps and military skill through training, indoctrination, well-designed command and control systems, and the formation of a competent set of lower-level officers.

While social and material factors must be taken into account, some organizations become militarily effective without these endowments while some well-endowed organizations fail despite these advantages.

To test the theory and isolate the importance of organizational versus structural factors, the project adopts a two-stage approach. First, I use a set of statistical models to demonstrate that structural variables are poor predictors of insurgent organizational composition. Second, I conduct in-depth case studies of ten organizations in Vietnam (1940–1975) and fifteen organizations in Iraq (2003–present). These two countries represent promising areas of study because there is a high degree of variation in structural and organizational factors as well as in military effectiveness. To evaluate the detailed hypotheses generated by the theory, I collected precise information about the internal dynamics of insurgents through archival research, interviews with ex-combatants, and secondary sources. For example, during nearly five months at the National Archives II in HÓ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, I reviewed thousands of documents including internal memoranda from rebel organizations along with French interrogations and intelligence reporting.

By demonstrating the centrality of organizational processes to insurgent military effectiveness, the project underscores that insurgent forces are not sui generis, but fit within the broader spectrum of military organizations attempting to use violence in a calibrated manner. Thus, the project highlights the importance for policymakers of explicitly assessing organizational capacity rather than treating all insurgent or terrorist groups as like entities or overvaluing the effect of social networks and material resources. While some insurgent groups can only be defeated with involved and costly tactics—including major ground combat—the project also shows that many seemingly weaker groups are still able to reliably maintain ceasefires. As a result, rather than risk escalating violence by militarily destroying such groups, conflict mediators can work to craft peace agreements by identifying the actors that can be brought to the negotiating table. Similarly, while social and material factors must be taken into account, some organizations become militarily effective without these endowments while some well-endowed organizations fail despite these advantages.

An Education in Violence: Teaching and Learning to Kill in Central Texas

Harel Shapira, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin

Research Grant, 2015

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This research examined a relatively new and growing population: people who have obtained concealed handgun licenses and carry their guns with them on a regular basis. Drawing on field work at gun schools and in-depth interviews with concealed handgun license holders, the research examined two aspects of gun ownership that have been given insufficient attention in existing scholarship: first, the process by which people are socialized into gun ownership; and second, the embodied, everyday practice of gun ownership.

The research showed that becoming a gun owner involves a learning process in which both the mind and body are trained to feel comfortable with, and need, guns. Cognitively, it means developing interpretative frames for thinking about guns, safety, and violence. Specifically, one must learn to think that they need guns, that guns are safe, and that killing another human being can sometimes be a moral action.

Gun owners train their bodies to feel comfortable with guns through habit formation, making the experience of holding, shooting, and carrying a gun so normal that the violence contained within the gun is rendered banal.

While one must become ideologically comfortable with guns, a person must also learn to be physically comfortable with guns, and ultimately have positive experiences holding, shooting, and carrying guns. Although such embodied experiences are enabled by the above interpretative frames, they are not directly produced by them and require physical training. Gun owners train their bodies to feel comfortable with guns through habit formation, making the experience of holding, shooting, and carrying a gun so normal that the violence contained within the gun is rendered banal. These learned interpretive frames and the embodied pleasures that gun owners experience with guns are co-constitutive, so that the interpretive frames enable and are simultaneously enabled by a set of embodied experiences, and vice-versa.

Bibliography

1. Shapira, H. and Simon, S.J. (2018) “Learning to Need a Gun.” Qualitative Sociology 41(1): 1-20.

Exploring Violent Careers over the Life Course: A Study of Urban African American Males and Females

Elaine Eggleston Doherty, Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

Research Grant, 2012, 2014

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The primary purpose of this two-year project was to examine the criminal career dimensions and patterns of violence among a cohort of urban African American males and females into mid-adulthood because most of what we know about patterns of violence within the same individuals over the life course is from White males or from samples that have included African American males and females but only through early adulthood (i.e., twenties and thirties). Data come from a prospective developmental study of a community cohort of African American first graders from the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago (N=1,242) who were initially studied in 1966 (at age six) and then assessed at three additional waves (ages sixteen, thirty-two, and forty-two). For this project, in collaboration with the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority (ILCJA), we collected and coded criminal history information for the cohort from ages seventeen to fifty-two.

The extension of criminal history data into the fifties for the Woodlawn cohort provides a unique opportunity to examine the patterns of violence among a sample that represents an understudied population.

Overall, we found both similarities and differences between the criminal career patterns of existing published studies and the Woodlawn cohort. For instance, we found rates of participation similar to those for African Americans from national probability sample estimates. By age fifty-two, 65.2% of the 589 males (n=384) and over one-quarter of the 628 females (28.8%, n=181) had been arrested at least once. Moreover, 45.8% of the male cohort (70.3% of the male offenders) and 12.1% of the female cohort (42.0% of the female offenders) had at least one violent arrest. However, the violence trends over time are in contrast to the typical age-crime curve identified among Whites. Among the Woodlawn men there is a steady to increasing pattern throughout the twenties and thirties with close to 20% of the male cohort still being arrested for violence in their mid-thirties. In fact, the prevalence rates of property and violence are similar throughout the twenties and thirties for the Woodlawn men. Violence among the females also shows a steady rate even farther into adulthood (throughout the forties), but at lower rates, with approximately 3% of the cohort arrested for violence between ages seventeen and forty-two before falling to below 1% by age fifty-two. This finding is in contrast to the current contention based on largely White samples that high rates of violence are limited to a small cohort or to young adulthood.

In sum, the extension of criminal history data into the fifties for the Woodlawn cohort provides a unique opportunity to examine the patterns of violence among a sample that represents an understudied population. Thus, these descriptive analyses contribute to the larger body of knowledge regarding the relationship between age and crime and the unfolding of the criminal career for African American males and females.

Bibliography

1. Doherty, Elaine Eggleston and Margaret E. Ensminger (2014). "Do the Adult Criminal Careers of African Americans Fit the "Facts"?" Journal of Criminal Justice 42: 517-526.

Social Order and the Genesis of Rebellion: A Study of Mutiny in the Royal Navy, 1740–1820

Michael Hechter, Sociology, Arizona State University

Steven Pfaff, Sociology, University of Washington

Research Grant, 2009

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Mutinies are part of broader class of rebellion and insurgencies and understanding them sheds light on contentious politics generally. Although there have been many studies of mutiny, for those seeking to understand the causes of naval insurrections, these studies are disappointing. Studies of rebellion are frequently undermined by the tendency to compare instances of rebellion only to one another rather to other cases in which rebellion was possible but did not take place. Unlike every previous study of naval mutiny, ours includes both cases in which documented episodes of mutiny did occur and a larger set of non-mutinous cases randomly selected from the population of all ships at risk during the period 1740 to 1820, the high point of the sailing navy. In addition, our data include observations on thousands of individual seamen who took part in a dozen mutinies, which allow us to assess the individual as well as group-level determinants of mutiny. This design allows us to pinpoint the general causes of mutiny. Some of our findings have been surprising.

Although grievances have largely been disregarded in studies of rebellion, structural grievances—anticipated deprivations imposed on individuals due to their position in the social structure—must be distinguished from incidental ones that arise unexpectedly. In our study, the most important determinant of mutiny was the rate of sickness—an incidental grievance that the crew attributed to poor governance by the ship’s officers.

We show that the failure of governance is the single largest factor that explains the incidence of mutiny in the Royal Navy.

What holds a rebellion together after the situation begins to sour? We find that the rebels’ control over information about the possibility of an amnesty was a critical cause of the resilience of the Nore mass mutiny. Violence was used to maintain order through corporal punishment but only moderate levels of flogging helped to maintain order. At specific thresholds, the frequency and severity of flogging increased the odds of mutiny. Ironically, when commanders perceived insecurity, they punished more harshly. But this harshness provoked resistance.

Finally, social scientists have long debated the role of revolutionary climates as determinants of rebellion. We find that the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror led to a generalized fear on the part of British elites—a group that includes Royal Navy officers—which led to more stringent punishment of sailors for so-called “moral” offenses, rather than those related to performance.

All told, this project has important implications for the study of social order and rebellion in many other settings. We show that the failure of governance is the single largest factor that explains the incidence of mutiny in the Royal Navy. This has a resonance beyond naval history to help us understand why rebellion occurs today in our prisons, in our neighborhoods, and in the outbreak of the radical insurgencies that we face.

Bibliography

1. “Grievances and the Genesis of Rebellion: Mutiny in the Royal Navy, 1740- 1820,” American Sociological Review 81: 1 (2016): 165-189 (Michael Hechter, Steven Pfaff, and Patrick Underwood).

2. "The Problem of Solidarity in Insurgent Collective Action: The Nore Mutiny of 1797,” Social Science History 40: 2 (2016): 247-270 (Steven Pfaff, Michael Hechter, and Katie Corcoran).

Beijing-Seoul Families and Neighborhoods Study

Clifton R. Emery, School of Social Welfare, Yonsei University

Research Grant, 2011, 2012

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What do neighbors, friends, and extended family members do in response to domestic violence and child abuse, and does it make a difference? Are there cultural differences in this informal social control of family violence, and do such differences explain cultural differences in the prevalence and severity of domestic violence and child maltreatment? These are the principal questions the Families and Neighborhoods Study (FNS) attempts to answer, using newly developed measures of informal social control on random probability samples of cities. The FNS also tests propositions developed from Emery’s (2011) theoretical typology of domestic violence. The principal investigator (PI) received funding from HFG in 2011 and 2012 to carry out the FNS survey in Beijing, China, and Seoul, South Korea. In 2011 the study team interviewed 506 adults in a representative random probability sample of 506 families in Beijing. In 2012 the study team followed up with 541 interviews of adults in a representative random probability sample of families in Seoul. The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter. The findings also suggest that the neighborhood collective efficacy measure may not be the best way to capture informal social control of family violence, as the data do not show the expected relationships between collective efficacy and family violence, but do show relationships between the PI’s informal social control measures and family violence.

Based on the promising findings from the HFG-funded study, the FNS has now expanded to include data from representative samples from Beijing, Seoul, Hanoi, Ulaan Baatar, Kathmandu (collected and currently under analysis or review), Philadelphia (collection in progress) and Madrid (planned for summer 2014). In one of the twists of fate that so frequently baffle academics, the findings from the first two cities (Seoul and Beijing) remain in the peer review process while findings from later waves of data collection have already been published. This fact frustratingly prevents a detailed discussion of the Beijing-Seoul findings here. It is hoped that this omission can be corrected soon as the Seoul findings are presently under revision for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter.

In Hanoi, the FNS found that acts of informal social control by neighbors that try to protect the child are associated with less very severe abuse of the child (Emery, Trung & Wu, 2013). The same study found that when very severe abuse did occur, abuse-related externalizing behavior problems were lower when parents reported protective informal social control by neighbors (ibid). The goals of current data collection include making possible East-West comparisons of informal social control and the assessment of causal relationships via experimental techniques on population-based surveys.

The FNS has also found important relationships between variables suggested by Emery’s (2011) typology and intimate partner violence in Kathmandu and Ulaan Baatar.

Bibliography

1. Emery, C.R., Trung, H. & Wu, S. Neighborhood Informal Social Control of Child Maltreatment: A Comparison of Protective and Punitive Approaches. Child Abuse & Neglect, June, 2013. DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.05.002.

2. Emery, C.R. Disorder or Deviant Order? Re-Theorizing Domestic Violence in Terms of Order, Power and Legitimacy. A Typology. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16(6): 525-540, November-December, 2011.

Diaspora and Conflict: The Liberians of Staten Island

Jonny Steinberg, Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria

Research Grant, 2008, 2009

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This is a study of a community of Liberian refugees and economic migrants in a housing project in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The purpose was to examine the ways in which a diaspora takes conflict from home with it, and, in particular, the ways in which diasporas, frozen in the moment of their flight and caught up in old resentments, might transmit conflict back to the home country.

The research results were published in two forms. The first was a book titled Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City. It documented and analyzed a conflict that raged in Staten Island’s Liberian community from 2003 to 2008. I argued that the community had erected a stage on which it had played out, in miniature, so to speak, its deep fears about the nature of the postwar settlement taking shape back home. The very distance from home is what gave the theater its credibility; in the mutual anonymity of exile, people invented horrendous histories for their neighbors, such that it appeared that the most horrendous of the characters who had prosecuted the war back home were living on Staten Island. The conflict was thus incubated in exile. It was not, though, to the best of my knowledge, transmitted back home inasmuch as I saw no evidence of Staten Islanders funding conflict in Liberia.

The conflict was thus incubated in exile.

The second research product was an article published in the journal African Affairs; it documented and interpreted the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) work among the Liberian diaspora in the United States. The TRC undertook this work on the grounds that the diaspora was intimately involved in Liberia’s civil war and that no process of reconciliation would be complete without its involvement. I argued that the TRC’s diaspora project failed, in large part because the body’s work was seen as a substitute for an endeavor to bring to justice those who had prosecuted the war.

Bibliography

1. Jonny Steinberg, Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York, London and Johannesburg, 2011.

2. Jonny Steinberg, "A Truth Commission Goes Abroad: Liberian Transitional Justice in New York," African Affairs, 110 (2011), pp. 35-53

Longitudinal and Contextual Analyses of Violent Crime in the European Union

Patricia L. McCall, Sociology, North Carolina State University

Research Grant, 2009, 2010

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The purpose of this research is to explore the extent to which retrenchment in welfare support is related to homicide trends across European countries between 1994 and 2010. Using a longitudinal decomposition design that allows for stronger causal inferences compared to typical cross-sectional designs, we examine these potential linkages between social support spending and homicide with data collected from a heterogeneous sample of European nations, including twenty Western nations and nine less frequently analyzed East-Central nations, during recent years in which European nations generally witnessed substantial changes in homicide rates as well as both economic prosperity and fiscal crisis. Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide specifically, impacting homicide rates within two to three years for this sample of European nations.

Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide.

The Farm Killings

Jonny Steinberg , Political Science, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation

Research Grant, 2000

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Shortly after South Africa’s first democratic elections were held in 1994, white agricultural associations raised the cry that their members were being killed in increasing numbers by predatory criminals. A moral panic followed. The killings were dubbed “farm murders” and were said to be orchestrated by shadowy forces, possibly connected to the new government, and aimed at driving white people off the land.

I spent eighteen months conducting intensive ethnographic work in several farming districts around the country. My research findings were presented in two forms. The first was a research monograph (published by the Institute for Security Studies) as well as a string of newspaper and magazine articles. The idea that there was an epidemic of “farm murders,” I argued, was mostly manufactured by the creation of the category “farm murder” as a specific recordable crime. When the murder of farmers is placed back in its proper context and compared to other rural murders, it becomes apparent that middle class rural people in general, and not just white farmers, became highly vulnerable to predatory crime during the transition to democracy. The idea that white farmers were targeted in particular had no empirical basis.

When the murder of farmers is placed back in its proper context and compared to other rural murders, it becomes apparent that middle class rural people in general, and not just white farmers, became highly vulnerable to predatory crime during the transition to democracy.

The second research product was a book titled Midlands, which won South Africa’s premier nonfiction award, the Sunday Times‘s Alan Paton Prize. It documented a single killing of a white farmer and analyzed the motives of the killers. I argued that a series of unwritten rules governing the relationship between the landed and their tenants was being renegotiated by a combination of cunning, wits, and violence, and that the murder was an extreme and tragic moment in this process of renegotiation.

Bibliography

1. Jonny Steinberg, Midlands, Johannesburg, 2002.

2. Martin Schönteich and Jonny Steinberg, Attacks on Farms and Smallholdings: An Evaluation of the Rural Protection Plan, Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2000.

Ethnic Violence vs. Imperial Segregations: Multinational Criminality in the Russian Imperial City as a Space of Conflict and Cooperation

Ilya V. Gerasimov, Center for the Study of Nationalism and Empire

Research Grant, 2011

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For over two decades, I’ve been studying a variety of topics in the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. As I see now, all of them have one thing in common: they address different aspects of the phenomenon of societal self-organization, involving various social groups in diverse historical circumstances. The research project that resulted in the writing up of the book manuscript with the support by the foundation began in the late 1990s, and was conducted in archives and libraries in five countries. Focusing on case studies of four Russian imperial cities (Vilna [Vilnius], Odessa, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod), I was trying to reconstruct the peculiar worldview of the majority (close to 90 percent) of the urban population in Imperial Russia that can be cautiously identified as plebeian society: i.e., all those who did not belong to the fairly well-studied privileged and middle classes. The collected materials revealed a paradoxical situation: in the early twentieth century, when the population of urban centers was swelling at an astonishing pace (mainly due to migrants from the countryside), both the outdated legal norms and the modern hegemonic public discourses failed to regulate the bulk of the urban society. The imperial legislation did not fit the realities of the rising mass society, while the majority could not culturally, socially, and even technically (e.g. in terms of availability of the produced print runs of newspapers) belong to any public sphere. And yet, this rising mass plebeian society displayed a surprisingly high coherence and even standardization that can be seen in all four very different and distant cities that were used as case studies in my research. How was this coherence achieved in a society in flux, contrary to the inertia of social institutions and traditions, in violation of the legal norms of the well-ordered police state, and beyond the reach of public discourses?

Ethnically marked criminal violence emerged not only as a socially menacing phenomenon but also as an important indicator of intergroup boundary realignments.

I argue that there was in fact a common language of communication within that society, and self-representation of that society, only it was nontextual (nondiscursive). Social practices can be viewed as such a distinctive language of social self-description and self-representation. I identify three such main social practices: patriarchality (that helped people to sustain stability by pretending to be unaware of the competing projects of political or national mobilization); the middle ground (a peculiar mechanism of creative mutual misunderstanding); and criminal violence. In particular, ethnically marked criminal violence emerged not only as a socially menacing phenomenon but also as an important indicator of intergroup boundary realignments, and a side-effect of new patterns of emerging social solidarity. Violence can be senseless but is never meaningless, and my study elaborates on discovering those context-sensitive meanings of violence used by plebeian social groups that had no means or skills to express their interests and concerns through any elaborated public discourse and therefore relied on direct action.