Do criminal groups make or break citizens? How criminal organization presence affects citizen-state interactions

Abstract

When and where do citizens organize to contest criminal organization presence? And where they do contest, why do groups of citizens in some places organize through the state while in others they pursue nonstate solutions? Criminal groups operate around the world, affecting the political, economic, and social lives of millions. Conventional wisdom expects that criminal group presence demobilizes citizens and civil society. In contrast, I show that groups of citizens can and do organize, and that their contestation takes different forms: state-centered and nonstate. I develop a theory of mobilization to explain citizens’ varied reactions to the presence of organized crime. I argue that three factors drive their decisions about whether and how to contest. First, citizens can only contest where multiple criminal groups compete: each group is less able to target citizens, making their contestation less costly. Second, a robust pre-existing civil society enables citizens to organize contestation. Third, the form of their contestation depends on the degree of local state autonomy from organized crime. Citizens will channel organized contestation through the state where the local state is perceived as autonomous from organized crime, and will engage in nonstate contestation where there are observable indications of local state collusion. Communities’ decisions about whether and how to contest criminal organization presence spill into other forms of civil society engagement around non-crime issues. The project examines subnational variation in Mexico, where despite similar levels of criminal activity, local responses have diverged. I combine five municipal case studies and a survey of civil society members across 100+ municipalities to document accommodation and organized contestation and examine the conditions under which each emerges. A co-authored survey at the neighborhood level in Mexico City demonstrates how community organizing around crime can facilitate future organizing efforts, even around unrelated issues. A central contribution of this project is to illustrate the counterintuitive, yet substantively important, ways in which criminal group activity increases citizen-state interactions around crime. Organized crime is broadly considered an impediment to functioning democracy, depressing voter turnout, impinging on freedoms of speech and organization, and limiting journalists’ ability to write and publish freely. Yet the existence of organized contestation points to the importance of understanding under what conditions criminal organization presence can push citizens toward the state and strengthen local democracy.